The Weather is Getting Worse?

Oh, dear. Philip Duncan at the New Zealand Herald has written a story that uses the idea that storms are getting worse due to climate change. He is described as a ‘weather analyst’. I have no idea what a ‘weather analyst’ might be, but it is hard to imagine that it has anything to do with science. For example, he says the following:

But the problem with diagnosing climate change as the reason for the increase in worldwide severe weather is that you need decades to really review it, and by then it may be too late to reverse. Talk about stuck between a rock and hard place.

Fact: the world is heating up. Fact: insurance companies are paying far more than before for weather-related disasters. Fact: organisations such as Niwa and NOAA have been warning us for over a decade that climate change will lead to more floods in summer and more snow storms in winter.

Let’s deal with his ‘facts’. First of all, although the world has warmed, the reason for the warming is the issue i.e. is it due to human activity? The other problem is that he uses the expression that’ the world is heating up’, despite there being a pause in the warming. This from Judith Currie:

This concept of a recent pause in the warming seems to be fairly widely accepted by many mainstream consensus scientists (e.g. the recent Greenwire article),with explanations ranging from aerosols, to solar, to oceans. The duration and magnitude of a pause that is significant in the context of the AGW debate is debatable, but I have made some suggestions.  Note that the short time scales considered here preclude determination of a statistically significant trend at the 95% confidence level, although lack of statistical signficance does not negate the existence of a pause as defined here.

The facts about insurance companies paying out more is absolutely true. However, the reason is straightforward. There is more building/population increases in places which are at risk of extreme weather events; for example the massive coastal developments in places like Florida, or the building of housing on flood plains in the UK (see here for serious analysis). This is from Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., who specialises in climate change and natural disasters.

There is seemingly a bottomless well of nonsense on disasters and climate change. I have long ago accepted that such nonsense is, like the presence of arguments rejecting the basic science of climate change, a situation to be lived with rather than changed. Even so, I can still poke some fun.

As just one of his many examples, Dr. Pielke gives the following:

• Climatewire reports uncritically a claim coming from Swiss Re that “the financial toll of global weather disasters amounts to between 1 and 12 percent of U.S. gross domestic product annually.” This totals $160 billion to almost $2 trillion.

Reality Check: The actual number for global losses as a percent of US GDP is closer to 0.1%, with the maximum about 1.2% in 2005. The total cost of all hurricanes since 1900 in normalized dollars is about $1.4 trillion. The media (in general) rarely question numbers given to them from the reinsurance industry and on disasters and climate change have a strange aversion to the peer reviewed scientific literature. Innumeracy.

In another post, Dr. Pielke summarises the widespread reporting of connections with climate change and disasters saying the following:

The information above documents a pattern of misrepresentation of the science of disasters and climate change in the Stern Review report, the reports of the IPCC, an the US CCSP. The pattern of misrepresentation has three common characteristics:

1. Reliance on non-peer reviewed, unsupportable studies rather than the relevant peer reviewed literature.

2. Reliance on and featuring non-peer reviewed work conducted by the authors of the assessment reports.

3. Repeated reliance on a small number of secondary of tertiary sources, repeatedly cited such that intellectual provenance is lost.

The evidence presented here, and in great detail via the links, is unambiguous and unequivocal in support of my claims. Though if you would like to refute them with evidence, please do so in the comments. Until the climate science community cleans up its act on this subject it will continue to give legitimate opportunities for opponents to action to criticize the climate science community.

Interestingly, deaths from extreme weather events are actually at a low point, global tropical cyclone activity has reduced, and there is a host of other evidence that questions whether there are more natural disasters than before (see here for links to many other sources, and my previous discussion of an IPCC report on climate change and disasters). In summary, whilst it is correct that insurers are paying out more, there is no evidence that this is a result of climate change creating more extreme weather. I end the point with a long quote from Professor Judith Currie:

Judith Curry, chair of Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
The substantial interest in attributing extreme weather events to global warming seems rooted in the perceived need for some sort of a disaster to drive public opinion and the political process in the direction of taking action on climate change. However, attempts to attribute individual extreme weather events, or collections of extreme weather events, may be fundamentally ill-posed in the context of the complex climate system, which is characterized by spatiotemporal chaos. There are substantial difficulties and problems associated with attributing changes in the average climate to natural variability versus anthropogenic forcing, which I have argued are oversimplified by the IPCC assessments. Attribution of extreme weather events is further complicated by their dependence on weather regimes and internal multi-decadal oscillations that are simulated poorly by climate models.

I have been completely unconvinced by any of the arguments that I have seen that attributes a single extreme weather event, a cluster of extreme weather events, or statistics of extreme weather events to anthropogenic forcing. Improved analysis of the attribution of extreme weather events requires a substantially improved and longer database of the events. Interpretation of these events in connection with natural climate regimes such as El Nino is needed to increase our understanding of the role of natural climate variability in determining their frequency and intensity. Improved methods of evaluating climate model simulations of distributions of extreme event intensity and frequency in the context of natural variability is needed before any confidence can be placed in inferences about the impact of anthropogenic influences on extreme weather events.

As for the claim in the Herald article that ” organisations such as Niwa and NOAA have been warning us for over a decade that climate change will lead to more floods in summer and more snow storms in winter.” This fact is indeed correct (e.g. see here). Ok, but has there been any evidence that might support this taking place in New Zealand? I do not mean anecdotes, I mean rigorous scientific analysis. None is given in the article. As has been discussed, there is no evidence on a global scale. Another problem with the article is that Philip Duncan starts with an anecdote, as follows:

During the snow storm last August many people commented “so much for global warming”. The thing is, a warmer planet means bigger snow storms. Winter temperatures will still fall below freezing but a couple of degrees more warmth in the air can lead to more moisture and that makes bigger snow storms.

This paragraph is followed by the discussion of the ‘facts’ quoted earlier, implying that the snow is the result of climate change, but then he later suggests New Zealand might benefit from climate change

Dr Renwick also said something else: New Zealand may actually benefit from climate change. But how will we cope with the world wanting to move here in 100 years? And what about the millions who will suffer as a result of more droughts, floods and extreme weather?

Another concern is Philip Duncan’s poor attempts to suggest that he is something of a neutral observer.

Personally, I don’t subscribe to the scaremongering from the climate-change supporters, or deniers.

But the amount of severe weather around this planet in the past 10 years has been staggering.

The article describes exactly the kind of scaremongering that he purports to not to subscribe to. In his conclusion, he says the following:

The reason why the world is warming is something I still am not sure of, but I do know something is changing. And if we don’t get on top of it in the short term, our grandchildren may have to deal with something mankind hasn’t faced in thousands of years: a heatwave followed by an ice age. While Western nations will adapt to climate change, the poor nations of this world will not. And we are talking about hundreds of millions of people who may suffer.

This is, from any reasonable point of view, scaremongering. In places, he tries to dress up the piece with expressions of doubt and balance, but the entire impetus of the article is towards ‘we are doomed’, with the further implication that we can do something about the problem. Despite at times trying to appear to take a balanced view, his use of the word ‘denier’ in the article reveals that there is nothing balanced in his view.

As a last note, I am currently unaware of any scare mongering from the skeptic side of the argument, except to point out the potential for economic harm from policy to mitigate global warming. It is a very, very odd statement. The skeptical position is the opposite of scare mongering…..

Overall, another big ‘fail’ for the quality of discussion about climate change in the New Zealand Herald.

Economic Impacts of Climate Change Policy

I have a couple of posts sitting half completed, but felt compelled to write on a fascinating and insightful analysis that I picked up from Climate etc. It is an extract from a blog post called Our Finite World, and the relevant material can be found here and here. The author Gail Tverberg is an actuary and her primary area of interest is oil supply. In the first post, Gail looks at energy use and GDP for both emerging and developing economies. She notes that world-wide energy intensity in relation to GDP has been flat, and then asks how it is possible that several countries have been decreasing the energy intensity of their economies:

We are dealing with a large number of countries with very different energy intensities. The big issue would seem to be outsourcing of heavy manufacturing. This makes the energy intensity of the country losing the manufacturing look better. Outsourcing transfers manufacturing to a country with a much higher energy intensity, so even with the new manufacturing, its ratio can still look better (lower). It is hard to measure the overall impact of outsourcing, except by looking at world total energy intensities rather than individual country amounts.

In both of the posts, Gail fills the pages with charts, data and analysis, so I cannot do justice to her work in a summary. However, there are two points (of three) that I found to be of particular interest, and I quote these below:

1. The industrialization of Southeast Asia has allowed importers from around the world to reduce their energy intensity of GDP, but much of the savings has been offset by greater energy use (largely coal) in Southeast Asia. On a CO2 basis, we are likely  worse off, because of this transfer.

2. There is no evidence that the Kyoto Protocol reduced worldwide CO2 emissions. In fact, to the extent that it encouraged outsourcing of industrial production to the Far East and made goods from the Far East more competitive, it may have contributed to rising world CO2 emissions. It would appear that a different approach is needed that recognizes the fact that fuels are part of a world market. Fuel savings in one part of the world are not necessarily helpful for the world as a whole.

I have not read much else from the blog, but I would guess from the general discussions that Gail is on the ‘warmer’ side of the climate debate. However, she is capturing something that I (from a skeptic standpoint) have always been concerned about. In some respects, the negative economic impact of climate change mitigation upon the developed world has been discussed before. For example, this UK economics blog discusses the issue of the original Climategate emails in the context of economics, and cites an article from Christopher Booker (I have not found the original) as follows:

The real gain to Corus from stopping production at Redcar, however, is the saving it will make on its carbon allowances, allocated by the EU under its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). By ceasing to emit a potential six million tonnes of CO2 a year, Corus will benefit from carbon allowances which could soon, according to European Commission projections, be worth up to £600 million over the three years before current allocations expire.

But this is only half the story. In India, Corus’s owner, Tata, plans to increase steel production from 53 million tonnes to 124 million over the same period. By replacing inefficient old plants with new ones which emit only “European levels” of CO2, Tata could claim a further £600 million under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism, which is operated by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – the organisers of the Copenhagen conference. Under this scheme, organisations in developed countries such as Britain – ranging from electricity supply companies to the NHS – can buy the right to exceed their CO2 allocations from those in developing countries, such as India. The huge but hidden cost of these “carbon permits” will be passed on to all of us, notably through our electricity bills.

It is all fairly obvious really; if you enact these carbon dioxide emission schemes in a lopsided way, energy usage will shift to those countries that are low cost. In essence, these schemes are a driver of the hollowing out of developed country energy intensive manufacturing, and have no doubt been a contributor to the rapid growth of emerging economies. The great thing about Gails’ posts are that they present the case with such startling clarity.

The broad economic impacts of this shift in energy intensive manufacturing from developed economies are fairly obvious; negative impact upon balance of trade and less economic growth than would be the case if Kyoto had not been enacted.

This is all well and good to point out, but it is another element of the impact of this shift that worries me. Manufacturing jobs employ large numbers of workers who earn a good wage in comparison to service industries, for example in compared to shop workers. In particular, manufacturing tends to develop highly paid skilled workers, and this is a concern I would like to highlight. When policy such as Kyoto are enacted, they have real impact on both the economy but also the potential for ordinary people in a developed economy to have a better standard of living.

The trouble is that, for most people, their main source of news is a media that has accepted the climate alarmist story, and often reports on climate change in a way that is clearly biased towards alarm (I have written several posts on this subject). They entirely neglect the potential for negative consequences, even though those consequences will eventually impact upon their readers/viewers. There are a few lonely voices such as Christopher Booker who point out these real impacts but most people will never hear of such impacts (unless it is their job that is being lost).

Instead, what we have is promises of ‘green jobs’ and the media seem to go along with this. However, as every country is using the same promise, we come to a point where it becomes impossible for every country to generate enough of these ‘green jobs’ to offset the losses. More disturbingly, if those jobs (e.g. manufacture of wind turbines) are reliant on intensive energy use, they will in any case end up being outsourced to developing economies. As such, it is interesting to find that five out of the ten largest manufacturers Chinese and Indian, and that they together have a large market share. They are getting the benefits of these ‘green jobs’ but with none of the associated pain. And that pain is the loss of highly skilled, well paid manufacturing jobs in developed economies.

Note: For this post, I am not going into some of the complexities of the knock on impacts of loss of manufacturing,  or how the impacts of ‘green’ policy are calculated/considered, as I want to keep the post focused.

The New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme – News

There has been news on the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), and this is the introduction from a report from the New Zealand Herald:

The soft start to New Zealand’s carbon pricing regime is set to get softer still.

The Government yesterday released a review of the emissions trading scheme chaired by David Caygill and its own preliminary response to it.

The headline for the report is ‘Softer still on climate change’. I like the idea that it is possible to be ‘soft’ on climate change which is rather an odd notion; in particular when there has been no scientific evidence presented to suggest any warming in New Zealand. I do not want to go into the details, but the essence of the story is the implementation of the ETS is being slowed down, such that the costs for business and households will kick in over a longer period.

There is an interesting response to the phased introduction in a TV One interview, in which the interviewer discusses the concept of a ‘climate crisis’ before introducing an interviewee  who has just participated in an alarmist event arranged by Al Gore. Described simply as an ‘expert’ (e.g. the title of the interview is ‘Expert Responds to ETS Changes’), Dr. Rod Oram’s profile on Wikipedia is as follows:

Rod Oram is a New Zealand journalist writing on corporate, economic and political issues. He is a columnist for the Sunday Star-Times and Good Magazine, a regular broadcaster on radio and television and a frequent public speaker. He is an adjunct professor in the business school at Unitec in Auckland and he has contributed to several regional economic development projects.

I checked the Unitec staff search facility and was unable to find his details and I am somewhat puzzled as to what, exactly, he is an expert in. Likewise a written piece on the TV One website describes him as follows:

A New Zealand climate change expert says people need a cash incentive to change their habits, and delaying an emissions trading scheme will not help.

This is the definition of ‘expert’ from dictionary.com:

a person who has special skill or knowledge in some particular field; specialist; authority:

I am sure that Dr. Oram is an ‘expert’ in something, but I am at a loss to see how he might be an expert in climate change. Nevertheless, this is how this person is characterised, and it comes as no surprise to hear that he is against the slower implementation of the ETS. My favourite moment was when he suggests that the ETS is not about ‘saving the world from New Zealand’ but ‘about making New Zealand a great deal more efficient in both energy and other terms’. He goes on to give a personal example of how he installed solar power and reduced his electricity bill by 40% and purchsed smaller cars. So there we perhaps have an example of his ‘expertise’; he installed solar power and purchased smaller cars?

This is an example of New Zealand journalism at its very worst. A person with no apparent expertise in a subject is characterised as an ‘expert’, and that person by coincidence is a climate alarmist (as evidenced by his participation in Al Gore’s event). It is all very, very shabby.

In another TV One interview the Environment Minister Nick Smith is interviewed over the phone, and the report cuts to images surrounding climate change, for example showing pictures of wind farms after a picture of a chimney bellowing out smoke. Within this montage there are pictures of burning forests and forest destruction, and there is even an image of a lonely polar bear floating on a piece of ice. I particularly liked the polar bear image as polar bear populations are stable, despite their use as the poster-animal of climate change.

The bottom line is that, during the interview, TV One might as well have added captions while Nick Smith was talking, saying that he was a ‘Polar Bear Killer’, or ‘Forest Burner in Chief’. The use of this footage during the interview was calculated, biased and completely underhand. It is yet another example of biased media coverage.

TV3 offers another example, titled ‘Government’s ETS changes help consumers but not planet’. With a title like this, you know the direction of the piece, and it delivers as expected. The report gets off to a fine start by characterising CO2 as a pollutant, even though it is essential to life on earth, and describes those who emit the gas as, for example, ‘big polluters’, whilst discussing how companies will ‘not have to pay for their pollution’. The reporter’s summary at the end of the piece is of particular note, saying that the government will ‘spend $500 million’ by not implementing the ETS faster. It is not clear how this might be seen as ‘spending’ when it is a tax that is foregone. The reporter goes on to say that the policy will do ‘nothing to save the planet, in fact it just puts it off for another day’. A balanced report – I think not….

I hope that the point I am making is clear. There is an agenda in the reporting in the New Zealand media, and it is not even difficult to see it. It is brazen and shameless, and it almost seems that they wear their bias on their metaphoric sleeves with pride. However, what they are presenting to the people of New Zealand is their own views, and seeking to use the power of the media to shape the views of the New Zealand people. Instead of presenting the facts of the situation, the news media are seeking to manipulate opinions to their own version of events/their own perspectives. Whilst all news media have some degree of bias on most subjects, the issue of climate change stands out for the crass and open way the bias is expressed.

The bias of the media would not be such a problem if it were not for the fact that all of the major outlets seem to be following the same path. At present, the New Zealand public have no alternative to the climate alarmism bias in any major media outlet, leaving them with no option but to be spoon fed the alarmist perspective. In my last post I discussed the self-censorship of the media over the scandal of the scientific fraud being conducted by NIWA. This is the other side of the coin, which is the relentless bias against any view/policy that goes against climate alarmism. It is a very, very sorry state of affairs.

New Zealand Media – A Scandalous Silence

There has been a scathing attack on NIWA in a recent post in the Climate Conversation Group. All the evidence that is being presented is indicative of a serious scientific fraud being perpetrated by NIWA regarding the New Zealand temperature record. It is a fraud that is being funded by taxpayer money, and it is a fraud that is, and will continue, to cost taxpayer money. Government policy is being directed by fraudulent science but, unbelievably, the fraud appears to be gaining no attention from the news media. It seems that the news media are self-censoring on this issue. I have included a long extract from the Climate Conversation Group post below:

NIWA didn’t use Rhoades & Salinger. We can prove it. They lied.

NZ Climate Science Coalition statisticians have uncovered evidence of scarcely believable deception from our National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Ltd (NIWA).

Last December, NIWA released a reconstructed NZ temperature series Report on the Review of NIWA’s Seven Station Temperature Series (“7SS Review”) (pdf, 8.5 MB). It has a fresh new graph (below) that’s all but indistinguishable from the previous graph. But that’s not the point.

The point is the new series is a lie.

It’s important to understand that NIWA have a Bible and they know how to thump it. Rhoades and Salinger 1993, Adjustment of temperature and rainfall records for site changes (R&S), is the NIWA Bible for estimating the effect of known site changes on temperature and rainfall measurements.

How do we know this? Because NIWA told us. Oh, how often they’ve told us! For they never tire of saying: “the adjustments to the multiple sites comprising the ‘seven-station’ series were calculated by Salinger et al. (1992), using the methodology of Rhoades and Salinger (1993).”

NIWA said one thing, did another

That wearisome statement appears in the Overview portion of the 7SS Review, in the discussion on each and every one of the seven stations, and R&S is mentioned as an authority many times in its 169 pages — nowhere does it mention any deviation from the well-established scientific methodology in R&S. Before the 7SS Review began, NIWA and its minister, Wayne Mapp, made it crystal clear in media releases and in answer to questions in the Parliament that they’d be using R&S to make the adjustments.

But NIWA didn’t follow Rhoades & Salinger. They did whatever they liked so they could show warming.

The evidence that is being produced by the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition is damning. It is evidence that should be headline news, but where is the coverage in the press and on television? I checked the New Zealand Herald, and conducted a search for New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, and found no mention of the scandal. Instead, I found an article which is an attack on an Associate Professor Chris de Freitas that leads with examples of so-called ‘weather extremes’. Associate Professor de Freitas is not teaching climate change alarmism, and the implication of the article is that, in questioning anthropogenic climate change, Professor de Freitas is a ‘nut’.

The emphasis in the de Freitas article is on the ‘science’, but curiously the Herald’s taking the high ground on ‘science’ does not extend to reporting the scientific fraud that is being perpetrated by NIWA. It seems that science is only important when confirming the Herald’s editorial policy.What of other news outlets? I searched stuff.co.nz and found nothing, and the same for TVNZ’s website. I tried TV3′s search, with no discussion of the issue, and then tried some regional newspapers, all with the same lack of results.

Perhaps I am missing the coverage in my searches (which is possible), but it appears that a major scandal is being completely ignored by the media. Complete silence. I actually expected that I would find some kind of coverage, albeit expected that the usual suspects would be trotted out to denigrate NZCSC as ‘nuts’. Quite honestly I am astonished. It seems that the media is completely uninterested in what can only be described as a massive scientific fraud.

There really is something very wrong here. The news media have a duty to inform their readers of important news. As the post in the Climate Conversation Group points out, NIWA’s temperature record determines $NZ billions of spending, and is therefore a matter of great import. Even if editorial policy is ‘warmist’, this does not excuse or explain the complete silence from the media on this scandal. At the very least, there should be some kind of coverage. The lack of coverage is of itself a scandal.

The Propoganda Identified

There is an acerbic commentator in the UK, called Rod Liddle, who has recently written and interesting piece in the Specatator. I point it out, as Rod Liddle ends his piece with:

None of this means climate change — which, incidentally, I think is probably a fact — is happening or not happening.

I assume he means significant anthropogenic climate change in this statement, as nobody (sane) suggests the climate does not change. The subject of his article is the ongoing news of climate records being set. He opens the article with this:

What do you suppose the chances are of this being the coldest June since records began, or maybe the dampest June since records began? My guess is that it will almost certainly be the most dramatic of some climatic variation since records began; paradoxically, every other month is. Every season is. Every year is. Every year is something. The weather is on a roll, it keeps breaking records, nothing can stop it.

He is, of course, quite correct, and it seems that this is the kind of news that we can commonly find in New Zealand, but I have found similar articles in the U.S. press, and in other countries. The point in these stories is that they give an impression of something special taking place, that the climate is somehow out of whack, out of kilter, that anthropogenic climate change must indeed be real. If I think back to my childhood, there were occasional mentions of unusual weather patterns, but I do not remember this constant onslaught of weather records.This is what Rod Liddle has to say on the subject:

Well, let’s take a look at this ambitious, hyperactive weather we’re all enjoying. The comment ‘drought zones have been declared across much of England and Wales’ seems to refer to, er, East Anglia. A few other areas are indeed at the ‘near drought’ stage, and the water companies are warning, as they do every year, that restrictions on water usage might be brought in. However, no restrictions are in place anywhere, yet at least, not even in the parched Mojave wastelands of Norfolk. Spring? April was lovely and warm, well above the average. March was a little cooler than the average, May a little above. The Met Office pronounced spring to be the driest for 20 years in some areas. In other areas, presumably, it wasn’t. January was colder than usual — bloody nippy, to use the technical term — while February was pleasantly warm (the ninth mildest in 100 years, in point of fact. Which means you could quite regularly get your kit off on Snowdon, if you wanted, over the last century).

Quite reasonably, he goes on to skewer other examples, and notes that what we are really seeing weather…that sometimes deviates from the mean in some places at some times. Perhaps even more interesting is that he has noted that the promises of a warm UK have come to nothing, and that there has been a shift in the climate change narrative:

Does any of this statistical arcania matter? The problem, I think, is that totally normal variations from the mean, and the continual screaming headlines about records being broken are used by the climate change lobby to insist that this is a consequence of our own actions, a direct result of man-made global warming. This is a slight change of tack, of course; previously we were told that global warming meant Britain would become, well, warmer — but two sharpish winters put paid to that prediction. Now everything is the consequence of man-made global warming. That cold December we endured was the consequence, and so too was the mildly mild weather we enjoyed in the February of the following year. Drought is a consequence of global warming; so too are floods. Hot weather and cold weather. Sunshine and no sunshine. And it helps if they can imply that there is something abnormal about it all, something terribly extreme and disquieting.

The problem for those that promote the climate change scare is that they predicted that it would not be long before the UK saw no snow at all, and the predictions were found to be false. So a new narrative is created, in which all unusual weather, regardless of general trends, is highlighted. For Joe Public who does not take a great interest in the climate change controversy, it seems that the world is indeed changing around them. A continual blizzard of records appears to suggest that the climate situation is going to hell in a handcart.

Is it any wonder that people become convinced of the anthropogenic climate change story when it appears that there is such strong evidence, even though the evidence is not strong at all. It is, quite simply, manipulation. Sadly, most people do not have the time to dig into the details of the climate change controversy, and will instead rely on a sense of disquiet generate by these kinds of stories.

Note: Apologies for the lack of posts, but time has been very short of late, including a trip to China which was one of many distractions.