Arctic greenhouse gas emissions "jump 30%"

16 January, 2010 by

A scary headline for a Saturday morning, and the rest of the story isn’t much better:

ARCTIC emissions of a powerful greenhouse gas jumped 30 per cent in recent years in a worrying hint that global warming might unlock vast stores frozen in permafrost, scientists say.

“It’s too early to call it a trend but if it continues this way there will be serious implications,” said Paul Palmer, a scientist at Edinburgh University in Scotland who was among authors of the study of methane emissions from wetlands.

The 30.6 per cent rise in emissions from the Arctic from 2003-2007, to about 4.2 million tonnes, was the biggest percentage gain for any region of the world’s wetlands in the study in the journal Science with colleagues in Scotland and the Netherlands.

Arctic wetlands account for only two per cent of global emissions from wetlands, most of which are in the tropics. But many experts have pointed to risks that climate change could melt permafrost stores of billions of tonnes of methane, a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

“It’s a warning the scientists have been giving for a while now – what we are seeing are signs of global warming,” Mr Palmer said. (source)

Mr Palmer’s pretty certain – this is “global warming” at work. But even the news story has to concede that only 2% of methane emissions actually originate in Arctic regions, but in any case I thought I’d pay the $15 and download the full paper from Science: Large-Scale Controls of Methanogenesis Inferred from Methane and Gravity Spaceborne Data, and see if the headline and the alarmism was really justified. So I started off with the abstract:

Wetlands are the largest individual source of methane (CH4), but the magnitude and distribution of this source are poorly understood on continental scales. We isolated the wetland and rice paddy contributions to spaceborne CH4 measurements over 2003–2005 using satellite observations of gravity anomalies, a proxy for water-table depth {Gamma}, and surface temperature analyses Ts. We find that tropical and higher-latitude CH4 variations are largely described by {Gamma} and Ts variations, respectively. Our work suggests that tropical wetlands contribute 52 to 58% of global emissions, with the remainder coming from the extra-tropics, 2% of which is from Arctic latitudes. We estimate a 7% rise in wetland CH4 emissions over 2003–2007, due to warming of mid-latitude and Arctic wetland regions, which we find is consistent with recent changes in atmospheric CH4.

The paper uses a model to estimate the global distribution of methane emissions according to changes in temperature and water-table depth. The temperature data originates from the NCEP/NCAR database. The total emissions of methane from global wetlands is claimed as 227 Tg/year (1 Tg = 1 million metric tonnes), from the IPCC AR4 report.

By analysing the temperature and water table distribution, the paper claims that arctic emissions have increased by 30.6% from 2003 – 2007. Since total emissions from the Arctic is only about 4.2 Tg/year in 2007 (about 2%), this means that in the period covered by the paper, those emissions have risen by about 1 Tg/year, which is less than 0.5% of total methane emissions. So whilst it is correct that the increase is 30%, this arises from the fact that it is calculated by reference to a tiny number as a percentage of a slightly tinier number.

To put this into perspective, here is the graphic from the paper showing the changes in emissions of methane from different sources between 2003 and 2007:

Changes in methane emissions plotted against year

It is obvious that the areas where methane emissions are rising most rapidly are the tropics and the midlatitudes. And although the percentage change in the Arctic is large, the absolute change is very small. I haven’t even bothered to go into the temperature sources – but considering global temperatures as measured by satellite have been pretty steady since about 2001, there would have to be arguments that the contribution arising from the melting of permafrost should be negligible in this period. But I would assume that the NCEP/NCAR figures, since they are based on NOAA data, would show an increase.

The only mention of climate change in the paper is in the very last paragraph:

There is substantial potential for wetland emissions to feed back positively to changes in climate and therefore it is critical that we understand the extent of overlap between wetlands and regions that are most sensitive to projected future warming. We anticipate that the new constraints developed here will ultimately improve model predictions of this feedback.

“Substantial potential” – no evidence, just a hunch. Yet out of that one paragraph, a string of scary news stories has been generated, thanks to an author who has the preset “global warming” bias. The media spin cycle on full blast.

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Monckton & Plimer vs. Readfearn & Brook

15 January, 2010 by

Carbon Sense

This will be a battle worth watching. Only wish I could be there:

The Brisbane Institute is holding a climate change debate with a panel consisting of Lord Christopher Monckton, Professor Ian Plimer, Graham Readfearn and Professor Barry Brook on January 29th at the Hilton Hotel, Brisbane, 12 – 2pm. Please see the attached brochure for full details and booking information: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/climate-debate-brisbane.pdf

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Tom Switzer: The Climate is Changing

15 January, 2010 by

WSJ Online

Another excellent article from Tom on the changing attitudes to cap-and-trade:

Nowhere is the changing climate more evident than in Australia. Last month, the Senate voted down the Labor Government’s legislation to implement an emissions-trading scheme. Polls show most Aussies oppose the complicated cap-and-trade system if China and India continue to chug along the smoky path to prosperity. The center-right Liberal-led opposition, moreover, is now led by Tony Abbott, a culture warrior who has described man-made global warming in language unfit to print in a family newspaper and cap-and-trade as “a great big tax to create a great big slush fund to provide politicized handouts, run by a giant bureaucracy.”

Until Mr. Abbott’s election as opposition leader last month, the climate debate in Australia had been conducted in a heretic-hunting, anti-intellectual atmosphere. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd claimed that climate change is the “greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time.” In clear breach of the great liberal anti-communist Sidney Hook’s rule of controversy—”Before impugning an opponent’s motives, answer his arguments”—Mr. Rudd linked “world government conspiracy theorists” and “climate-change deniers” to “vested interests.” Much of the media, business and scientific establishment deemed it blasphemy that anyone dare question his Labor Party’s grand ambitions.

Australians had heard a lot of science, much of it poorly explained. But the “dismal science” had been conspicuously absent from the climate debate. There was very little serious analysis of the economic consequences of climate change: What choices did we have to mitigate its effects, and how much would these choices cost us? Labor ministers had emitted a lot of hot air about global warming and the urgency with which resource-rich Australia (which accounts for only 1.4% of global emissions) must act.

All of this has now utterly changed: Australia’s debate has entered a new phase, one that goes beyond the religious fervor and feel-good gestures that had held sway all too often. Suddenly, political strategists are thinking the unthinkable: far from presaging an electoral debacle that was inevitable under Mr. Abbott’s green predecessor Malcolm Turnbull, the issue could be a godsend for conservatives Down Under.

Read it here.

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Dodgy data at NASA and NOAA as well?

15 January, 2010 by

Yet more fudge?

If you thought the CRU-files were an isolated incident, and that apart from that blip, the world of climate science is whiter than white, think again. It appears that much the same has been going on at other leading climate centres, as Watts Up With That reports:

Climate researchers have discovered that NASA researchers improperly manipulated data in order to claim 2005 as “The Warmest Year on Record.” KUSI-TV meteorologist, Weather Channel founder, and iconic weatherman John Coleman will present these findings in a one-hour special airing on KUSI-TV on Jan.14 at 9 p.m. A related report will be made available on the Internet at 6 p.m. EST on January 14th at www.kusi.com.

In a new report, computer expert E. Michael Smith and Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo discovered extensive manipulation of the temperature data by the U.S. Government’s two primary climate centers: the National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Ashville, North Carolina and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at Columbia University in New York City. Smith and D’Aleo accuse these centers of manipulating temperature data to give the appearance of warmer temperatures than actually occurred by trimming the number and location of weather observation stations. The report is available online here.

The report reveals that there were no actual temperatures left in the computer database when NASA/NCDC proclaimed 2005 as “THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD.” The NCDC deleted actual temperatures at thousands of locations throughout the world as it changed to a system of global grid points, each of which is determined by averaging the temperatures of two or more adjacent weather observation stations. So the NCDC grid map contains only averaged, not real temperatures, giving rise to significant doubt that the result is a valid representation of Earth temperatures.

The number of actual weather observation points used as a starting point for world average temperatures was reduced from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,000 now. “That leaves much of the world unaccounted for,” says D’Aleo.

Read it here.

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Tony Abbott at the Sydney Institute

15 January, 2010 by

Tony Abbott delivers an earlier Sydney Institute address

I was fortunate enough to attend Tony Abbott’s policy speech at the Sydney Institute last night and had the pleasure of meeting him afterwards. It was a very interesting speech, with one of the key messages being that environmental matters are being sidelined thanks to the obsessions with climate change. I understand he will announce a climate change policy in a couple of weeks, but the focus of last night’s speech was the Murray-Darling, and the creation of a 15,000 strong land army to tackle environmental problems.

Mr Abbott did touch on climate issues, however:

Of course, Australia has a role in reducing global emissions but we can’t save the world from climate change on our own. To act alone would simply export emissions (and jobs) to other countries. Not only has the Rudd Government’s grandstanding on climate change failed. It’s masked the near total neglect of those environmental problems that Australians alone can fix. In the past two years, there has been almost no progress on improving water use in the Murray-Darling basin, only modest additional use of renewable energy, and no further support for more effective land care. In fact, funding for solar panels, water recycling and land care programmes has been cut. Instead, there’s been a great deal of political barracking plus obsessive support for an emissions trading scheme: a great big new tax on everything that merely masquerades as a programme to improve the environment.

…

A unilateral emissions tax here in Australia would do next to nothing for the environment but would seriously damage the competitive position of our export industries. In the long run, it would damage our ability to fund the environmental improvements here in Australia that only Australians can bring about.

It’s stunning to hear the Greens to give even limited support to ideas on the environment from the Liberals, as the ABC reports:

Greens Senator Sarah Hanson Young agrees with the Opposition Leader’s critique of the Government.

“They have done little on tackling the Murray Darling Basin – a lot of talk and no action,” she said.

Senator Hanson Young says both ideas have merit, but the Liberal’s track record on environmental issues undermines Mr Abbott’s message. (source)

That’s why they’re changing the track. But we can always count on a knee-jerk reaction from Penny Wong, and we weren’t disappointed:

“It appears Mr Abbott is again making things up as he goes along, stealing from failed Howard government policies when he can’t come up with his own ideas,” Senator Wong said.

“Mr Abbott now has 19 days to release his detailed and fully costed policy on climate change.” (source)

Tick tock tick tock. Penny clearly doesn’t read the papers, or else she would have seen The Australian’s ridiculing of her constant, robotic “countdown mode” just two days ago (see here).

Read the full text of the speech here.

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Dr Roy Spencer: GW predictions based on faith, not science

15 January, 2010 by

Dr Roy spencer explains why climate modellers can tune their models to achieve just about any rate of warming they like:

The ‘consensus’ IPCC view, on the left, would be that the 1 deg. C increase in temperature was the cause of the 1 Watt increase in the Earth’s cooling rate. If true, that would mean that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide by late in this century (a 4 Watt decrease in the Earth’s ability to cool) would eventually lead to 4 deg. C of global warming. Not good news.

But those who interpret satellite data in this way are being sloppy. For instance, they never bother to investigate exactly WHY the warming occurred in the first place. As shown on the right, natural cloud variations can do the job quite nicely. To get a net 1 Watt of extra loss you can (for instance) have a gain of 2 Watts of forcing from the cloud change causing the 1 deg. C of warming, and then a resulting feedback response to that warming of an extra 3 Watts.

The net result still ends up being a loss of 1 extra Watt, but in this scenario, a doubling of CO2 would cause little more than 1 deg. C of warming since the Earth is so much more efficient at cooling itself in response to a temperature increase.

As a result of this inherent uncertainty regarding causation, climate modelers are free to tune their models to produce just about any amount of global warming they want to. It will be difficult to prove them wrong, since there is as yet no unambiguous interpretation of the satellite data in this regard. They can simply assert that there are no natural causes of climate change, and as a result they will conclude that our climate system is precariously balanced on a knife edge. The two go hand-in-hand.

Their science thus enters the realm of faith. Of course, there is always an element of faith in scientific inquiry. Unfortunately, in the arena of climate research the level of faith is unusually high, and I get the impression most researchers are not even aware of its existence.

Read it here.

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The Daily Bayonet GW Hoax Weekly Roundup

15 January, 2010 by

Skewering the clueless

As always, a great read!

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Breaking: Peter Spencer ends hunger strike

13 January, 2010 by

From The Australian:

HUNGER striker Peter Spencer has ended his 52 day protest over farmers’ property rights and Australia’s climate change responsibilities but will continue his fight “on the ground” supporters said today.

In a statement released shortly after 9:30 am today, his supporters said he would now be hospitalised until doctors could determine his medical condition.

“As much as the nation is concerned about me, my concerns are directed at the families of the hundreds of farmers who have suicided and the politicians who have failed to show any concern, compassion or morality for what the government has done to these families and the nation’s Constitution. My committed stance on the tower was to press the point,” Mr Spencer said.

His spokesman Alistair McRobert said Mr Spencer has been under increasing pressure from supporters about his welfare and in response has said, “On day 52 of his hunger strike, which was initiated to correspond with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at Copenhagen, Peter Spencer (61 years old) comes down from the suspended platform part way up a wind monitoring tower on his Shannon’s Flat property “Saarahnlee” near Cooma, NSW,” the statement said.

“Spencer’s passive protest is not in vain. It has placed issues at the forefront of every Australian and gained unprecedented attention across Australia, and the world concerning thousands of Australian farming family’s property rights which have been stolen to meet Australia’s entire Kyoto Protocol International Treaty Obligations and in so doing, breaching Australia’s Constitution.”

As I have commented on this blog before, I still need to see evidence that this was a conspiracy between the Commonwealth and the States. If anyone has such evidence, let us see it.

Read it here.

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Countdown with Penny Wong, the clock starts now

13 January, 2010 by

Tick tock

From The Australian. Penny Wong, the robotic climate change minister keeps resetting her internal clock:

The Climate Change Minister tells journalists on July 22 last year:

IN 22 days Malcolm Turnbull will have to show some leadership and be clear about what his party’s position is.

Wong on ABC Sydney 702 the next morning:

THE Liberal Party is in disarray on this issue and Mr Turnbull really needs to do something about it and he has got 21 days to do that.

Wong on August 3:

MR TURNBULL has 10 days to decide whether he is going to continue to be led by the climate change sceptics or whether he is going to show some leadership on this important issue.

The clock starts ticking again on October 15 as the minister issues a press release:

WITH less than 55 days to go before the climate change conference in Copenhagen, it is vital that all countries do as much as possible.

Wong in Copenhagen on December 17:

IN these next three days, we must seal the deal.

Yesterday, Wong hits the reset button and restarts the countdown:

MR Abbott has indicated he will provide a detailed and fully costed climate change policy by the time parliament resumes in February. That is just 21 days away.

Yawn. Time for a firmware update, Penny.

Read it here.

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Extreme weather the witchcraft of the 21st century

13 January, 2010 by

Another climate sceptic gets what's coming…

Frank Furedi, writing in The Australian, correctly compares the hysteria of climate alarmists today to the paranoia of witch-hunters of the Medieval:

The term extreme weather speaks for itself and has become the new normal. “Extreme weather on the rise,” warns the website of the Australian Weather Channel. It communicates a sense of helplessness: “But our emergency response teams are under stress” so “who is going to help you”? This is a rhetorical question.

Extreme weather is not so much a scientific as a cultural metaphor that expresses the anxieties of our time. The conceptual linkage of weather with extreme symbolises a growing tendency to endow natural phenomena with moral meaning.

We can no longer accept that sometimes harsh climatic conditions just happen. As in ancient times when superstition reigned, we interpret bad weather as a symptom of divine displeasure.

Today unexpected weather conditions are blamed on the impact of human beings on the environment. In medieval times unusual climatic episodes were seen as the handiwork of wicked demonic forces. Witchcraft was used to account for virtually every misfortune and unpleasant act. It was the climatic change brought by the so-called Little Ice Age in the 16th century that led to a resurgence of witch-hunting in Europe. From 1380 onwards, accusations of magic and weather-making increased dramatically in inquisitorial trials.

The resurgence of witch-hunting in the late 16th century was influenced by the belief that witches possessed demonic powers that could manipulate the climate in order to undermine the welfare and health of the communities in which they lived.

Throughout history people have sought to blame unusual climatic conditions on demonic forces. What the association of witchcraft with weather-making accomplished was to mobilise people’s fears against the evil forces of heretics and non-believers. Scaremongering about witchcraft promoted the idea that its demonic powers could literally dominate nature. Father Friedrich Spee, a Jesuit critic of witch-hunting, noted sarcastically that “God and nature no longer do anything; witches, everything”. But such beliefs were no joke. A late winter in the province of Treves in the 15th century led to more than 100 people being burned at the stake.

Since burning witches leaves a big carbon footprint, we are likely to find more environmentally friendly ways of punishing those who transgress society’s confusing moral boundaries.

Read it here.

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