Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #480 – Watts Up With That?

The Week That Was: 2021-11-20 (November 20, 2021)
Brought to You by SEPP (www.SEPP.org)
The Science and Environmental Policy Project

Quote of the Week: “There is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [H/t John Garrett]

Number of the Week: 99.9% Consensus

THIS WEEK:

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)

Scope: The Glasgow Follies are over and Western politicians had their opportunities to strut on the world stage, pledge how they will punish the ordinary people for their excesses and have gone home to explain to the ordinary people how they did not mean what they said. Discussed below are a few of the many descriptions of what occurred. The few true leaders of countries to emerge were those from India, China, and others in East Asia, and a few in Africa who understand the needs of their people and are not persuaded by the elaborate, shabby science used by the UN and other agencies to declare a climate crisis or emergency when there is none.

Fossil fuels are needed to lift the poor from extreme poverty, as China has clearly demonstrated. Fuels such as coal, so plentiful in many countries, can burn cleanly and generate reliable electricity to better provide for the heating and cooking needs of ordinary people than is possible from dung, wood, and other biofuels. Reliable energy, electricity is required for industrialization.

Anyone who has followed hourly, daily, weekly, monthly generation from wind and solar knows that claims that these sources can replace fossil fuels are a travesty. There are no energy storage systems (batteries, pumped-hydro storage, compressed air, etc.) big enough to cover the huge gaps in generation, and there is no proof-of-concept that wind or solar can replenish the storage in a timely manner.

For the US, Francis Menton summed it well:

“At this point, the biggest risk is that Biden and the Democratic Congress together put through enough of a ‘Green New Deal’ to effectively destroy the U.S. energy sector and leave the world with no clear shining example of energy success. It’s getting less and less likely but could still happen.”

The Biden administration may find it cannot bribe its way out of a hole it has dug no matter how generous the promised subsidies.

In addition, this TWTW will discuss the presentation of Willie Soon at the Heartland Conference covering research by many on the disagreements of impact of solar changes on the earth’s climate. The UN and its followers ignore these crucial differences to claim the impact of variation in the sun is miniscule, about zero. In another paper, Soon explains why, after thirty years of study, he is now sufficiently confident in the patterns his group has uncovered to make predictions of solar variability for the near future.

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The Global Age of Shams: Walter Russell Mead discussed the Glasgow display of ignorance well. He writes:

“If there is one thing the world should take away from the Glasgow COP26 summit, it’s that the most dangerous greenhouse-gas emissions come from the front ends of politicians, not the back ends of cows. Pandering is much more dangerous to human civilization than methane, strategic incompetence a graver threat than CO2; and dysfunctional establishment groupthink will likely kill more polar bears than all the hydrofluorocarbons in the world.

“The 19th-century writer Thomas Carlyle wrote of an Age of Shams in prerevolutionary France, when the chattering classes and political leaders had so fundamentally lost contact with the underlying realities of the day that they could no longer understand the political challenges facing the French social order, much less respond to them. The elaborate rituals of court life in Versailles persisted, the ministers and bureaucrats went through the motions of governance, and intellectuals sparkled in the salons—while the French monarchy sailed, like the Titanic, toward its rendezvous with destiny.

“COP26 was the kind of hollow ritual that characterized Carlyle’s Age of Shams. As one politician after another committed their countries to carefully crafted unenforceable pledges, none had the bad manners to observe that no country anywhere fully honored the climate pledges made with such fanfare in Paris six years ago. Even the pledges are insufficient to meet the stated goals of the U.N. climate process, and nobody is keeping the pledges.

“The intellectual and political disarray on display in Glasgow was terrifying. President Biden boasted about America’s new climate goals and its dedication to them. Yet in the same week he begged OPEC+ to bail out the world economy and his presidency by pumping more fossil fuels. Let future presidents face the rough contours of a world without fossil fuels; this one means to get re-elected, no matter how much greenhouse gas spews into the sky.

“Emerging-market countries had their own demands. The old magic number of $100 billion in annual climate finance to emerging markets has been discarded as pathetically insufficient. India alone now asks for $1 trillion by the end of the decade, and the total annual bill for emerging economies is estimated at $1.3 trillion. The only thing certain about this bill is that it will never be paid.

“On the positive side, as more than one breathless journalist reported, after 30 years of intense United Nations negotiations over climate change, the final declaration in Glasgow mentioned fossil fuels for the first time. Admittedly, those 30 years of patient diplomacy have seen an inexorable rise in greenhouse-gas emissions, but that is a minor detail. One trembles with excitement to contemplate the wordsmithing breakthroughs from the next 30 years of international conferences.

“No one should be surprised that COP26 failed to solve the climate problem. No coherent strategy for addressing a major, technically complex and politically sensitive issue has ever emerged or will ever emerge from a gathering of 30,000 people representing more than 190 countries and uncounted industry and nongovernmental groups.

“Like much of what happens in international life, COP26 was less about solving difficult problems than helping politicians survive their inability to provide effective leadership on issues that matter. European and North American politicians bask in the coverage of their pledges and their declarations of concern; Asian and African leaders make sure the folks back home know how hard they are fighting for that trillion-dollar payout. Emissions continue to rise.”

Mr. Mead then discusses other political issues which are not of concern for TWTW. In addition, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal discusses how unreal the situation is. See Article # 1 and Article # 2.

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Humiliating Failure: Paul Homewood presents excerpts from numerous UN documents which went into the preparation of COP 26. He recognizes that the UK prime minister Boris Johnson staked a significant part of his reputation on its success. He then shows the significant difference between pledges for 2030 and current emissions as compared to the 2015 Paris Agreement. Homewood concludes:

“The end of the road.

“In my view, we have seen the beginning of the end for the UN’s climate agenda.

There will no doubt be many more COPs to come. And there will be annual warnings from Prince Charles that we have 12 more months to save the planet.

“But the writing is now on the wall. Developing countries around the world are standing up and refusing to cut back on fossil fuels, because they know they have no alternative if they want to grow their economies and give their people a better life.

“They have got off the Climate Train.

“So should we.”

In his essay describing COP 26 and its goal for global central planning, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) president Kent Lassman concludes with a quote from Shakespeare describing the Glasgow Follies:

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.” — Act V, Scene v, Macbeth

But there is always next year. COP 27 is scheduled to take place not in cold Glasgow, but in warm Sharm al-Sheikh, Egypt, on the Sinai Peninsula, a coastal resort on the Red Sea. There the glimmering rich can show their concern for protecting the earth to ordinary people, not using jet fuel to fly in by luxury private jets, but by using diesel to cruise in on luxury yachts. So much more tasteful and fashionable. See links under After Paris!

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The Role of the Sun: At the 14^th International Conference on Climate Change, Willie Soon presented research he is doing with others on the role of the sun on earth’s climate. The first part of the lecture discussed the paper he wrote with twenty-two co-authors including many other experts in solar physics: “How much has the Sun influenced Northern Hemisphere temperature trends? An ongoing debate.” Published in Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, the paper discusses an important controversy in evaluating the influence of changing solar radiation on surface air temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere. If we do not know the natural influences on surface-air temperatures, we cannot hope to use them to estimate the influence of CO2. The beginning of the abstract reads:

In order to evaluate how much Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) has influenced Northern Hemisphere surface air temperature trends, it is important to have reliable estimates of both quantities. Sixteen different estimates of the changes in TSI since at least the 19th century were compiled from the literature. Half of these estimates are “low variability,” and half are “high variability.” Meanwhile, five largely independent methods for estimating Northern Hemisphere temperature trends were evaluated using: 1) only rural weather stations; 2) all available stations whether urban or rural (the standard approach); 3) only sea surface temperatures; 4) tree-ring widths as temperature proxies; 5) glacier length records as temperature proxies. The standard estimates which use urban as well as rural stations were somewhat anomalous as they implied a much greater warming in recent decades than the other estimates, suggesting that urbanization bias might still be a problem in current global temperature datasets – despite the conclusions of some earlier studies. Nonetheless, all five estimates confirm that it is currently warmer than the late 19th century, i.e., there has been some “global warming” since the 19th century.

Demonstrating their ignorance of solar physics, the censors at Facebook attacked the paper. The September 11 TWTW discussed the paper and incident. The paper by Soon, et al. was based on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5, 2013). About the same time the IPCC came out with its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6, 2021) with its foolish Summary for Policymakers featuring a hockey-stick style graph of 2000 years claiming to show roughly steady temperatures until modern times. This has been discussed in recent TWTWs, thanks to the efforts of Steve McIntyre exposing how poor the underlying studies are. (The Technical Summary (Figure TS.10) of AR6 also features a return of the missing “hot spot” starting about 2081, with no physical evidence.)

Figure TS:15 (p. 129) shows that the role of the sun in changes in global surface temperature from 1750 to 2019 is miniscule. To claim that the solar dynamo has no role in changing global temperatures for over 250 years is absurd.

In his Heartland presentation Soon went into the use of machine learning to reconstruct gaps in sunspots as reported in the World Data Center’s newly constructed annual sunspot time series (1700–2019; Version 2.0). The abstract of the paper states:

“The retrodiction and prediction of solar activity are two closely-related problems in dynamo theory. We applied Machine Learning (ML) algorithms and analyses to the World Data Center’s newly constructed annual sunspot time series (1700–2019; Version 2.0). This provides a unique model that gives insights into the various patterns of the Sun’s magnetic dynamo that drives solar activity maxima and minima. We found that the variability in the 11-year Sunspot Cycle is closely connected with 120-year oscillatory magnetic activity variations. We also identified a previously under-reported 5.5-year periodicity in the sunspot record. This 5.5-year pattern is co-modulated by the 120-year oscillation and appears to influence the shape and energy/power content of individual 11-year cycles. Our ML algorithm was trained to recognize such underlying patterns and provides a convincing hindcast of the full sunspot record from 1700 to 2019. It also suggests the possibility of missing sunspots during Sunspot Cycles −1, 0, and 1 (ca. 1730s-1760s). In addition, our ML model forecasts a new phase of extended solar minima that began prior to Sunspot Cycle 24 (ca. 2008–2019) and will persist until Sunspot Cycle 27 (ca. 2050 or so). Our ML Bayesian model forecasts a peak annual sunspot number (SSN) of 95 with a probable range of 80–115 for Cycle 25 between 2023 and 2025.”

Initially TWTW was skeptical because Bayesian statistics have been misused in many misleading studies, often because the researchers do not understand their limitations for making forecasts. However, Soon’s co-authors, particularly Velasco Herrera, have an understanding of the limitations of statistics. The mathematics is beyond the scope of this week’s TWTW. The authors state in the paper under “Results of hindcasting and forecasting solar activity cycles”:

“4.1. Quality criterion of the Bayesian sunspot model.

“Because solar activity is a highly variable, complex system, and because ML model estimates are limited by an uncertainty principle (Velasco Herrera et al., 2015), only probabilistic ranges can be specified for the annual average number of sunspots.

“To create a unique model for forecasting future solar cycles, the model must have (a) information on the patterns of the sunspot cycles found in the spectral analysis, as well as (b) information on variability that induces solar activity maxima and minima. A model with an artificial intelligent algorithm can never reproduce 100% of the objective data because this scenario leads to undesirable overtraining.

“Here, we show that with the analyzed sunspot time series, a ML model can be constructed that meets both the requirements (a) and (b). We used the Bayesian model firstly to obtain a model that can accurately hindcasts sunspot patterns and can be used in forecasting sunspot counts over the next several cycles.

“Since it is not possible to forecast the exact number of annual sunspots, we have applied the Bayesian ML model to reproduce the patterns of annual sunspots for forecasting subsequent solar cycles.”

Under conclusions they state:

“Our model yields a reliable reconstruction of the sunspot record observed from 1700 to 2019, as well as probabilistic forecasts of the sunspot time series from 2020 to 2100.”

This may become a significant improvement in forecasting the changing intensity of the sun, but only nature (the future) can tell.

As Soon pointed out in his lecture, Andrei Monin, the Russian physicist, applied mathematician, and oceanographer, who made significant contributions to statistical theory of turbulence and atmospheric physics stated:

“The greatest attention should be devoted to the question whether there is a connection between the Earth’s weather and the fluctuation in solar activity. The presence of such a connection would be almost a tragedy for meteorology, since it would evidently mean that it would first be necessary to predict solar activity in order to predict the weather.”[Boldface added]

See links under Science: Is the Sun Rising? and Defending the Orthodoxy.

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Red Team Missing: Jim Steele discusses the inferior quality of the recent report on climate being a threat to national security by the Department of Defense. In his discussion he mentions a 2003 DoD report on the importance of Red Teams for critical thinking needed for planning. It states in part:

“We argue that red teaming is especially important now for the DoD. Current adversaries are tougher targets for intelligence than was the United States major cold war foe. Red teaming deepens understanding of options available to adaptive adversaries and both complements and informs intelligence collection and analysis.”

The disaster of committing hundreds of thousands of ground troops into Southeast Asia without a strategic plan is an example of the need for red teams. Let’s hope the current Pentagon leadership will not follow the lead of the “best and the brightest” of the Pentagon “whiz kids” sixty years ago. See links under Challenging the Orthodoxy and Expanding the Orthodoxy.

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Number of the Week: 99.9% Consensus. On his blog, Tony Heller quotes a statement by UK environmentalist Mark Lynas:

“Have signed this letter calling for social media networks to take strong action against climate misinformation and disinformation. Given that we now know the climate consensus is 99.9% in the scientific community, there is no room for denialism.”

Apparently, the clueless Lynas has never heard of those scientists discussed in TWTW. Ignorance is bliss. See link under Below the Bottom Line.

Science: Is the Sun Rising?

Studying the Role of the Sun on Climate

By Willie Soon, 14^th International Conference on Climate Change, October 16, 2021

How much has the Sun influenced Northern Hemisphere temperature trends? An ongoing debate

By Ronan Connolly, et al. Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2021 [Free Article]

PDF: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1674-4527/21/6/131/pdf

Does Machine Learning reconstruct missing sunspots and forecast a new solar minimum?

By V.M. Velasco Herrera, W. Soon and D.R. Legates, Advances in Space Research, August 2021

Suppressing Scientific Inquiry

Thugocracy: Science in the Postmodern World (Roger Pielke Jr. as victim)

By Richard W. Fulmer, Master Resource, Nov 18, 2021