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Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #529 – Watts Up With That?


The Week That Was: 2022-11-19 (November 19, 2022)
Brought to You by SEPP (www.SEPP.org)
The Science and Environmental Policy Project

Quote of the Week:We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn’t any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.” Richard Feynman, Nobel Lecture, 1966.

Number of the Week: 0.003°C per year. Temperature from 200 meteorological stations: average rate of 0.005°C, per year during the past half century.

THIS WEEK:

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

Scope: Writing in Real Clear Energy, AMO Physics Professor Emeritus William Happer has an effective essay explaining why there is no dangerous warming from natural gas (mostly methane, CH4) which is vital for maintaining a stable electrical grid. Meanwhile the grid is becoming more fragile as special interest groups falsely claim wind and solar power is reliable and less costly than coal or natural gas. TWTW will discuss the essay using parts of the important paper written by Happer and W. A. van Wijngaarden on “Relative Potency of Greenhouse Molecules.”

The 27th annual Conference of Parties (COP 27) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) closed with the COP27 President, Sameh Shoukry declaring that they are “fair, balanced, and transparent in our approach.” The UN is not. It deliberately ignores forty years of advances in understanding the limitations of how atmospheric greenhouse gases influence earth’s temperatures. As Howard Hayden demonstrated in last week’s TWTW, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)            “…have provided incontrovertible evidence that their representative scenarios are physically impossible.” Even when using the more modest “scenario in which the radiative forcing is 7.0 W/m2” (SSP3-7.0), the IPCC gets the Stefan-Boltzmann law wrong. Thus, none of their projections, forecasts, or long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns are based on laws of physics. TWTW will explore the possibility of a term to describe this deliberate ignorance of advances in science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QENy1YYPKQ

Former parliamentary under-secretary for Energy, Science and Technology Barry Brill of New Zealand has written that in its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6, 2021) the IPCC backed down from its most extreme position. However, as witnessed at COP 27, it makes no difference to those making fanatical demands about the use of fossil fuels including enormous transfer payments from the US to developing nations. TWTW will review a few of the remarkable and positive changes that humanity has experienced, thanks to the use of these fuels.

In discussing the hypocrisy of COP 27, environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg brings up studies on the tremendous benefits to humanity in recent years from rural electrification, which requires reliable electricity, which cannot be supplied by wind or solar power.

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No Clothes? In discussing the absence of critical thinking demonstrated by the Biden Administration in its intensifying regulations on the production of natural gas (methane), William Happer begins with the Hans Christian Anderson’s story “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Happer writes:

“In Biden’s case, the new clothes are the nonsense that there is a climate emergency. But who would want to be considered “unfit for his office” or “unusually stupid” by questioning whether there really is an emergency? So, resplendent in his new regalia, President Biden has proposed regulations on methane emissions by the U.S. oil and gas industry, at a direct cost of more than $1 billion annually, to deal with a nonexistent problem.

“In fact, there is no climate emergency and there will not be one, with or without new regulations on methane emissions. Methane, the molecule CH4, is the main constituent of natural gas. Animals like cattle and sheep belch methane as they chew their cud. They are able to get more energy from forage by digesting some of the cellulose with the aid of methane-generating microorganisms in their stomachs. Termites use the same trick to digest wood. Microorganisms in soils, notably rice paddies, also emit large amounts of methane.

“To understand why methane regulation will be irrelevant to climate, it is necessary to discuss a few numbers. This is not customary in climate discussions, which are usually more based in emotion than in fact.

“Like water vapor (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2), and nitrous oxide (N2O), methane is a naturally occurring greenhouse gas. Together with clouds, greenhouse gases control how heat added to the Earth by sunlight is returned as thermal infrared radiation to space. Greenhouse gases impede the flow of heat from Earth’s surface to space. 

“The details of how this happens are considerably more complicated than described by the adjective ‘heat-trapping.’ Much of the heat transfer near the surface is due to convection of moist air and has little to do with greenhouse gases. And how the temperature varies with altitude at various locations on Earth’s surface is as important as the concentration of greenhouse gases.

“Few realize that large increases in the concentrations of greenhouse gases cause very small changes in the heat balance of the atmosphere. Doubling the concentration of methane – a 100% increase, which would take about 200 years at the current growth rates – would reduce the heat flow to space by only 0.3%, leading to an average global temperature change of only 0.2 °C. This is less than one-quarter of the change in temperature observed over the past 150 years. 

“Most of the predicted catastrophic warming from greenhouse gas emissions is due to positive feedbacks that are highly speculative, at best. In accordance with Le Chatelier’s principle, most feedbacks of natural systems are negative, not positive.

So, even if regulations on U.S. methane emissions could completely stop the increase of atmospheric methane (they can’t), they would likely only lower the average global temperature in the year 2222 by about 0.2 °C, a completely trivial amount given that humans have adapted to a much larger change over the past century while reducing climate deaths by over 98%.”

In explaining “U.S. to Sharply Cut Methane Pollution that Threatens the Climate and Public Health” November 2, 2022, the EPA claims:

“One third of the warming from greenhouse gases occurring today is due to human-caused emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that traps about 30 times as much heat as carbon dioxide over 100 years, and sharp cuts over the next decade will have a near-term beneficial impact on the climate. In the United States, the oil and natural gas industry is the largest industrial source of methane emissions, emitting more methane than the total emissions of all greenhouse gases from 164 countries combined.”

The EPA’s claims are substantiated by nothing but words and models that fail basic testing against the real atmosphere. Professor Happer’s analysis is based on detailed calculations of “Relative Potency of Greenhouse Molecules.”

“The forcings due to changing concentrations of Earth’s five most important, naturally occurring greenhouse gases, H2O, CO2, O3, N2O and CH4 as well as CF4 and SF6 were evaluated for the case of a cloud-free atmosphere.”

Clouds will only lessen the greenhouse effect; thus, the analysis provides an upper bound. The data used is from the HITRAN Database, which is well tested. Many of America’s weapons systems depend on it, including the Sidewinders, Stinger, and Javelin infrared guided missiles, as well as night vision devices. The abstract further states:

“For current atmospheric concentrations, the per-molecule forcings of the abundant greenhouse gases H2O and CO2 are suppressed by four orders of magnitude. The forcings of the less abundant greenhouse gases, O3, N2O and CH4, are also suppressed, but much less so.”

In this case, an order of magnitude is a power of ten, thus the effectiveness of carbon dioxide in an atmosphere with no CO2 is 10,000 times that of adding CO2 to today’s atmosphere. In writing:

“One third of the warming from greenhouse gases occurring today is due to human-caused emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that traps about 30 times as much heat as carbon dioxide over 100 years…”

…the EPA demonstrates that it is ignorant of the greenhouse effect, and insists on using misleading and false words. There appears that there is no one in this administration who is capable or will speak out about the profound distortions by the administration concerning atmospheric physical science.

Happer concludes his essay with:

“Biden and his advisors should reassess his new clothes and remember the wise word of the poet Alexander Pope:

”’A little learning is a dangerous thing;

“’Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring.

“’There shallow draughts intoxicate brain,

“’And drinking largely sobers us again.’

“A little learning really is a dangerous thing. Learn a few more scientific facts and sober up, President Biden!”

See links under Challenging the Orthodoxy and https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/us-sharply-cut-methane-pollution-threatens-climate-and-public-health

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Functional Illiteracy: Years ago, when teaching economics and statistics, Haapala realized that many students may know the correct terms but do not understand what the terms mean. The advent of statistical packages for laptop computers may have only worsened the situation. Calculations and various statistical methods have limitations. One must understand these limitations before applying such methods.

In writing his paper on the incorrect statistics used to attribute probability assessments to extreme weather events, Ross McKitrick exposed papers, perhaps 10,000 papers, that failed to correctly interpret the Gauss-Markov Theorem on the assumptions needed to apply ordinary least squares to give the best unbiased estimate (BLUE) possible.

This problem is compounded by politicians and bureaucrats who are mathematically illiterate. A 1988 book by mathematician John Allen Paulos explained the problem well: Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences. According to the book’s description on Amazon:

“Why do even well-educated people understand so little about mathematics? And what are the costs of our innumeracy? John Allen Paulos, in his celebrated bestseller first published in 1988, argues that our inability to deal rationally with very large numbers and the probabilities associated with them results in misinformed governmental policies, confused personal decisions, and an increased susceptibility to pseudoscience of all kinds. Innumeracy lets us know what we’re missing, and how we can do something about it.’

The problem exists beyond mathematics, as physician and molecular biologist of the Hoover Institution Henry Miller wrote in “Scientifically Illiterate America”:

“At least a modicum of scientific literacy is important for citizens. As the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry’s primer observed: ‘It is imperative that policymakers, the media, and the general public are able to distinguish the facts from mere interpretations of a biased constituency. Decision-makers and those who inform them must be able to judge the quality of the science and reasoning that supports a position and must know whether a set of scientific findings is really meaningful to a decision.’

“However, even when the science is sound and the data are ‘meaningful,’ politicians and government officials commonly ignore them, often in the cause of bureaucratic empire-building, advancing some ideological goal, or capitulating to activists. When I was an official at the Food and Drug Administration, I once heard a Clinton administration undersecretary of agriculture, who previously had headed an anti-technology advocacy group, deconstruct science: ‘You can have ‘your’ science or ‘my’ science or ‘somebody else’s’ science. By nature, there is going to be a difference.’ Translation: ‘I don’t care about data or the consensus in the scientific community. My opinions are just as valid.’

“The beauty of the scientific method, when done right, is that it protects us from ideology and bias, and helps us understand what is true and what really works. At its best, science can inform sound public policy. But when we ignore or misinterpret science, we move backwards toward a time when irrationality and superstition prevailed.” [Boldface added]

To avoid moving “backward toward a time when irrationality and superstition prevailed,” TWTW and SEPP try to emphasize that all evidence must be considered and properly presented. TWTW describes as “functional illiteracy” the use of important concepts without fully understanding them, including their limits.

In bureaucracies, such as government, all too often a little bit of exaggeration grows to a great deal of exaggeration. We have seen this on how increasing greenhouse gases may cause a bit of warming has grown to a “climate crisis” or “climate emergency.” See links under Other Scientific News and https://www.amazon.com/Innumeracy-Mathematical-Illiteracy-Its-Consequences/dp/0809074478.

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A Small, Meaningless Concession: Barry Brill, of New Zealand has written that in its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6, 2021) the IPCC has backed down from its most extreme emissions scenario. A similar essay by Judith Curry appeared in Climate Etc. on November 2 (Nov 5 TWTW). The average of all their modeled temperatures disagrees with measurements and will do so even after they abandon the most extreme one. Sadly, the damage caused by the exaggeration of the IPCC has been done. Many countries are making extreme claims of damages from global warming that are little more than exercises in extreme greed. For example, Colombia is claiming an annual loss of $800 billion, about 2.5 times its gross domestic product.

As discussed in last week’s TWTW, AMO physicist Howard Hayden showed that for the first time in its reports, AR6 of the IPCC brought up the Stefan-Boltzmann law and got it totally wrong. The authors of AR6 calculated an increase in infrared radiation emitted by the surface to be about one-third of that that would be emitted if the earth’s temperature rises 3.6ºC, the central estimate. Functional Illiteracy in action. See links under Challenging the Orthodoxy and After Paris.

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Benefits of the Industrial Revolution: According to IPCC reports, global warming started with industrial CO2 emissions, about in the year 1850 in England. According to “Our World in Data”, in 1850 about 74% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, a hand-to-mouth existence. Today, about 10% of a much larger population lives in extreme poverty.

“But even after two centuries of progress, extreme poverty is still the reality for every tenth person in the world. This is what the ‘international poverty line’ highlights – this metric plays an important (and successful) role in focusing the world’s attention on these very poorest people in the world.

“The poorest people today live in countries which have achieved no growth. This stagnation of the world’s poorest economies is one of the largest problems of our time. Unless this changes millions of people will continue to live in extreme poverty.”

Most of the extreme poverty is in Africa, where the UN, WEF, and other “do-good” organizations are unwittingly trying to stop economic growth. Given their Functional Illiteracy, the cruelty of these organizations is difficult to understand. According to Our World in Data, in 1850 life expectancy was 29.3 years (with little data outside of Europe and the Americas). In 2019 it was 72.6 years. Although there have been deficiencies and inequalities, the Industrial Revolution has been a great benefit to humanity. But how many academics calculating the “Social Cost of Carbon” take these numbers into consideration?

One of the great benefits from industrialization has been steady, reliable electricity. Modern industry requires reliable, affordable electricity. In addressing the hypocrisy exhibited at COP 27, environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg brings up studies on the benefits of rural electrification. This led to other studies in various regions of the globe.

By the 1920s most US cities and towns had electricity. But as late as 1932, only about 10% of rural America had electricity. Franklin Roosevelt made rural electrification an issue in his 1932 presidential campaign. By the 1950s the task was largely completed, with many homes having electrical appliances. Now this administration and the IPCC are declaring that reliable, affordable electricity is harmful to humanity?

See links under After Paris!, https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief, and https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

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Number of the Week: 0.003°C per year. Temperature from 200 meteorological stations: average rate of 0.005°C per year during the past half century. Many sources of claims of dangerous global warming from humans adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere cite the work of British steam engineer and amateur meteorologist Guy Stewart Callendar for revising the 19th century work on carbon dioxide and temperatures. The founder of the concept of greenhouse gases, John Tyndall, used spectroscopy to establish the warming effect, and yet today’s climate modelers ignore modern work in the field, which is used by van Wijngaarden and Happer.

A link in Nature Human Behaviour led to a link of a 2007 reproduction of Calendar’s original paper in a 1938 publication by the Royal Meteorological Society. Unfortunately, due to restrictions, TWTW could not copy the Summary. It reads:

“By fuel combustion man has added about 150,000 million tons of carbon dioxide to the air during the past half century. The author estimates from the best available data that approximately three quarters of this has remained in the atmosphere.

“That radiation absorption coefficients of carbon dioxide and water vapor are used to show the effect of carbon dioxide on ‘sky radiation.’ From this the increase in mean temperature, due to the artificial production of carbon dioxide, is estimated to be at the rate of 0.003°C per year at the present time.

“The temperature observations at 200 meteorological stations are used to show that world temperatures have actually increased at an average rate of 0.005°C per year during the past half century.”

Evidently, TWTW must be an extreme anti-science, climate denier. The Earth is now in the cooling Meghalayan age, of the warm Holocene geological epoch, in the Quaternary period of frequent glaciations. Glaciation can lower the earth’s temperatures in the temperate regions (where most people live) and polar regions by 10°C or more. A warming of 0.5°C per century should be welcome. See links under Below the Bottom Line and Changing Climate.

Challenging the Orthodoxy — NIPCC

Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science

Idso, Carter, and Singer, Lead Authors/Editors, Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), 2013

Summary: https://www.heartland.org/_template-assets/documents/CCR/CCR-II/Summary-for-Policymakers.pdf

Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts

Idso, Idso, Carter, and Singer, Lead Authors/Editors, Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), 2014

http://climatechangereconsidered.org/climate-change-reconsidered-ii-biological-impacts/

Summary: https://www.heartland.org/media-library/pdfs/CCR-IIb/Summary-for-Policymakers.pdf

Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels

By Multiple Authors, Bezdek, Idso, Legates, and Singer eds., Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, April 2019

http://store.heartland.org/shop/ccr-ii-fossil-fuels/

Download with no charge:

http://climatechangereconsidered.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Climate-Change-Reconsidered-II-Fossil-Fuels-FULL-Volume-with-covers.pdf

Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming

The NIPCC Report on the Scientific Consensus

By Craig D. Idso, Robert M. Carter, and S. Fred Singer, Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), Nov 23, 2015

http://climatechangereconsidered.org/

Download with no charge:

https://www.heartland.org/policy-documents/why-scientists-disagree-about-global-warming

Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate

S. Fred Singer, Editor, NIPCC, 2008

http://www.sepp.org/publications/nipcc_final.pdf

Global Sea-Level Rise: An Evaluation of the Data

By Craig D. Idso, David Legates, and S. Fred Singer, Heartland Policy Brief, May 20, 2019

Challenging the Orthodoxy

A Little Learning on Methane and Climate Change

By William Happer, Real Clear Energy, Nov 16, 2022

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/11/16/a_little_learning_on_methane_and_climate_change_864994.html

“A little learning really is a dangerous thing. Learn a few more scientific facts and sober up, President Biden!”

Relative Potency of Greenhouse Molecules

By W. A. van Wijngaarden and W. Happer, Jan 14, 2021

https://wvanwijngaarden.info.yorku.ca/files/2021/03/WPotency.pdf?x45936

Barry Brill: The overdue retraction of a giant lie

By Barry Brill, Breaking Views. NZ, Nov 7, 2022

https://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2022/11/barry-brill-overdue-retraction-of-giant.html

Climate Plans Remain Insufficient: More Ambitious Action Needed Now

By Staff, UN Climate Change, Oct 26, 2022

https://unfccc.int/news/climate-plans-remain-insufficient-more-ambitious-action-needed-now

Climate Alarmist Claim Fact Checks

Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, ICECAP, Nov 17, 2022

http://icecap.us/index.php/go/political-climate/alarmist_claim_rebuttals_updated/

Guest Feature: Energy *IS* the Economy

By Robert Hargraves, Grid Brief, Nov 15, 2022

https://www.gridbrief.com/p/guest-feature-energy-economy

“Sustainability is a myth.”

The Be-All / End-All “reposition global warming as theory” Memos: When It’s All You Got, You. Have. Nothing.

By Russell Cook, GelbspanFiles.com, Nov 16, 2022 [H/t WUWT]

http://gelbspanfiles.com/?p=14609

Defending the Orthodoxy – Bandwagon Science

Analysis: World has 9 years to avoid critical climate change threshold

By Zack Budryck, The Hill, Nov 11, 2022

Link to Analysis: Global Carbon Budget 2022

By Pierre Friedlingstein and multiple authors, Earth System Science Data, Nov 11, 2022

https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/14/4811/2022/

Questioning the Orthodoxy

Climate Change Weekly #453: Climate Catastrophism Is Worse Than Climate Change

By H. Sterling Burnett, Heartland, Nov 17, 2022

Thanks, Colorado Springs Gazette, for Warning of the Dangers of “Climate Change Catastrophism”

By Linnea Lueken, Climate Realism, Nov 16, 2022

After Paris!

COP27: A Parade Of Climate Hypocrisy

By Bjorn Lomborg, Forbes, Nov 10, 2022

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bjornlomborg/2022/11/10/cop27-a-parade-of-climate-hypocrisy/?sh=5207d9e472b3

Link to paper: Does basic energy access generate socioeconomic benefits? A field experiment with off-grid solar power in India

By Michaël Aklin, et al. Science Advances, May 17, 2017

https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/sciadv.1602153

Link to another study: The Welfare Impacts of Rural Electrification in Bangladesh

By Shahidur R. Khandker, et al, The Energy Journal.

https://www.iaee.org/energyjournal/article/2471

Link to a third study not used by Lomborg: Who Benefits Most from Rural Electrification? Evidence in India

By Shahidur R. Khandker, et al. The Energy Journal, Vol 35, No 2

https://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejarticle.aspx?id=2559

Opinion: Where I come from, being a climate ‘activist’ isn’t a choice

From CNN Opinion, Nov 10, 2022

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/10/opinions/amazon-climate-change-cop27-helena-gualinga/index.html

“Among those attending COP27 is 20-year-old Helena Gualinga. She hails from a remote village in the Ecuadorian Amazon – home of the Kichwa Sarayaku community, who have been fighting for climate justice and indigenous land rights for decades.”

[SEPP Comment: As with many claims, nothing to do with global warming.]

Opinion: Greenwashing Egypt’s human rights record with COP27

The COP27 meeting has drawn criticism due to the human rights and environmental records of its host country

By:Samaa Elibyari and Ehab Lotayef,  National Post (Can), Nov 12, 2022

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/opinion-greenwashing-egypts-human-rights-record-with-cop27

COP335

By John Robeson, Climate Discussion Nexus, Nov 16, 2022

COP27 — Colombia claims an absurd $800 billion a year “loss and damage”

By David Wojick, CFACT, Nov 16, 2022

https://www.cfact.org/2022/11/16/cop27-colombia-claims-an-absurd-800-billion-a-year-loss-and-damage/

Egypt’s COP27 ‘climate gabfest’ isn’t going ‘too well’

By Paul Homewood, Not a Lot of People Know That, Nov 14, 2022

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