Month: November 2015

Working on a video about the recent revelations around Exxon’s climate science program, I came across a striking image yesterday that gives some indication of the skill of Exxon’s modeling, as far back as 1982.

Above, you’ll see a graph showing Exxon’s projections for global warming, published in a 1982 internal briefing document on the greenhouse effect. Fortuitously, one of the forecast years is 2015, so it gives us something we can immediately compare.  For this year, the graph projects an atmospheric CO2 level of 409 ppm, just a tad above our actual 400, and shows an “Average Temperature Increase” of .84 °C.  We’ll have to wait a few weeks for the final word on 2015, but I’m told .84 C is pretty close to what NASA GISS will show.

Stats gurus have already reminded me it’s not a straight up comparison.
NASA’s baseline for starting temps is the 1950 to 1980 global average, and Exxon uses the single year 1979 as a base.  Exxon’s co2 level is slightly higher.  Exxon assumes climate sensitivity as being 3.0°C (+/- 1.5°C), which is dead-on with the 1979 National Academy of Science estimate, and broadly consistent with today.

Not exactly “apples to apples”, – but I’ll call it “macintosh to honeycrisp”.
Exxon correctly predicted a warming, identified the mechanism, and got the time frame and magnitude basically correct.  Show this to your Uncle Dittohead when he tells you “the climate models don’t work.”

For comparison, we can look at contemporary projections from another mainstream climate scientist, for instance, Wallace Broeker from 1975.

Skeptical Science:

Wallace Broecker was among the first climate scientists to use simple climate models to predict future global temperature changes.  His 1975 paper Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming? is widely credited with coining the term “global warming”. Continue reading “What #ExxonKnew Back When”

Guardian:

Germany’s Allianz SE, one of the world’s largest financial asset managers, said on Tuesday it would decrease investments in companies using coal and boost funding in those focused on wind power over the next six months.

Chief executive Oliver Baete said Allianz will no longer invest in companies if more than 30% percent of sales come from coal mining or if coal generates more than 30% percent of electricity.

He said Allianz decided ahead of next week’s United Nations climate change conference in France with “an eye on the 2C goal of the Paris climate negotiations as well as the economic risks involved.”

In 2014, Allianz managed about €1.8tn ($1.9tn) assets in US, Germany, France, Italy, Britain and the Asia-Pacific region.

The company plans to release more details later in the week, but experts estimate the decision on coal would affect investments worth €4bn. Some 90% of the investments affected are in bonds that will be allowed to mature while the six-month frame will apply to equities, Allianz said.

In Paris, more than 190 countries are to negotiate a new global pact to fight climate change. Most of them have already presented plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions after 2020, when the deal is supposed to take effect.

Carbon Tracker:

Fossil fuel companies risk wasting up to $2.2 trillion in the next decade, threatening substantially lower investor returns, by pursuing projects that could be uneconomic in the face of a perfect storm of factors including international action to limit climate change to 2˚C and rapid advances in clean technologies, think tank the Carbon Tracker Initiative warns today.

Continue reading “Stampede from Coal Continues”

Even as he continues to double down, Rep. Lamar Smith’s holy war against science is on shakier ground than ever. #lamarlysenko.

Chris Mooney in the Washington Post:

Even as Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, continues to investigate a high profile study from federal scientists debunking the idea of a global warming slowdown or “pause,” a new study reaches the same conclusion — in a different yet complementary way.

“There is no substantive evidence for a ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’ in warming,” write Stephan Lewandowsky, a professor at the University of Bristol in the UK, and two colleagues in Tuesday’s Nature Scientific Reports. “We suggest that the use of those terms is therefore inaccurate.”
–

Perhaps most notably, the new study uses a different temperature dataset kept by NASA, not NOAA, in its analysis. “You can definitely 100 percent say that our conclusion does not depend on the NOAA update,” says Lewandowsky. “We did not use the NOAA data.” The implication is that independent of Smith’s inquiry, the “pause” argument could still be invalid.

The new paper begins with a simple scientific literature review, finding that while there are many scientific publications citing the “pause” and trying to explain it, they aren’t very clear on its start date. Rather, start dates range from 1993 to 2003, although many start with 1998, a very hot El Nino year and at the time the hottest year on record (which serves to dampen the assessment of the rising temperature trend if this start date is chosen).

That in itself is odd, the paper contends, in that there never seems to have been a clearly accepted definition of the “pause” or “hiatus.”

Continue reading “Yet Another Study Debunks “warming pause” Myth”

Underlining the poor timing and tin-eared politics of  Lamar Smith’s terror campaign against climate science, not to mention the absolute cluelessness of the late,great Republican Party’s  Presidential field on the issue, these items stand out.

Climate Home:

Business leaders from 78 multinationals say they will take the fight to climate sceptics and urge politicians to implement tough and effective new carbon cutting plans.

Senior officials at Microsoft, Nestle, Pepsi, Tata, Dow Chemical and Indian conglomerate Mahindra are among those who say they will become “ambassadors for climate ambition”.

The push comes a week before UN-backed talks on cutting carbon emissions kick off in Paris. An estimated 138 world leaders are expected to attend the opening day of negotiations.

In a letter published by the World Economic Forum (WEF) the business chiefs say they will stress “the science debate is over: climate change is real and addressable” in public communications.

“Delaying action is not an option — it will be costly and will damage growth prospects in the years to come,” they write.

–

The companies involved offer a broad cross section of the global economy – although the letter lacks the support of big oil, gas or coal firms.

Together they generated over $2.1 trillion of revenue in 2014, according to the WEF.

Climate Nexus:

A new memo from nine major Democratic pollsters, however, shows that public opinion is becoming more widely consistent on certain issues within the climate sphere. There is broad support across party lines for clean energy and climate change mitigation, because they have proven economic, social, and environmental benefits for the American people. While support for clean energy has always been high, it is now backed by “growing concern about climate change, an increasingly vocal activist movement, and support from large financial and commercial interests.”

Hart Research:

The most important elements of this consensus are as follows.

(1) A large majority of Americans consider climate change to be a serious problem and want action to be taken now to address it.

Continue reading “The Climate Consensus Tidal Wave”

As I mentioned the other day, what somebody thought was a good idea is going south in a hurry.

For those that have not been closely following, the Chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, Lamar Smith, has been attempting to intimidate and surveil distinguished Government scientists, in response to research results that don’t confirm his favorite Fox News talking points on climate change.  More here, here, and here.

After being served with a mic-dropping slapdown by ranking Minority member Eddie Bernice Johnson, Mr Smith has responded by doubling down on doublespeak and clearly delusional charges which have already been answered.

Mr Smith continues to refer to unnamed “whistleblowers” who, he claims, said the recent study, showing no slowdown in global surface temperature rise, was rushed – despite statements from the editors of the prestigious journal which published the data, indicating the supposedly “rushed” process actually took considerably longer than the normal peer review process, and the “rushed” data was actually years in preparation and had been collected and processed by several groups in separate studies published several years previous.

Someone should have told Lamar that this kind of story worked a lot better when the overwhelming number of journalists were in a fog of Exxon-funded confusion.
As the story creeps outside the inside-baseball media – early indications don’t look so good for Mr Smith.  Escalating this fight as el-nino fueled extreme events continue to ramp up, and  scientists are about to confirm 2015 as the second-in-a-row hottest year on record by a mile, might not play out as he hoped.

US News and World Report:

Seventy-five years ago this August, a Soviet biologist named Trofim Lysenko was anointed head of the USSR’s Institute of Genetics. The son of peasants, his sweeping theories on farming dazzled Josef Stalin and were made mandatory across the empire.

They were hardly a panacea: Soviet farms floundered, yet more than 3,000 scientists who proposed alternatives were questioned, exiled or even executed, no matter the mountain of evidence that natural selection – not some mystical Russian-style communalism, as Lysenko believed – was what made crops grow.

Some see a bit of a parallel between the Soviet-style intimidation and a recent campaign in the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, where Chairman Lamar Smith has pressed forward with a probe questioning the processes and findings of a federal scientific agency – one that has led critics to accuse the Texas Republican of abusing his power and to warn of a chilling effect on further scientific research. Smith has demanded via subpoena, public pronouncements and heated letters that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration turn over internal emails on global warming research. The Texas Republican also has sought to bring agency staffers and NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan into closed-door, deposition-like interviews.

Ars Technica:

The NOAA study that was published in Science presented the latest version of the agency’s global surface temperature dataset and explored changes to the specific warming trend from 1998 to 2014. The update came from folding in a pair of previously published datasets: a new database of terrestrial weather stations, and the most recent version of a database of sea surface temperatures that included some corrections for non-climatic factors like changes in measurement techniques.

The weather station database was published in Geoscience Data Journal in June 2014, and NOAA processed the raw data using the same methods it had used before; those methods were published in 2011. The sea surface temperature database, which Rep. Smith appears to view with suspicion, was published in the Journal of Climate in February 2015, but started the peer review process in December 2013. (As any researcher can tell you, peer review can drag on for a long time.)

As of press time, an aide for the House Science Committee had not clarified why this series of events was being described as a rush “to publish the study before all the appropriate reviews of the underlying science” were completed. NASA incorporated this same sea surface temperature database into its own global surface temperature dataset back in July. Ars asked whether Rep. Smith plans to investigate NASA’s decision as well, but a response was not immediately provided.

In the meantime, a newly released letter from NOAA administrator Kathryn Sullivan to Smith has been posted online,  pointing out:

NOAA has made the data and the analysis available to the Committee, the public, and the scientific community.  The Committee has the raw data as well as the methodology that NOAA scientists used to analyze the data. Together these show that the decision to adjust the data was a scientific one.  The article was peer-reviewed and published in a preeminent and independent scientific journal. If the Committee doubts the integrity of the study, it has the tools it needs to commission a competing scientific assessment.

Rep. Smith’s complete response to ranking Member Johnson’s firm line is below.  He spends the letter railing against the administration and perceived sins, but adds nothing to the case for why scientists should be spied on. Continue reading “Lamar Lysenko”

Elsewhere on this page you can read about Congressman Lamar Smith’s continuing witch hunt against professional scientists.

Smith’s newest claim is that “whistle blowers” have come forward to allege that a recent NOAA study of global temperature was “rushed” for political purposes.

Editors of the journal Science, one of the most respected on the planet, which published the study, tell us, not so much.

Washington Post:

The escalating struggle between an influential House Republican and government scientists over their pivotal study of global warming now turns on accusations that they rushed to publish their findings to advance President Obama’s agenda on climate change.

But a spokeswoman for Science, the prestigious peer-reviewed journal that in June published the paper by climate scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in an interview that their research was subject to a longer, more intensive review than is customary.

“This paper went through as rigorous a review as it could have received,” said Ginger Pinholster, chief of communications for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes Science. “Any suggestion that the review was ‘rushed’ is baseless and without merit.”

She said the paper, submitted to the journal in December, went through two rounds of peer review by other scientists in the field before it was accepted in May. The number of outside reviewers was larger than usual, and the time from submission to online publication was about 50 percent longer than the journal’s average of 109 days, Pinholster said.

During the review, the research was sent back to NOAA for revision and clarification, she said. And because it was based on such an “intensive” examination of global temperature data, the reviewed was handled by one of the journal’s senior editors, she said, “so it could be more carefully assessed.”

Readers are familiar with Lamar Smith and his Witch Hunt against NOAA scientists as head of what tragically passes as the House “Science” Committee.

Now it’s moved up a notch.  This must have seemed like a good idea to somebody at some point.

Washington Post:

House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) opened another front in his war with federal climate researchers on Wednesday, saying a groundbreaking global warming study was “rushed to publication” over the objections of numerous scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In a second letter in less than a week to Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, Smith urged her to pressure NOAA to comply with his subpoena for internal communications. Smith says whistleblowers have come forward with new information on the climate study’s path to publication in June.The study refuted claims that global warming had “paused” or slowed over the past decade, undercutting a popular argument used by those who refute the scientific consensus that man-made pollution is behind global warming.

The “whistle blower” claim is the new wrinkle here, although it’s not completely original. (see below)

The study in question here is the Karl et al study from June which showed that one of denialdom’s most closely held crocks, the “pause” in global temperatures, is a statistical artifact that disappears when improved temperature data are applied.  Mr Smith has taken offense at that result, and seeks to bully, surveil, and intimidate the scientists responsible, and anyone else who might consider committing science in the future.

The data, methodology, studies, everything that Mr Smith would need to analyze if he were actually interested in science, is of course, readily available and always has been.

This set up the ranking Democratic member of the Committee to pen one of the most jaw dropping roundhouse clock cleanings I’ve ever seen.

Eddie Bernice Johnson, Ranking Member, House Committee on Science, Space and Technology:

In my prior letter, I noted that in four separate written demands to NOAA to comply with your “investigation” you never actually identified what it is you were claiming to investigate. instead of responding to either me or NOAA with some legitimate rationale for your actions, you instead wrote a fifth demand letter to NOAA which continued your insistence that NOAA must comply with your demands because your “investigation” – still without every making any accusation of any waste, fraud, or abuse to be investigated.
Just last week, you also sent a similar cajoling letter to Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker. In six separate, and increasingly aggressive,letters, the only thing you accused NOAA of doing is engaging in climate science – i.e., doing their jobs.

Yesterday, you again wrote to Secretary Pritzker demanding the same email communications of NOAA scientists you have demanded on six previous occasions. However, unlike the six previous demand letters you wrote, your seventh letter actually contained an allegation against NOAA’s scientists. In this letter you claim to have whistelblowers who have provided information showing:

“[t]hat the Karl study was rushed to publication despite the concerns and objections of a number of NOAA scientists.”

I would like to point out use how curious it is that you are only now justifying your previous six demand letters and subpoena with an actual allegation of “wrongdoing” by the agency. To be frank, this appear to be an after-the-fact attempt to justify a rising expedition. Moreover, your “whistleblowers” don’t even appear to be challenging the findings of the study, but rather, that the study was “rushed”. This mild accusation would hardly seem to warrant the hyper-aggressive oversight and rhetoric you have leveled at NOAA.

Continue reading “Cracker Congress Critter Claims Climate Conspiracy”

#2 US coal company Arch Coal stock has fallen to close to $1 per share (i.e. $1.01)–again–despite the reverse 10:1 split done in August.

Stocks that stay below $1 per share are not usually allowed to stay on the New York Stock Exchange, making the raising of capital very difficult–to say nothing of the strong likelihood that Arch will be filing for bankruptcy before very long–following the August bankruptcy filing of Alpha Natural Resources (formerly #3 US coal company)

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/081815/will-arch-coal-file-bankruptcy.asp

http://www.forbes.com/sites/spleverage/2015/10/27/arch-coal-cancels-exchange-offer-edges-closer-to-bankruptcy/

http://trib.com/business/energy/arch-coal-says-it-may-file-for-bankruptcy-soon/article_41c971cf-7813-50a5-8881-e695397e21b1.html

For Colorado readers, Arch is an important supplier to Xcel’s biggest Colorado coal plants.

For US readers, Arch Coal provides over 10% of the country’s coal….

It is unclear who will be financing coal mining in the not-too-distant future and coal does not “hop” on the trains itself…

States should be making plans for how to keep the electrical grid stable without a supply of coal for each state’s coal plants.

Continue reading “The Free Market’s War on Coal”

Above, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson’s remarks on a revenue neutral carbon tax from October 2009.(he’s for it, along with most of the other leading oil major execs)
Good ideas eventually get around.

Toronto Globe and Mail:

Alberta’s NDP government is imposing new curbs on emissions from the oil sands and establishing an economy-wide carbon tax in a sweeping new plan aimed at showing it is serious about fighting climate change.

The long-awaited strategy, which comes days before world leaders meet in Paris for a major climate summit, also includes a phaseout of coal-fired power generation in the next 15 years, a 10-year plan to nearly halve methane emissions, as well as incentives for renewable energy.

There are no hard carbon targets, but under the plan, Alberta’s carbon emissions will begin to fall under today’s levels by 2030.

The government promised the moves would be revenue-neutral, and all money would be reinvested in the province on such things as new technology to fight pollution and into a new “adjustment fund” to help affected families and businesses deal with the changes.

Alberta’s climate-change strategy was released only hours before Ms. Notley was set to meet with Canada’s other premiers and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa on Monday. That group will be headed to Paris for the summit. “Alberta is showing leadership on one of the world’s biggest problems, and doing our part,” Ms. Notley said in statement.

Ms. Notley’s six-month-old government says the lack of a wide-ranging climate policy has hampered the province’s energy industry as it has tried to persuade the United States and other trading partners to accept more shipments of crude from the oil sands.

Grist:

For seven years, the Canadian province of British Columbia has had a carbon tax. It is, on its own terms, a resounding success — carbon emissions are falling even as the economy continues to grow.

Not only is it effective, but it is, from a policy standpoint, incredibly elegant:

Continue reading “Alberta Adopts Carbon Tax”