Climate change items in the 2009 Federal Budget

So, the Australian 2009-2010 Federal Budget is delivered. ‘Clean energy’ stands as one of the infrastructure centrepieces – an investment that is hoped to both pull the economy out of recession and get us on the pathway to a low carbon economy. A princely sum of $4.5 billion directed to renewable energy, infrastructure for climate observing systems, and funds for low emissions technology development. It sure sounds imprressive, but under scruity, it turns out to be mostly just smoke and mirrors.

Breaking down the numbers, we find that $1 billion is a rollover of existing funds, while $2.4 billion has been directed towards research, development and demonstration of low-emissions coal technology (that’s ‘carbon capture and storage’ for those not au fait with its prefered euphemism). A little under half a billion will go towards establishing a body to support research into renewables.

I’m ambivalent about the large bucket of money handed to coal. There are severe technical and logstical constraints on ‘clean coal’, which mean that it can never be scaled up to become a major global solution to carbon mitigation.Yet the technology, if developed to maturity, has the potential to be used to drag carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and lock it away underground – if power generation furnaces are fed by biomass rather than fossil fuels. So in a future ‘geoengineering’ role, it remains a promising approach that is worth supporting. The trouble is, it can be so easily used to ‘greenwash’ the rampant expansion of coal use today, while the climate system becomes increasingly, and perhaps irreversibly, hostile to our modern society and the planet’s biodiversity.

As to the investment in renewable energy such as solar power, I’m honestly not sure what value add we’re getting out of this budget. The mandatory renewable energy target (MRET), which will commit Australia to produce 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, is already going to drive major investment in renewables through carrot-and-stick incentives. What is this budget doing that the MRET legislation won’t already do? Almost certainly nothing.

One practical measure, which I support, is the commitment of $228 million to double the capacity of Adelaide’s Port Stanvac desalination plant, giving it an annual output of 100 gigalitres. In my view there is no real prospect that Australia’s major cities will ever again break their chronic water stress – and restore some decent quanta to environmental flows – unless a technological solution like desal is adopted across the country. Desert states in the Middle East have been doing it for years. The key climate consideration is to have that desalinated water produced from low carbon energy sources. Unfortunately, the paltry commitment to low carbon energy rollout in this and previous budgets, coupled with the flawed design and inadequate targets of the CPRS, means ‘carbon-friendly’ desal remains a pipe dream.

Comments and thoughts on the environmental, climate and energy aspects of the budget are welcome.

Al Gore’s blind spot on nuclear power

I’ve just started reading a book by William Tucker called ‘Terrestrial Energy‘. It’s really very good, and I’ll write up a full review of it here once I’ve finished it. But the reason for this post is to consider a quote from Al Gore that Tucker cites in the Preface, pages ix — x. It comes from his testimony, in March 2007, to the US Senate. Gore says the following, when asked about the possible role of nuclear power in combating global warming:

I think it’s likely to be a small part of it. I don’t think it will be a big part of the solution, Senator… I’m assuming that we will somehow find an answer to the problem of long-term storage of waste… I’m assuming that we will find an answer to the problem of errors by the operators of these reactors… But the main problem I think is economics. The problem is these things [nuclear reactors] are expensive, they take a long time to build, and at present, they only come in one size—extra-large….

There was quite a bit more said, and you can read the entire transcript of his conversation with Senators Isakson and Alexander, here. Gore added:

So I mean, I’m not a reflexive opponent of nuclear—I just happen to think it’s only going to play a small role….

He repeated much the same line in an interview on CBS television in July 2008, and in an interview with the Guardian newspaper in March 2009, so we can safely assume that the position he states above has not changed over the last few years. For those who follow the news on energy futures, you may recall what Gore said about renewable energy in July 2008:

America must commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and other clean sources within 10 years.

So Gore foresees the need for a transformational change in energy supply in a rapid time-frame, but considers that nuclear power is likely to have little or no role in this second industrial revolution. I will leave the matter of whether 100% renewables by 2020, or indeed any other time-frame, is realistic. Suffice to say that regular readers of this blog know that I have concluded that such a target is extraordinarily implausible, from many technical, logistical and socioeconomic standpoints. So what about Al Gore’s view on nuclear power prospects — are these also being overrated by its proponents?

Tucker (pg x — xi) has the following to say in response to Gore’s cited testimony:

Saying that nuclear reactors only come in “one size — extra large” is woefully uninformed. Reactors can come in any size. Experimental reactors in laboratories and universities can generate 1 or 2 megawatts (A megawatt — MW — is the standard unit of commercial electricity, able to power about 1,000 homes.) Submarine reactors in the Nuclear Navy generate between 20 and 50 MW, and battleships run on 70 to 100 MW. When Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the Nuclear Navy, “beached” one of his submarine reactors at Shippingport, Pennsylvania in 1957 to produce the first commercial nuclear plant, it generated 60 MW — about 1/25th the size of today’s.

Utility reactors grew to 300 and 500 MW and beyond, with the largest now reaching 1,500 MW — what Gore calls “extra large”. This is because giant generators are the cheapest way to produce electricity. Coal plants are built to the same size, but this isn’t the only way reactors can be built. The Russians are now powering Siberian villages with 80 MW reactors floated in on barges. China and Japan are building modular reactors of 150 MW to power small communities. There isn’t any reason reactors can’t be built to the neighborhood level, combined with hydrogren production or water desalinization. If we ever colonize the moon, it will probably be with transportable nuclear reactors.

The real problem is public fear of all things nuclear. In truth, nuclear power still terrifies people. It seems unnatural and diabolic, a bastard technology conjured up by guilt-ridden scientists trying to exonerate themselves for inventing the atomic bomb. For many people — even those most concerned about global warming — nuclear remains the embodiment of evil, the symbol of all that is wrong with the modern world.

[Yet]… Nuclear energy is the source of the earth’s natural heat, the incredible furnance that heats the earth’s interior to temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun, spitting out volcanoes and lava flows, floating the planet’s continents like giant barges on its molten core. The source of this energy is nuclear power, the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century. While we have always looked to the sun for our energy, the unlocking of nuclear power has left us with an alternative — terrestrial energy. There is nothing sinful or reprehensible about using this energy. In fact, it has come just in time to help us deal with what may be our twin crises — climate change and the increasing scarcity of world oil.

I would agree completely with Tucker — Al is poorly informed on this matter and I can only conclude has failed to grasp the full realities of our energy challenge.

Look at Gore’s Senate testimony again. We have the answer to the problem of long-term storage of waste. They’re called fast spectrum and molten salt reactors, which burn up all of the actinides. We have the answer to the problems of errors by operators. It’s called ‘inherent’ or ‘passive’ safety sytems, which are reliant on the imutable laws of physics. One size, extra large? Nonsense. Reactors now come in all different sizes, and design schematics for the Integral Fast Reactor’s commercial exemplar, the S-PRISM by General Electric Hitachi, are set up in blocks containing multiple standardised, modular loops of 380 MW each (by the way, if you are at all interested in the technical aspects of the IFR, that linked paper by Allen Dubberly is a must read). Standardisation, modularity, additivity, passive safetly, on-site processing of self-protecting fuels — they’re all game-changers for the economics of the nuclear power industry (and a carbon price that puts a real environmental cost on coal would also be useful).

So I’m extremely disappointed to find that a man like Gore, who has taken so much time and effort to listen to scientists on the problem of climate change and has been in the position to receiving the top-level advice and expert briefings for decades, seems to have taken no time to try to understand developments in nuclear power, nor to listen to the world experts at his doorstep in the Argonne and Idaho National Laboratories. Why the bipolarity of effort? I don’t know, but to me, it’s Gore’s own Inconvenient Truth. Yet I’m hopeful that it is also something that can be changed, given that he (and many like him) are surely people who are willing to look at complex problems logically, are able to cast aside deep-seated preconceptions, and are willing to face up to really big, confronting challenges.

Voluntary Actions and the Rudd Government’s changes to its proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction System

Guest Post by Tim Kelly. Tim works as a Principal Climate Change Advisor in the Water Industry and is a regular contributor to Brave New Climate.

The Australian Government is belatedly acknowledging the harm that its proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme will have on the effectiveness of voluntary actions taken to reduce emissions.

The media release from the Prime Minister, Treasurer and Minister For Climate Change and Water on May 4, 2009, stated that : “The Rudd Government has listened to Australian households who have raised concerns that their individual efforts to reduce emissions will not be adequately taken into account under the CPRS”, and a number of measures were proposed.

So did the Government listen enough and has it has fixed the problems in regards to voluntary actions as claimed, or made them worse?

Firstly, this discussion is not about the overall target or whether the potential change to the upper end of the Government’s potential target provides sufficient improvement. Secondly, whilst I do believe that voluntary choices for businesses and households to avoid emissions intensive products and services are essential in an effective low emissions economy, this comparison can be seen in my joint submission [1] with Professor Barry Brook to the Senate Economics Committee.

Where do the benefits of voluntary actions currently belong?

Under emissions trading, the benefits of voluntary actions are changed or cancelled, yet many believe that there are simple fixes that can be applied. It is important to understand how voluntary mechanisms work, whether actions are effective, and who owns the benefits. This understanding can serve as the foundation to determining whether the actions still have merit under emissions trading. So lets consider several examples:

1) Energy Efficiency: Without emissions trading, where individuals, households and businesses find ways to reduce their electricity use, fuel use or consumption of other products and services, their greenhouse gas emissions are reduced and National emissions are reduced.

2) GreenPower: Under Australian law, GreenPower works as a donation. Customer emissions are not reduced (despite marketing messages that suggest otherwise [2]) but new renewable energy is created which serves to avoid emissions from non renewable power stations so National emissions are reduced.

3) Household solar and hot water systems when Renewable energy Certificates (RECs) are sold: Where households esablish these systems, their emissions are reduced, but their RECs are signed across to third parties, either other renewable energy that was already required by law is no longer needed so there is zero reduction in emissions Australia wide or, their RECs are used to create GreenPower that double counts the greenhouse reduction and use benefits as it is sold to other households and businesses negating the additionality of the efforts of the GreenPower Customer.

4) Household solar and hot water systems when Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) are kept by the householders: Household emissions are reduced and National emissions are reduced.

So there are a number of good outcomes and wasted outcomes from current voluntary actions, and I maintain that there is an urgency to either reform GreenPower and electricity emissions accounting or clarify that it is really just a donation system for the benefits to be shared amongst all grid customers in proportion of their use so that the Trades Practices Act (1974) is complied with. (Also note that this matter is about the legal assignment of benefits and has nothing to do with how the grid is used or how inputs or outputs to the grid are measured).

The basic problem of voluntary actions under an emissions trading system.

As pointed out [3] by me since September 2008, by Richard Dennis in his discussions from the Australia Institute, and others where greenhouse gas emissions are voluntarily reduced by an individual or business under an emissions cap and trade scheme, this frees up permits that can then be used elsewhere in the market resulting in zero reductions in Australia’s National emissions.

So let us run through the same four examples again, under an emissions trading scheme with no Government fixes of problems. (I will skip the some of the details that still apply).

1) Energy Efficiency: Individual, household or businesses reduce their emissions but National emissions are no longer reduced reduced as permits are redirectred and used elsewhere.

2) GreenPower: Customer emissions are not reduced (as before), but now National emissions are not reduced either. The Nation’s biggest electricity users receive the lion’s share of the scope 2 greenhouse reductions where the State grid emissions intensity factors are reduced.

3) Household solar and hot water systems when Renewable energy Certificates (RECs) are sold: Household emissions are reduced but National emissions are not reduced because a) renewables that were already required by law are no longer needed and b) because permits are redirectred and used elsewhere in the market.

4) Household solar and hot water systems when Renewable energy Certificates (RECs) are kept by the householders: Household emissions are reduced but National emissions are no longer reduced.

By using these examples we can see that individual actions to reduce emissions become less meaningful under emissions trading, compounding a number of pre-existing problems.

Government contradictory approaches on how voluntary actions have meaning under the proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction System:

In the Government’s Discussion Paper on a National Carbon Offsets Standard, and in follow up claims by Minister Penny Wong there have been a number of explanations on how voluntary actions might work under the CPRS. The Government first claimed that traditional tangible voluntary action still has value in that it reduces:

“the demand for permits. This will in turn reduce the carbon price, reducing the cost to the economy of achieving the same level of abatement. As the cost to the economy decreases it becomes increasingly feasible to set more ambitious emissions reduction targets”.

With this approach, it is the “feasibility” aspect that determines whether the cap is reduced in following 5 year target and gateway periods that determine how quickly Australia will move towards and beyond its mid term target in five yearly blocks. My own view is that this approach was probably close to how the scheme would work but it has virtually been abandoned by the changes announced on May 4, 2008.

Voluntary retirement of Australian Emissions Units (also referred to as permits)

The contradictory approach comes from the concept of voluntary retirement of Australian Emissions Units AEUs. The basic idea is that if there is a fixed amount of permits released, and persons or entities acquire these permits but retire some of them voluntarily without causing emissions then this will cause a reduction in total permits available for pollution so National emissions will be reduced.

There are two fatal flaws with this approach as follows:

a) Where AEUs are released in surplus, this approach has no impact. This can where the the cap is breached and unlimited permits begin to be released as can occur under the CPRS proposal for $10/tonne unlimited permits in the first year followed by $40/tonne unlimited permits commencing in the subsequent year. As soon as the cap is breached, there would be proof that voluntary retirement of permits has failed.

Alternatively, recession can cause permit surplus (as currently being experienced in the European emissions trading system) meaning that individuals may be retiring permits that may not have been used anyway.

b) Secondly, the logic is a complete contradiction of the Government’s case for traditional tangible voluntary actions to have meaning. This is what will happen:

Voluntary retirement of Australian Emissions Units causes greater AEU scarcity. This will in turn increase the carbon price, increaseing the cost to the economy of achieving the same level of abatement. As the cost to the economy increases it becomes less feasible to set more ambitious emissions reduction targets.

In addition, unlike traditional actions like permanent improvements in efficiency or additional renewable energy generation, throwing AEUs in the bin, does not create infrastructure that would improve Australia’s capacity to reduce emissions further.

Changes made to the CPRS on May 4, 2009

Australian Carbon Trust

Sounding like something dreamed up in an episode of “ The Hollow Men”, the Government has proposed the Australian Carbon Trust where Australians can donate money that will be used to “fund efficiency improvements in commercial buildings and businesses”. Well at first glance this sounds good but this does not reduce emissions under the Government’s scheme so it is really just more charity for businesses. Which ones, we don’t know!

Voluntary Retirement of Permits

The Federal Government has proposed that “a new website will provide a one-stop shop for individuals and households to simply calculate their energy use and buy and retire carbon pollution permits under the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme”.

The question must be asked as to why individuals and households would buy and surrender permits? This will cause greater AEU scarcity, increase the carbon price unnecessarily, increase the cost to the economy of achieving the same level of abatement and make the situation less feasible to set more ambitious emissions reduction targets! This is the Government’s own logic applied the defence of traditional voluntary actions but acting in the opposite direction.

One further complication is that as the price of pollution increases in time (and it must to achieve deep cuts in emissions) the cost of this approach increases in a perverse manner. In a propper functioning market, the cost of voluntary action to reduce emissions should decrease in comparison to greenhouse intensive options, not be tied with the cost of pollution.

Changes to GreenPower

The Government will now retire an Australian Emissions Permit associated with GreenPower sales above a threshold. This means that the indirect benefit of GreenPower that as previously described by the Department of Climate Change will reduce the demand for permits. This will in turn reduce the carbon price, reducing the cost to the economy of achieving the same level of abatement. As the cost to the economy decreases it becomes increasingly feasible to set more ambitious emissions reduction targets is now cancelled because a permit is now going to be removed to increase the demand for permits. This will in turn increase the carbon price, increase the cost to the economy of achieving the same level of abatement. As the cost to the economy increases it becomes less feasible to set more ambitious emissions reduction targets.

So with the Government’s proposed change, we end up back where we started from. Decreased scarcity to ultimately reduce emissions is undone with re-introduced scarcity. I am astounded that the Australian Government has used the same logic at once in two different directions claiming that either way emissions will be reduced.

GreenPower Threshold

GreenPower threshold that causes AUE retirement only for purchases above 2009 levels has focused attention on the fairness of the threshold rather than the mechanism itself. Whilst the use of thresholds to count or discount voluntary efforts of individuals in any given year is blatantly unfair, it is irrelevant and diversionary in this instance as the whole concept of throwing permits in the bin is flawed anyway and the general problems of whether voluntary action is meaningful under an emissions cap and trade scheme are not resolved.

Furthermore, none of the underlying problems of GreenPower, its greenhouse accounting and its marketing messages have been resolved. The Government is proposing to recognise greenhouse reductions of a product that has no greenhouse reductions to offer, as these benefits have already been assigned to all grid customers under Australian Law. The Government might has well retire an AEU with old shoes because in terms of greenhouse reductions they have the same merit.

Efficiency

So where does efficiency end up under the Government’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction System? Whilst not making a clear unambiguous statement, the Australian Government has now progressed on a pathway that suggests that energy efficiency which reduces the emissions of households and businesses is futile in terms of emissions reduction unless further payments are made to the Australian Carbon Trust to throw permits in the bin.

The Governments Fact Sheet on Individual Action reads as follows:

“Web based tools will enable households and small businesses to calculate their energy use and the dollar savings that can be made through actions to reduce energy use such as installing energy efficient appliances. Individuals can then pledge the resulting savings, or any other amount, to the Energy Efficiency Savings Pledge Fund. The fund will buy and cancel carbon pollution permits to create additional emission reductions. Individuals could also choose to purchase and cancel offset credits complying with the Government’s forthcoming National Carbon Offset Standard“

If my family and I go a bit hungry and shiver in the dark and manage to halve our personal emissions this doesn’t count under the Government’s new implied perspective on voluntary action. Instead of being able to use our savings to pay off our mortgage, to reduce emissions we then need to donate our savings to the Energy Efficiency Savings Pledge Fund presumably managed by the Australian Carbon Trust where it will be used to buy a permit which forces up electricity prices, does nothing tangible to reduce emissions and makes the situation less feasible to reduce the cap in the future.

In my view, if my family reduces its emissions by halving resource use then this should be recognised in regards to our personal footprint, and if the Federal Government is now suggesting that under the CPRS our actions are not genuine and that we should also buy and throw permits in the bin, through a mechanism that cannot work in the real world then the system is wrong and it is offensive.

Conclusion

Given the choice between throwing permits in the bin or enhancing traditional voluntary actions in support of the concept that this will provide greater capacity to reduce emissions and ultimately make a diference, the latter option is better.

Both options are less than satisfactory. Both options cannot be used at the same time and still be regarded as credible.

It is my view that the Federal Government has not fully understood the problems of voluntary actions under its CPRS, and its proposed mechanisms for voluntary action are unrealistic, contradictory (therefore self cancelling), unfair and ineffective. The situation is no better as a result of the Government’s changes to recognise GreenPower, or its Carbon Trust. A more transparent approach would have been to be upfront and state that voluntary actions don’t work effectively under emissions trading.

The tragedy in all of this is that the Federal Government is proposing a scheme that is more like a taxation mechanism anyway because of its significant interventions to manipulate the price, the setting of upper limits starting at $10 per tonne CO₂-e and increasing to $40 per tonne CO₂-e in the second year, and unlimited permits in any given year. This approach relies on managing the price beneath the cap in a way that is more akin to a carbon tax scheme. The only difference is that all actions are voluntary and enhanced under a carbon tax approach whereas voluntary actions are harmed under the proposed emissions cap trade scheme.

Climate Denial Crock

In a recent post, I directed readers to a couple of excellent information websites, which are designed explicitly to answer/rebutt all of the common ‘arguments’ (for want of a better word) that are recycled by climate change pseudo-sceptics. Those two websites, Global Warming Debate and Skeptical Science, along with other excellent anti-denial sites like Deltoid and Greenfyre’s (which deal with the day-to-day lunacy that crops up in the newspapers and blogosphere), serve this ongoing need very well. But they do require one to take the time to read a lot of stuff, and let’s face it, there is such a morass of reading material thrust at us each and every day, that it can be easy to ’switch off’.

As a way of adding diversity to your climate and energy education, I’ve already pointed to some useful multimedia sources for understanding more about fast reactor nuclear power. This post is to alert you to a similar non-textual resource which tackles the recycled pseudo-sceptical arguments head-on. It’s called ‘Climate Denial Crock of the Week‘, produced by Peter Sinclair (aka ‘greenman3610′).

This is an expanding series of ‘documentary’ videos posted on YouTube, underpinned by excellent production values, and narrated with a dash of humour to keep the material interesting. Each weekly ’smashing of the crockery’ lasts about 5 to 10 minutes, so it’s not a huge time committment to follow this, week in, week out. It’s definitely worth the bandwidth — Sinclair manages to pack a whole lot of useful and accurate information into each video. All in all, it’s a really superb resource and I applaud his ongoing effort.

So far, the following 13 episodes have been posted (listed below in so particular order — you can watch them in any sequence) — the blurbs after the title are by the producer:

Solar Schmolar — A favorite hobby horse of Climate Denialists is that there is some kind of invisible, undetectable influence from the sun that is responsible for the unequivocal warming of the last century. Let’s put that crock under a microscope and see where the cracks are.

Ice Area and Volume –Denialists continually try to confuse the issue of northern polar ice caps. Here are the facts from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Party like it’s 1998 – One of the enduring classics of denialism, “Global warming stopped in 1998″, is of course, nonsense. Here’s why.

It’s Cold. So there’s no Climate Change – ”I looked outside, and it was snowing, therefore, there is no climate change.” If that’s what passes for rational thought in your social group, you owe it to yourself to watch this edition of Climate Denial Crock of the Week.

The Scoop on Southern Polar Ice — Don’t back down from the watercooler wars. Climate Denial Crock of the Week shoots down the brainless, Rush Limbaugh factoids of global climate denial. Keep coming back each week for more real science on climate change, and send me your suggestions for climate crocks to crush.

Mars Attacks! – It seems to be agreed among deniers, that there is a warming happening on other planets in the solar system. And not just one or two planets. It is considered climate denier gospel that all the other planets are warming, and that this is proof that some kind of solar activity is warming the whole system. Let’s look at the evidence.

The ‘Temp leads Carbon” Crock –Find out what a straw man argument is, and how the most spectacular cherry pick in the history of scientific argument is just part of a day’s work for the professional deniers.

All Wet on Sea Level Rise – Sea level rise will be one of the most destructive effects of climate change, so naturally, Deniers have something grossly in error to say about it. We’ll look, as always, at the source documents.

The Medieval Warming Crock – The so called Medieval Warming Period is an article of faith among deniers. But what does the “Supreme Court of Science” say?

The Great Petition Fraud — We’ve all heard about the “Petitions” of “Scientists” who disagree with Climate Science. This sordid little episode in the history of climate denial points up once again the fundamental dishonesty of the climate denial industry.

I Love the ’70s!! – Everyone has a favorite decade, and for Climate deniers, that decade has got to be, the 70s. Yes, the decade of disco, kung fu, and watergate Because in the 70’s, Deniers will tell you, All climate scientists believed an ice age was coming. Those crazy climate scientists! Why can’t they make up their minds? But is that really true? Maybe a little historical perspective is in order.

That 1500 Year Thing — Climate Deniers S. Fred Singer and Dennis Avery make their living by confusing and obfuscating the science of climate change. Their latest book, “Unstoppable Global Warming every 1500 Years”, is a compendium of vintage as well as cutting edge climate crocks. Let’s find out who they are and how they are bamboozling their audience.

The “Urban Heat Island” Crock — Could the scientists at NASA, the National academy of science, the American Meteorological Society, and every professional scientific organization on the planet really have been so silly as to miss something this obvious?

Enjoy the Channel, and make sure you subscribe to the feed, so that you’ll always remember to get your weekly dose of climate crockery! I’ll also keep this post’s title listing updated as new vids are added.

More ice, flat temperatures – what does it all mean?

Simple messages, which make headlines and create doubt amongst the laity, are an easy sell in the pseudo-sceptical world of climate science contrarianism. Many sound (kind of) plausible, and so gain an undue amount of traction among the general public and non-science decision-makers.  Ian Plimer’s recent book capitalises on these themes to full advantage, and, as Tim Lambert has patiently detailed over the past year or so, some media outlets such as The Australian also give such unscientific messages an extended and unbalanced run.

One that never seems to go away is that ‘1998 was the hottest year and every year since has been cooler‘ meme, or similar such variants. This little gem preys upon most people’s lack of appreciation of statistical inference, just like the ‘climate models didn’t predict recent variability‘ exploit a lack of understanding of the difference between a mean model output and any single realisation of a stochastic model run. Another one that’s come up quite a bit recently — including a number of editorials and reports in The Oz (I’m quoted in one of them) — is the claim that Antarctica (and worldwide) ice extent is growing. It’s a great one for climate contrarianism, because it immediately raises people’s suspicion levels — ‘How can the Earth be warming if the ice is growing?‘. You get the picture. Doubt is their product.

Now it would be nice to give people a simple explanation to these — ideally, some analogy that is easily visualised in the mind. Alas, the scientific explanations for these will always be, by necessity, somewhat technical and therefore easily glazed over by 95% of readers. Recently, the Australian Science Media Centre asked some scientists for an explanation, in simple terms, as to why ice in Antarctica might be growing. You can find their answers here. Ian Allison gave the most technically comprehensive and scientifically satisfactory reply, but I don’t imagine it meant much to most folks. I had a stab at a simpler explanation, which I reproduce below, but I also struggled, I think, to really make it clear.

Question: With confusion in the media this week over whether ice is decreasing or increasing in the Antarctic, here experts clarify the apparent anomaly.

Answer: This is a common source of confusion among climate change sceptics. As the world warms, the atmosphere’s ability to hold water vapour increases. Think of how humid it is in the tropics, and how dry the Arctic air is. The largest desert on Earth is the continent of Antarctica — it receives very little annual precipitation. In a warming world, more water vapour allows for more snowfall in Antarctica, which accumulates particularly in East Antarctica where the temperature never rises above freezing point. So, ice accumulates on that side of the continent. In the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica, this extra accumulation of snow is more than offset by summer surface melt.

Also, as the sea warms around the continent, especially in the most northerly parts of the continent (Antarctic Peninsula) large ice shelves are eroded from beneath, and the frequency with which they break up starts to accelerate. This melting of buttressing ice shelves unplugs the land-based glaciers, and they begin to flow into the sea more rapidly. As such, there is a large net loss of ice from the western half of the continent, and a slight gain in the eastern half. More sea ice builds up around the continent because as the surface waters warm, the ocean becomes more stratified (it ‘turns over’ less readily). Less ocean heat is brought up from below. So it’s a battle between the negative effect of increased surface melt of sea ice, and the positive effect of more snowfall and decreased in melting from below, both of which reinforce sea ice formation. The result — a steady state or slight increase in the amount of floating ice around the great southern continent.

Better explanations than this exist. The main point of this blog entry is to alert my readers to two sites that I consider to be outstanding in this respect. They are ‘Skeptical Science (examining the science of global warming skepticism’ and ‘The Global Warming Debate (a layman’s guide to the science and controversy)’. I’d recommend these two sites as the first ‘go to’ point for anyone with doubts or simple curiosity about what the whole ‘climate change debate’ is about — even above Real Climate (which is technically superior to all other climate science blogs, but is generally pitched at a sufficiently advanced level that the casual layperson may often feel overwhelmed by the content and technical jargon).

John Cook, who runs Skeptical Science, took a break for a few months but is now up and running with three excellent new posts — one on the ‘cooled since 1998′ malarky and the other two on Antarctic ice spread. All three offer superb explanations. This site also has a list of the 50 ‘Hottest Skeptic Arguments‘ (in rank order) and regular specific posts which add further commentary to key points or things that are currently in the news. It is worth spending a day reading through the whole site, and sending links to your friends and family when they raise questions.

The Global Warming Debate is a wealth of interesting information. It includes 14 ‘chapters’ (extended web-based postings with pictures, hyperlinks and scientific references), supported by flash-driven video presentations presented by the author. It is simply superb. Here is the ‘About‘ description from the website, which gives you a broader idea of the motivation and content:

I created this presentation in response to persistent arguments that I’d read throughout the Internet (see introduction). “The Global Warming Debate” is my attempt to document the controversy as it is presented to the general public. Legitimate scientific questions remain, but the question of whether or not humans are capable of significantly altering the climate has been resolved.

If you are wondering “why should I believe you?” my advice is: don’t take my word for it. I have no special expertise in climate science. I call it a “Layman’s Guide” because it is by and for the layman. What I do suggest is to investigate the citations that I provide and weigh both the credibility of the argument and those making it. This is covered in much more detail in section 2 (”The Scientific Consensus“), but the world’s scientific societies, from which we draw virtually all of our scientific knowledge of the Earth, have all endorsed the science of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

Skeptics call this an “appeal to authority” but it is really an appeal to credibility. There is a very small group of active climate scientists who doubt the consensus position on climate change, and their alternative theories will be examined in this presentation. The “debate” that you read about in newspaper editorials or watch on political talk shows overwhelmingly originates from Libertarian-leaning think tanks who see anthropogenic global warming as a conspiracy of greedy scientists and a danger to free market ideals.

In reality, a very good case for global warming has been made by the world’s scientists, and the consequences of not acting are grave. I will present a mainstream view of global warming based on my best effort to understand the various issues, from measurements of past temperatures and atmosphere, to modeling the climate of the future, to policies and technologies intended to mitigate the problem. This remains a work in progress, and comments are always welcome.

If you are truly sceptical (i.e., unsure of the case but willing to be convinced, if sufficient, logical and rational explanations are presented), about whether humans are having an impact on the climate system, how valid past temperature reconstructions and present measurements are, what the models really say, and how climate change attribution works, then you have a duty to read this site. All of it. Then we can talk, here or on other climate science sites (many linked in my left sidebar), about the points you still don’t understand or are unconvinced about.

Over to you, John Cook and cce. I tip my hat at your efforts.

2008 Was Earth’s Coolest Year Since 2000

Climatologists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City have found that 2008 was the coolest year since 2000. The GISS analysis also showed that 2008 is the ninth warmest year since continuous instrumental records were started in 1880.

Left: Annual-mean global-mean anomalies. Right: Global map of surface temperature anomalies for 2008. Click image to enlarge. Credit: NASA GISS

The ten warmest years on record have all occurred between 1997 and 2008.

The GISS analysis found that the global average surface air temperature was 0.44°C (0.79°F) above the global mean for 1951 to 1980, the baseline period for the study. Most of the world was either near normal or warmer in 2008 than the norm. Eurasia, the Arctic, and the Antarctic Peninsula were exceptionally warm (see figures), while much of the Pacific Ocean was cooler than the long-term average.

The relatively low temperature in the tropical Pacific was due to a strong La Niña that existed in the first half of the year, the research team noted. La Niña and El Niño are opposite phases of a natural oscillation of equatorial Pacific Ocean temperatures over several years. La Niña is the cool phase. The warmer El Niño phase typically follows within a year or two of La Niña.

The temperature in the United States in 2008 was not much different than the 1951-1980 mean, which makes it cooler than all the previous years this decade.

Comparison of 2008 temperature anomalies with the mean 2001-2007 anomalies. Note that this figure uses a slightly different color bar than that of the figure above in order to show more structure in the right-hand map. Click image to enlarge. Credit: NASA GISS

“Given our expectation that the next El Niño will begin this year or in 2010, it still seems likely that a new global surface air temperature record will be set within the next one to two years, despite the moderate cooling effect of reduced solar irradiance,” said James Hansen, director of GISS. The Sun is just passing through solar minimum, the low point in its 10- to 12-year cycle of electromagnetic activity, when it transmits its lowest amount of radiant energy toward Earth.

The GISS analysis of global surface temperature incorporates data from the Global Historical Climatology Network of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climate Data Center; the satellite analysis of global sea surface temperature of Richard Reynolds and Thomas Smith of NOAA; and Antarctic records of the international Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.

“GISS provides the ranking of global temperature for individual years because there is a high demand for it from journalists and the public,” said Hansen. “The rank has scientific significance in some cases, such as when a new record is established. But rank can also be misleading because the difference in temperature between one year and another is often less than the uncertainty in the global average.”

Towards climate geoengineering?

[BWB Note: I'm a bit tight for time right now, but Andrew Glikson saves the day with another great post, this time elaborating on some of the 'options' we made need to face if we delay too long in cutting carbon emissions. For earlier discussions of this topic on BraveNewClimate, see here and here.]

Guest post by Andrew Glikson (Andrew is an Earth and paleo-climate scientist, Australian National University who contributes regularly to Brave New Climate).

That global climate change has reached an impasse whereby the “powers-to-be” are entertaining climate geoengineering mitigation, instead of the urgent deep reduction of carbon emissions required by science, represents the ultimate moral bankruptcy of institutions and a failure of democracy.

With global atmospheric CO₂ levels rising at about 2 ppm/year toward 388 ppm, or near-440 ppm CO₂-e (including methane effects), John Holdren, in his first interview since being appointed as Obama’s new science adviser, revealed in an interview with AP (8 April, 09) “global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth’s air” which “as an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort … It’s got to be looked at … We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table … One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays“. Holdren compared the way humanity is facing dangerous climate change to passengers in a car with bad brakes heading toward a cliff in a fog, saying “The sensible passengers will certainly say: ‘Let’s put on the brakes, even if we don’t know it will save us. It may be too late. We don’t know exactly where the cliff is. . . . Let’s get on with it.’ “.

Holdren is not alone in considering geoengineering. The National Academy of Science is also looking at the subject in its new multidiscipline climate challenges program. The American Meteorological Society is preparing a statement on geoengineering, stating “it is prudent to consider geoengineering’s potential, to understand its limits and to avoid rash deployment.”.The British parliament has discussed the idea.

Climate geoengineering ideas fall into at least four principal categories:

(1) Increased reflectivity (albedo) of the atmosphere, injecting sulphur dioxide (suggested by Paul Crutzen, the Nobel Prize winning atmospheric chemist), or alumina particles, or even installing reflectors in space. The effects of sulphur injections would simulate volcanic events, such as of Pinatubo (1991) or Tambora (1816), which resulted in cooling of the Earth surface by about 0.5 degrees. At best, albedo enhancement represents a short term band aid solution to the fundamental greenhouse problem, and will not be able to prevent ocean acidification.

(2) Increased sequestration of CO₂ in the oceans, enhancing algal blooms and phytoplankton photosynthesis through fertilization with iron filings, or constructing vertical pipe systems designed to enhance oceanic circulation and CO₂ intake from the atmosphere.

(3) Biochar burial and soil enrichment. Combustion of plant waste under low oxygen conditions and burial as charcoal, removing carbon from atmospheric circulation and enhancing plant growth and photosynthesis, as well as soil enrichment. A major controversy erupted with objections to Biochar by George Monbiot, involving James Lovelock and James Hansen.

(4) Chemical sequestration involving combination of CO₂ with sodium hydroxide (NaOH) installed in pipe systems (”Sodium trees”), followed by separation and burial of CO₂, costed at about $US300 a ton. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests the reduction of atmospheric CO₂ by 50 ppm would cost about $US 10 — 15 trillion (although mass production may lessen the cost, as well as contribute to employment), less than 10 times the global military expenditure in 2007.

Increasingly, a “technological fix” may look attractive to Obama and possibly the EU (and Rudd?), in view of at least three major obstacles to CPRS and ETS schemes:

First, due to the cumulative nature of atmospheric CO₂, neither 5/15% nor 25/40% emission reduction by 2020 relative to 2000 would be able to prevent major climate change. This is because CO₂ levels, now at 387 ppm and rising by 2 ppm/year, will exceed 400 ppm by 2020, well into the high danger zone. Assuming CO₂ emissions are reduced by even 40% relative to 2000, it would keep rising by a minimum of 1.2 ppm/year reaching levels near or above 450 ppm by 2050, and this is without even accounting for the effects of methane, likely reduced CO₂ intake by the oceans and increase in positive feedbacks from the biosphere. At 450 ppm, with lag effects, polar ice sheets undergo advanced melting, with consequent major sea level rise. It is not clear how many of the submissions made to the Australian Senate Inquiry into the CPRS take account of this factor.

Second, it is a good question whether even such feeble CPRS attempts would not be squashed by the all powerful fossil fuel lobby, currently supporting a massive well-funded disinformation campaign, including claims that the Earth is “cooling”, accusing scientists and environmentalists of “environmental thuggery“, including threats such as by Republican congress woman Michelle Bachmann (“I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us” adding “The science is on our side on this one“.

Third, The preoccupation of suburbia international with economic issues. Until people fully understand the implications of runaway climate change, government actions are likely to be restricted within the context of the virtual reality of economic boom-bust bubbles, where greed and fear obscure the physical realities of the environment and of agricultural food production, a consequence of over 60 years of commercial propaganda rendering populations victims of ruthless vested interests at the expense of future generations.

The Wilkins ice shelf collapse is but the latest symptom of fast-melting polar ice. Last year was the first during which the huge (13,680 square kilometers) shelf, which bridges the West Antarctic Peninsula with the Charcot and Latady islands, developed fractures during mid-winter. Now Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) images acquired on 2 April 2009, by the European Earth Observation (ESA’s) Envisat satellite, confirm the ice shelf is collapsing into thousands of ice bergs, removing the barrier for the flow of continental glaciers into the ocean.

Climate geoengineering is fiercely feared and resisted by many scientists and environmentalists, due to the collateral damage and side effects, and as it would take pressure of the carbon polluters. Moreover, that the powers-to-be reached an impasse with CPRS schemes suggests to many a moral bankruptcy of institutions and a failure of democracy. It is likely only a combination of deep urgent cuts in carbon emissions, coupled with major investments in fast-tracked development of a wide range of effective carbon dioxide draw-down methods may be capable of making the difference.

New Aerosol Observing Technique Turns Gray Skies to Blue

Roughly 30 percent of the radiation from the sun is reflected back into space, some of it by tiny airborne particles called aerosols. This artist concept depicts the process. Credit: UMBC/Megan Willy + View animation

Tiny, ubiquitous particles in the atmosphere may play a profound role in regulating global climate. But the scientists who study these particles — called aerosols — have long struggled to accurately measure their composition, size, and global distribution. A new detection technique and a new satellite instrument developed by NASA scientists, the Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor (APS), should help ease the struggle.

Some types of small aerosols — such as black carbon from motor vehicle exhaust and biomass burning — promote atmospheric warming by absorbing sunlight. Others, such as sulfates from coal-fired power plants, exert a cooling effect by reflecting incoming solar radiation back into space. Overall, aerosols present one of the greatest areas of uncertainty in understanding what drives climate change.

But quantifying the influence of aerosols on the atmosphere and climate has been hampered by difficulties in measuring the aerosols themselves. The problem is especially acute over land, where the glare from sunlight reflecting off Earth’s surface overwhelms the passive imaging instruments scientists typically use to detect aerosols.

In recent years, however, researchers from NASA Goddard’s Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City have developed new remote-sensing techniques to more accurately measure aerosols over land.

Aerosol particles come from both human and natural sources. The left half of this animation shows an urban cloud packed with gray soot particles. The right half shows a salt-filled cloud over a pristine area of the ocean. Credit: UMBC/Megan Willy + View animation

The Research Scanning Polarimeter (RSP), an aircraft-based version of APS, is the first such instrument to measure polarized light at one particularly important wavelength. “The 2.2 micrometer channel is critical because it provides the only passive method we have to retrieve accurate and detailed aerosol properties over land surfaces,” said Michael Mishchenko, Glory’s project scientist.

RSP uses crystal prisms to effectively filter out the bright glare from Earth’s surface, functioning somewhat like polarized sunglasses by only allowing light waves oriented in specific directions to pass.

According to Brian Cairns, an aerosol climatologist at GISS who has pioneered the technique, polarized images have a dull tone that make the subtle hues of aerosols easier to detect amidst the shades of gray land.

“The blueish tint of small aerosols in the atmosphere is more clearly distinguishable with polarized light,” Cairns said.

The new retrieval technique also integrates more information about short-wave polarized light into models used to determine aerosol properties. Past approaches have left short-wave polarized light — which is crucial for calculating how high aerosols reside in the atmosphere and how much radiation the particles are absorbing — largely out of the equation.

RSP is not the first instrument to use polarimetry to measure aerosols. In 1996, a series of three French satellite instruments started measuring aerosols with polarized light. Cairns’s technique measures polarization more accurately, integrates more longwave and shortwave polarization information into the mathematical models, and is the first to provide accurate estimates of aerosol size and composition over land.

The RSP instrument views a point in the atmosphere from more than 100 angles, enabling more complete characterization of aerosols by robust mathematical models. RSP and the soon-to-be-launched APS use parallel optical paths to collect measurements from all wavelengths and polarizations simultaneously. This approach to monitoring the continuously changing scene offers greater accuracy compared to previous polarimeters, which used a rotating filter wheel to measure wavelengths and polarizations sequentially.

This pair of images shows a standard view of farmland near the Chesapeake Bay (left) and a polarized image of the same scene (right). The polarized image has less glare and a dull tone that makes it easier for researchers to detect small aerosols. Credit: NASA GISS/Brain Cairns

To test their technique, Cairns and colleagues from Columbia University and the U.S. Department of Energy conducted a series of field campaigns. In 2003, researchers mounted an RSP instrument on a Cessna 310 airplane and flew the instrument above smoke plumes from wildfires in California’s Simi Valley. In 2005, a J31 research aircraft flew RSP over dust plumes in Oklahoma.

In both cases, the airborne data corresponded well with observations from ground-based photometers known to provide accurate aerosol measurements. By integrating the additional polarization wavelengths into their computer models, Cairns estimated that the technique is several times more accurate than previous measurements. The results were presented in January in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Qingyuan Han, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama Huntsville who was not involved in the study, agreed. “The high sensitivity of polarized reflectance offers tremendous information that could not be obtained by other techniques,” he said.

For instance, Light Detection and Ranging, or lidar, bounces pulses of light off of airborne aerosols and can accurately measure the vertical distribution of aerosols. But current LIDAR systems still struggle to measure aerosol size and composition, says Han, who conducts research using LIDAR. He sees roles for both techniques as a complement to one another.

The techniques developed with the RSP instrument have contributed to the creation of the APS, a spaceborne version that will fly on NASA’s Glory satellite. Functionally identical to RSP, the APS uses slightly different wavelengths of light to improve estimates of ocean color, water vapor, and cirrus clouds. “But the theory for APS and RSP is exactly the same,” said Cairns.

According to Cairns, APS will be especially useful for identifying and quantifying smaller aerosols, which come mainly from human sources. Smaller aerosols are thought to affect climate more than larger aerosols such as dust and salt.

Once Glory launches, scientists expect APS to offer a wealth of new data that will help them peel away long-standing uncertainties about aerosols. “We still don’t understand a lot about them,” Cairns said, “and yet they play such a key role in our climate system.”

Web Links

News Release: NASA’s Next Climate-Research Satellite One Step Closer to Orbit

Glory APS Science

Glory Mission Homepage

Media Contacts

Adam Voiland, Goddard Space Flight Center, Md., 301-352-4631

This article is derived from a NASA Earth news feature.

More ice, flat temperatures – what does it all mean?

Simple messages, which make headlines and create doubt amongst the laity, are an easy sell in the pseudo-sceptical world of climate science contrarianism. Many sound (kind of) plausible, and so gain an undue amount of traction among the general public and non-science decision-makers.  Ian Plimer’s recent book capitalises on these themes to full advantage, and, as Tim Lambert has patiently detailed over the past year or so, some media outlets such as The Australian also give such unscientific messages an extended and unbalanced run.

One that never seems to go away is that ‘1998 was the hottest year and every year since has been cooler‘ meme, or similar such variants. This little gem preys upon most people’s lack of appreciation of statistical inference, just like the ‘climate models didn’t predict recent variability‘ exploit a lack of understanding of the difference between a mean model output and any single realisation of a stochastic model run. Another one that’s come up quite a bit recently — including a number of editorials and reports in The Oz (I’m quoted in one of them) — is the claim that Antarctica (and worldwide) ice extent is growing. It’s a great one for climate contrarianism, because it immediately raises people’s suspicion levels — ‘How can the Earth be warming if the ice is growing?‘. You get the picture. Doubt is their product.

Now it would be nice to give people a simple explanation to these — ideally, some analogy that is easily visualised in the mind. Alas, the scientific explanations for these will always be, by necessity, somewhat technical and therefore easily glazed over by 95% of readers. Recently, the Australian Science Media Centre asked some scientists for an explanation, in simple terms, as to why ice in Antarctica might be growing. You can find their answers here. Ian Allison gave the most technically comprehensive and scientifically satisfactory reply, but I don’t imagine it meant much to most folks. I had a stab at a simpler explanation, which I reproduce below, but I also struggled, I think, to really make it clear.

Question: With confusion in the media this week over whether ice is decreasing or increasing in the Antarctic, here experts clarify the apparent anomaly.

Answer: This is a common source of confusion among climate change sceptics. As the world warms, the atmosphere’s ability to hold water vapour increases. Think of how humid it is in the tropics, and how dry the Arctic air is. The largest desert on Earth is the continent of Antarctica — it receives very little annual precipitation. In a warming world, more water vapour allows for more snowfall in Antarctica, which accumulates particularly in East Antarctica where the temperature never rises above freezing point. So, ice accumulates on that side of the continent. In the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica, this extra accumulation of snow is more than offset by summer surface melt.

Also, as the sea warms around the continent, especially in the most northerly parts of the continent (Antarctic Peninsula) large ice shelves are eroded from beneath, and the frequency with which they break up starts to accelerate. This melting of buttressing ice shelves unplugs the land-based glaciers, and they begin to flow into the sea more rapidly. As such, there is a large net loss of ice from the western half of the continent, and a slight gain in the eastern half. More sea ice builds up around the continent because as the surface waters warm, the ocean becomes more stratified (it ‘turns over’ less readily). Less ocean heat is brought up from below. So it’s a battle between the negative effect of increased surface melt of sea ice, and the positive effect of more snowfall and decreased in melting from below, both of which reinforce sea ice formation. The result — a steady state or slight increase in the amount of floating ice around the great southern continent.

Better explanations than this exist. The main point of this blog entry is to alert my readers to two sites that I consider to be outstanding in this respect. They are ‘Skeptical Science (examining the science of global warming skepticism’ and ‘The Global Warming Debate (a layman’s guide to the science and controversy)’. I’d recommend these two sites as the first ‘go to’ point for anyone with doubts or simple curiosity about what the whole ‘climate change debate’ is about — even above Real Climate (which is technically superior to all other climate science blogs, but is generally pitched at a sufficiently advanced level that the casual layperson may often feel overwhelmed by the content and technical jargon).

John Cook, who runs Skeptical Science, took a break for a few months but is now up and running with three excellent new posts — one on the ‘cooled since 1998′ malarky and the other two on Antarctic ice spread. All three offer superb explanations. This site also has a list of the 50 ‘Hottest Skeptic Arguments‘ (in rank order) and regular specific posts which add further commentary to key points or things that are currently in the news. It is worth spending a day reading through the whole site, and sending links to your friends and family when they raise questions.

The Global Warming Debate is a wealth of interesting information. It includes 14 ‘chapters’ (extended web-based postings with pictures, hyperlinks and scientific references), supported by flash-driven video presentations presented by the author. It is simply superb. Here is the ‘About‘ description from the website, which gives you a broader idea of the motivation and content:

I created this presentation in response to persistent arguments that I’d read throughout the Internet (see introduction). “The Global Warming Debate” is my attempt to document the controversy as it is presented to the general public. Legitimate scientific questions remain, but the question of whether or not humans are capable of significantly altering the climate has been resolved.

If you are wondering “why should I believe you?” my advice is: don’t take my word for it. I have no special expertise in climate science. I call it a “Layman’s Guide” because it is by and for the layman. What I do suggest is to investigate the citations that I provide and weigh both the credibility of the argument and those making it. This is covered in much more detail in section 2 (”The Scientific Consensus“), but the world’s scientific societies, from which we draw virtually all of our scientific knowledge of the Earth, have all endorsed the science of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

Skeptics call this an “appeal to authority” but it is really an appeal to credibility. There is a very small group of active climate scientists who doubt the consensus position on climate change, and their alternative theories will be examined in this presentation. The “debate” that you read about in newspaper editorials or watch on political talk shows overwhelmingly originates from Libertarian-leaning think tanks who see anthropogenic global warming as a conspiracy of greedy scientists and a danger to free market ideals.

In reality, a very good case for global warming has been made by the world’s scientists, and the consequences of not acting are grave. I will present a mainstream view of global warming based on my best effort to understand the various issues, from measurements of past temperatures and atmosphere, to modeling the climate of the future, to policies and technologies intended to mitigate the problem. This remains a work in progress, and comments are always welcome.

If you are truly sceptical (i.e., unsure of the case but willing to be convinced, if sufficient, logical and rational explanations are presented), about whether humans are having an impact on the climate system, how valid past temperature reconstructions and present measurements are, what the models really say, and how climate change attribution works, then you have a duty to read this site. All of it. Then we can talk, here at BNC or on other climate science sites, about the points you still don’t understand or are unconvinced about.

Over to you, John Cook and cce. I tip my hat at your efforts.