GWPF Newsletter: Arctic Ice Growing Again

Computer Climate Simulations Just Crashed

In this newsletter:

1) Arctic Ice Growing Again
Ron Clutz, Science Matters, 16 September 2018
 
2) Harry Wilkinson: Arctic Sea Ice Just Won’t Play The Game
The Conservative Woman, 7 September 2018

 
3) Computer Climate Simulations Just Crashed
Andrew Montford, GWPF, 18 September 2018 
 
4) Al Gore’s Claim About Hurricane Florence Debunked By Scientists
Valerie Richardson - The Washington Times, 16 September 2018 
 
5) Remember When Climate Change Meant The End Of Coffee? Never Mind
Alex Berezow, American Council of Science and Health, 17 September 2018 
 
6) Big Green Inc.: Inside The $4 Billion U.S. Foundations That Are Funding Green Activists
Michael Bastasch, The Daily Caller, 17 September 2018
 
7) California Climate Policies Facing Revolt From Civil-Rights Groups
Robert Bryce, National Post, 15 September 2018 
 
8) The Biggest Economic Change In The Last Ten Years That No One (except the GWPF) Talks About
Money Week, 17 September 2018

Full details:

1) Arctic Ice Growing Again
Ron Clutz, Science Matters, 16 September 2018

Arctic ice is presently 500.000 km^2 more than in 2007, and 1.2 million km^2 more than the record setting 2012.

One week ago on day 252 MASIE reported the lowest daily extent of the year at 4.43M km2.  One week later the image above shows how the ice edges have refrozen and extended.  Note also the significant snowfall both in Canada and Russia

Mid September we can see the long predicted collapse of Arctic ice is postponed for yet another year. The graph shows MASIE reporting ice extents above 4.5M km2 for the month of September.  A dip on day 252 to  4.43M km2 will likely be the daily minimum for the year, since 200k km2 of ice has been added in the last week.  The graph also shows that 2018 is presently 96k km2 above the 11 year average ice extent, 350k km2 more than 2016,  472k km2 more than 2007, and 1.2M km2 (a full Wadham!) more than the record setting 2012.

Interestingly, in September until yesterday NOAA’s officially referenced Sea Ice Index (SII) was showing more ice than MASIE, by about 200k km2.  That means the SII September monthly result will continue the plateau in Arctic ice since 2007.

The table below shows ice extents in the various basins comprising the Arctic Ocean for day 259 for 2018 and 2007 in comparison to the 11 year averages (2007 to 2017 inclusive).

Full post
 
2) Harry Wilkinson: Arctic Sea Ice Just Won’t Play The Game
The Conservative Woman, 7 September 2018

Arctic sea ice is proving remarkably reluctant to enter its appointed ‘death throes’, despite the usual suspects having already planned the funeral. Climate Change Anxiety Disorder, it turns out, is yet to impose its angst on the actual climate, no matter how hard the BBC tries to make it.

The latest observations show that Arctic sea ice is on course to have a greater minimum extent than in 2015 and 2016, and is running higher than levels seen a decade ago. Back then, the BBC reported that Arctic summers may be ice-free by 2013, although this estimate was described as being ‘too conservative’.

That prediction was spectacularly wrong, and contrary to warnings of an ‘Arctic death spiral’, sea ice extent has been remarkably stable in the last decade. No one can say what exactly will happen next; if this humbling affair teaches anything it should be precisely that.

The climate has misbehaved in other ways too. The Greenland Ice Sheet has been gaining mass at a record rate for the second year running, and Antarctic sea ice extent is perfectly normal relative to the 1981-2010 average. These facts get little coverage because they don’t sound alarming at all, and for most reporters that means they’re not news. These ‘inconvenient truths’ are nonetheless a helpful reminder that climate change coverage should be taken with a healthy dose of scepticism. There is a long way to go before we can make accurate predictions about how the climate will behave, if indeed we ever can.

Climate science has to be more deeply grounded in real-world observations rather than models that are inevitably riddled with flawed human assumptions.

Full post & comments
 
3) Computer Climate Simulations Just Crashed
Andrew Montford, GWPF, 18 September 2018 

Ross McKitrick and John Christy have an important new paper out in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

This is the latest fusillade in the long battle over whether the climate simulations that lie behind demands for decarbonisation and other political action actually amount to nothing but a hill of beans (as they say on the other side of the pond).

Computer climate simulations predict that manmade global warming will cause the troposphere over the tropics to warm much faster than the surface, and there have been a series of scientific papers arguing whether these predictions are being borne out in practice. In a blog post published yesterday, McKitrick relates some of the back story, including attempts by one mainstream scientist to withhold his data, and the subsequent revelation that he had truncated it in a way that fundamentally altered the conclusions that would be drawn. McKitrick also outlines a series of subsequent papers that have concluded that real-world warming in the troposphere is much less than predicted:

[W]hether we test the tropospheric trend magnitudes, or the ratio of tropospheric to surface trends, across all kinds of data sets, and across all major trend intervals, models have been shown to exaggerate the amplification rate and the warming rate, globally and in the tropics.

So it’s not looking too good for the models. The next logical step is to consider what this means for the bigger picture, and this is where the new paper comes in. As McKitrick points out, if climate simulators get the rainfall in the Amazon wrong, it’s perhaps not the end of the story – that part of the model might be adjusted. But he and Christy are suggesting that what the models indicate about the tropical troposphere is essentially a diagnostic of their structures – almost all climate models agree that it will warm rapidly and it should only be greenhouse gases that can cause such a warming.

In other words, if the models get this wrong, something is fundamentally wrong. Which is why it’s so important that the authors conclude their paper thus:

Comparing modeled to observed trends over the past 60 years…shows that all models warm more rapidly than observations and in the majority of individual cases the discrepancy is statistically significant. We argue that this provides informative evidence against the major hypothesis in most current climate models.
 
4) Al Gore’s Claim About Hurricane Florence Debunked By Scientists
Valerie Richardson - The Washington Times, 16 September 2018 

Another climate-change claim by former Vice President Al Gore is coming under fire, this one involving Hurricane Florence.

Mr. Gore said Friday that two major storms from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans had never made landfall at the same time, referring to Hurricane Florence, the Category 1 hurricane that struck North Carolina on Friday, and Super Typhoon Mangkhut, which hit the Philippines early Saturday.

“This is the first time in history that two major storms are making landfall from the Atlantic and the Pacific simultaneously,” Mr. Gore told the crowd at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, which wrapped up Friday.

He cited the storm activity on opposite sides of the globe as an example of climate change driving unusual and extreme weather, but meteorologist Ryan Maue was quick to dump cold water on Mr. Gore’s assertion.

“Al Gore just (fraudulently) claimed without any evidence that we’ve never had hurricanes in both the Atlantic and Pacific making landfall at the same time,” tweeted Mr. Maue, an adjunct scholar at the free-market Cato Institute.

University of Colorado Boulder meteorologist Roger A. Pielke Sr. also took issue with the claim by Mr. Gore, known for his 2006 climate-change film, An Inconvenient Truth, and the 2017 follow-up, An Inconvenient Sequel.

“Such statements show that he is not familiar with the history of tropical cyclone landfalls,” said Mr. Pielke in an email.

Full story
 
5) Remember When Climate Change Meant The End Of Coffee? Never Mind
Alex Berezow, American Council of Science and Health, 17 September 2018 

For roughly the last two years, the media has been warning us that climate change is threatening the world’s supply of coffee beans.



GWPF Climate Briefing (2016): Roasting the Coffee Apocalypse (click on image above to watch video)

According to the hypothesis, growing conditions for coffee will no longer be suitable in many places, and plagues and pestilences will destroy the crops. If that doesn’t kill off coffee, then the lack of pollinators will.
As usual, the media wasn’t shy in its headlines.

The New York Times bluntly stated “Climate Change Threatens World’s Coffee Supply, Report Says.” TIME magazine took it a step further: “Your Morning Cup of Coffee Is in Danger. Can the Industry Adapt in Time?” Newsweek, in its typical “dial-it-up-to-11” editorial style, wrote, “Climate Change Effects Could Mean the End of Coffee Beans.”

That’s right. The end of coffee beans. We’ll have to drink tea. I shudder to think of it. Even Popular Science got in on the action: “Climate change will make your coffee cost more and taste worse.”

Thankfully, these are all testable hypotheses. The world has been getting warmer over at least the past few decades, so coffee production should be decreasing, and coffee prices should be going up. Are they?

Coffee Prices Collapse, so Some Farmers Turn to Cocaine

Nope. According to a new report by the Financial Times, prices for coffee beans have hit a 12-year low. But that’s only taking into account recent data. If we look all the way back to the beginning of time (which, in this case, is the 1970’s), we see that the highest coffee prices, just under $3.40 per pound, occurred in April 1977. Today, the coffee price is about 93 cents per pound. 

The price of coffee is not at a historical low, but it is low enough that some farmers have decided to produce cocaine, instead.

The reason behind the current collapse in prices is because Brazil produced a record crop. Once again, this is the exact opposite of the wide-eyed speculation the media had been cramming down our throats over the past two years.

A Media Mea Culpa?

Don’t expect the media — or the scientists who make theses sorts of predictions — to apologize anytime soon.

Full post

see also: Record Coffee Harvests Debunk Another Climate Scare

6) Big Green Inc.: Inside The $4 Billion U.S. Foundations That Are Funding Green Activists
Michael Bastasch, The Daily Caller, 17 September 2018

Major foundations handed nearly $4 billion to global warming activists, anti-fossil fuel campaigners and other environmentalists over the past eight years, according to a database debuted Monday.

The website Big Green, Inc. tracked $3.7 billion in commitments from major grant-making foundations to environmental causes from 2008 to 2016. It’s a project of the free market Institute for Energy Research and is based on nonprofit tax filings.

IER president Tom Pyle said the vast web of funding detailed by Big Green, Inc. shatters the notion environmentalists are locked in a David versus Goliath-like struggle against energy companies.

“The truth is the environmental left is a deep-pocketed and powerful force in American politics that is working to stop all natural gas, oil, and coal production in the United States,” Pyle said in a statement.

IER’s project found, for example, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation gave out $2 billion in grants to environmental causes, including climate activism, between 2008 and 2016 — the largest grant-maker in the database.

The Energy Foundation handed out $444 million in grants and the Sea Change Foundation doled out $373 million. The Energy Foundation got funding from liberal billionaire Tom Steyer’s charitable trust from 2009 to 2013, the group disclosed on its website.

Full post
 
7) California Climate Policies Facing Revolt From Civil-Rights Groups
Robert Bryce, National Post, 15 September 2018 

Hugely expensive green mandates will hit poor Californians the hardest.

In April, civil-rights groups sued to stop some of California’s policies designed to address climate change. Then on Monday, California governor Jerry Brown signed into law SB 100, which requires the state’s utilities to obtain all their electricity from carbon-free sources by 2045. Before signing the bill, Brown said the legislation was “sending a message to California and to the world that we’re going to meet the Paris agreement.” In fact, it will only increase the hardships that California’s climate policy imposes on the poor, as detailed in the lawsuit.

High electricity prices should be a concern for California policymakers, since electric rates in the state are already 60 percent higher than those in the rest of the country. According to a recent study by the Berkeley-based think tank Environmental Progress, between 2011 and 2017 California’s electricity rates rose more than five times as fast as those in the rest of the U.S. SB 100 will mean even higher electricity prices for Californians.[…]

The gist of the lawsuit is this: California’s high housing, transportation, and energy costs are discriminatory because they are a regressive tax on the poor. The suit claims that the state’s climate laws violate the Fair Employment and Housing Act because CARB’s new greenhouse-gas-emissions rules on housing units in the state “have a disparate negative impact on minority communities and are discriminatory against minority communities and their members.” The suit also claims the state’s climate laws are illegal under the Federal Housing Act, again because their effect is felt predominantly by minority communities. It also makes a constitutional claim that minorities are being denied equal protection under the law because California’s climate regulations are making affordable housing unavailable to them.

Full post
 
8) The Biggest Economic Change In The Last Ten Years That No One (except the GWPF) Talks About
Money Week, 17 September 2018
John Stepek

Today I want to move away from the “ten years on” coverage.

I’m not promising I won’t return to it. In fact, I’ll probably start taking a weekly Friday look at comparable financial crises and the experience of other countries (such as Iceland), to see what we can learn (and what we haven’t learned) from 2008.

But for now, let’s move onto something more contemporary.

One of the most interesting and dramatic economic changes over the past ten years has occurred in a sector that is almost the diametric opposite of the financial sector.

We’re talking about the business of real stuff. We’re talking ten-gallon hats and cowboy boots, not three-piece suits and hipster beards.

We’re talking about oil.

How fracking transformed US oil production

In 1970, US oil production hit a peak of 9.6 million barrels of oil a day.

From that high point, it declined. It didn’t fall in a straight line, not quite. It rose between 1976 and 1985, to hit a secondary peak of just under nine million barrels a day. But from there, it was basically in free fall. And that slide didn’t stop for over 20 years (this data is all from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), a US government agency, in case you’re wondering).

This is one reason that fears of “peak oil” took such a powerful hold in the mid-2000s. The main proponent of the theory – M King Hubbert – had successfully predicted the peak in US oil production. And it increasingly looked as if he’d be right about everywhere else too, particularly as no one really knew how much oil the Opec cartel really had.

Oil prices spent most of the 2000s hitting records we’d never seen before (I’m barely middle-aged – ahem – but I’m already old enough to remember when $40 a barrel of crude was shockingly high, not stunningly low).

The idea that we were going to run out of oil went from being a fringe concern that united both hardcore small-government libertarian survivalists and left-leaning eco-anarchists, to being the sort of thing that analysts would happily toss out to justify their forecasts on CNBC of a morning.

In 2008, US oil production hit rock bottom. America was pumping out five million barrels of oil a day (this was partly due to the impact of the financial crisis – production basically was consistently low between 2005 and 2008).

But that changed dramatically. It took the US 38 years to go from pumping out 9.6 million barrels to pumping out five million. It took less than a decade to jump back up above the nine million mark.

And this year, the US has surpassed its old peak. It’s now pumping out more than 10.5 million barrels a day. It is now, according to the EIA, the largest crude oil producer in the world.

What happened? Two things. Oil prices soared, and markets did their thing. Because oil became so expensive, it meant you could spend more on trying to get the stuff out of the ground.

As a result, fracking – one of many “unconventional” oil sources – became worth doing. The US was already using it to produce natural gas, but the idea of extending the technique to oil seemed difficult. When I first read about it in the early 2000s, the idea of fracking for oil appeared to be one of those “maybe in 20 years’ time” technologies.

Turns out it was easier and more worthwhile than they thought. And over time, a combination of improving technology and better-than-expected oil fields meant that the price of production fell.

And thankfully, the oil price remained high enough to justify the interest in fracking. Although the price of oil collapsed after the financial crisis very briefly, it had a spectacular rebound and spent most of the period between the crisis and 2014 above $100 a barrel.

The incredible shift in global power over the last ten years

The other factor that kept fracking going, of course, was low interest rates. In 2015, when oil prices collapsed, oil production in the US dipped too – not by a lot, but it broke the breathless run of increasing production to that point.

Opec tried to break the frackers. With their low cost of production, the Saudis could technically afford to hold out at a lower oil price than the fracking companies.

The big scare in 2015 (as well as concerns over a slowing China) was that, as a result, the debt of fracking companies would turn bad and batter markets.

But at low interest rates, the fracking companies could afford to roll over their debt. They could afford to borrow more. They could take each other over. And they could avoid going bankrupt.

Eventually, Opec called it a day first. And now the oil price (as measured by the Brent crude benchmark) is challenging the $80 a barrel level again.

This is an extraordinary shift in the balance of global power.

Full post

The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.