The P Value* of Climate Policy – What is the Probability that Policymakers Really Know What They’re Talking About on Climate Change?

Posted on February 14, 2019 by colinwright2012

PM Justin Trudeau plays scientist peering through a microscope at… nothing.

*A p value helps determine the significance of results when conducting a hypothesis test in statistics.

In November, PM Trudeau’s principal adviser, Gerald Butts, took time out from his presumed full schedule to block me on Twitter. My offense was, I think, trivial; I replied to a Tweet from Gerry where he was crowing about the Liberals’ tremendous fiscal management as outlined in their fiscal update. I asked how the oil and gas sector was doing and if he’d like to comment on any associated drop in tax revenues. I also inquired about the health of Canada’s steel and aluminum industries and what progress had been made on expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline. I concluded by suggesting that things were going swimmingly.

Okay, I was a little sarcastic, but didn’t name-call or use offensive language. Unlike Gerry, who has called people he disagrees with “Nazis” on Twitter, I merely suggested that things were perhaps not as rosy as the government would have us believe and I think plenty of room remains for more and harsher criticism.

Like his boss, Gerry is strangely adolescent when it comes to social media. He may not be obsessed with selfie moments, but he often engages in petty squabbles on Twitter that a grown-up in his position should be embarrassed by. Still, he’s under no obligation to pay attention to cranky old guys like me who share none of his responsibility with respect to guiding the ship of state; blocking me is his prerogative.

More worrying than his online behaviour is his undue influence over and apparent happiness with the federal Liberals’ rejigging of the national economy. By now, everyone must be aware that Butts is on record saying he believes there should be no fossil fuel industry in Canada by 2050. Trudeau let slip in a town hall meeting in 2017 that he shares that view when he asserted that the oil sands had to be phased out. We all know, or were certainly told repeatedly, that Stephen Harper had a “hidden agenda” even though I’m not sure what anyone would point to as evidence of its execution in whole or in part. Strangely, no one suspects the present “sunny ways” government of having any such nefarious plan while evidence of a consistent, deliberate and, so far, very effective strategy to cripple the fossil fuel industry in Canada is all around us.

Of course, some people welcome such an agenda and don’t care if it’s covert just as long as it satisfies the moral imperative we all share to fight climate change. And everyone is of course up to date on the science, or at least claim to be, so that discussion is over. When you’re safely atop the moral high ground it is easy to accept and even regurgitate the Liberal pap regarding the actions they’ve taken. The Great Bear Rainforest is assuredly no place for a pipeline so Northern Gateway was justifiably cancelled. Our coastlines (well, at least a specific portion of one) must be protected so hooray for the tanker ban. And TransCanada, abandoned their Energy East project simply because market conditions had changed; that decision was in no way influenced by the introduction of onerous new regulations by the Liberal government. Trudeau was pro-Keystone XL during the 2015 election campaign, happily so while hiding behind the smokescreen of Obama’s purely political and obvious intention to cancel it. It never occurred to Justin and his crew that Clinton might not win the U.S. election and that Trump would immediately roll back Obama’s ideologically-driven decision. Now, Trudeau is mum on the project.

Which leaves only Trans Mountain and it increasingly looks like buying it was a stroke of genius because the government can simultaneously thump its chest about taking action while controlling the pace by which the approval and construction processes are undertaken; it must be done right, don’t you know, so it’s going to take some time. Thank goodness that this government believes in the rule of law and the authority of the courts, particularly when the courts make judgements that fully align with their own agenda. It’s so fantastic, this play, it even provides a stream of revenue to the government from the very industry it is bent on dismantling while it maintains a chokehold on distribution growth.

But the obfuscation, the high-minded pronouncements, the outright chicanery can all be forgiven because the climate is in crisis and we must do this for the planet and the future of humanity. As the recent United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties, COP24, in Katowice, Poland was approaching we were inundated with waves of gloomy prognostication from, to name a few, the IPCC, Britain’s Met Office and the U.S. Global Change Research Program. We were repeatedly told that the deadline for action is now closer, the costs of inaction have soared, and the situation has clearly never been more dire.

On October 31st, in the midst of this pre-COP hysteria, an important new and fully peer-reviewed paper was published in the prestigious, gold standard science journal, Nature. The paper, Quantification of ocean heat uptake from changes in atmospheric O2 and CO2 composition, was authored by researcher Laure Resplandy and nine others. It referenced 69 other papers and the research was supported by or used data from a number of highly-regarded scientific institutions that are front and centre in climate change research including: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (U.S.); the Princeton Environmental Institute (U.S.); the National Center for Atmospheric Research (U.S.); the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (U.S.); and the Canadian Greenhouse Gas Program.

The research was designed to quantify the amount of heat being absorbed by the world’s oceans using a novel approach. Rather than using actual temperature data gathered over time from a variety of sources, ocean heat uptake would be calculated by measuring changes in the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide released as the ocean warms. Using this method, the researchers determined that the oceans have been warming 60% faster than previously thought over the past quarter-century.

This staggering result was immediately reported by media outlets around the world. It provided yet another horrifying statistic showing just what a bind the planet is in. The fact that research findings of this sort now drive headlines is faintly amusing. Research papers like Resplandy et al, 2018, make for dry, and often impenetrable reading. The language is arcane, and the mathematics and statistical analyses are well beyond the grasp of most people. Any visual material, graphs and charts, provide little relief and can be all but indecipherable. It’s difficult to accept that the average journalist, untrained in science, can properly decode a research paper and fully grasp its findings and conclusions. It’s doubtful they ever read the actual papers but more likely rely instead on the PR talking points that journals like Nature or the institutions that fund the research provide when a paper is released. But Resplandy et al was pitched as being policy-relevant and therefore very newsworthy.

Most of the time, this is a smoothly functioning process that continually builds up the climate change narrative over time. It is relentless and has generated a near-universal acceptance of climate change “truths,” i.e., that it is driven by increasing amounts of CO2 being dumped into the atmosphere through the human use of fossil fuels, that it is spiralling out of control, that the consequences are catastrophic and that the science cannot be questioned.

Periodically, however, some brave soul does the unthinkable and successfully challenges a research finding. And that is what happened with Resplandy et al. An independent climate science researcher, retired British financier Nicholas (Nic) Lewis, read the paper and almost immediately noticed problems with the math and statistical analyses underpinning it. Lewis tried to reproduce the paper’s results and contacted the authors to determine why he was unable to do so. Ultimately, he discovered that the paper grossly overstated the heat uptake of the world’s oceans and underestimated the uncertainty attached to those findings; in short, the paper was all but worthless.

Lewis suggested that the authors should retract the paper and advise the media they were doing so and why. He then publicized his analysis on the blog of climate scientist Judith Curry, Climate etc. It must have been somewhat embarrassing, but Nature did acknowledge problems with the paper and advised that the team of researchers were working to resolve them. Several mainstream media outlets also reported that issues had been found with the paper. While the announcement of the paper’s findings had generated considerable media interest, the climb-down over its failings was more subdued.

This whole episode is simultaneously both important and entirely inconsequential. Important because it highlights that much of the science is accepted without question as few people seriously examine or are even capable of seriously examining what is being produced, including peer reviewers. Inconsequential because the impact of Lewis’s efforts to get at the truth is Lilliputian in scale; almost no one is paying attention. Additionally, with all the furious condemnation in the public sphere of “deniers” or “skeptics,” few are encouraged to actively do what science demands which is to challenge any and all scientific knowledge no matter how strong the consensus supporting it.

As an independent researcher, Lewis conducts his own research and collaborates with others. The peer-reviewed results from these efforts have been published in reputable journals. Lewis has also served as an IPCC Expert Reviewer. Some of his work has focused on better approximating the magnitude of the expected temperature response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2, which is captured in a couple of key metrics that are still only expressed as range estimates by the climate science community. His findings shift the range down slightly relative to estimates from other studies. These metrics are critically important for several reasons, not least because they make it possible to calculate a price for CO2 emissions that reflects their actual cost to the environment.

Discovering problems in Resplandy et al was not the first time that Lewis has revealed deficiencies in the work of well-funded and highly regarded researchers or government agencies operating at the very nexus of climate science. In 2013 he held the British Meteorological Office to account for its misrepresentation of how its major climate model known as HadGEM2-ES performed relative to actual observations of climate data. The Met Office claimed its model incorporated, and the model’s outputs were consistent with, the findings of the most recent climate science including work that Lewis had collaborated on. Lewis demonstrated these claims to be false. The Met Office climate forecasts were high and outside the range of those of other researchers and agencies, including the IPCC’s.

Lewis’s success as an unfunded ‘amateur’, exposing significant failings in the work of climate science professionals is extraordinary but not without precedent. Perhaps the most noteworthy case is that of retired Canadian mining analyst Steve McIntyre. McIntyre became interested in climate science when he noted that the ‘hockey stick’ curve, made famous in Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, and which was purported to depict 1,000 years’ of global average temperature eliminated noted climate events like the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. McIntyre initially reached out to climate scientist Michael Mann asking for access to his data and computer code so that he could try and understand and replicate Mann and his team’s results. Mann was uncooperative from the start and eventually became hostile. It is a long and well-documented story but McIntyre along with fellow Canadian Ross McKitrick, an environmental economist, ultimately managed to punch serious holes in the ‘hockey stick’ as well as the data and methodology used to produce it. McIntyre and McKitrick were even targeted in some of the infamous ‘Climategate’ emails that cast several of the key actors in the world of climate science, including Michael Mann, in a very poor light.

What Lewis, McIntyre, and McKitrick have in common are exceptional math skills and proficiency in statistical analysis. These are essential tools in the world of climate science, relying as it does on elaborate computer models based on a mix of actual observational data, proxy data from sources such as ice cores, lake sediments and tree rings, and parameterized values for model elements where real or proxy data are not available or where it is not yet, or will never be, possible to model the physical characteristics of the elements in question. Climate science is not a single discipline but is a complex amalgam of multiple disciplines including, physics, chemistry, biology, etc.; common to all, a reliance on statistical analysis. As the edifice is built almost entirely on statistics and statistical modelling and as a huge number of the so-called ‘experiments’ conducted are computer simulations using datasets developed with these models, it becomes apparent that the most critical skillset among all those possessed by a team of climate scientists is world-class statistical analysis chops. That two ‘amateur’ scientists and a professor of environmental economics who possess these talents, Nic Lewis, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, have been able to critically challenge and ultimately negate the findings of highly-credentialed, well-funded and esteemed professional climate scientists is proof of that.

As a point of clarification, in the context of this discussion the terms relating to statistics and statistical analysis are used to imply highly advanced techniques, not simple measures like the arithmetic mean of a set of numbers or the use of percentages to illustrate a simple linear trend. Much of the controversy regarding Michael Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ focused on his team’s apparent misapplication of a predictive technique called principal component analysis (PCA). Following is a description of PCA that appeared in a nature/methods article published in June 2017 on the Nature.com website:

PCA reduces data by geometrically projecting them onto lower dimensions called principal components (PCs), with the goal of finding the best summary of the data using a limited number of PCs. The first PC is chosen to minimize the total distance between the data and their projection onto the PC (Fig. 1a). By minimizing this distance, we also maximize the variance of the projected points, σ2 (Fig. 1b). The second (and subsequent) PCs are selected similarly, with the additional requirement that they be uncorrelated with all previous PCs. For example, projection onto PC1 is uncorrelated with projection onto PC2, and we can think of the PCs as geometrically orthogonal. This requirement of no correlation means that the maximum number of PCs possible is either the number of samples or the number of features, whichever is smaller. The PC selection process has the effect of maximizing the correlation (r2) (ref. 2) between data and their projection and is equivalent to carrying out multiple linear regression3,4 on the projected data against each variable of the original data. For example, the projection onto PC2 has maximum r2 when used in multiple regression with PC1.

No lay user of statistical information, e.g., a sports enthusiast interested in comparing the save percentage of NHL hockey goalies or a would-be home buyer tracking interest rate trends, could be expected to have even heard of PCA or other advanced analytical techniques much less possess the remotest understanding of them. That simple truth likely also applies to nearly all policymakers who use summaries of the findings generated using these methods as the basis for their policy prescriptions.

I am not arguing here that the mentioned exposures of poorly executed and effectively valueless research overturn the central climate change narrative that human activity is affecting the world’s climate. What these events do is raise the possibility that other research findings, widely accepted and endlessly propagated by policymakers and the media, might also be flawed or even fundamentally unsound. They also highlight the enormous complexity and the still prevalent uncertainty of climate science. These characteristics are also highlighted by many other peer-reviewed studies that explore very specific issues but receive no media attention or attention from advocacy or political groups. Politicians, the media, and other influencers portray climate science as if it were a hard, tangible and readily understood object, an absolute truth. It is more akin to a spongiform, amorphous blob that defies easy understanding and about which almost nothing is absolute.
Richard Lindzen, Professor Emeritus, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), recently delivered a lecture, Global Warming for the Two Cultures. He identified the two cultures as being “non-scientists” and “scientists” and described the divide that exists between them. For the issue under consideration, Lindzen assumes that members of both groups are highly educated but on some levels incapable of communicating with each other. Lindzen said, “The gap in understanding is also an invitation to malicious exploitation. Given the democratic necessity for non-scientists to take positions on scientific problems, belief and faith inevitably replace understanding, though trivially oversimplified false narratives serve to reassure the non-scientists that they are not totally without scientific ‘understanding.’ The issue of global warming offers numerous examples of all of this.”

Lindzen then walked his audience through a description of the climate system that he suggested should be readily understood and accepted as uncontroversial by the “scientists” in attendance and hopefully somewhat intelligible to the “non-scientists” present. He concluded this description by urging attendees to, “Consider the massive heterogeneity and complexity of the system, and the variety of mechanisms of variability as we consider the current narrative that is commonly presented as ‘settled science’.”

In an exploration of the current prevailing political narrative, Lindzen suggests that the belief that climate can be summarized by a single variable, the globally averaged change in temperature and that this variable is controlled by, “the 1-2% perturbation in the energy budget due to a single variable – carbon dioxide,” is, “based on reasoning that borders on magical thinking.” The unquestioning acceptance of this belief gives politicians confidence that they know exactly what policies are required to control CO2.
We are now experiencing firsthand in Canada the impacts of decisions being made and political actions being taken that are based on scientific findings that are speculative in nature and where the massive uncertainty attached to them is unrecognized if not completely unstated. As Lindzen points out, “our leaders are afraid to differ, and proceed, lemming-like, to plan for the suicide of industrial society.”

To take this discussion full circle, no one, not even non-scientists can have been fooled by the party trick Trudeau performed in 2016 at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo when he discoursed on quantum computing. If anything, that stunt is the perfect analog for how his government and many others use references to science as props to justify their policy decisions. It is nothing more than the rote recitation of a few talking points to establish for their audience their understanding of something about which they know very little. Trudeau and those around him are non-scientists. They have liberal arts educations and their presumed expertise is in politics. Gerry Butts may have been the head of an activist environmental organization, but his role was to foster and try to exercise political influence, not direct scientific inquiry.

An essay, I Pencil, written in 1958 by Leonard E. Read illustrates this point simply and eloquently. Read points out that a pencil is made from a handful of basic materials, wood, graphite, rubber, metal and paint, but no person on the planet fully understands all the processes that go into making a pencil or can make one without the support of countless others who create the required materials and tools. The breadth and depth of human experience and knowledge that led to the design and creation of something so commonplace and simple cannot be understated.

Do we imagine that any of the key actors in the present government are capable of fully explaining the relatively straightforward science and engineering required to make a pencil? So why do we think they fully comprehend the science and know enough to support the massively dislocating solutions they propose to solve the climate problem? As a group, they are simply not qualified to make truly science-based policy decisions but only believe themselves to be.

The problem today is that the lines have become incredibly blurred. Scientists like Michael Mann, and they are legion, have become politically vocal and confront opponents not to argue the science but to delegitimize them by political means. Scientists now advocate policy solutions, which is outside their areas of expertise and functional mandates. Ordinary citizens have divided into camps of believers and deniers even though neither group has the capability to properly evaluate the information that is presented to them. This turmoil does not provide the terra firma to support policies designed to dramatically re-engineer our energy systems, our economy, indeed our whole way of life.

While I have argued here for the necessity of placing mathematical and statistical analysis front and centre in climate science, there is also an argument to be made for paying greater attention to empirical data. Empirical data is necessary to prove or disprove favoured theories and to assess the quality of modelled ‘experiments.’ So far, observations have shown that the modelling, in many cases, is overly pessimistic and the situation is possibly less dire than the catastrophists claim.

A recent aggregation of Environment Canada weather data by Ross McKitrick reveals that data collected by the 30 weather stations nationally that have reported local temperatures from 1888 to 2017 reveal a warming trend of 0.1⁰C/decade over that time frame. For the 267 weather stations with data from 1978 to 2017, the recorded trend is 0.24⁰C/decade. McKitrick’s report, Trends in Historical Daytime Highs in Canada 1888-2017, shows that the overall warming trend is not uniform geographically or temporally and that in some locations no (statistically) significant trend is identified while in others the trend is greater than the national average trend. Summary notes from Trends in Historical Daytime Highs in Canada 1888-2017:

1. There is a trade-off between the number of available stations and the length of record. There are 30 stations with data back to 1888 and 267 stations with data back to 1978.

2. Over the past 130 years the median warming rate in the average daytime high is about 0.1 degrees per decade or 1 degree per century.

3. Over long samples there is little polar amplification (increased warming with latitude) but it does appear in fall and winter months in more recent subsamples.

4. Over the past 100 years, warming has been stronger in winter than summer or fall. October has cooled slightly. The Annual average daytime high has increased by about 0.1 degrees per decade. 72 percent of stations did not exhibit statistically significant warming or cooling.

5. Since 1939 there has been virtually no change in the median July and August daytime highs across Canada, and October has cooled slightly.

6. There are 247 stations with data back to 1958. However as the time span decreases the range of observed trends greatly expands. All months exhibit median warming but with much wider variability.

7. Post-1958 Arctic coverage is much better than earlier. There is little indication of polar amplification.

8. Post-1978 the range of trends grows dramatically. The median trend in March and April is slightly negative.

9. Some polar amplification is observed in the post-1978 annual trend, mainly due to the late fall and early winter months.

Putting these data in perspective, imagine you are sitting in your home and a family member complains that it feels cold and they request that the heat be turned up. You agree and, fortunately, as a means of managing your family’s home heating costs, you have a thermostat that measures temperature in hundredths of a degree. You generously turn the heat up by 0.24⁰C. A few minutes later the same family member complains that they don’t notice any difference even though the temperature has gone up nearly a quarter of a degree. Perhaps, given more time, say, a decade, they would notice, but likely not.

A 2016 report prepared for York Region, Historical and Future Climate Trends in York Region, predicts dramatic increases in temperature in the region by mid-century. York Region stretches from the northern boundary of metropolitan Toronto to the southern shores of Lake Simcoe. The report used historical data from 1981 to 2010 and climate model ensembles to develop its predictions including IPCC emissions scenario RCP 8.5. This scenario is a business-as-usual, high economic and population growth and low technological change scenario which yields the highest estimates of temperature increase of all the IPCC scenarios. In discussions of IPCC forecasts, it is generally acknowledged to be unrealistic and overly dire in its perspective, but it was explicitly chosen for this report.

There is a section on methodology where the datasets and models chosen and how they were used are discussed. It is likely opaque to most readers and I suspect for the majority of, if not all the municipal politicians and bureaucrats for whom the report was prepared. The report also includes a lengthy section on historical climate impacts where rainstorms, ice storms, hot spells, dry spells, and other weather events are not too subtly attributed to climate change, although this type of attribution is not supported by the climate science community generally, and by the IPCC specifically.

Rather than explaining in lay terms how the report’s findings were produced, what assumptions it relies on, and the limitations that should be considered, it would appear to be designed to make the report appear as technically sophisticated and scientifically defensible as possible. It may well be both of those things but, equally, could be a smokescreen from behind which a predetermined set of conclusions to support a favoured policy agenda has been delivered.

Richmond Hill, a town in York Region, has recently announced the hire of a project manager whose mandate will be to plan and implement municipal climate change priorities that will address the allegedly increasing impacts of climate change and reduce greenhouse gases. The scale of this action is obviously far less than that of the actions taken by the federal government to limit emissions and move to wind down the oil and gas industry. But it starts from the same premise and is built on the same shaky foundation. It also is a decision taken by people who are, like most of their federal and provincial counterparts, and the general public, scientifically illiterate but very happy to pronounce on subjects about which they know almost nothing.

As a nation, we should all stop and pause and try to figure out how to address this issue without dividing into camps and without wilfully destroying the institutions, industry, and infrastructure that helped create the best world that humans have ever lived in. While the debate rages about the Trudeau government’s imposition of a carbon tax, a debate characterized by name-calling, divisiveness and the repetition of simplistic bromides such as the need to “put a price on pollution,” we still haven’t had the discussion we need. That discussion must include scientific information from across the spectrum made accessible to the majority who are non-scientists. It must also include an equally accessible estimation of uncertainty around any of the major claims made. In short, a proper discussion and resolution of the differences between the “two cultures.” Then, we will have a basis for developing policy. Living in a democracy as we do, we accept the idea of majority rule and so the notion of a consensus view being an appropriate way to settle scientific questions has gained wide support. But it is another societal ideal that would be more properly applied and is more analogous to the scientific method; the requirement in our legal system that to win conviction the prosecution must prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. That is what we need to move forward. As amateur and non-consensus researchers have proven time and again, we have not yet met the ‘no reasonable doubt’ standard, there is still ample room and justification for skepticism regarding the prevailing narrative. Moving forward without doing so is akin to surrendering to mob rule. We should not, and cannot, let that happen.

(Un)Scientific American – Fatuous Nonsense on Climate Change & Social Unrest in Iran

Posted on January 11, 2018 by colinwright2012

Iran protest

The attribution of virtually any significant weather event to climate change is a particularly grating and ill-informed habit of climate evangelists. It is not supportable by the science, even blithe suggestions that climate change “contributed” to the severity of an event or to the frequency of particular event types are not verifiable. Making such statements is no less ridiculous than saying during a cold snap, “so what happened to global warming?”

To claim that climate change is a major driver of the current social unrest in Iran takes climate change attribution to a whole other level of bullshit. But, that’s where Scientific American went when it posted an article by Scott Waldman on January 8, Climate Change May Have Helped Spark Iran’s Protests.

According to Waldman, “The impacts of climate change are among the environmental challenges facing Iran that helped spark protests in dozens of cities across the Islamic republic.” He then says, “Rising temperatures are seen by some experts as an underlying condition for the economic hardships that led to the unrest.”

One such expert, Barbara Slavin, from the Atlantic Council, claims, “the role of climate change on the protests is “massive” and underreported by the media. The protests have largely sprung from provincial cities that climate refugees now call home, instead of the capital, Tehran.” Slavin maintains these “climate refugees” have moved from their farms into urban centres because 14 years of drought have made farming impossible.

Waldman throws in some alarmist projections – rainfall is expected to fall by 20% in the Middle East by the year 2100 and temperature to rise by 5⁰C – which are poor substitutes for observational data. Actual weather data covering 114 years from 1901 to 2015 highlight the obvious; Iran is a hot, arid country. Looking at both precipitation and temperature data over this period, a couple of things are quite striking. First, temperature has risen by about 1⁰C, consistent with global trends but hardly catastrophic. Second, precipitation has fluctuated quite dramatically, month-by-month and year-by-year but the monthly linear trend is nearly flat.[1]

Over the most recent 14-year period in the data (2002-15) the precipitation trendline for January shows a fairly steep decline but in July it shows an increase. Given that January is a wetter month in Iran than July, it is not surprising that the annual trend over this limited time frame is negative. But 14 years in terms of climate is almost nothing, using this limited data to prove climate change effects when the century-plus trend tells a markedly different story is just cherry-picking data to support your narrative.

Waldman also suggests that the worst effects of climate change in Iran, “could be curtailed with a drop in emissions from fossil fuels, a large percentage of which come from fossil fuels derived from the Middle East.” He then cites Kaveh Ehsani, an expert in Iranian politics at DePaul University, who claims, “there is a growing sense of environmentalism in Iran, in response to the drought and deadly heat waves.” But just to make sure he nails all the villains in the piece he also asserts that, “the Trump administration’s retreat from the Paris climate agreement and its larger rejection of climate policy mean that Iranian citizens are increasingly blaming environmental problems on the United States.”

Well, that’s neat and tidy. Western use of fossil fuels, the resultant changing climate, plus climate change denialism are the cause of civil unrest in Iran. The solution: stop using fossil fuels.

Waldman makes only passing reference to poor water management practices. In the abstract of a research paper, Water management in Iran: what is causing the looming crisis?, author Kaveh Madani states: “The government blames the current crisis on the changing climate, frequent droughts, and international sanctions, believing that water shortages are periodic. However, the dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning and managerial myopia.”[2]

The paper identifies three major causes of Iran’s growing water crisis: “(1) rapid population growth and inappropriate spatial population distribution; (2) inefficient agriculture sector; and (3) mismanagement and thirst for development.” Madani also posits that if Iran fails to change its water management policies and practices it risks losing, “its international reputation for significant success in water resources management over thousands of years in an arid area of the world.” In other words, the current regime in Iran has failed to adapt well to changing circumstances, certainly less well than its predecessors.

Waldman’s failure to mention population growth is a glaring omission. Iran experienced more than a fourfold increase in population over the past 60-plus years from about 19 million in 1955 to 82 million currently.[3] Half the population is under 30; it’s hardly a stretch to suggest a correlation between youth and civil unrest, particularly when those young people live under the iron rule of a despotic theocracy that limits their personal and political freedoms as well as economic opportunities.

Scientific American describes itself as “the award-winning authoritative source for the science discoveries and technology innovations that matter.” Let’s hope that the fatuous nonsense that is Waldman’s article was just a misstep into a pile of activist ordure rather than evidence of a more troubling malaise undermining the journal’s scientific authority.

[1] All climate data from the World Bank Group, Climate Knowledge Portal

[2] Water management in Iran: what is causing the looming crisis?, Kaveh Madani, August 2014, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences

[3] Population data from Worldometers.info, 2018

March Madness

Posted on May 9, 2017 by colinwright2012

March Madness
On successive weekends, the March for Science and the People’s Climate March, neatly timed to coincide with the conclusion of President Trump’s first 100 days in office, were perceived by many people as beacons warning of the environmental disaster that is sure to happen if Trump’s “anti-science” and “anti-environment” agenda is allowed to proceed unchecked. From a slightly more sanguine perspective, they reinforce that progressives appear to have lost their collective minds and hysteria will be the new normal for the foreseeable future, or at least until they get their way again.

Being pro-science and pro-environment are cornerstones of progressive dogma. As they are wont to do, progressives presume ownership in these areas. They believe that science is truth and that science can be “settled” such that no further discussion is necessary or should even be allowed. Increasingly, they are demanding radical changes on multiple policy fronts, particularly economic and energy policy, to avoid the cataclysmic events that, according to their understanding and interpretation of science, are otherwise unavoidable.

Inflexible, strident, intolerant and self-righteous, too many progressives live in a binary world where theirs is the good side and the non-aligned are so “off” that it is not impolitic to loudly and publicly vilify them for their intellectual intransigence or outright stupidity. Life must be simple in a world where doubt has been banished and refuting the arguments of those who disagree is more an exercise in naming and shaming – logic, reason and substantive argument having become passé.

Progressives’ self-proclaimed love of science and wholesale support for the environment (which today principally means stopping climate change) is vigorously propagated by much of the mainstream media and with unbridled zeal by new media. As Jack Shafer and Tucker Doherty pointed out in their recent (May/June 2017) study for Politico, The Media Bubble is Worse Than You Think, most working journalists in old or new media in the U.S. are liberal, urban and geographically concentrated in a handful of major cities on the east and west coasts of the country. Shafer and Doherty note that since 2015 internet publishing jobs started to outnumber print media jobs. They report that 73% of internet publishing jobs are in the Boston to Richmond, or Seattle to San Diego corridors and that most of these people live in “blue counties.” They further note that when, “…conservative(s) use “media” as a synonym for “coastal” and “liberal,” they’re not far off the mark.”

The relationship between the pro-science, pro-environment movement and the media is perhaps a little too cozy and the parties are a little too willing to overlook one another’s faults. One consequence is that volume and repetition often override carefully curated facts and argument, i.e., it seems that providing unwavering support for the overarching narrative is more important than verifiable truths and cogent analysis of the available facts.

Just a few days before the March for Science a piece entitled, The Other Poison Gas Killing Syrians: Carbon Dioxide Emissions, was posted by the online journal, The Nation. Author Juan Cole, a professor of History at The University of Michigan, was clearly agitated that President Trump had ordered a retaliatory airstrike against Syria over its alleged deployment of Sarin gas against civilians with deadly effect, while he and his party do nothing about reducing, but, in fact, “…are committed to increasing the daily release of hundreds of thousands of tons of a far more deadly gas—carbon dioxide.” This preposterous statement, never mind the headline, speaks volumes about both Cole and his editors’ understanding of the threat to the environment posed by CO2. Cole goes on to describe CO2 as, “the most noxious gas of all.”

According to Adip Said, in a science primer written for Biology Cabinet, Research and Advisory on Biology, “carbon dioxide is an organic compound formed by one atom of Carbon and two atoms of Oxygen (O=C=O).” The primer further notes that, “carbon dioxide is by far the most important (organic compound) for the sustainability of the biosphere (the whole of life on Earth).” Any child paying attention in elementary school science class must surely be aware of these simple, basic scientific truths but they are apparently news to Cole and The Nation who are convinced CO2 is the vilest of poisonous gases. This must rank among the most elemental misapprehensions of science ever.

The same article trucks out the variously discredited notion that climate change was a key driver of a major drought in Syria between 2007 and 2010 which displaced thousands of farm workers and their families, contributing to the conflict, loss of life, and refugee crisis in Syria. That’s a heavy burden for a simple molecule.

To be sure, this article is extremist and rooted in flights of fancy rather than fact. But there are other signs that the progressive platform suffers from more than surface rot. In a piece for The New Republic, Emily Atkin posits that Bill Nye is not the appropriate person to lead the climate fight. Known to his juvenile television audience as “The Science Guy,” Nye is not, and never has been a practising scientist. He holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering but hasn’t worked in the field for thirty-odd years. He has drawn attention lately for his climate change activism. In public appearances and YouTube videos he has become increasingly intolerant of skeptic viewpoints, makes frequent references to the climate science “consensus,” and declares the science to be settled.

Nye was front and centre in Washington during the March for Science, and was photographed behind a barricade with prominent and controversial climate scientist Michael Mann. He was also a guest on CNN just prior to the March for Science along with Princeton Physicist, William Happer, who himself is the object of some controversy as he has met with Donald Trump and is apparently under consideration for the role of chief science advisor to the president.

Happer is on record as disagreeing with the classification of CO2 as a pollutant by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) during Obama’s tenure in the Oval Office. He has also suggested that the gas is essentially benign and that the increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have benefitted plant growth and the planet has been greening as a consequence. His position is that, as a trace gas in the atmosphere, increased levels of CO2 do not condemn the planet to a catastrophic outcome.

As a physicist with a long and distinguished career in science, Happer’s thoughts on the issue should not be readily dismissed, but that is exactly what Bill Nye, the putative “Science Guy” did on the CNN panel. In response to Happer’s comments that humans exhale around two pounds of CO2 daily and that the planet has lately been greening, Nye went into attack mode and, as Atkin pointed out in her piece, “…scolded CNN for allowing a climate-change denier to speak with the same authority as mainstream climate scientist(s).”

Atkin then asserts that, “Nye isn’t wrong, exactly, to criticize CNN for giving Happer a platform, but he also knows better than anyone that this is how cable news conducts climate change debates.” Atkin’s concern is that Nye has become prickly and no longer uses reason to contest the positions of the other side but instead tries to shut them down. “The old Nye would have played along. He would have challenged Happer’s ignorance, and educated CNN viewers on the harms of greenhouse gases.”

Atkin’s credibility with respect to this skirmish suffers on two fronts. The first is her interpretation of Happer’s comments where she distills two points into one and in doing so misunderstands and misrepresents what the physicist said. Atkin seems to believe Happer is saying that human exhalation of CO2 has contributed to the greening of the planet. She suggests he doesn’t understand that human respiration returning carbon to the atmosphere completes a closed loop process begun when plants fix carbon from the air which is subsequently ingested by humans.

Happer’s comment about human respiration is merely intended to highlight the absurdity of calling CO2 a pollutant when it is integral to all life, including human life. His second point about the greening of the planet is substantiated by numerous studies and photographically documented by NASA satellites. A paper published in April 2016, in the journal Nature Climate Change delivered by 32 researchers from 24 institutions in eight countries reported that more available CO2 in the atmosphere was the principal driver of recent planetary greening, accounting for 70% of the increased plant growth followed by nitrogen deposition (9%), climate change (8%) and land cover change (LCC) (4%). According to NASA, “The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States.”

Climate advocates Atkin and Nye are either ignorant of this finding or chose wilfully to ignore it. The greening is a positive externality arising from the consumption of fossil fuels and, given its scale, for advocates is an unwelcome counterpoint to their usual doom and gloom narrative. It does not, of course, represent a solution to the climate problem but it does provide mitigation. In trying to tie Happer’s two points together, Atkin asserts, “There is no such “closed loop” for the some 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide that fossil fuel combustion adds to the atmosphere every year, which is why the planet is warming.” She completely glides by the fact that the greening is net new carbon sequestration by plants on a massive scale that provides a brake for CO2-induced warming.

Nye’s response was to try and deny the legitimacy of Happer’s participation in the discussion rather than discuss the relative merits of the points he raised. This is the all too typical response from advocates; reassert the certainty of your beliefs and denigrate your opponent. While Atkin believes Nye should have argued her faulty point about a “closed loop” she is more concerned that Nye has lost his cool and no longer uses logic, fact and reason to shut down opponents.

“The problem is not Nye’s understanding of the science. It’s that he’s become unable to explain it, in simple and clear terms, to a skeptical audience. Maybe he’s been defending science for too long now, and has grown tired of debating conservative cranks whose very job is to reject everything he says. Or maybe he’s become enamored with his celebrity, and has discovered that—like the cable-news pundits and hosts he tussles with—being performative is a more lucrative path than honest inquiry and factual rigor. But so long as a partisan performance artist is the national face of the climate change fight, conservatives will continue to have a case that the left’s championing of science is all about politics.”

The second blow to Atkin’s credibility is her willingness, despite recognizing that Nye is, “…a partisan performance artist,” to grant him scientific authority over an accomplished actual scientist, in this case Happer. Presumably, the latter is just another “conservative crank.” Sensibly, of the two, which is really a “science guy,” the distinguished career physicist or the children’s entertainer? Atkin is right that Nye is ill-suited to leading the climate fight, not just because of his current state of distemper but because too many of the placard-waving marchers who follow him and the people who report on these events have a demonstrable deficit with respect to their own scientific literacy.

It’s possible Nye takes cues for the sort of behaviour he exhibited on CNN from well-known climate scientist, Michael Mann. Mann gained prominence many years ago with his “hockey stick” graph that purported to show contemporary warming proceeding at an historically unprecedented pace. Al Gore featured it in highly theatrical fashion in his hyperbolic film, An Inconvenient Truth. Mann’s findings were challenged by a number of scientists and statisticians and, depending on which side of the great climate divide you sit, you either believe he was totally exonerated or that his science is a little dodgy, or worse.

Mann interpreted the questioning of his work as a personal attack and in his book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From the Front Lines, he rolls out his “Serengeti Strategy,” a rather clumsy analogy that seeks to position Mann as the target of predatory deniers funded by fossil fuel interests. In the book, he is critical of anyone who disagrees, friend and foe alike. Mann is serially litigious and makes a habit of denouncing other climate scientists who see things differently.

He was his usual prickly self during a recent U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Science, Space, and Technology hearing on Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method. During Mann’s testimony he criticized the work of fellow panelists John Christy, Judith Curry and Roger Pielke Jr., all, like Mann, tenured PhDs who have worked in the field for most or all of their careers. He chirped that Pielke is no longer working in the field and called Curry a “climate science denier.” It seems that, in Mann’s estimation, none can hold a candle to him as a scientist; they are all just wrong. This disrespect is unseemly but probably travels well in this age of social media where publicly naming and shaming is a surer path to “owning” your opponent than engaging in civil, reasoned debate. So armed, the “Science Guy” goes forth and talks smack.

What was the expected outcome of these marches and what, actually, did they achieve? Physician Jeremy Faust in a piece in Slate on April 24, The Problem With the March for Science, provides a succinct appraisal of the value of these events.

“Being “pro-science” has become a bizarre cultural phenomenon in which liberals (and other members of the cultural elite) engage in public displays of self-reckoned intelligence as a kind of performance art, while demonstrating zero evidence to justify it. On any given day, many of my most “woke” friends are quick to post and retweet viral content about the latest on what Science (and I’m capitalizing this on purpose) “says,” or what some studies “prove.” But on closer look, much of what gets shared and bandied about is sheer bullshit and is diagnostic of one thing only: The state of science (and science literacy) in this country, and most of the planet for that matter, is woefully bad.”

The March for Science and the People’s Climate March were little more than feel-good exercises where participants could publicly parade their virtue and push back against the “cranks” whose views are perhaps a little more circumspect and therefore less readily captured in a clever slogan or raucous chant. The science/climate issue has been fraught for some time. It is now another erosive agent wearing away at the thin tissue of our public discourse. As impressive as it is that so many were moved to gather and link arms in support of “science” and “climate” it would be a major step forward if the people leading the conga line and their media allies worked a little harder to understand what others are saying, were less intolerant, and could more convincingly demonstrate a legitimate claim to their assumed certainty.

Up in Smoke – Burning Taxpayers’ Money Chasing a Dream

Posted on October 6, 2015 by colinwright2012

Anyone planning to cast a ballot on October 19th should take a careful look at progressive promises to invest in green energy technologies. The return on such investments will likely be very poor as Ontario, the United Kingdom, and Germany have already demonstrated. To date, the leaders’ debates and mainstream media coverage of the election have left some key questions unanswered by the Liberals and NDP (the Green Party, too, but they have no hope of forming a government).

In December 2013 an ice storm swept up from the Great Plains of the U.S. into southern Ontario and moved eastward across the province knocking out electric power for hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses. Toronto was particularly hard hit, some residents waited a week or more for power to be restored.

My family was without power for about a day; an inconvenience, far from catastrophic, and even somewhat enlightening. You very quickly comprehend how reliant we are on an uninterrupted supply of electricity when it is suddenly unavailable.

As a ratepayer concerned about the rising cost of electricity in Ontario and the provincial government’s headlong rush into renewables, I thought it might be interesting to see how the green energy plant was performing during the crisis. Viewing the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) website a day or two after the storm revealed that both wind and solar were effectively contributing nothing to meeting the power needs of Ontarians.

Wind turbines cannot be operated in icy weather conditions. Accumulated ice unbalances the rotor blades which may lead to a very expensive failure. Latitude and seasonality affect the amount and intensity of sunlight received by a particular patch of real estate, so photovoltaic panels in Ontario would have been at their least productive when the ice storm struck. Being capped with layers of ice and snow can’t have helped much either.

When service was restored it was electricity from Ontario’s nuclear, hydro, and gas-fired generating plants that flowed to customers. Ontario’s nuclear plants supply more than 60% of the electricity used in the province annually. During the ice storm and its aftermath they were humming along reliably while the renewables were stopped dead in their tracks.

Solar and wind are both plagued with a major, as yet unaddressed, problem – intermittency. Solar and wind are often at peak output when there is no concurrent demand for that output, and produce nothing when demand is at its highest. Unlike zero-emissions nuclear power plants, they are largely unfit for purpose.

Capacity utilization in Ontario is about 83% for nuclear plants and around 26% for wind. A simple analysis using IESO and other publicly available data suggests that replacing the fleet of nuclear power plants in Ontario would require more than 20,000 wind turbines at a conservatively estimated cost of more than eighty billion dollars. To provide gas-fired back-up capacity or some form of energy storage system to meet demand when the wind isn’t blowing would add billions more to that estimate – all for a net gain of zero in terms of reduced emissions.

Like many environmentalists, the signatories to the recently unveiled ‘Leap Manifesto’, believe that we must decarbonize immediately to save the planet and that we can meet all of our energy needs with wind and solar power. The manifesto is just one more indicator of how hopelessly optimistic and misguided these green enthusiasts are. Even without the damage to the distribution network during the ice storm, thousands of residents would still have been freezing in the dark if the province had to rely entirely on wind and solar to supply its electricity.

I also checked the IESO website this past July 28, when southern Ontario was experiencing a heat wave. In the middle of the afternoon, there was no wind and virtually no electricity being generated by the scores of wind turbines standing motionless in the countryside. Demand for electricity was peaking as homes and businesses cranked up their air conditioning. Once again, nuclear, hydro, and gas-fired generators fed the grid and kept everyone cool. Solar contributed less than one half of one per cent of generated output during the day, and of course nothing once the sun had set.

A key actor in the Ontario Liberal government’s decision to adopt renewables as the way forward was Gerald Butts. He had then-premier Dalton McGuinty’s ear just as he now has Justin Trudeau’s in his role as Trudeau’s principal advisor. Butts is a fervent environmentalist who used to head up WWF Canada. He’s on record saying, “…100 per cent sustainable, renewable energy is possible and economical by 2050 if we start the transition today.” For the record, WWF Canada opposes nuclear power generation so it’s probably reasonable to assume this is Mr. Butts’ and Mr. Trudeau’s position also.

While campaigning in Trois Rivières on September 2, Trudeau declared, “Ensuring that our infrastructure is able to adapt to new challenges – like climate change and threats to our water and land – is essential to our future prosperity.” He then laid out his party’s plans to address this perceived deficiency through (presumably deficit-financed) infrastructure “investments”. These investments will include the establishment of a “…Canada Infrastructure Bank to provide low-cost financing for infrastructure projects, and Green Bonds to support renewable energy projects.” The Liberals promise to “…use new financing instruments to stimulate investment in retrofits and distributed energy systems.”

In short, the federal Liberals will adopt the ruinous policy that Gerald Butts sold to their provincial counterparts in Ontario. It’s extraordinary that these radical and economically unsound positions are part of a major party’s platform, particularly a platform founded on the belief that public investment is what is needed to kick-start the national economy. The return ratepayers in Ontario have seen from the McGuinty/Wynne “investments” in green energy is worse than the output of a solar panel at midnight – less than zero. We don’t need to borrow money to repeat those mistakes nationally.

The NDP are no less committed than the Liberals to this fanciful line of thought. Tom Mulcair, presumably to reinforce his credibility on this file, frequently reminds us that he held the Environment portfolio as an MNA in Québec. In a 2013 speech to the Economic Club of Canada Mulcair said in order to ensure Canada’s long-term prosperity an NDP government would, “…invest in modern, clean energy technology that will keep Canada on the cutting edge of energy development and ensure affordable energy rates into the future.” The NDP has always opposed nuclear power so we can be pretty sure the range of investment options Mr. Mulcair is considering is pretty limited.

Mulcair also told the Economic Club audience that, “We will rise to meet our international climate change obligations by creating a cap-and-trade system that puts a clear market price on carbon.” Mr. Trudeau also talks about putting a price on carbon. The revenues generated will presumably be directed to “clean technology” investments so favoured by both leaders, and both are practically champing at the bit for a chance to commit Canada to massive emissions reductions at the Paris COP in December.

As an informed, concerned member of Canada’s electorate I think Mulcair and Trudeau owe voters explicit details about how their vague plans to limit emissions, price carbon, and “invest” in renewables will deliver the low-, or no-carbon robust economy they each promise. I believe that the positions of Liberal advisor Gerald Butts and Leap Manifesto author Naomi Klein are extreme, unaffordable and ultimately counter to the national interest.

So, Mr. Mulcair, Mr. Trudeau, please tell us how much do we need to reduce emissions by, and what will the effect on the global climate be if we make these cuts, bearing in mind that Canada is responsible for less than 2% of world emissions? If the solution is renewables, what is the target proportion of our energy mix for these technologies and what will it cost to achieve? Most forecasts suggest that renewables, including biofuels, will be only 10-20% of the global energy mix by 2050. How will we ensure the global competitiveness of our industries and the financial security of Canadians if they must shoulder additional tax burdens, higher costs for carbon-based fuels, and ongoing subsidies for renewables? We need substantive answers to these questions, and more. Asking voters to take a leap of faith just doesn’t cut it.

Access to affordable, reliable energy delivered the prosperity Canadians enjoy today. How we will maintain that foundation, or at least avoid materially damaging it, is the most important conversation we haven’t had in this election to date. The progressive parties, with their ill-defined plans to “invest in green technology” have provided plenty of reasons for Canadians to be very wary of the future they promise.

Played by the Great Crusader

Posted on September 17, 2015 by colinwright2012

Canada is now in the midst of a protracted, unusually long federal election. There is hope among many people that this will be prime minister Stephen Harper’s last hurrah, not least the country’s progressives whose animosity toward the Conservative leader has been identified by some pundits as ‘Harper derangement syndrome’ because of the tendency of those afflicted to lay the blame for any problem or issue confronting Canada at Harper’s feet.

In the initial McLean’s leaders’ debate all three of the aspirants hoping to unseat Mr. Harper referenced energy and environmental policy and, more specifically, how dismal, in their view, the Conservative record is in these areas. In today’s world, more often than not, when concern is expressed for the environment it is a proxy for concern over catastrophic anthropogenic global warming – climate change – caused by the burning of carbon-based fuels. Proposed solutions inevitably hinge on a massive reduction, or the outright elimination, of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions – something that is now referred to as ‘carbon pollution’ despite carbon dioxide being a colourless, odourless gas essential to virtually all forms of life.

From a policy perspective then, energy and the environment are inextricably bound to one another. We cannot make progress on either front without due consideration of the impacts any proposed policy will have on the corollary issue. It is now commonplace to hear that the world’s, and Canada’s, core objective must be a shift to a low-carbon economy and the solution is to move firmly and rapidly to ‘renewables’.

Renewables today typically means wind, solar and biofuels. Hard-core environmentalists also dislike zero-carbon energy sources such as nuclear and hydro because of the potential contamination risks and waste issues associated with the former, and the impact on local ecosystems implied by the latter. This leaves a pretty limited set of alternatives with which to effect the desired shift away from carbon-based energy sources.

It should be noted that self-described environmentalists have done a great job propagating their views among politicians and the media so that today, what a rational, pragmatic person might consider to be, at a minimum, an outrageously ambitious and likely unachievable solution is now considered to be the way forward.

Faith in renewables has long been a core element of any self-respecting progressive’s thinking on energy and the environment. The icing on the cake is the increasingly espoused idea that shifting to renewables is also the path to a robust and vibrant economy. This notion is almost Orwellian in that it implies that the wealth we enjoy and largely take for granted has been generated despite, rather than because of, carbon-based fuel use.

For Canadian environmental and energy policy this line of thinking has profound implications. The Conservative government under Harper’s direction is accused of having put all of the economy’s eggs in a single basket – oil exploitation. They are further accused of gutting environmental regulation in their haste to turn Canada into an energy superpower. The sitting government is apparently all about fast-tracking risky pipeline projects, permitting waterways to be used as open sewers and allowing oil companies to ride roughshod over Canadian laws and values.

In the debate and in their daily campaign pronouncements, Ms. May, Mr. Mulcair and Mr. Trudeau toss words like ‘climate’, ‘responsible’, ‘sustainable’, ‘renewable’ and ‘technology’ around like confetti. These are code words intended to convey to voters that these leaders’ thinking is aligned with the widespread progressive view on energy and the environment. Factual data are, however, conspicuously absent.

As with so many aspects of Canadian political, cultural, and economic life, the influence of the United States in this sphere is palpable. U.S. president Barack Obama has clearly made solving the climate problem a legacy project. He has delivered much overheated rhetoric on the subject and taken some deliberate, but arguably symbolic actions. These include signing a ‘landmark’ carbon emissions agreement with China, subsidizing the solar power industry, bringing in tough new regulations for coal-fired power generation and, most critically for Canada, blocking the northern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline which is intended to move Canadian (and American) oil south to U.S. refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.

Keystone XL is a project of energy giant Trans Canada Corporation and is not fundamentally different from any other pipeline project in North America other than it has been demonized by environmental groups in the U.S. and Canada and become the focal point for the anti-oil movement. The environmental movement in the U.S. has been an important constituency for president Obama and he has quite willingly pandered to their positions on energy and the environment. Doing so has allowed these groups to propagate the idea that oil from Canada’s oil sands is ‘dirty’ and that stopping development of the oil sands is critical to the planet’s survival. The environmental lobby in the U.S. has effectively positioned blocking Keystone XL as a test of Obama’s credibility as a climate crusader and Obama appears to have swallowed not only the bait, but the hook, the line, and the sinker as well.

As a consequence of Obama’s inaction, Canadian oil production has been prevented from getting to market easily and has been forced to sell at a discount. Rail transport has been used as a much riskier and more costly alternative. The obstruction of Keystone XL has also put wind in the sails of opponents of other proposed pipelines, notably Enbridge’s Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain projects in B.C., and Enbridge’s Energy East project that will reverse the flow of an existing pipeline and move western oil through Ontario and Quebec to New Brunswick where it will be refined.

Even before the election campaign started in Canada the leaders of the opposition parties made pretty clear that they were much enamoured of Mr. Obama’s positions. Mr. Mulcair opposes the Northern Gateway and Keystone, wants a more rigorous approval process for Trans Mountain, and has waffled furiously trying to appease competing constituencies on Energy East. He likes the idea of “sustainably” refining oil in New Brunswick but has a thorny problem trying to square the need for a pipeline with provincial sentiments to facilitate that. Many people in Quebec, a province critical to the NDP’s electoral hopes, are anti-oil and strongly opposed to reversing the flow of an existing pipeline that runs through the province.

Mr. Trudeau is all over the map but appears to be opposed to Northern Gateway, lukewarm toward Kinder Morgan, supportive of Keystone XL and fuzzy on Energy East, while Ms. May is fundamentally opposed to oil and pipelines, and the oil sands in particular. Mr. Trudeau’s position might be seen as a little cynical; it’s relatively safe to support Keystone XL when you enjoy the comfort of knowing your confrere in the White House is never going to permit it.

These three use concern over the approval process for pipeline projects to bolster their positions on the various proposals in play. According to this trio, the fourteen-year process that the proponents of Northern Gateway have had to navigate is insufficient. For the record, the Joint Review Panel that evaluated the submission determined that the project was in Canada’s best interest and gave conditional approval for the project in December 2013. The National Energy Board (NEB) has said the project can only proceed if all 209 of the conditions catalogued by the Joint Review Panel are met.

That process is ongoing but apparently is not robust enough for progressives. It is hard to fathom what would constitute a sufficiently robust process to satisfy the concerns of these people. It is probably reasonable to suspect they don’t know either, as their objections appear to be based more on emotion than how to resolve particular engineering, safety or social/economic issues. Never mind though, complaining about a gutted environmental regulatory process is sure to be a vote winner among like-minded progressives.

Having been a leading actor in the blocking of Canadian pipeline development, Obama adopted the role of climate change emissary and signed an agreement with China, much heralded by progressives. Under the agreement, Chinese carbon emissions will continue to rise for the next fifteen years until they peak in 2030, when, it is promised, they will begin to decline. For its part, the U.S. must reduce its emissions 28% from 2005 levels by 2025. Due to the substitution of gas for coal in electricity generation and a reduction in energy demand because of the Great Recession, the U.S. has already seen a 10% reduction in its CO₂emissions.

Chinese CO₂ emissions are forecast to increase by about 40% over this time frame and, as China is already responsible for around 25% of global emissions, but the U.S. only 15%, the impact of this ‘historic’ agreement will be negligible. Meanwhile, Canada accounts for barely 2% of global emissions, and its oil sands production only 0.12%, but suffers the unchallenged criticism of the great crusader.

U.S. emissions have gone down over the past few years primarily because of abundant natural gas from fracked shale deposits displacing coal for electricity generation, not because of any policy action on the part of the Obama administration. Concurrent with the increase in gas production, oil production in the U.S. has increased by more than 40% during his presidency. Over the same time frame, Canada’s oil production has only increased about 25% and total Canadian production is less than half that of the U.S. Turning a vast area of the lower 48 states into a pin cushion through a massive fracking program that will make the U.S. the world’s largest oil producer gets scant attention, while a dubious agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is lauded as some sort of climate change breakthrough.

The “dirty oil” tag attached to Canadian oil sands product refers to two aspects of its production: the energy intensity and related CO₂ emissions of the extraction process and; the physical degradation of local environments as a consequence of mining-type operations. The industry has invested heavily and successfully in technology to reduce energy intensity, and significant effort is put into land reclamation following extraction. The industry also operates under a robust regulatory regime, as do all resource extraction and other heavy industries in Canada.

An interesting analysis by a branch of the International Energy Agency found that emissions related to oil sands production were equivalent to those for extra heavy oil, around 9.3-15.8 gCO₂/MJ (grams per megajoule), while for oil shale (fracked oil) the emissions range between 13.0 and 50.0 gCO₂/MJ. Fracked wells typically release significant amounts of methane during the well completion process and often flare off large quantities of natural gas (methane) during production because there is no facility to capture, store and transport it. Flaring is preferable to releasing the gas in its raw state from an emissions perspective because methane as a greenhouse gas traps about 25 times the amount of heat that CO₂ does. Without even taking into account the strain fracking places on water resources, it’s evident that fracking is a pretty “dirty” undertaking in its own right. Perhaps president Obama might have looked in his own backyard before describing Canadian oil sands production as “extraordinarily dirty”.

The southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline, long since approved, built, and put into service, now transports U.S. oil from fracking projects to refineries in Texas. At the same time, pipeline projects to transport fracked gas in the U.S., which will likely displace Canadian natural gas from eastern Canadian and U.S. markets, are moving ahead. The latest move by the president has been to approve exploratory drilling off the coast of Alaska which upsets environmentalists but which Obama defends in terms of balancing economic and environmental interests. Apparently, Canadians are to be discouraged from seeking a similar balance and encouraged to castigate those who advocate such plans.

The president’s other climate initiatives have not exactly produced stellar results. The Obama administration’s $80 billion clean technology program was tarnished when flagship solar panel maker Solyndra, the recipient of a $500 million federal loan guarantee, went bankrupt. An electric-car battery plant that received $250 million also filed for bankruptcy.

In 2014, renewables accounted for 9.8% of U.S. energy consumption but much of that energy was supplied by hydro-electricity generation, and the burning of wood and waste, as well as liquid biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel, rather than from wind and solar generation. That’s up from around 6.23% of total consumption since 2005, an increase of 54% but, at the same time, overall energy use has declined 2% so the gain is less than it appears. Carbon-based fuel consumption has declined about 6% but overall energy use from all sources has only declined 2%. Energy consumption fell dramatically in 2009 because of the recession and has been slowly rebounding since. Liquid biofuels are also questionable in terms of net benefits as they are energy intensive to produce and remove agricultural resources from food production.

So, does this represent a dramatic shift away from carbon-based fuels and toward renewables, to a low-carbon economy? In a word, no. Solar and wind projects in the U.S., as in jurisdictions like Ontario, Germany, or other European countries, are directly subsidized by government. Without those subsidies investment in these wholly inadequate technologies would disappear. Unlike the ‘subsidies’ that progressives believe are enjoyed by the carbon-based fuel industry, these are real cash transfers, not imputed social and environmental costs based on scenarios of cataclysmic events that progressives are convinced will happen if we don’t stop using carbon based fuels forthwith. And nor are they capital cost allowances that all businesses receive when they invest in new equipment or other means of production. One wonders, when they do their math, do they ever look at the other side of the balance sheet and consider the almost inestimable contribution carbon fuels have made to the developed world’s health, wealth and general quality of life? When your outlook is as gloomy as most progressives’, probably not. The world will be run on carbon-based fuels for decades to come. As Mr. Harper has noted, switching to a low-carbon economy is a long-term endeavour and will require “serious technological transformation” – carpeting the planet with solar panels or creating forests of windmills won’t cut it.

The progressive trio of Mulcair, Trudeau, and May have all publicly expressed a wish to leap aboard the climate change bandwagon in Paris at the upcoming 21^st Conference of the Parties (COP) in December and commit Canada to an agreement that will align its environmental and energy policies with those of the ‘enlightened’ countries of the world, including the U.S. under Obama. Much of their motivation seems to come from a desire to rid Canada of its shame at having been such an unwilling, uncommitted participant at past COPs. This eagerness betrays the frightening reality that these three, and their legions of progressive followers, have been played.

Masquerading as an environmental crusader, Obama has effectively pursued a protectionist policy that has negatively impacted the Canadian economy and severely strained a long-standing and valuable relationship. His obstructionist behaviour goes against the grain of fair-trading and probably violates NAFTA. He has subtly, but also openly, maligned the Canadian government over its handling of the environment portfolio yet there is little in his own record to crow about. But, that’s Obama, if overheated rhetoric, verbal contortions, and hubris were the principal measures of national leadership, rather than material accomplishments, his two-term presidency would be the yardstick against which the records of past and future presidents would be measured.

Let’s check the scorecard. Under Obama, the U.S. has massively increased its oil production through fracking, a “dirty” process if we accept progressive nomenclature. In addition it has entered into an agreement with the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, China, that gives license to unfettered Chinese emissions for at least fifteen years. One leg of a single pipeline project, Keystone XL, has been obstructed preventing Canadian oil from getting to market easily. Approval may be granted, according to Obama, if Canada tightens up its management of its oil sands and makes its “dirty oil” cleaner, even though Canadian oil sands emissions are but 1/10^th of 1% of the world total while Chinese and U.S. emissions are 40+%. U.S. CO₂ emissions have declined modestly, largely due to cheap fracked gas substituting for coal in electricity generation and because of the lingering impacts of the Great Recession on demand for energy. Shell has been given a green light to start exploratory drilling off the Alaskan coast and renewables, through cash subsidies, have managed to deliver a small, insignificant share of overall energy consumption.

Canada, meanwhile, has had to trade its oil at a discount, has seen rising opposition to new pipeline and energy projects in part because of the influence of opinion makers like Obama, has had to ship much of its oil by rail, a riskier, more energy-, and emissions-intensive means of transport, and has seen its reputation tarred by progressive activists both within and without its borders. Through all of this, Canada’s federal government has pushed for fair treatment of its energy industry by its largest trading partner and principal international ally, waited patiently for the regulatory process to finally deliver approval for energy projects, eased out of the hopeless Kyoto accord that the U.S. never signed on to, and tried to defend its positions against a rising cacophony from agitated and largely irrational, or at least unthinking and poorly informed, progressives.

The teaching moment that Obama provides for progressives in Canada is that enlightened self-interest is more important than heart-felt but unrealizable dreams about a buzzword-laden, oil and pipeline-free future. Stephen Harper has managed the environment and energy files masterfully. His singular failing has been his inability to articulate and explain his actions; something not easily done when you are swimming against an absolute torrent of adverse opinion. He is almost the polar opposite of Obama, whose ability to gain traction arguing that black is white, or up is down, is nothing, if not remarkable. It is a sad prospect that the leadership alternatives in this country can be so easily played and cannot readily identify what is in the national interest.

Small Beer – Climate Change Alarm Hits a New Low Over a ‘Record High’

Posted on January 19, 2015 by colinwright2012

After months of anticipation the global warming alarmist community dolefully (gleefully?) reported that a new record high annual average surface temperature for the globe was observed in 2014. According to the believers, this new milestone in global average temperature was a record in the modern period, i.e., since 1880, and more evidence, as if any were needed, of the inexorable rise of the earth’s temperature due to human activity.

Whenever some hapless doubter, after a cool summer or a frigid winter, dares to query the legitimacy of the whole anthropogenic climate change theory, they are immediately advised that such variation is “just weather.” For example, in the winter of 2013-14 ice cover in the Great Lakes at 88.3% was the fourth highest it has been since 1973 and not far off the record of 94.7% set in 1979, according to Environment Canada. That agency was quick to note that:

A season of unusually cold weather in the Great Lakes basin is not a sign that the century long trend of rising temperatures has reversed. In fact, while Canada and the eastern U.S. froze at times this winter, many locations including Alaska and Europe, were experiencing unseasonably warm temperatures.

Fair enough, and great to see the scientists at Environment Canada were able to slip the muzzle long enough to get that comment published on their website.

With this perspective in mind, we must surely be able to assume that the new record global average temperature is not merely some variation due to weather, but a troubling shift in an already unsettling trend. The new record was announced by both the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in the US.

According to the NOAA website the global average surface temperature (land areas and oceans combined) was 0.02ºC above the previous high recorded in 2005 and 2010. That’s right, 2/100ths of a degree warmer. Their error bounds are multiples of that value which means this result is not statistically significant, i.e., 2014 was not meaningfully different from 2005 or 2010 and the change could simply be due to accumulated errors in the reporting and calculation of the value. But, it’s a new record, and it supports the scary narrative so, hey, let’s get it out there.

NASA, on its website, noted:

The 10 warmest years in the instrumental record, with the exception of 1998, have now occurred since 2000. This trend continues a long-term warming of the planet, according to an analysis of surface temperature measurements by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

That statement, while factually correct, is a little misleading. Depending on your start and end points, you may get a long-term warming trend, or no trend at all. As NASA observes, the ten warmest years in the modern temperature record, with the exception of 1998, have occurred since 2000. But since at least 2000 there has been no trend, as this latest result confirms. Global average temperature has not risen for over a decade, no matter the spin put on the observational record by these agencies.

Meanwhile, the level of CO₂ in the atmosphere since 2007 has risen from an average of about 370 parts per million (ppm) to around 400 ppm, an increase of approximately 8% and still rising. The climate change models, which give dimension to the ‘threat’ posed by the ever-increasing level of CO₂ and are critical to the narrative, all over-estimate the temperature response to that rise. This probably explains in part, the eagerness with which this new ‘record’ was released. Without a meaningful increase in temperature soon, support for the entire enterprise might begin to wane as the discrepancy between actual temperatures and forecast temperatures increases. Already, the gap raises serious questions about the validity and usefulness of the models and that introduces a lot of uncertainty about what an appropriate policy response looks like.

To its credit, NOAA also reports that while the surface temperature observations remain high (a 2/100ths of a degree record, let’s not forget) the satellite measurements of atmospheric temperature did not deliver a similar result. There are two main analytical datasets used to assess satellite measurements, one produced by the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and another produced by Remote Sensing Systems (RSS). They use slightly different methods and so UAH found that 2014 was the third warmest year for the lower- and mid-troposphere and RSS found it was the sixth warmest for the same atmospheric zones. UAH measurements extend from 1979 forward and RSS’s extend from 1981. Both found that 2014 average temperature in the stratosphere was the 13^th warmest since satellite measurement began.

According to NOAA:

The stratospheric temperature is decreasing on average while the lower and middle troposphere temperatures are increasing on average, consistent with expectations in a greenhouse-warmed world.

Well, maybe, but what is missing from that statement is NOAA’s own uncertainty with respect to temperature changes in the stratosphere. NOAA is a participant in an ongoing study of stratospheric temperature that hopes to resolve unexpected results from the analysis of satellite temperature observations. On their website they reference an article, “The mystery of recent stratospheric temperature trends”, published in Nature in 2012, the abstract of which reads as follows:

A new data set of middle- and upper-stratospheric temperatures based on reprocessing of satellite radiances provides a view of stratospheric climate change during the period 1979–2005 that is strikingly different from that provided by earlier data sets. The new data call into question our understanding of observed stratospheric temperature trends and our ability to test simulations of the stratospheric response to emissions of greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting substances. Here we highlight the important issues raised by the new data and suggest how the climate science community can resolve them.

The “mystery” referenced in the title of the Nature article is that from about 1995 forward there is no trend – not up or down, just flat and strangely similar to surface temperature results over roughly the same period. Not so cut and dried then, but certainly something worth exploring. Perhaps someone at NOAA should brief the PR team.

Finally, it’s also interesting to consider NOAA’s comments on sea ice extent. Rapidly melting polar sea ice is a much-vaunted marker of a warming planet.

Recent polar sea ice extent trends continued in 2014. The average annual sea ice extent in the Arctic was 10.99 million square miles, the sixth smallest annual value of the 36-year period of record. The annual Antarctic sea ice extent was record large for the second consecutive year, at 13.08 million square miles.

Seems odd that you’d lead with the “sixth smallest” and wind up with “record large” considering that the record Antarctic sea ice extent in 2014 was more than two standard deviations from the mean – statistically very significant – while a 2/100ths of a degree change in surface temperature – which most assuredly is not statistically significant – is worthy of a global press release.

The 2014 temperature ‘record’ is pretty small beer, but sufficient it seems to keep the whole climate change juggernaut rolling.

colinwrightsblog

As an aside, I've been thinking about this…

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