John Cook's Climate Change Mythbusters 18

This is part of a series reposting material from John Cook's Skeptical Science website. Although he is a physicist rather than a specialist in climate science, he is a convinced "global warmist" and tries to rebut frequently-raised objections to the theory. However, it is always possible to question the data (e.g. this valuable note about measuring temperature) and the line of argument. Please help advance the debate - with facts and logic.

What is the link between hurricanes and global warming?

What The Science Says:
There is increasing evidence that hurricanes are getting stronger due to global warming.

Climate Myth: Hurricanes aren't linked to global warming
“According to the National Hurricane Center, storms are no more intense or frequent worldwide than they have been since 1850. […] Constant 24-7 media coverage of every significant storm worldwide just makes it seem that way.” (Paul Bedard)

The current research into the effects of climate change on tropical storms demonstrates not only the virtues and transparency of the scientific method at work, but rebuts the frequent suggestion that scientists fit their findings to a pre-determined agenda in support of climate change. In the case of storm frequency, there is no consensus and reputable scientists have two diametrically opposed theories about increasing frequencies of such events.

The background to these enquiries stems from a simple observation: extra heat in the air or the oceans is a form of energy, and storms are driven by such energy. What we do not know is whether we might see more storms as a result of extra energy or, as other researchers believe, the storms may grow more intense, but the number might actually diminish.

What do the records show? According to the Pew Centre, “Globally, there is an average of about 90 tropical storms a year”. The IPCC AR4 report (2007) says regarding global tropical storms: "There is no clear trend in the annual numbers [i.e. frequency] of tropical cyclones."

But this graph, also from the Pew Centre, shows a 40% increase in North Atlantic tropical storms over the historic maximum of the mid-1950, which at the time was considered extreme:



But while the numbers are not contested, their significance most certainly is. Another study considered how this information was being collected, and research suggested that the increase in reported storms was due to improved monitoring rather than more storms actually taking place.

And to cap it off, two recent peer-reviewed studies completely contradict each other. One paper predicts considerably more storms due to global warming. Another paper suggests the exact opposite – that there will be fewer storms in the future.

What can we conclude from these studies? About hurricane frequency – not much; the jury is out, as they say. About climate change, we can say that these differing approaches are the very stuff of good science, and the science clearly isn’t settled! It is also obvious that researchers are not shying away from refuting associations with climate change, so we can assume they don’t think their funding or salaries are jeopardised by research they believe fails to support the case for AGW. The scientific method is alive and well.

Never mind the frequency, feel the width

So far, all we’ve managed is to document here is what we don’t know for sure yet. But we do know there is extra energy in the system now, so could it have any other effects on tropical storms? Here, the science is far less equivocal, and there is a broad consensus that storms are increasing in strength, or severity. This attribute, called the Power Dissipation Index, measures the duration and intensity (wind speed) of storms, and research has found that since the mid-1970s, there has been an increase in the energy of storms.

Recent research has shown that we are experiencing more storms with higher wind speeds, and these storms will be more destructive, last longer and make landfall more frequently than in the past. Because this phenomenon is strongly associated with sea surface temperatures, it is reasonable to suggest a strong probability that the increase in storm intensity and climate change are linked.

Basic rebuttal written by GPWayne

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Seven climate theories

Or is it eight... or nine?

Back in 2010 a booklet called Seven Theories of Climate Change by Joseph L. Bast was published by the Science and Public Policy Institute.

It lists seven climate change theories, one of them being the AGW CO2 theory. The booklet is worth reading not so much because it delimits what we know of climate drivers, but because it highlights how exceedingly complex the issue is. Vastly more complex than popular journalism would have us believe.

Climate science is dominated by uncertainty and there are also highly uncertain connections between these theories, so I’ll merely summarise them below. Additional theories and ideas from readers are very welcome – this is an evolving, not an evolved science.

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1 Anthropogenic Global Warming

The mainstream theory of climate change heavily promoted for reasons beyond the scope of this post. Greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide are said to be causing a catastrophic rise in global temperatures.

2 Bio-thermostat

The second theory of climate change is really a number of theories bundled together. Feedbacks from biological and chemical processes are said to contribute towards global temperature stability by suppressing temperature increases. These are :- 

• Enhanced carbon sequestration by plants as atmospheric CO2 increases, thereby causing increased rates of plant growth.
• Carbonyl sulphide (COS) produced biologically is said to form sulphate aerosols in the atmosphere which reflect solar radiation and lead to a cooling effect.
• Biosols are biologically derived plant compounds which circulate in the atmosphere and may act as condensation nuclei for clouds. They may also diffuse solar radiation close to the ground, reducing the effect of shade and increasing photosynthesis and CO2 uptake.
• Iodine containing compounds formed in sea air by marine algae may act like biosols.
• Dimethyl sulphide is emitted by oceans and may be a source of cloud condensation nuclei.
• Other aerosols. There are other natural aerosols which may also have an impact on climate.

3 Cloud Formation and Albedo

A third theory says that the climate is controlled by the formation and albedo of clouds.

4 Land Use

A fourth theory is that climate is affected by large scale changes in land use such as forestry, irrigation and building cities.

5 Ocean Currents

The fifth theory claims that climate cycles are the result of changes to ocean circulation patterns.

6 Planetary Motion

The sixth theory is that gravitational and magnetic oscillations of the solar system cause solar variations and/or other influences which change the terrestrial climate.

7 Solar Variability

The seventh theory is that solar variability accounts for most or all climate change.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Immigration, abortion and demographics

Some days ago, I answered a post on Raedwald's site regarding the economic effect of immigration to the UK and the claimed impact on our per capita wealth. The official statistics I found told me that actually, both GDP and per capita GDP showed a rising trend until the bankers' bubble burst in 2008. That's not to say that GDP is necessarily the best measure of well-being: eating more sweets and having more fillings at the dentist's both increase GDP.

Arguing for (or against) immigration purely on economic grounds is not as simple as it might seem. A 2004 paper by David Coleman and Robert Rowthorn ("The Economic Effects of Immigration into the United Kingdom") concludes (my emphases):

"This article has examined the impact of immigration on citizens of the United Kingdom. The claim that large-scale immigration will be of great economic benefit to them is false. Some will gain, but others will lose. With respect to the existing population of the UK and their descendants, the purely economic consequences of large-scale immigration could be negative or positive, but either way they will be small. Two earlier reviews of the economic effects of immigration to the UK came to carefully argued conclusions that stopped far short of a clear endorsement of its advantages, despite being presented in collections that otherwise served to underpin the new policy (Findlay 1994; Kleinman 2003). Immigrants are the only unequivocal economic beneficiaries of migration. There is no guarantee that anyone else will be, not even the sending countries from which the migrants come.

"The more important effects of sustained large-scale immigration on the UK are demographic, social, and environmental: provoking unexpected renewed growth in population and in housing demand and risking new and intractable social divisions and a corresponding weakening of national identity and cohesion, with the prospect of an eventual eclipse of the population receiving the migrants and of its culture..."

In a self-indulgently showy phrase ("filling a demographic gap created by sterile, murderous British selfishness"), I added another dimension to the debate, namely the impact of abortion and birth control in the UK, and was challenged on it by "Wolfie". But I think I can show that this has made a difference, in more ways than one.

To help me answer, I've used Wikipedia's article on the UK's demography, and Johnston's archive on abortion statistics. The latter stops at the year 2010, so I've assumed that for the following three years the number of abortions was the same as in 2010 (i.e. 208,935). If that is so, then since 1968 (i.e. the year after abortion was legalised) there have been over 8 million "terminations". The rate of slaughter increased over the decades:

It's said that 98% of abortions are carried out for "social" reasons, so we'll assume that in all cases the children would otherwise have survived, though obviously a percentage would have died at some point (but not a very high one, in our country). Now because the overwhelming number of terminations happened in the last 50 years, all those individuals would be of working age or younger, and here is how the demographic might have looked:

 

This opens up a can of worms, as they say. For example, I don't know whether if an aborted child had been allowed to live, its mother might have chosen not to conceive another later on.

But other things being equal, we would now have a population of 71 million rather than 63 million. Or possibly not, since we would have hit a housing crisis much earlier and presumably public policy on immigration would been different.

And getting the balance between young and old isn't enough. For although there would have been an extra 4 million people of working age, that doesn't automatically mean that there would be another 4 million jobs for them to do. So policy on globalisation would have had to be rethought.

Instead, the government develops its theme of seeing people as inconvenient, and seeks to adjust the demographic equation by slaughter of the old, to boot. The Liverpool Care Pathway, the creeping program to decriminalise assisted suicide, and now the £50 bribe to GPs to save the NHS £1,000 by denying patients the ambulance ride to terminal care in hospital.

Just as, surrounded by CCTV and cyberspies, we are still told that this isn't "1984", we are sliding into dehumanisation while being reassured that we're not Nazis. My father could have spared himself the trouble of fighting the latter in North Africa and Italy; they're back, and winning.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Weekend Arts: Lowry

Source: Wiki (see terms of use)

You can always get me along to an exhibition of an artist with a clear world-view, even if it's not one I particularly like.  Only just squeaked in to the Tate Lowry, though, which closes this weekend.

No great visual revelations here - you know pretty much what you are going to get, wall after wall of it (none of his strange erotic stuff included in this show).  But there are several really illuminating things to be learned that you won't find in wiki.

• He can properly be placed squarely in the French tradition of Utrillo and Pissarro, having been formally trained at the Manchester School of Art by the less well-known impressionist Valette.  Indeed, he (Lowry) exhibited in Paris more than in England in his early years.  (To judge from the single Valette in the show - a grand urban nocturne - the master was, *ahem* perhaps better than the student ... just a matter of taste, obviously)
• He was a fire-watcher on a high factory roof during WW2, which readily explains the perspectives of many of his post-war paintings.
• He was capable of taking the piss in no uncertain terms.  Two separate paintings are exhibited side-by-side without comment, one entitled 'People arriving at work' and the other 'People going home from work'.  They are essentially identical (not mirror-images), down to the colour of individuals' coats
• He had a short 'welsh' period when he painted some more-studious-than-usual / less generic, and rather magnificent Welsh landscapes  
• Gates and gateways clearly had significance for him (might be a fruitful opening for psychological speculation)

This is all a bit late to count as a recommendation for any except London-area readers - sorry about that - but it's meant that way.  Time well spent.

This post first appeared on the Capitalists@Work blog  


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Why I left England

Allow me to introduce myself.  New blogger on Broad Oak.  Name's Paul.

My first ten years in Stretford, Manchester, by definition makes me a city boy I guess.  My middle class conservative parents preached the conventional line of good education to get a good job, to get a good wage to get a nice house, to get a beautiful wife, to have some kids, etc.  So how come I end up in a rainforest in Australia?

This is one of 3 dams on my property of 156 acres.  I have managed to put up with this place for nearly 40 years now.

How I was corrupted from the conventional, the straight and narrow, began at school when I failed the now defunct 11+ exam and thrown onto the academic scrapheap.  I was sent to a 'secondary' school 75 years old, with an annual intake of 500 kids.  In that time 1 student had progressed to university.  I knew the system was wrong and unfair.  I did manage to pass enough exams to get to university with extraordinary help from the headmaster who taught me maths in his tiny office.

At university I was revolting.  Sorry, I mean I was revolutionary.  I joined the peace society, embraced the hippy thing which was new at that time and went barefoot with bell-bottomed trousers with bells.  Yes, a real wannabe.  The naturals didn't have to work that hard.  Somehow I got an honours degree.  Then hit the hippy trail through Asia for 5 years with an incredibly small amount of money, but learned there were millions of people who would say I was rich.  I came to Australia to work and replenish my depleted purse.  I didn't imagine how the vastness of the landscape and the welcome solitude it affords would permeate my being.

I left behind thoughts of career, any desire to achieve 'success', any need to accumulate money, and those ridiculous bell-bottomed trousers with bells.

I did have a family and raise kids, and I guess that will always be a constant in the changing fads of lifestyle.  I have always paid my way, though often barely, and take pride that I have always stayed out of debt.

I left England because it is too crowded.  It is too cold.  So many wonderful things like the pubs and the museums, the friendly and stoical people, the humour and the eccentrics, but just too crowded.

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Really simple climate change

My background is chemistry, one of the most experimental sciences. No doubt that’s why I look at the empirical evidence when it comes to claims made by other sciences.

Unfortunately it seems to me that far too many pundits, both amateur and professional, rely on arguments from authority instead of empirical evidence when comes to climate change.

Of course climate experiments have an inevitable tendency towards ambiguity because climate is not a great subject for experimental science in that none of the variables can be controlled.

Yet to my mind, this is still where the climate debate should begin – experimental design. If scientists make claims about a causal link between some climate parameter and global temperatures then we should surely demand a repeatable experiment to support those claims.

Yet how do we design a controlled empirical trial of climate change theories when we can’t control any of the variables?

A really simple approach

Suppose we confine ourselves to inventing a simple trial of global temperature prediction which may be applied to any climate theory.

For example, we could say that global temperature predictions must be accurate over a period of thirty years – at the moment that would be from 1983 to 2013. I suggest thirty years because the climate appears to be crudely cyclical and some of the cycles may be long. Even thirty years is much too short, but it will do for falsification if not verification.

Therefore, according to this really simple test:-

Anyone who in 1983 predicted a pattern of global temperatures which in 2013 has turned out to be correct, then their theory passes our test. Whatever theory they used. Evidence might be a paper published in 1983 or earlier, or maybe even a newspaper article.

As far as I know that’s nobody.

No matter – we can easily shift the test period by five years. So anyone who in 1988 predicted a pattern of global temperatures which in 2018 turns out to be correct, then their theory passes our test. Whatever theory they used.

As far as I know that’s nobody again – no need to wait until 2018.

And so on and so on. In my view we don’t set the bar anywhere near high enough to assess the performance of climate theories. Yet demanding real world performance is no different from checking the fuel consumption claims of car manufacturers.

As with all things climate-related there are caveats, but one attraction of such a robustly empirical approach is that anyone may take personal ownership of their stance on climate change. There is no need to be browbeaten on this issue – it doesn’t require scientific qualifications or even expertise. Do you need engineering expertise to measure the fuel consumption of your car?

We turn around the usual relationships with climate scientists with: don’t tell me – show me. We also create a more level playing field for alternative climate theories and that is surely the most interesting aspect of raising the bar.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Immigration and inequality

Raedwald put up a piece today on the financial costs of inadequately controlled immigration under New Labour. This has been brought into national debate by statistics on unemployment among immigrants and so on. I looked around and here is my reply:

Raedwald, what you say seems intuitively right but the stats say otherwise. With the odd hiccup, both GDP and GDP-per-capita increased up to the 2008 financial collapse, also the Gini index has reduced slightly since (the story seems to be that in a poorer economy there is more equality, as it was here in the 1970s). GDP has gone down because of the b----y banks, and so has fixed capital formation. Seems the financial sector is more to blame than immigration from those points of view.

Also we have to remember that our national enthusiasm for responsibility-free intercourse has led to the butchering of millions of unborn children since 1967 (latterly female-child-focused, it seems), plus declining fertility because of contraception. The foreign workers are, to some extent, filling a demographic gap created by sterile, murderous British selfishness.

Up to the GFC there is a pattern of increasing income inequality, and the higher up the scale the wider the divergence. This is to be expected because those who have more disposable income will invest more and so increase their income and wealth further. However, median wages in the UK have not stalled as in the USA, where middle earners' real wage rates have stood still since the 1970s. This may be because our tax and benefit system redistributes more downwards than in America.

Immigration may create additional strain in (e.g.) the education system, though many immigrants value education highly and push their children to learn and aim high. They will become our doctors and lawyers.

The real national crisis is in the drift from manufacturing to the service sector, and Sir James Goldsmith warned what would happen if GATT went through. We cannot compete in a global economy, and though there are some success stories (e.g. Land Rover here in the Midlands), watch out what happens when the Chinese have learned everything from us that they need to know.

The Asians I know dislike the weirdy-beardies as much as the rest of us. What we have in the Brit Taliban element is what we had to beat off in the 17th century, i.e. Puritans.

Wish I had time to show the graphs etc but I have a job to go to tomorrow.

Fraternally,

Sackerson

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