‘CLIMATE MCCARTHYISM CLAIMS YET ANOTHER VICTIM’
…Climate Statistics Prof. Dr. Caleb Rossiter Calls AGW ‘the faltering hypothesis’ – Unpublished (surprise) letter to NY Times on the direction of causality between temperature and carbon dioxide
To the Editor, New York Times:
The Times’ campaign to prop up the faltering hypothesis that industrial gasses have led to catastrophic climate change reached a nadir with a news article (February 28: Study of Ice Age Bolsters Carbon and Warming Link) implying that an increase in global carbon dioxide levels 20,000 years ago caused the end of the ice age, beginning the 20 degree rise in global temperature since then. The causality, of course, is in the other direction: every 100,000 years for many millions of years the earth has gone through a 20-degree temperature cycle that is perfectly correlated with the change in earth’s orbit around the sun from circular to five percent elliptical. In the middle of these cycles it is well-known that changes in temperature and carbon dioxide reinforce each other, but at the extremes, it is the reversal in temperature that drags carbon dioxide along with it.
The mechanism through which the change in orbit works its magic is poorly understood, because the warming power of such an orbital shift is insufficient to trigger such a reversal in temperature. But it is certain that the seas and land begin to release their stored carbon dioxide in response to this mechanism during ice ages, and to absorb it from the atmosphere at the high end of the cycle, which happens to be at the present day. In contrast, there is no posited mechanism by which carbon dioxide suddenly decides to lift itself out of or dump itself into its sinks all on its own, reversing the runaway rise or decline in temperature.
Unlike the news article, the study in the March 1 issue of Science cited by the Times is exploratory, careful, and thoughtful. It focuses on one geographic region to study the time lag between increases in temperature and carbon dioxide. It uses new techniques to estimate that the time lag could be quite small, but notes that both increases in that region could have been responses to changes already underway elsewhere on the planet. And it most certainly does not make former vice president Gore “right” in the misleading segment of his well-known climate talk in which he implies that because temperature and carbon dioxide “go together” we are soon due for an …
Climate Statistics Prof. Dr. Caleb Rossiter: Unpublished (surprise) letter to the Nation magazine on why ‘350’ is an impossible and undesirable goal
The Nation’s call for a “national pollution cap of no more than 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere” (20 Progressive Executive Actions, February 11) is impossible to realize. Carbon dioxide circulates globally, so its level is not set by any nation. The level is already 395 parts per million and rising by about two units every year. The time-scale for these molecules falling to sea or land ranges from decades to thousands of years. Even if the United States stops producing industrial carbon dioxide the carbon level will continue to rise with economic growth in other countries.
If the call for a cap refers instead to promoting a set of policies that encourage all countries to agree to the century or so of carbon-free life it would take to return to 350, it has a significant downside. Cheap electricity is essential to continuing the dramatic increase in life expectancy in the developing world in the past 50 years: according to the World Bank, 20 years in Asia, 15 years in Latin America, and seven in Africa before the 1980’s, when a combination of civil war, structural adjustment, and HIV/AIDS drove it back down. Cheap coal is what is available right now, not expensive renewables. It seems immoral to deny developing nations the right the developed world had to development through cheap power, particularly as the technology now exists to scrub emissions from coal, reducing sulfur dioxide and other gasses that really are pollutants, because they damage human health.
I applaud the moral motivation that drives “350,” and a fear of climate catastrophe justifies such a position. As someone who has taught climate statistics, though, I must dispute advocates’ certainty in their fear. The models that try to divide the one degree rise in global temperature since 1850 between human and natural causes are weak, as are claims that the increase has led to catastrophic weather. The future “scenarios” generated by the climate modelers, in which CO2-driven warming escalates in the next century to dramatic proportions, are even weaker. The positive feedbacks to initial warming that are included in climate models are mostly guesswork. In the lab, at least, the response of the heat-absorbing frequencies of carbon dioxide molecules is a square-root function, meaning that additional CO2 has …
Climate Statistics Prof. Dr. Caleb Rossiter rails against fellow leftists for comparing skeptics to ‘Holocaust deniers’ – ‘Please, call me a skeptic. And lay off World War II’
http://www.calebrossiter.com/Love%20electricity.html
November 20, 2012: Good Germans, Munich, Brownshirts, Deniers, Churchill: Enough with the World War II Analogies!
Here is what my friend and anti-imperial compatriot John Tirman, executive director of the M.I.T. Center for International Studies, “tweets” about me and others who are not convinced that industrial emissions are the primary cause of the one degree rise in global average temperature since 1860 – or that this historically minuscule rise, whatever its reasons, is a primary cause of random storms and droughts: “One day, climate change deniers will be viewed like Holocaust deniers are now. #sandy #climatechange” Ouch.
How am I, a statistician who teaches about the uncertainty of exploratory computer climate models in separating human-induced warming from natural fluctuations of various cycles and extreme randomness (an uncertainty that is openly acknowledged by the modelers themselves, who call their models “scenarios” and not “predictions”), analogous to someone who denies that the Nazis planned and carried out the murder of six million Jewish civilians?
Can’t I just be called an “industrial-emissions-warming-catastrophe” skeptic, honoring Diogenes, Socrates, and the core tradition of scientific thought, the refusal to accept claims “on authority” without testing them with reality? Skepticism has brought us a better understanding of our solar system (thanks, Copernicus and Gallileo) and our universes big and little (thanks, Einstein and Heisenberg), the end of the unjust and brutal social systems of monarchy, feudalism, slavery, imperialism, and colonialism, as well as the modern medicines and treatments of water, crops, and materials that have extended our lives some 50 years on average from the 1600’s. Skeptic, please.
John’s respect for the climate models is beyond my ability to alter. (Lord knows I have tried: for a version of the “climate change” chapter in my anti-imperial history “The Turkey and the Eagle,” see here.) But being called a “denier” got me to thinking: why do so many of us reach to the horrors of World War II to make our ad hominem arguments?
In high school in the 1960’s I called Americans who were not out in the streets marching against segregation and the Vietnam War “Good Germans,” since my parents had taught us that the real villains in World War II were the apolitical Germans, not Nazis at all, who just went about their business as Hitler rose to power. When President Lyndon Johnson and his intellectual allies cited “Munich” as the reason they
Climate Statistics Prof. & Anti-War Activist Dr. Caleb Rossiter Slams The Left & Asks: ‘Why are the leftists happily hopping into bed with Al Gore, a Dixie whom they have fought on foreign and military policy from the MX missile to aid to the Salvadoran army to landmines?’ – Declares: ‘Leftists are expending resources on what is certainly a non-solution to what is most likely a non-problem.’
Climate Catastrophe: Convenient Fibs and Dangerous Prescriptions
by Caleb S. Rossiter, March 2010
Statistical tests and mathematical models are important tools of social and physical science. They are at the core of the constant barrage of claims about causality that analysts and advocates make with charts, numbers, and correlations between variables. Which economic policies have led to the greatest reduction in poverty rates in African countries? Which anti-retroviral drug regimen best prolonged the lives of AIDS patients? What military forces and tactics are best designed to achieve victory in an engagement? The answers are rarely self-evident, and since controlled experiments in which just one variable of interest is changed are hard to arrange in human and natural systems, only complex multivariate modeling can isolate the contribution of each variable.
If the researcher is brutally skeptical about all assumptions and so can test them impartially, if the variables are clear and measurable, and if the data are fantastically accurate, one just might be able to identify which combination of characteristics tends to correlate with what type of result, and how sure one can be of these tendencies. Then the evidence of correlation in these models can be used to sneak up on causation, always mindful that one is describing statistical averages, and not certainties that are always replicated. For example, many smokers go their whole lives without a trace of lung cancer, but the difference in cancer rates between large populations of smokers and non-smokers after statistically controlling for confounding influences such as income, ethnicity, and exercise, proves to a high degree of certainty that smoking causes lung cancer. The inability of the average citizen to understand statistical studies and the inherent self-interest of their authors have caused many on the political left to be highly skeptical of studies that contradict their instincts, such as those purporting to show that the minimum wage costs jobs or that DDT does not cause health problems for humans. The popular bumper sticker “Question Authority” is the left’s answer to the mainstream “experts” who translate such studies into society’s conventional wisdom. (1)
Due both to the complexity of the system and the potential impact on people of the policies being proposed, no topic in international affairs is more in need of statistical analysis than the effect of industrial emissions and other human activities on the global climate. Unfortunately, the analyses and even the underlying data …
Climate Statistics Prof. Dr. Caleb Rossiter: ‘My blood simply boils too hot when I read the blather, daily, about climate catastrophe. It is so well-meaning, and so misguided’ – ‘Obama has long been delusional on this issue’
(My LAST Piece on “Climate Change,” I Promise)
The Debate is finally over on “Global Warming” – Because Nobody will Debate
I am deserting from the Climate War. I will never write another climate article or give another climate talk, and I’ll bite my tongue and say oooooooooooom when I hear or see the sort of exaggerations and certainties about the dangers of heat-trapping gasses that tend to make my blood boil at their absurdity. For a decade I’ve been a busy soldier for the scientific method, and hence a “skeptic” to climate alarmism. I’ve said all I think and know about this repetitive, unresolveable topic. I’ll save hundreds of hours a year for other pursuits!
This is not like my pledge to my wife after a marathon that “I’ll never do another one.” This is real. There is simply too little room for true debate, because the policy space is dominated by people who approach this issue not like scholars weighing evidence, but like lawyers inflaming a jury with suspect data and illogical and emotional arguments.
The believers in human–induced catastrophic climate change, strongly represented among the liberal and radical left of American and international politics, have won the mainstream media and government battle for the conventional wisdom, but lost the war for policy change. None of the governmental and few of the institutional and individual actors who claim to fear climate change will take real steps to reduce their use of energy, choosing instead to put on phony shows of “green-ness” and carbon-trading shell games. So it’s over, on both fronts.
I guess I should be happy, since in the other two areas, and blogs, in which I expend professional and personal blood, sweat, and tears (the American empire, and school “reform”) I am usually in agreement with the radical left, and never win. I nod my head happily when reading the Nation magazine and listening to Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now, yet am sadly on the losing end of the policy fights in my areas that they describe. Politicians and well-paid reformers continue to double down on the disaster of nearly 30 years of the blame-the-teacher, mistest-the-student regime, and U.S. arms and training for dictators have reached new heights under every president from Carter to …