• Tag Archives climate change

  • A Carbon Tax Won’t Stop Hurricanes

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    In the midst of a severe hurricane season and the destruction wrought by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, many people are claiming that man-made global warming has intensified rainfall and hurricanes. However, comprehensive facts show that rainfall and hurricane activity are well within the bounds of natural variation, and there is no cogent evidence that they have increased over the past century.

    Moreover, the United States contains only 1.9 percent of the world’s surface area, and the earth’s climate oscillates widely over time and place. Hence, focusing on US-area hurricanes that occur within a single year easily distorts the issue of climate change.

    The Claims

    While Hurricane Irma was razing the Caribbean and barreling toward Florida, climate scientist David Hastings told the Washington Post, “Hurricane Harvey and Irma should resolve any doubt that climate change is real.” Likewise:

    • CNN’s Ron Brownstein reported during Hurricane Harvey, “There is no doubt that climate change, particularly because of warming the ocean waters and the gulf waters, makes storms like this more common.”
    • Meteorologist Eric Holthaus wrote in Politico that “climate change is making rainstorms everywhere worse, but particularly on the Gulf Coast.”
    • The BBC’s Laura Trevelyan stated, “Of course we do have a changing climate we do have warming waters. With more warming waters, you get more moisture coming into the atmosphere, and what hurricanes absolutely love is moisture because that gives them rainfall. And that’s what’s happened in this situation with Hurricane Harvey.”

    In the same vein, FactCheck.org science writer Vanessa Schipani asserted that global warming “makes intense storms like Harvey more likely to occur.” In support of this statement, she declared that:

    • “A warmer world leads to greater moisture in the atmosphere, which leads to greater precipitation, which leads to more intense storms.”
    • A 2013 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report “found that scientists are ‘virtually certain’ (99 to 100 percent confident) that there has been an ‘increase in the frequency and intensity of the strongest tropical cyclones since the 1970s’ in the North Atlantic Ocean.”
    • One of the “key findings” of a draft report by the U.S. Global Change Research Program is that “human activities have ‘contributed to the observed increase in hurricane activity’ in the North Atlantic Ocean since the 1970s.”
    • The same report says that “studies that have looked at this question have come up with a ‘fairly broad’ range of contributions for humans, but ‘virtually all studies identify a measurable, and generally substantial, [human] influence,’ it adds.”

    The claims above paint a distorted picture of reality by ignoring the most relevant and comprehensive facts about this issue.

    Global Rainfall Trends

    Contrary to the notion that global warming has caused more rain, the authors of a 2015 paper in the Journal of Hydrology studied rainfall measurements “made at nearly 1,000 stations located in 114 countries” and found “no significant global precipitation change from 1850 to present.”

    The paper also notes that previous studies had analyzed shorter timeframes and found rainfall changes that some people had attributed to global warming, but those results were generally not statistically significant and “not entirely surprising given that precipitation varies considerably over time scales of decades.”

    Beyond total rainfall, many climate models predict that global warming will cause the rain to fall in shorter periods, and thus, with more intensity. Yet, even according to the IPCC—which has engaged in deceitful actions to exaggerate global warming—evidence for such an outcome is highly questionable:

    Since 1951 there have been statistically significant increases in the number of heavy precipitation events (e.g., above the 95th percentile) in more regions than there have been statistically significant decreases, but there are strong regional and sub-regional variations in the trends. In particular, many regions present statistically non-significant or negative trends, and, where seasonal changes have been assessed, there are also variations between seasons (e.g., more consistent trends in winter than in summer in Europe).

    This issue becomes even murkier when looking at the bigger picture, because apparent changes in rainfall intensity sometimes vanish when examining longer timeframes that better account for natural variations. For example, the International Journal of Climatology published a paper in 2015 about extreme rainfall in England and Wales that revealed, “Contrary to previous results based on shorter periods, no significant trends of the most intense categories are found between 1931 and 2014.”

    Global Storms and Hurricanes

    A “tropical cyclone” is a circular wind and low-pressure system that develops over warm oceans in the tropics. Cyclones with winds ranging from 39 to 73 miles per hour are called “tropical storms,” and those with winds exceeding 73 miles per hour are called “hurricanes.” Technically, there are different names for cyclones with hurricane-force winds in different areas of the world, but for the sake of simplicity, this article refers to them as hurricanes.

    The datasets below, which were originally published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in 2011, show that the global number and intensity of tropical storms and hurricanes have not increased over the past four decades:


    Corroborating this data, the IPCC reported in 2012, “There is low confidence in any observed long-term (i.e., 40 years or more) increases in tropical cyclone activity (i.e., intensity, frequency, duration), after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities.”

    In spite of these facts, a national scientific poll commissioned by Just Facts shortly before the 2016 presidential election found that 44% of Trump voters and 77% of Clinton voters believed that the global number and intensity of hurricanes and tropical storms have generally increased over the past 30 years. This sharp disconnect between reality and perception accords with a flood of global warming-related misinformation spread by the media and environmental groups.

    North Atlantic Storms and Hurricanes

    In the North Atlantic region, where hurricanes Harvey and Irma formed, tropical storm and hurricane activity has  significantly increased over the past four decades. However, this trend fades in the wider context of variation over the past century. As explained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):

    No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.

    NOAA states that North Atlantic tropical storms show a “pronounced upward trend” since 1878, but this is because these records are “relatively sparse” in their early decades. After NOAA adjusts for the “estimated number of missing storms,” the trend in storm activity is “not significantly distinguishable from zero.” Furthermore, NOAA notes that the upward trend in the unadjusted data,

    Is almost entirely due to increases in short-duration (<2 day) storms alone. Such short-lived storms were particularly likely to have been overlooked in the earlier parts of the record, as they would have had less opportunity for chance encounters with ship traffic.

    With regard to the most intense storms, NOAA reports that “the reported numbers of hurricanes were sufficiently high during the 1860s-1880s that again there is no significant positive trend in numbers beginning from that era…. This is without any adjustment for ‘missing hurricanes.’”

    Even more relevant to the implications of Harvey and Irma, NOAA notes that the record of North Atlantic hurricanes that reach land are “more reliable” than for the entire North Atlantic, and they “show a slight negative trend beginning from 1900 or from the late 1800s.” In other words, the most reliable data shows the opposite of what many media outlets are reporting.

    NOAA emphasizes that one cannot logically assess hurricane trends based only on those that reach land because they are “much less common” than the full number of hurricanes that form at sea. This highlights the absurdity of drawing conclusions based on hurricanes that make landfall, much less hurricanes that make landfall in one region in a single year

    After reviewing the data above, NOAA states, “In short, the historical Atlantic hurricane record does not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced long-term increase.”

    Similarly, the very same 2013 IPCC report cherry-picked by FactCheck.org states, “No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.” This is word-for-word the same as stated by NOAA.

    “Scientists Say”

    Three times in her FactCheck.org article, Schipani used the phrase “scientists say” as if she were citing the universal opinion of scientists. Given the contents of her article, a longer but honest rewording of this phrase would be that “some scientists who have previously misled the public about global warming say so, but some scientists disagree.”

    For example, Schipani quoted climate scientist Michael Mann—creator of the notorious hockey stick chart and inventor of a “trick” to “hide the decline“ in temperatures—as though he were an unquestionable authority. Mann claimed that global warming may have caused Hurricane Harvey to stall over Houston and drop a devastating amount of rain in this location. However, Schipani failed to inform her readers that some other climate scientists, like Roy Spencer, disagree with Mann and write:

    I don’t know of any portion of global warming theory that would explain why Harvey stalled over southeast Texas. Michael Mann’s claim in The Guardian that it’s due to the jet stream being pushed farther north from global warming makes me think he doesn’t actually follow weather like those of us who have actual schooling in meteorology (my degree is a Ph.D. in Meteorology). We didn’t have a warm August in the U.S. pushing the jet stream farther north.

    Similarly, Schipani uncritically cited:

    • The IPCC, whose scientists wrote an array of incriminating emails in which they said things like, “I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC, which were not always the same.”
    • Kevin Trenberth, an IPCC lead author who participated in a press conference where he misrepresented the facts about global warming and hurricanes. As a result, Chris Landsea, a scientist who Trenberth had tasked to draft a chapter on Atlantic hurricanes for the IPCC, quit the IPCC and stated, “I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound.”
    • The U.S. Global Change Research Program, which cited a certain paper as evidence that climate change is causing more floods, while in reality the paper states, “In none of the four regions defined in this study is there strong statistical evidence for flood magnitudes increasing with increasing” greenhouse gas levels.

    In Conclusion

    Certain media outlets have linked Hurricanes Harvey and Irma to global warming by ignoring wide-ranging facts and cherry-picking timeframes, geographical locations, report contents, and the opinions of scientists. As explained in an academic book about analyzing data, “One of the worst abuses of analytics is to cherry pick results. Cherry pickers tout analysis findings when the results serve the purpose at hand. But, they ignore the findings when the results conflict with the original plan.”

    Webster’s College Dictionary defines science as the “systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation.” By this standard, there are no grounds to claim that global warming has increased rainfall or hurricane activity.


    James Agresti

    James D. Agresti is the president of Just Facts, a nonprofit institute dedicated to publishing verifiable facts about public policy.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.



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  • The Totalitarianism of the Environmentalists

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    The Totalitarianism of the Environmentalists


    Late last year, I gave a talk about human progress to an audience of college students in Ottawa, Canada. I went through the usual multitude of indicators – rising life expectancy, literacy, and per capita incomes; declining infant mortality, malnutrition, and cancer death rates – to show that the world was becoming a much better place for an ever-growing share of its population.

    It seemed to me that the audience was genuinely delighted to hear some good news for a change. I had won them over to the cause of rational optimism. And then someone in the audience asked about climate change and I blew it.

    While acknowledging that the available data suggests a “lukewarming” trend in global temperatures, I cautioned against excessive alarmism. Available resources, I said, should be spent on adaptation to climate change, not on preventing changes in global temperature – a task that I, along with many others, consider to be both ruinously expensive and, largely, futile.

    The audience was at first shocked – I reckon they considered me a rational and data-savvy academic up to that point – and then became angry and, during a breakout session, hostile. I even noticed one of the students scratching out five, the highest mark a speaker could get on an evaluation form, and replacing it with one. I suppose I should be glad he did not mark me down to zero.

    My Ottawa audience was in no way exceptional. Very often, when speaking to audiences in Europe and North America about the improving state of the world, people acknowledge the positive trends, but worry that, as Matt Ridley puts it, “this happy interlude [in human history will come] to a terrible end.”

    Of course, apocalyptic writings are as old as humanity itself. The Bible, for example, contains the story of the Great Flood, in which God “destroyed all living things which were on the face of the ground: both man and cattle, creeping thing and bird of the air.” The Akkadian poem of Gilgamesh similarly contains a myth of angry gods flooding the Earth, while an apocalyptic deluge plays a prominent part in the Hindu Dharmasastra.

    And then there is Al Gore. In his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, Gore warns that “if Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida,” before an animation shows much of the state underwater. Gore also shows animations of San Francisco, Holland, Beijing, Shanghai, Calcutta, and Manhattan drowning. “But this is what would happen to Manhattan, they can measure this precisely,” Gore says as he shows much of the city underwater.

    Thinking Environmentalist Laws Through

    It is possible, I suppose, that our eschatological obsessions are innate. The latest research suggests that our species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, is 300,000 years old. For most of our existence, life was, to quote Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Our life expectancy was between 25 years and 30 years, and our incomes were stuck at a subsistence level for millennia. Conversely, our experience with relative abundance is, at most, two centuries old. That amounts to 0.07 percent of our time on Earth. Is there any wonder that we are prone to be pessimistic?

    That said, I wonder how many global warming enthusiasts have thought through the full implications of their (in my view overblown) fears of a looming apocalypse. If it is true that global warming threatens the very survival of life on Earth, then all other considerations must, by necessity, be secondary to preventing global warming from happening.

    That includes, first and foremost, the reproductive rights of women. Some global warming fearmongers have been good enough to acknowledge as much. Bill Nye, a progressive TV personality, wondered if we should “have policies that penalize people for having extra kids.”

    Then there is travel and nutrition. Is it really so difficult to imagine a future in which each of us is issued with a carbon credit at the start of each year, limiting what kind of food we eat (locally grown potatoes will be fine, but Alaskan salmon will be verboten) and how far we can travel (visiting our in-laws in Ohio once a year will be permitted, but not Paris)? In fact, it is almost impossible to imagine a single aspect of human existence that would be free from government interference – all in the name of saving the environment.

    These ideas might sound nutty, but they are slowly gaining ground. Just last week, a study came out estimating the environmental benefits of “having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding air travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight), and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year).”

    And then there is Travis N. Rieder, a research scholar at Johns Hopkins’ Berman Institute of Bioethics, who says that “maybe we should protect our kids by not having them.” He wants tax penalties to punish new parents in rich countries. The proposed tax penalty would become harsher with each additional child.

    And that brings me to my final point. Since the fall of communism, global warming has been, without question, the most potent weapon in the hands of those who wish to control the behavior of their fellow human beings. Lukewarmists like me do not caution against visions of an environmental apocalypse out of some perverse hatred of nature. On the contrary, concern for the environment is laudable and, I happen to believe, nearly universal. But environmentalism, like all –isms, can become totalitarian. It is for that reason that, when it comes to our environmental policies, we ought to tread very carefully.

    Reprinted from CapX.


    Marian L. Tupy

    Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org and a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • After Paris: There Is No Existential Crisis

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    After Paris: There Is No Existential Crisis

    President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord has thrown the world into a blazing furnace full of weeping and gnashing of teeth—or the political world, at least, has been thrown into a fiery tizzy.

    The front page of the New York Daily News reads  “TRUMP TO WORLD: DROP DEAD, Decides to hell with science, Earth’s future.

    “Former President Barack Obama broke his silence, saying, in part, that with this decision the Trump administration “joins a small handful of nations that reject the future.”

     

    Former Secretary of State John Kerry lambasted Trump’s decision as “an ignorant, cynical appeal to an anti-science, special-interest faction,” as well as saying, “This choice will rightly be remembered as one of the most shameful any president has made.”

    And the list goes on and on and on.

    To hear these people talk, apparently, the human race can only progress into the future and create new industries and technologies if we are flogged into it begrudgingly by our ‘wise’ government and corporate leaders.

    Are we really ready to presume what human society will look like several decades from now? Are we seriously expected to believe that government action is the only way to tackle the problem of climate change? If we fail to use the heavy hand of government to brave the future, why should we assume the human race will fail to innovate and adapt to complex challenges on its own?

    Imagine, if you will, a world where you cannot turn to governments to solve problems such as climate change.

    How would you achieve your righteous ends? Would you simply do nothing if you could not turn to government?

    I ask because too often, noble goals serve as a Trojan Horse for political control.

    Governments often present us with grand solutions as gifts for our real and perceived problems, but once inside the gates, they proceed to saddle our communities with a slew of regulations, mandates, taxes, diktats, quotas, subsidies, penalties and the like. The cursed gift of government, it seems, is always a central plan that conflates voluntary cooperation, collective action, and even community itself with centralized political control.

    But we do not need the trappings of central planning to solve our collective problems. Society can run itself, thank you very much; it needs no single creator or director.

    Unnecessary Committees and Commisions



    Society already has great gifts for solving complex human issues—individual liberty, initiative, and ingenuity, along with the free and open exchange of goods and ideas—and we need not sacrifice these liberal benefactors of the modern world to dream impossible dreams and fight unbeatable foes. 

    The greatest achievements of the human race have not come from government committees and accords, but from intrepid yet everyday individuals working in concert to tackle the unknown and implacable through innovation and persuasion.

    Yet, rather than allowing people to freely choose and coordinate their own plans in our common struggle against nature, too many people first brand other people as the problem. Too many would rather rely on commanding and controlling others to fix humanity’s wicked problems than freely solve the problem themselves. Too many conflate the government’s failure to act as society signaling we are resigned to do nothing—thus, the weeping and gnashing of teeth over Donald Trump’s recent decision.

    I find all the hysterics and tears of hubris laughable. This mindset deserves to be mocked for its lack of imagination and obsequious acceptance of corporate cronyism and global governance as the only path to the future; it deserves to be mocked for claiming the singular appearance of “doing something” (without much effect) is better than actually tackling the problem from many different directions; it deserves to be mocked even on environmental activist grounds as a list of empty promises and half-measures, as a perversion of the cause, just as a free trader may mock NAFTA or an anti-war activist may mock Barack Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize; and it deserves to be mocked for how little it respects the ability of average people to change their station and adapt to the changing world on their own without the pretentious prodding of government leaders.

    I’m willing to bet the existence of the entire human race that without the Paris Climate Accord, we will rise to meet the challenge of climate change successfully.

    Further, if we would shrink government generally—i.e. give average people the freedom to think and trade as they wish in the energy sector or any other industry—then by the accord’s own target year of 2100, the market (which is simply free people trading and producing as they wish based on their own enlightenment) will have reduced carbon emissions and given us new technologies beyond the wildest dreams of those now bemoaning the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord.

    In fact, the U.S. clean energy sector has grown leaps and bounds in only the last few years despite the lack of a robust central plan. Coal is already giving way to cleaner forms of energy and will continue to do so no matter what Donald Trump promises the miners of West Virginia. And the fact that there is this burgeoning clean energy industry does not mean we should engage in crony capitalism and wealth redistribution between nations to “prime the pump.”

     

    Picking winners and losers in the clean energy sector is just as bad as doing so in any other sector (including the fossil fuels industry.). Must we really kowtow to corporations and their client states by granting them government privileges and sweetheart deals to create new technologies they already have enough incentive to create anyway?

    No, if we wish to solve the climate change problem, I suggest we try, first and foremost, to create products and services that will actually make people’s lives better immediately rather than imposing immense costs upfront with no clear time horizon wherein we reap the benefits. Just as one need not convince people of evolution before they take vaccines or life-saving drugs, there’s no need to convince people of the science of climate change if you can sell them a better, cheaper, cleaner, and more practical way to power their lives.

    Shaming, lecturing, and trying to control people’s behavior through the political process for unclear results and opaque benefits is not serving this cause well, as sound as the science and as noble as the cause may be.

    Don’t Depend on the Government

    Ironically enough, Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord may very well usher in a new era of initiative absent the federal government. After Trump’s decision, many industry leaders, mayors, and governors pledged to pursue solutions to climate change absent the federal government. As the CEO of General Electric Jeff Immelt tweeted, “Climate change is real. Industry must now lead and not depend on government.”

    That’s the spirit, Jeff, but my only question is: what the hell have you been waiting for?

    Industry and the people of the United States should have been saying this long ago. It’s time to stop looking to central governments and global committees—whether the issue is climate change or poverty or education or whatever—to make our world a better place.

    The time for us to pursue the future ourselves is long overdue, and it would be a shame to sell ourselves and the future short because we’re too busy bickering over political power.

    Reprinted from Anti-Media


    Joey Clark

    Joey Clark is a budding wordsmith and liberty lover. He blogs under the heading “The Libertarian Fool” at joeyclark.liberty.me. Follow him on Facebook.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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