The Looming Climate Crisis

By Chip Neville

For my fellow classmates in the Yale Class of 1962 on the occasion of our 50th reunion.

Preface.

When I began this article last January, I intended it to be a short primer on the subject of climate change, and I thought it would take perhaps two or three weeks to complete. Instead it has taken six months and has become a long essay or short book — take your choice — on the subject.

This essay or short book was also more difficult to write than I had anticipated. Polishing my general knowledge — I make no claim to specialist’s knowledge — of the technical issues involving climate science turned out to be the easy part; the hard part was understanding the convoluted history of the political controversy surrounding global warming. Parts of this work were also painful to write because several of the scientists involved in obstructing and delaying action on global warming were people I have admired at times in my life, and, quite frankly, still admire. None-the-less, we now stand on opposite sides of a bitter divide. Fortunately I do not know these people personally.

I have no credentials in climate science, but I think I can claim, perhaps immodestly, to be scientifically literate. I majored in mathematics and physics at Yale; I earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Illinois, and I retired as a professor of computer science.

At our class reunion, the 50th reunion of the Yale Class of 1962, three of our most distinguished classmates held a panel discussion on the environment and global warming. I need to make it very clear: this article has been written entirely independently of them, and the opinions I express in it are entirely my own and do not reflect the opinions of Yale University, the Class of 1962, or the panel participants. Nevertheless, I will quote from our distinguished classmate Bill Reilly, writing in our 50th reunion classbook:

“Climate change is to America what the German buildup in the 1930s was to the British: the threat that grows more menacing even as we determinedly pretend it is not there.”

Thanks to my wife Judi Ann Goodman for enduring the five months it took to write this essay, and for her constant encouragement and support. Thanks to my daughter Rachel Neville and son-in-law Keith Swindle for loaning me their lanai in Hawaii while I completed the last three chapters, and to Rachel for transliterating the name of the Russian photographer who took the picture of smoke from wildfires blanketing the third largest city in Russia. And thanks to my daughter Anne Neville and son-in-law Diego Bonilla for taking such good care of baby Ellie.

One last thing, why all the footnotes? Well, would you trust me, a mere mathematician, to tell you things on my own authority?

Contents.

Preface.
Part I. The climate change problem and its solution.
The main cause of global warming: rising carbon dioxide levels. The unmistakable signs that the Earth is warming, how it will affect us, and what we can do.

Chapter I. A lesson from the past.
Chapter II. The looming climate crisis.
Chapter III. The cause of global warming.
Chapter IV. The scientific controversy 1900-1975.
Chapter V. What can we do?
Chapter VI. How do we know the climate is changing?

Part II. Politicians, scientists, and think tanks.
How a small group of conservative think tanks and obstructionist scientists, supported by the fossil fuel and tobacco industries, have successfully delayed action on climate change for years.

Chapter VII. The political global warming debate.
Chapter VIII. The Royal Society’s “Dear Nick” letter.
Chapter IX. Why have they been so successful? The tobacco connection.
Chapter X. Scientists and think tanks.
Chapter XI. Ironies.
Chapter XII. Personal reflections.

Part III. Scientific dissenters and majoritarians.
It is tough being a scientific dissenter on climate change, and it is equally tough being in the scientific majority.

Chapter XIII. The scientific dissenters.
Chapter XIV. On the importance of contrarians.
Chapter XV. The politics of dissent.
Chapter XVI. A pause in the temperature rise.
Chapter XVII. The scientific majority.

Part IV. The hockey stick wars.
How a simple scientific graph showing the unprecedented temperature rise in the 20th century became the battleground for the dispute over global warming.

Chapter XVIII. The opening salvo in the hockey stick wars.
Chapter XIX. Update on the current situation.
Chapter XX. A personal view.

Part V. The climategate scandal.
Embarrassing emails revealed, distortions by enemies, the fight really gets dirty, and a welcome breath of sanity.

Chapter XXI. Climategate.
Chapter XXII. Why Climategate happened.
Chapter XXIII. Fighting dirty.
Chapter XXIV. A welcome breath of fresh air.

Part VI. Water vapor and other greenhouse gasses.
Without water vapor, the Earth would be a frozen ball of ice. Without carbon dioxide, there would be no water vapor. With more carbon dioxide, there is more water vapor and a hotter Earth.

Chapter XXV. Water vapor and clouds.
Chapter XXVI Aerosols.
Chapter XXVII. Other greenhouse gasses.

Part VII. Ocean acidification and its consequences.
Ocean acidification, what may have caused the great Permian extinction, and some good news for once.

Chapter XXVIII. Ocean acidification.
Chapter XXIX. My favorite disaster scenario.
Chapter XXX. A brief reprieve?

Part VIII. Conclusion.
How research on solar power can make nuclear power safer, and a path to solving the climate change problem without giving up our liberties, or radically changing our American way of life.

Chapter XXXI. Solar-nuclear synergy.
Chapter XXXII. Conclusion.

References.

Part I. The climate change problem and its solution.
The main cause of global warming: rising carbon dioxide levels. The unmistakable signs that the Earth is warming, how it will affect us, and what we can do.

Chapter I. A lesson from the past.

I first learned about the consequences of climate change when I was a young man. In the early 1970s, we took a trip along Old Route 66 to the Grand Canyon. On the way back, we stopped at the Petrified Forest. One of the sights at the Petrified Forest is the Puerco Pueblo. As I stood on the gray weathered porch of the visitor center there, looking out over the dry sere land, the wind moaned, and it seemed like the loneliest place in the world. The visitor center sign said that the Pueblo Indians who had lived there nearly a thousand years before had been stranded by the Great Drought, and had been cut off from their nearest neighbors one hundred miles away for 75 years. It seemed as though they must have hung on by the skin of their teeth, and the same would be true of anyone so rash as to try living there today.

Of course, people do live there today, or at least near by, and the story told by the visitor center sign has changed. We know the ancient Indians were not stranded, but that the Pueblo was an adaption to extreme drought in the South West. As the Park Service web site now explains:

“Moving from scattered, small villages into a large 100-room pueblo was one way that the ancestral Puebloan people adapted to a series of droughts from A.D. 1215 through 1299, during the Pueblo IV period. Puerco Pueblo is located near the Puerco River, a major drainage that bisects the park. The river would have been a more reliable source of water for crops than the reduced summer rains. Farming of corn, beans, and squash was moved to the floodplains and terraces along the river.”[1]

Nevertheless, the series of severe droughts that afflicted the South West during the Medieval Warm Period in Europe, roughly from 1100 to 1300, did bring down the great Pueblo civilizations in places like Chaco Canyon, and forced the people to migrate South and settle in more concentrated communities near rivers where irrigation was possible. The migration was hard, and Pueblo civilization never again attained the heights it had in the Chaco period. In scenes that may have resembled those portrayed in the Cormac McCarthy novel, “The Road,” some of the migrants may even have been victims of cannibalism.[2] Environmental crisis does bring down civilizations, and the effects on ordinary people are often devastating.

Chapter II. The looming climate crisis.

We are now facing a World environmental crisis which may soon become even more severe than that which affected the Pueblo peoples. We are facing rising global temperatures caused, according to almost all climate scientists, by rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere. The source of these greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, is the combustion of the fossil fuels, coal, oil, and natural gas, that power our industrial civilization. We are impaled on the horns of a dilemma: If we continue business as usual, floods, fire, drought, Famine, and War caused by rising temperatures face large numbers of the World’s 7 billion people — even U.S. Intel says so.[3] Some of this is already starting to happen. For example, the Russian wildfires of July and August, 2010, provided a taste of things to come. They broke out because the hottest recorded summer in Russian history caused severe drying, and by the time they were over, an estimated 56,000 people had died from the smog and heat wave.[4]

We experienced frighteningly large wildfires this year (2012) in the Western United States. The Colorado and Wyoming forest fires were huge, and smoke from them was clearly visible from the air. On June 25 of this year, Judi and I were flying across the country to Hawaii. As we approached Cheyenne Wyoming at 38,000 feet, we could see a thin brownish black haze from the Colorado and Wyoming fires to the West. If you consult the Google Crisis map from June 27, you will see large fires burning near Colorado Springs, near Fort Collins just Southwest of Cheyenne, and near Laramie to the West of Cheyenne.[4a] The most destructive of these, the Waldo Canyon fire, came perilously close to devastating the city of Colorado Springs, and it caused the partial evacuation of the United States Air Force Academy.[4b] As in Russia, the fires were made worse by extreme heat and drought.[4c] While it is not possible to definitely attribute the fires to global warming — after all there have been many other droughts and severe fire seasons in Colorado and Wyoming — it is clear that the extreme heat made things much worse. To quote University of Arizona climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck:

“This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level. The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about.”[4d]

On the other hand, we are utterly dependent on fossil fuels and the power they provide for all the benefits that have come to us through the Industrial Revolution. Giving up fossil fuels seems unthinkable; in fact even the recent relatively modest increase in domestic gasoline prices to around 4 dollars a gallon — prices in Europe run to $9 or $10 per gallon — threatens to push the United States back into recession, put millions out of work, and possibly guarantee the defeat of Obama in the next Presidential election.

This dilemma has produced a bitter partisan divide, with the modern Republican party almost totally opposed to taking any concrete action to lower greenhouse gas emissions. It was not always so; taking action to head off global warming used to be a bipartisan issue. In fact, President George H. W. Bush signed the 1992 Rio treaty requiring signatories to voluntarily stabilize their emissions of greenhouse gasses at 1990 levels by the year 2000, and our distinguished classmate Bill Reilly played a key role in this.[5] Unfortunately, we missed our emissions target by 14%, and in 2001 President George W. Bush withdrew from the 1997 Kyoto protocol, the successor to the Rio treaty.

The last prominent Republican political figure to advocate curtailing carbon dioxide emissions was John McCain during the 2008 Presidential election.[6] We are now in a bitter partisan stalemate which has prevented us from taking any action to curtail global warming. If we continue this, we are going to see world-wide floods, fire, drought, Famine, and War, perhaps not in the next 10 or 20 years but 30 or 40 years from now, and where Famine and War strike, can the other Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Pestilence, and Death, be far behind? We have to ask ourselves, do we really want to bring about the prophesies in the Book of Revelation?

Of course, there is a contrary view. Those who doubt the reality of global warming, mainly on the right, like to say that predictions of an impending disaster are simply ridiculous left-wing paranoia. In fact, there is a documentary film made with the working title, “Apocalypse my Arse.”[7] (The film was released with the more sober title, “The Great Global Warming Swindle.”)

But Nina Federoff, the President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, warned in her AAAS Presidential Address this year that for every degree C (1.8 degrees F) of warming, crop yields decrease by 10%.[8] She ought to know, she is a world famous molecular biologist and crop specialist. One has to wonder, what will happen when, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts under a variety of scenarios, the global average temperature warms by 3 degrees C by the year 2100?[9] One thing we do know is that crop yields in tropical and temperate countries will drop by 30%. Of course, crop yields in Siberia, Greenland, and the Canadian North will rise, but how likely is it that Russia, Denmark, and Canada will welcome 5 or 6 billion desperate refugees out of the 9 billion people expected by then?[10]

Chapter III. The cause of global warming.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is an exceedingly rare gas in our planet’s atmosphere. Even today with rising carbon dioxide levels, it comprises slightly less than 0.04% of our atmosphere. Despite its low concentration, it is an extremely useful gas. Plants breathe it in and use sunlight and photosynthesis to extract the carbon they need for their leaves, stems, and trunks. When they extract this carbon, they exhale oxygen. In fact, it was this very process which produced the oxygen in our atmosphere, starting with the Great Oxygenation Event about 2.4 billion years ago.[11] So we have to have carbon dioxide, not only to eat (ultimately we eat plants), but also to breathe (of course, we breathe the oxygen respired by the plants).

Over the eons, a great deal of the immense store of carbon originally in the Earth’s atmosphere has been “fixed,” that is extracted, by plants, and stored underground as fossilized plant remains. That is how our great coal beds and most of our oil deposits were formed during the Carboniferous and Permian periods.[12] When we burn this fossil carbon, we put the carbon dioxide back into our atmosphere. That is the cause of the accelerating increase in carbon dioxide observed at measuring stations like that atop the extinct volcano at Mauna-Loa, Hawaii.

Scientists have known for a long time that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. That is, it traps warmth and so raises the temperature of the Earth (or the interior of a greenhouse, for that matter.) In fact, in 1896 Svante Arrhenius, who a few years later won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, quantified “the contribution of carbon dioxide to the greenhouse effect” and speculated “about whether variations in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide have contributed to long-term variations in climate.”[13] In later work he explicitly suggested that the burning of fossil fuels will cause global warming.[14]

Chapter IV. The scientific controversy 1900-1975.

We now know Arrhenius was right, but his ideas about climate change were not generally accepted by the scientific community at the time, or for years afterwards. As the American Meteorological Society’s 1951 “Compendium of Meteorology” put it, the idea that adding CO2 would change the climate “was never widely accepted and was abandoned when it was found that all the long-wave radiation absorbed by CO2 is <already> absorbed by water vapor.”[15]

It was not until the 1950s that the scientific consensus started to change, largely as a result of cold war weapons research. As Spencer Weart at the American Institute of Physics puts it, “… officials <and scientists> were not aiming to answer academic questions about future climates, but to provide for pressing military needs. Almost anything that happened in the atmosphere and oceans could be important for national security.”[16] In 1957, Roger Revelle showed that the “chemicals <in the sea> create a peculiar buffering mechanism that stabilizes the acidity of sea water but prevents the water from retaining <most of> the extra CO2 it takes up.”[17] So most of the increased amounts of carbon dioxide emitted in the air by burning fossil fuels remained in the air. Revelle warned that greenhouse effect warming “may become significant during future decades if industrial fuel combustion continues to rise exponentially,” and that “human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.”[18]

In 1958, using funds supplied by Roger Revelle’s grants, Charles Keeling began taking a continuous series of measurements of carbon dioxide concentrations at Mauna Loa, an extinct volcano in Hawaii. His measurements showed unambiguously that carbon dioxide levels were rising.[19] In fact, “the measurements collected at Mauna Loa show a steady increase in mean atmospheric CO2 concentration from about 315 parts per million by volume (ppmv) in 1958 to 396 ppmv as of April 2012.”[20] In other words, CO2 concentrations in the Earth’s atmosphere have increased by approximately 25% in the 54 years since we, the members of the Class of 1962, entered Yale.

Other developments were also crucial in changing the scientific consensus. Improved laboratory measurements, made possible by Cold War scientific research support, showed that the wavelengths of light (spectral bands) absorbed by carbon dioxide resolved into sharply defined lines with spaces between, and, most important, the spectral lines of water lay IN the spaces, so they did not overlap with the spectral lines of carbon dioxide. Thus heat radiation absorbed by carbon dioxide in the air would not already have been absorbed by water vapor.[21] This disposed of the American Meteorological Society’s objection cited above.

Finally, in the 1950s, the complicated effects of carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect on climate could begin to be modeled by digital computers. Computers had been another product of World War II and Cold War military research, though they were rapidly improved by commercial companies (like IBM) because they were so useful in business. We, fellow members of the Class of 1962, were there when Yale got its first computer! (This is from personal memory. I attended a brief FORTRAN workshop in 1959 while at Yale.) The modeling results, primitive though they were, showed that increased carbon dioxide concentrations would indeed increase temperatures.[22]

There is one additional line of evidence which comes from examinations of paleoclimate, the climate of past ages. Examinations of ice cores from the arctic and antarctic showed in 1980 that during past ice ages, carbon dioxide levels were as much as 50% lower than now, and they fell and rose in sync with past ice ages.[23] Interesting note for us: Yale’s own Karl Turekian made important contributions to this research.

This combination of careful measurement and computer modeling, based on well established physical and chemical principles, continues to undergird the global warming predictions of climatologists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) today — except that we’ve come a long way since 1975, and our models and predictions are far more accurate. That rising carbon dioxide concentrations are causing global warming is now accepted by an overwhelming majority of scientists. 90% of scientists believe global warming is real, and 82% believe human activity is a significant contributing factor — with oil company geologists the most numerous naysayers.[24]

Chapter V. What can we do?

The situation is not hopeless. We can address the cause of global warming by halting the steady rise of CO2 concentrations, a rise of approximately 2 parts per million every year[25] This rise occurs because 80% of our energy in the U.S. is produced by burning coal, oil, and natural gas. An inevitable chemical biproduct of this burning is CO2. As we produce increasing amounts of energy, we put more and more CO2 into the atmosphere, at a faster rate than the oceans can absorb. To address the looming climate change crisis, we must radically change the way we produce energy in this country and the world. We can do this, and in fact we possess the technological tools today to do this without harming our living standards.

Bill Gates recently gave an interview with MIT Technology Review where he laid out a path for us to take.[26] Here are a few highlights:

Interviewer Jason Pontin: “You are a member of the American Energy Innovation Council, the AEIC, which calls for a national energy policy that would increase U.S. investment in energy research every year from $5 billion to $16 billion.”

Bill Gates: “Right.”

Jason Pontin: “I was stunned that the U.S. government invests so little.”

Bill Gates: “… I was stunned myself. You know, the National Institutes of Health invest a bit more than $30 billion.”

Bill Gates: “I was stunned, when I did the work with the AEIC, to see that if you wanted the U.S. energy industry as a whole to fund this R&D, you’d only have to tax energy 1 percent. …”

Bill Gates: “… in a vague sense we can say that we want energy that costs, say, a quarter of what coal or electricity does and emits zero CO2. … So I think it’s very important, both to give poor people cheap energy and to avoid hugely negative climate change, that the U.S. government and other governments fund basic research.”

Jason Pontin: “Let’s talk about poverty. What is the minimum amount of energy that a person in a developing country should have access to for a reasonable standard of living?”

Bill Gates: “Well, a level that’s about half of current European usage, which is a quarter of current U.S. usage. The room for efficiency–I’m saying it’s probably a factor of four. And then I’m saying the rest of the world should be allowed to live at that energy level. Now, the aggregate energy therefore for nine billion people, which is about what the peak population is expected to be, is dramatically greater than what we have today, and that’s why when you multiply that big E by the CO2 per E, that number better be pretty damn small, because you’re not just trying to stay where you are today; you’re trying to get 90 percent down from where you are today. So wow, that number has got to be approaching zero.”

Bill Gates’ solution is to go nuclear, and he has put his money where his mouth is. He is a principal investor in TerraPower, a company designing a new reactor called a traveling-wave reactor.[27] The great advantage of a traveling-wave reactor is that it can use the enormous stores of spent reactor fuel we have lying around dangerously from 60 years of nuclear power. You will recall that during the Fukushima disaster, the Japanese government was so alarmed by the imminent prospect of the spent fuel rods in the rapidly drying containment pools overheating and catching fire that they made plans to evacuate Tokyo.[28] Gates and TerraPower have made a lot of progress with their traveling-wave reactor and it is nearing commercial availability. In December 2011, The Guardian reported, “Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates confirmed on Wednesday he is in discussions with China to jointly develop a new kind of nuclear reactor <TerraPower’s traveling-wave-reactor>.”[29]

Bill Gates’ traveling wave reactor is cooled with liquid sodium rather than water. This has a great advantage: his reactor operates at a higher temperature than a conventional one, so it is more efficient because he gets much more heat out it than he would from a conventional reactor of similar size. Unfortunately, using liquid sodium as a coolant also has a significant disadvantage: liquid sodium is dangerous and can explode on contact with water. Though his reactor design is probably extremely safe, its safety profile would be greatly improved by using molten salt as a coolant. We shall discuss these issues in greater detail in chapter XXXI.

The other promising path to abundant energy without excessive CO2 is solar power. Solar power is already in commercial use. John Quiggin, writing recently in The National Interest, outlines the stunning progress made in the past decade, and especially in the past year:

“… the average price of PV <photovoltaic e.g. solar> cells at the beginning of the twenty-first century was more than $5 per installed watt, leading to a cost of more than 50c per kilowatt hour. The global installed base of PV totaled a mere 1.4 gigawatts (GW), about equal to one medium-sized coal or nuclear plant.”

“The average retail price of solar cells as monitored by the Solarbuzz group fell from $3.50/watt to $2.43/watt over the course of the year, and a decline to prices below $2.00/watt seems inevitable. For large-scale installations, prices below $1.00/watt are now common. In some locations, PV has reached grid parity, the cost at which it is competitive with coal or gas-fired generation.”[30]

As an example of the progress being made, consider Twin Creeks Technologies. This startup company has developed a process to radically cut the thickness of solar cells.[31] They produce silicon sheets only one third the the thickness of a human hair, and solar cells made from these thin sheets are so flexible that they can be rolled up like a sheet paper. This promises to cut the cost of solar cells in half.[32] What makes Twin Creeks Technologies unique is that they already have a pilot plant operating in Mississippi.

The quite remarkable decrease in solar cell costs and the market surge in solar installations over the past few years was driven by technological and manufacturing improvements, but it was also driven by non-technological forces. First, as part of the Recovery Act of 2009, the U.S. Treasury had the 1603 tax grant program in place. This program “allowed renewable energy companies to get 30 percent of the cost of a new project back as a cash grant once construction was completed rather than spreading the benefit over a period of years.” The program expired at the end of 2011, and so far Congress has not renewed it.[32a]

Second, Chinese dumping of subsidized solar cells on the U.S. market drastically decreased the cost of solar panels. The U.S. Commerce Department estimates that the Chinese export subsidy amounted to around a quarter of the actual manufacturing cost of a solar cell, and in May of this year (2012) they imposed a 31 percent penalty tariff on Chinese solar cells.[32b] Chinese dumping drove many U.S. solar cell manufacturers out of business, for example Evergreen Solar which had opened a solar cell plant in Devins, Massachusetts to great fanfare in 2008. Their business plan assumed that solar cell wholesale prices would drop to around $2.00 per watt by 2014. Instead, the subsidized Chinese solar cells reached that level in 2010. Evergreen Solar closed their Devens plant in March of 2011, and filed for bankruptcy in August of 2011.[32c]

In the short run, the cost of PV (photovoltaic) installations using solar cells is likely to rise, but within a year or two, technological improvements like those promised by Twin Creeks Technologies will drive the cost down even below present levels.

Now for the fly in the ointment: To quote Bill Gates again,

“You can see this in microcosm in the Texas grid. When wind was like 2 percent, they would let the wind guys bid low and then fail to deliver, with no penalty. Well, now wind is up to about 8 percent of the Texas grid. And so the guys who are maintaining the standby power, which is mostly natural gas, are saying, ‘Hey, when the wind guys fail, shouldn’t they pay at least a penalty? Because most times they don’t fail, and yet we’ve always had to maintain this backup for them.’ It just points up that without a storage miracle, you cannot take intermittent sources up to large numbers. In fact, not only do you need a storage miracle, you need a transmission miracle, because the intermittent sources are not available in an efficient form in all locations.”[33]

What goes for wind goes for solar. Bill Gates’ needed “storage miracle” is the reason why the U.S. Government has been investing lots of R&D money in battery research, and his needed “transmission miracle” explains all the talk about a smart-grid. The advantage of nuclear power is that it provides steady, reliable baseline power. The advantage of wind and solar is, of course, that if something goes wrong we don’t have disaster on our hands. I believe we need to develop enough traveling-wave reactors, like the TerraPower design, to burn the dangerous stores of spent reactor fuel we have dangerously lying around. The amount left would be a small enough to safely store in a repository like the one planned for Yucca Mountain, without generating huge political opposition.

Chapter VI. How do we know the climate is changing?

I wish I could point to the past two winters, so much snow in 2010-2011, so warm and so little snow in 2011-2012, as evidence for CLIMATE CHANGE, but in fact they are not; they are WEATHER. The difference is, as University of Illinois climatologist Eric Snodgrass explains,

“Climate is the average of weather. For example, last winter <2010-2011> we had 41 inches of snow (in Champaign <Illinois>); this winter we might struggle to get to 14 inches. Average these years and it matches the climatological average for Champaign – a record that goes back to the late 1800s”[34]

So LONG TERM AVERAGE changes are what constitute evidence for climate change and global warming. One long term indicator of climate change, one that those of us in many areas of the country may have noticed, is that Spring now arrives several days early. As you can see from the sidebar map from Climate Central, this has been particularly pronounced in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, as well as along the Pacific Coast (except for California) and much of the Inter-Mountain West and the Great Plains.[35]

Another long term indicator of climate change is that winters are getting warmer. According to “Cameron Wake of the University of New Hampshire’s Climate Change Research Center … winter temperatures in the Northeast have risen 4 degrees <F> in the past 30 years.”[36] Interestingly, this is much more than the 1.5 degrees F rise in yearly average temperatures in the Northeast, so the bulk of our warming here in Connecticut has been due to warmer winters.

Climate change also manifests itself in the Northward march of species formerly prevalent only in warmer parts of our country. In the West, many of you may have noticed the large stands of pine devastated by pine beetle infestations. The standing gray skeletons of once healthy trees are stark evidence of the Northward march of an insect once held in check by cold winters.[36a] The infestation has been so severe that Tom Tidwell, the Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, says:

“We’ve always had bark-beetle infestations, but we’ve never had anything that’s been so widespread and spread so quickly. The only place it’s really starting to slow down is just where we’re starting to run out of trees.”[36b]

People in the West worry that the dry stands of dead trees are making the devastating forest fires sweeping the West burn hotter and faster. (Thanks to Ellen Susman for telling me about pine beetles in Colorado and their effect on fires during a quiet moment before our 50th Reunion Class Entertainment.) The AP reports this concern, but it also reports that the scientific verdict is still out on whether pine beetle kill makes devastating fires more likely or not.[36c] In any event, irrespective of their influence on forest fires, beetle infestations made possible by a warming climate are wreaking havoc on the forests of the West. This is the way extinctions happen when abrupt warming is carried on for a century or two.

An indicator of climate change from farther away is that the Arctic is warming. In fact, people are growing potatoes in Greenland,[37] and agriculture is flourishing there for the first time since the Eric the Red and the Vikings settled from 982 until sometime in the 1400s.[38] And the fabled Northwest Passage is now open.[39]

Agriculture in Greenland is good, and the opening of the Northwest Passage is even better, but the best evidence for long term global warming is something more prosaic: the heat content of the oceans has been rising. This is NOT something you are likely to have noticed personally — the water at Cape Cod in June feels about as cold now as it ever did, but careful measurements show that the heat content of the first 700 meters of the ocean has been rising since the 1970s, “just when greenhouse gas levels reached a level high enough to be important.”[40]

While the best evidence of long term global warming is the long term the rise in the heat content of the oceans, the most dramatic evidence would be extreme weather events such as the Texas drought and heatwave of 2011, and the drought and heatwave we are experiencing now (2012) throughout much of the country. Usually, it is not possible to attribute individual extreme events to global warming, but very recently this has become possible for some. In a series of papers which appeared in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society this July (2012), the authors were able to assign INCREASED PROBABILITIES due to global warming to some extreme events.[40a] Specifically, the studies found:

The extreme Texas heatwave of 2008 was 20 times more likely in the globally warmed climate of 2008 than it had been in the 1960s. However, it was not possible to assign definite odds to the 2008 Texas drought. Data for the even more severe heatwave and drought of 2011 were not available in time for publication.[40b]

It was not possible to assign definite odds to the 2011 drought in East Africa, which led to a tragic famine in Somalia and food shortages elsewhere. However, computer climate model runs replicate the decades long warming of the pool of warm water in the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans called the “Indian-Pacific Warm Pool (IPWP),” and there is a great deal of evidence linking this warming to decreased rainfall in East Africa. In fact the link is so strong that climate scientists were able to help give “effective early warning of the 2011 East African food crisis.”[40c]

It was possible to rule out climate change as a cause of the severe 2011 flooding in Thailand, which caused “unprecedented” damage. Instead, “nonmeteorological factors were much more important in setting the scale of the disaster. Examples are the changing hydrography of the river (the levels of the Chao Phraya were in some places more than 0.5 m higher than in 1995 for even a slightly lower discharge), conversion of agricultural land to much more vulnerable industrial usage, and reservoir operation policies.”[40d] Even though the disastrous 2011 Thailand floods were not caused by global warming, this illustrates the importance of land use policies in dealing with the expected consequences of climate change, a subject to which we shall return at the end of chapter XIII.

An interesting example of an extreme weather event which was made far less likely by climate change, but which non-the-less occurred, was the extraordinarily cold 2010 December in Britain. The winter of 2010-2011 began with the second coldest December in the Central England Temperature record dating back to 1659. (Yes, the Brits have a continuous instrumental temperature series for Central England dating back to 1659!) Such an event is unlikely under any circumstances, but it was possible to calculate that the already small probability of such an event was reduced by a factor of approximately 5 by current global warming.[40e]

Part II. Politicians, scientists, and think tanks.
How a small group of conservative think tanks and obstructionist scientists, supported by the fossil fuel and tobacco industries, have successfully delayed action on climate change for years.

Chapter VII. The political global warming debate.

Taking action against global warming would be an open and shut case, one would think, but nothing could be farther from the truth politically. Despite the fact that SCIENTIFICALLY the case is open and shut, we are now engaged in a bitter and divisive POLITICAL debate on curtailing global warming. To see why, we must look at who has much to lose if we radically change the way we produce energy in this country and the world. (Not if we radically change our way of life — I am certainly not advocating that — but if we radically change the way we produce energy.) As radical changes typically involve action by the Federal Government as well as private industry, we must also look at who is ideologically opposed to government regulation and intervention in the market place.

In his Technology Review article, Bill Gates says that to raise an extra 11 billion in R&D funds for energy research, “you’d only have to tax energy 1 percent.”[41] If we multiply 11 billion by 100 (because 1% is 1/100) we find that the total market for energy in the United States comes to 1.1 TRILLION dollars. That’s not chump change even for multi-billion dollar corporations.[42] 80% of our energy in the U.S. comes from coal, oil, and natural gas, and while this figure represents actual energy produced rather than dollars expended, it indicates that a drastic change in the way we produce our energy stands to cost the coal, oil, and natural gas companies around 80% of that 1.1 TRILLION dollars. And that’s just in the U.S. alone. No wonder the fossil fuel industry is unenthusiastic about meeting the challenge of climate change.

Conservative commentators like to point to left wing paranoid conspiracy theories when people talk about concerted efforts by the fossil fuel industry to spread disinformation about the threat of climate change, but unfortunately there is DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE of just such efforts dating from the first days of the political global warming debate. In 1998, as the New York Times reported:

“Industry opponents of a treaty to fight global warming have drafted an ambitious proposal to spend millions of dollars to convince the public that the environmental accord is based on shaky science.”

“Among their ideas is a campaign to recruit a cadre of scientists who share the industry’s views of climate science and to train them in public relations so they can help convince journalists, politicians and the public that the risk of global warming is too uncertain to justify controls on greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide that trap the sun’s heat near Earth.”

“An informal group of people working for big oil companies, trade associations and conservative policy research organizations that oppose the treaty have been meeting recently at the Washington office of the American Petroleum Institute to put the plan together.”[43]

The Times report goes on to list Exxon (now ExxonMobil), Chevron, the Southern Company, as well as The George C. Marshall Institute and The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (now The Advancement of Sound Science Center or TASSC) as participants, in addition, of course, to the American Petroleum Institute where the participants met. The group planned to spend $5 million over two years to, in the words of the Petroleum Institute memo on which the report was based, “maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours on Congress, the media and other key audiences.” The memo also called for $600,000 to be to be spent on 20 or so “respected climate scientists,” recruited “to inject credible science and scientific accountability into the global climate debate, thereby raising questions about and undercutting the ‘prevailing scientific wisdom’.” This campaign was to be directed at science writers, editors, columnists and television network correspondents.[44]

Public exposure of the plan seems to have caused it to be abandoned, but the strategy outlined in the Petroleum Institute memo has continued to be used by the coal and oil companies and their conservative think tank allies to great effect.

Chapter VIII. The Royal Society’s “Dear Nick” letter.

The Royal Society, sometimes known as the Royal Society of London, is the oldest and most prestigious scientific body in the world. On September 4, 2006, in its famous “Dear Nick” letter, it took the unprecedented step of taking ExxonMobil to task for misrepresenting climate science, and for funding groups which mislead the public about climate science and global warming.[45] The letter was addressed to Nick Thomas, Director, Corporate Affairs, Esso UK Limited, and was signed by Bob Ward, Senior Manager, Policy Communication for the Royal Society. The letter is quite interesting for what it reveals about ExxonMobil’s tactics at the time, and is worth quoting almost in full:

“Dear Nick”

“Thank-you for your recent letter and accompanying copies of the 2005 ExxonMobil ‘Corporate Citizenship Report’ and the ‘UK and Ireland Corporate Citizenship’ brochure. I have read both with interest, but I am writing to express my disappointment at the inaccurate and misleading view of the science of climate change that these documents present.”

“In particular, I was very surprised to read the following passage from the section on Environmental performance under the sub-heading of ‘Uncertainty and risk’ (p.23 in the ‘Corporate Citizenship Report’:”

‘While assessments such as those of the IPCC have expressed growing confidence that recent warming can be attributed to increases in greenhouse gases, these conclusions rely on expert judgement rather than objective, reproducible statistical methods. Taken together, gaps in the scientific basis for theoretical climate models and the interplay of significant natural variability make it very difficult to determine objectively the extent to which recent climate changes might be the result of human actions.’

“As I mentioned in July, these statements are very misleading. The ‘expert judgement’ of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was actually based on objective and quantitative analyses and methods, including advanced statistical appraisals, which carefully accounted for the interplay of natural variability, and which have been independently reproduced.”

“Furthermore, these statements in your documents are not consistent with the scientific literature that has been published on this issue. …”

“At our meeting in July, I also told you of my concerns about the support ExxonMobil has been giving to organizations that have been misinforming the public about the science of climate change. …”

“I have carried out an ad hoc survey on the websites of organizations that are listed in the ExxonMobil 2005 Worldwide Giving Report for ‘public information and policy research’, which is published on your website. Of those organizations whose websites feature information about climate change, I found that 25 offered views that are consistent with the scientific literature. However, some 39 organizations were featuring information on their websites that misrepresented the science of climate change, by outright denial of the evidence that greenhouse gases are driving climate change, or by overstating the amount and significance of uncertainty in knowledge, or by conveying a misleading impression of the potential impacts of anthropogenic climate change. My analysis indicates that ExxonMobil last year provided more than 2.9 million to organizations in the United States which misinformed the public about climate change through their websites. …”

“Yours sincerely”

“Bob Ward”
“Senior Manager, Policy Communication”

This letter reveals that as late as 2006, ExxonMobil was still following the strategy laid out in the American Petroleum Institute memo of “raising questions about and undercutting the ‘prevailing scientific wisdom'” in regard to global warming and climate change. It reveals that ExxonMobil was working through a variety of organizations “which misinformed the public about climate change,” and it reveals that ExxonMobil was supporting these organizations by helping fund them to the tune of $2.9 million for the single year 2005.

Of course, companies have the right to get their message out, but note that ExxonMobil was playing both ends against the middle: it also featured links to the websites of 25 organizations that “offered views that are consistent with the scientific literature.” In this way, ExxonMobil could give the appearance of impartiality in a scientific debate which was still undecided. Of course the debate had long been OVERWHELMINGLY DECIDED in favor of anthropogenic global warming with serious future consequences, but ExxonMobil’s support strategy was cleverly designed to undermine that proposition.

ExxonMobil and other corporations fighting environmental progress have got a very good return for their dollars. ExxonMobil spent a mere $2.9 million on various organizations fighting action on climate change in 2005 according to the Royal Society, and the entire budget of the conservative Heartland Institute for 2010 was a mere $4.4 million according to a recent article in the conservative but extremely well written Weekly Standard. But this same article in The Weekly Standard points out that the Natural Resources Defense Council took in $99 million in 2010.[46] The highly successful corporate campaign to delay action to stop climate change has been one of the most successful examples of asymmetric warfare on record. Unfortunately, it may also have jeopardized the future of our Republic and our entire civilization.

Chapter IX. Why have they been so successful? The tobacco connection.

The corporate campaign to delay action to halt global warming has been so successful because it has followed the tobacco industry’s strategy of casting doubt on the science, first put forward in the infamous Brown & Williamson memo from 1969 about how to deal with the evidence that smoking causes cancer:

“Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.[47]

As the American Petroleum Institute memo shows, this was the industry plan as far back as 1998, and as the Royal Society letter shows, this is exactly what ExxonMobil was doing in 2005. This same strategy was taken up by the George W. Bush administration after Republican political consultant Frank Luntz advised a group of his clients in 2003:

“The Scientific Debate Remains Open. Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field.”[48]

Luntz has since changed his mind and now says that humans have contributed to global warming.[49] He has even used his public relations skills for the Environmental Defense Fund to map out a political path for obtaining a consensus on stopping climate change.[50]

This strategy was extremely successful politically. As Sharon Begley wrote in Newsweek in 2007, quoting David Goldston, the Republican chief of staff for the House science committee until 2006:

“Challenging the science wasn’t a hard sell on Capitol Hill <during the George W. Bush years>. ‘In the <Republican> House, the leadership generally viewed it as impermissible to go along with anything that would even imply that climate change was genuine,’ says Goldstone … . ‘There was a belief on the part of many members that the science was fraudulent, even a Democratic fantasy. A lot of the information they got was from conservative think tanks and industry.'”[51]

It still is politically successful and is largely responsible for our present political impasse in regard to climate change.

The strategy of casting doubt on the science was invented by the tobacco companies, but there is an even closer connection between tobacco and the corporate campaign to delay action on climate change. Many of the same conservative think tanks that now battle climate change action previously battled action against smoking. In fact one was founded by Phillip Morris to get its message out, and several of the scientists involved in these think tanks previously worked with the tobacco companies.

Why on Earth were the TOBACCO companies interested in global warming? Well, they certainly didn’t like government regulation, and they succeeded in forming an alliance against many forms of government regulations, including those relating to the environment. In this way they could cloud the issue (remember, “doubt is our product”) and the organizations they supported (and sometimes founded) could appear to be advocates for the general public good rather than spokespersons for the tobacco industry.

Consider the example of TASSC, The Advancement of Sound Science Center (and formerly The the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition). TASSC was founded by the tobacco company Philip Morris (now Altria) in 1993 through the public relations firm APCO because it was under pressure from the Environmental Protection Agency on the issue of passive exposure to cigarette smoke. TASSC’s founding documents show that it was founded to create the false “impression of a ‘grassroots’ movement which would fight ‘overregulation’ and portray the danger of tobacco smoke as just one ‘unfounded fear’ among others,” such as global warming. “APCO proposed to set up ‘a national coalition intended to educate the media, public officials and the public about the dangers of ‘junk science’. Coalition will address credibility of government’s scientific studies, risk-assessment techniques and misuse of tax dollars … Upon formation of Coalition, key leaders will begin media outreach, eg editorial board tours, opinion articles, and brief elected officials in selected states.'”[52]

TASSC did indeed broaden its advocacy beyond smoking issues, and “did as its founders at APCO suggested, and sought funding from other sources. Between 2000 and 2002 it received $30,000 from Exxon … The website it has financed – JunkScience.com – has been the main entrepot for almost every kind of climate-change denial that has found its way into the mainstream press.”[53]

Chapter X. Scientists and think tanks.

The name “George C. Marshall Institute” conjures up images of enlightened foreign policy, the Marshall Plan, and rebuilding Europe from the ashes of World War II. In fact, the George C. Marshall institute was one of the organizations involved in the American Petroleum Institute memo, and, as the Wikipedia delicately puts it, has “since the late 1980s … put forward environmental skepticism views, and in particular has disputed mainstream scientific opinion on climate change, although it continues to be active on defense policy.”[54]

At the time of the American Petroleum Institute memo, the Marshall Institute’s chairman and founder was Frederick Seitz, one of the most distinguished scientists in the United States. He was a past President of both Rockefeller University and the National Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of the National Medal of Science. In the 1990s, he led the determined opposition against action to reduce global warming, and in 1994 Seitz hit a trifecta. In one Marshal Institute document,[55] part of which is reproduced in the sidebar from the original, he managed to assert:

1. “there is no good scientific evidence that passive <cigarette smoke> inhalation is truly dangerous under normal circumstances.”

2. “there is reason, based on sound scientific work, to express doubt that we are in immediate danger from either global warming or depletion of the ozone layer.”

3. “it appears that our planet is not in immediate danger of a runaway rise in temperature as a result of anthropogenic greenhouse gases.”

(We will explain the “ozone hole,” or “depletion of the ozone layer,” in a moment.) As remarkable as this document is, the “most important legislative victory” of the global warming opposition Seitz led “was the Senate’s 95-to-0 vote in 1997 to oppose U.S. participation in any international agreement—i.e., the Kyoto Protocol—that imposed mandatory greenhouse-gas reductions on the U.S.”[56] Frederick Seitz’s influence was indeed enormous.

In the 2000s, Seitz’s connections to the tobacco companies and the Marshall Institute’s connection to ExxonMobil became embarrassingly public. In a 2007 Frontline interview, Seitz discussed his role in distributing $5 million per year from the tobacco company R.J. Reynolds’ over a 10 year period, money which supported research at Rockefeller University where he had been President. He defended himself, perhaps correctly, by saying that the money was “green,” and the work he and R.J. Reynolds had supported led to Stanley Prusiner’s Nobel Prize for the discovery of prions. (Prions are the cause of mad cow disease.) But more disturbingly, he received $65,000 per year from R.J. Reynolds WHILE PRESIDENT OF ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY, and when asked if “R.J. Reynolds wanted you to do any specific research on the links between tobacco and cancer,” he answered “No.”[57]

After retiring from Rockefeller University, Seitz became a prominent member of R.J. Reynolds’ biomedical research committee,[58] and R.J. Reynolds was very happy to have him as a “permanent consultant.”[59]

As for the financial support ExxonMobil gave the Marshall Institute, that is also documented in the Frontline interview. Seitz, while he denies taking any money personally from ExxonMobil, agrees that they did indeed help fund the Marshall Institute.[60]

The close financial connections between Seitz, the Marshall Institute, and the tobacco and oil companies raise the question, did they take the stands they did because they were paid to do so? Seitz indignantly denied this in his Frontline interview,[61] but suspicions still linger.

Frederick Seitz died in 2008 at the age of 96.[62] We need to remember what a great scientist he had been, and his later advocacy of several causes contrary to the public interest should not vitiate the memory of his earlier fine scientific work.

We also need to take a moment to explain the “ozone hole” for those who do not remember the controversy, because it is involved in the statements of several scientists besides Seitz who dispute the importance of climate change. Briefly, ozone is a molecular form of oxygen composed of THREE atoms of oxygen rather than the TWO in the molecular oxygen we breathe. For short, ozone is O3 vs O2 for the oxygen we breathe. Ozone is poisonous, but in the stratosphere acts to protect us from the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation by absorbing it.[63] Ultraviolet radiation is known to be a cause of skin cancer, and widely thought to be a cause of the most serious and often fatal form, malignant melanoma.

In the 1974, Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina found that compounds known as chlorofluorocarbons — freon is a chlorofluorocarbon — could damage the ozone layer. Chlorofluorocarbons were used in everything from propellants in hairspray bottles to refrigerants in airconditioners and refrigerators, so DuPont and other chemical companies, recognizing that this scientific finding was a grave threat to their business, struck back. They used the same strategy the tobacco companies had used a few years before: casting doubt on the science. (They also personally vilified Rowland and Molina.) Then, in 1985, scientific measurements of the ozone concentration in the stratosphere over Antarctica revealed the existence of an “ozone hole,” that is a region severely depleted in ozone compared to values measured just a decade before, and the Montreal Protocol limiting the use of chlorofluorocarbons was signed two years later in 1987 by a REPUBLICAN President, Ronald Reagan.[64] In 1995, Dr.’s Rowland and Molina received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work.[65]

You might think that this would resolve the issue, but all through the 1990s scientists associated with the Marshall and Heartland Institutes continued to campaign against implementing the provisions of the Montreal Protocol, and these same scientists were (and still are) extremely effective in stopping action on global warming.

One of these scientists is Sallie Baliunas. She is a distinguished astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and was a former Deputy Director of the Mount Wilson Observatory in California,[66] where she oversaw the refitting of the famous old Hooker Telescope, with its huge (until fairly recently second largest in the World) 100 inch mirror cast from green French champagne bottle glass. Sallie Baliunas’s great accomplishment there was to outfit the “100 inch” with adaptive optics, which increases its resolution by a factor of 20 to an incredibly fine 0.05 arc seconds.[67] This is 1,200 times finer than the resolution of the human eye.

Sallie Baliunas is also the Senior Scientist at the Marshall Institute and chairs their Science Advisory Board.[68] And she has served on their Board of Directors.[69]

Throughout the 1990s, Sallie Baliunas waged an incessant campaign to stop action to close the ozone hole. For example, in 1995 she testified before Congress that, “The observational evidence casts doubt on (a) a substantial thinning of ozone over most of the world, and (b) increasing trends in UV-B radiation.”[70]

Much information from the dark ages BW (Before Web) is difficult to obtain, but thanks to the Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine,” information from the early AW (After Web) era is often available. A case in point is a 1997 Marshall Institute page where Sallie Baliunas takes aim at both the ozone hole and global warming. She says:

“The burden of regulations is about to ratchet up. One expensive increase will result from removing chlorine-containing refrigerants, such as Freon and other CFCs, from society. CFCs are thought to gradually erode the ozone layer of the stratosphere. … A short-term cost of $2 trillion will rip through the U.S. economy according to a 1993 estimate contained in House Resolution 291.”

“A second costly regulatory burden, involving carbon dioxide and global warming, is pending in the Rio Treaty. The planned global warming regulations make the CFC regulations seem like small change. Worldwide, the summed cost of the most-often discussed policies for limits on greenhouse gas emissions could be several trillion dollars by the year 2100. … I estimate that stabilizing concentrations could cost about one-fourth of the GNP of the U.S. on an annual basis.”[71]

The actual cost of implementing the Montreal Protocol which limited “Freon and other CFCs” was far less than Sallie Baliunas’s $2 trillion estimate.[72]

The Marshall Institute was deeply involved in battling the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to limit CO2 emissions. A 1999 page we can access thanks to the “Wayback Machine” contains a letter which illustrates the incredible pressure President Clinton was under NOT to sign the Kyoto Protocol. The letter contains the paragraph,

“With such uncertain science, and the serious economic growth and international issues involved, our global policies encompassed in the Kyoto accords need to be reoriented from a response today to a predicted man-made threat – to preparing a global energy posture which could effectively respond to future man-made climate changes if they become more certain and significant.”[73] (Italics added.)

This letter is signed by a “Recipient, National Medal of Science,” a “Past President, National Academy of Sciences,” and a “Director Emeritus, Scripps Institution of Oceanography.” These were, of course, Seitz and his gang of distinguished climate doubters.

The rest of the page consists of 10 items presenting the now familiar arguments: “Predictions of Warming Continue to Drop,” “Is Global Warming Caused by Human Activities,” “Do We Need to Act Now on CO2 Admissions <sic!>,” “Is There a Scientific Consensus on the Causes of Global Warming?,” etc., etc.[74] Things haven’t changed much since then, and climate change doubters continue to repeat these same tired old arguments.

It is important to remember that Sallie Baliunas had done some very good scientific work, and in particular her excellent paper “Evidence for Long-Term Brightness Changes of Solar-Type Stars” in Nature[75] seemed to buffer the arguments of those who genuinely felt (or argued for political reasons) that the 20th century warming was due to variation in the Sun’s energy output rather than greenhouse gas emissions. In 2001 she coauthored an influential and oft-quoted Marshall Institute report with Willie Soon that advocated just this viewpoint.[76] But as often happens in science, later studies in the 2000s “showed that the varying stars were not so much like the Sun after all.”[77] Nevertheless, Baliunas and Soon’s 2001 report continues to be quoted by global warming skeptics even today as evidence that mainstream climate scientists have it all wrong.

In 2002, she was asserting that the “mandated limits on greenhouse gas emissions” from the Kyoto Protocol would cause a huge loss to the American economy, and that “over a decade, that GDP loss would accumulate to a loss three times more intense than the impact of the Great Depression.”[78]

In 2003, she and Willie Soon published a paper in the journal Climate Research[79] which asserted that Michael Mann’s famous hockey stick graph (more about that later) was wrong, and that the 20th century had not been the warmest in the past 1,000 years. The paper was read into the Congressional Record by politicians intent on stopping action on global warming, and a huge furor arose in the mainstream climate science community. They believed the paper was seriously flawed and that Baliunas and Soon had “cherry picked” their data. Several of Climate Science’s editors resigned in protest over the fact that the paper had been accepted by the journal and published. Later on, this episode would become one of the main issues raised in the Climategate emails (more about that later too) and would be used by climate change doubters to buttress their charges that a group of elite mainstream climate scientists had tried to censor the peer-reviewed literature.[80]

In 2007, Sallie Baliunas gave an interview with ABC News’s 20/20 program, where she said that “added CO2 in the atmosphere may actually benefit the world because more CO2 helps plants grow. Warmer winters would give farmers a longer harvest season, and might end the droughts in the Sahara Desert,”[81] and when asked, “Why don’t we hear about this part of the global warming argument?,” replied,

“It’s the money! Twenty-five billion dollars in government funding has been spent since 1990 to research global warming. If scientists and researchers were coming out releasing reports that global warming has little to do with man, and most to do with just how the planet works, there wouldn’t be as much money to study it.”[82]

There is NO evidence that Sallie Baliunas was ever involved with tobacco money, but the same cannot be said for a third distinguished scientist, S. Fred Singer. He has been a prominent critic of global warming, and is a Senior Fellow at the Heartland Institute.[83]

Singer has been involved with a number of other conservative think tanks as well. In a 1994 report from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, part of which is reproduced from the original in the sidebar, Singer accused the EPA of having “manipulated selected portions of the existing literature until it produced the desired result,” that is the result that second hand cigarette smoke causes cancer.[84] It turns out that the report was funded by Philip Morris through the public relations firm APCO, the same firm which set up TASSC. APCO hired the de Tocqueville Institution to do the research and writing, so tobacco money paid for the report.[85] Singer denies knowing where APCO got the money, and there is no documentary evidence that he knew.

The Alexis de Tocqueville report also includes sections on the dangers of radon, pesticides, and the EPA Superfund to clean up badly polluted sites. The section on radon goes after our classmate Bill Reilly, who had been President H. W. Bush’s EPA administrator, for sticking up for the health of school children,[86] and then concludes, “If you do not smoke, there is very little to worry about.”[87]

As for the ozone hole, Singer testified before Congress in 1995 that “there is no scientific consensus on ozone depletion or its consequences.”[88]

Singer is still trying to oppose the Montreal Protocol and efforts to close the ozone hole,[89] and he still claims “the EPA fudged their analysis to reach a predetermined conclusion <that second hand cigarette smoke is a cancer risk> — using thoroughly dishonest procedures.”[90]

Singer makes extreme statements about global warming and those who warn of the dangers of global warming. Consider, for example, these recent statements of his:

“It all suggests manipulation of crucial data.”[91]

“In this enterprise, the group was aided not only by environmental zealots, anti-technology Luddites, utopian one-worlders, and population-control fanatics, but also by bureaucrats, businesses, brokers and bankers, who had learned how to game the system and profit from government grants and subsidies …”[92]

“Within the United States, and also elsewhere, global warming scares have become a means of transferring taxpayer money to politically influential cronies.”[93]

“We’re reaching a tipping point — not of the earth’s climate, but of the financial schemes that permanently divert funds from productive activities into wasteful ones, all in the name of ‘saving the climate.'”[94]

In addition to making pronouncements like these, Singer is a regular speaker at the Heartland Institute’s International Conferences on Climate Change, and will be speaking this May (2012) at their 7th International Conference in Chicago.[95]

The Heartland Institute itself, where Singer is a Senior Fellow, was closely involved with Philip Morris in the 1990s in questioning the link between second hand tobacco smoke and health, just as Singer did. Heartland even published “policy studies” summarizing Philip Morris reports.[96] And even today, just like Singer, they claim there is no evidence that second hand tobacco smoke is harmful. In the “Reply to Our Critics” section of their website’s “About” page, they link to one of their policy studies which says:

“The only legitimate grounds for interfering in smokers’ choices are the potentially harmful effects of second-hand smoke on nonsmokers. … This is pure junk science.”[96a]

The close connections between various conservative think tanks and the tobacco industry is illustrated in this 1994 memo exchange between Matt Winokur and Roy Marden of Phillip Morris, about their campaign to keep the EPA from regulating second hand tobacco smoke or “ETS” (Environmental Tobacco Smoke). Winokur writes,

“Do CATO, CEI or Reason Foundation have any hooks into int’l groups? And are there any other U.S.-based groups that have taken a favorable position which might have an int’l connection? What about Marshall Institute?”

to which Marden replies,

“Heritage is with us on most issues, e.g., tax, trade, and would be with us on ETS, but it is not an issue that (as yet) they have taken a position on. Cato, etc., has, and that work can be used as a basis on which to engage some of these other outfits-with a reasonable degree of certainty a priori that they would be on our side.”

“As for the Marshall Institute, it’s not a group with which I have much familiarity .”[97]

It is odd that Roy Marden didn’t know much about the Marshall Institute, since their founder and chairman Fred Seitz had been on R.J. Reynolds payroll, but he didn’t.

Thanks to the tobacco settlement, we have an enormous trove of documents unearthed through the legal process of discovery, documents which are now publicly available through places like the Legacy Tobacco Library of the University of California, San Francisco. We have much less information about connections between conservative think tanks and the oil companies. We do know there are some, in particular connections between the Marshall Institute, the Heartland Institute, and ExxonMobil. I have already discussed the financial support the Marshall Institute received from ExxonMobil while Fred Seitz was Marshall’s chairman. The Heartland Institute has also benefited from ExxonMobil financial support — to the tune of $600,000 between 1998 and 2006.[98] (According to Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, this support had ended by 2007.[99]) What we do not have, unfortunately, is verifiably authentic internal oil company documents proving conclusively that their recent support for climate change doubting think tanks was part of a well thought out strategy for obstructing action on global warming.

Chapter XI. Ironies.

Climate science is filled with ironies. Perhaps the greatest is that a warm global average temperature for a year is no guarantee that the weather will be warm in a particular place during a particular season. For example, 1940-1942 were warm years, but the brutal Russian winter of 1941-1942, which stopped Hitler’s Wehrmacht in its tracks, was famously the coldest since the winter of 1812 which stopped Napoleon. The extraordinarily severe winter weather which Europe experienced this year (2012) in the month of February is another example of this phenomenon.

But the second greatest irony is surely that S. FRED SINGER INVENTED CAP AND TRADE, the policy of capping emissions and then allowing companies which emit less to sell emissions credits to companies which emit more. Cap and Trade is generally given credit for effectively and inexpensively reducing sulfur dioxide emissions causing acid rain, and, under the Montreal Protocol, effectively and inexpensively limiting chlorofluorocarbon emissions destroying the ozone hole.[100]

A third irony is that when Singer proposed this, he was on a committee where his cap and trade scheme was opposed by environmentalists on the committee. (They felt it was a “license to pollute.”) But Nierenberg, one of Seitz’s gang of distinguished scientists opposing action on just about everything, put Singer’s proposal into a signed appendix, and the idea was adopted.[101] I guess this just goes to show that no-one is all bad, or always right.

Chapter XII. Personal reflections.

I found the last chapter difficult to write because all three of the scientists I just discussed were people I admired at some point in my life. In my brief incarnation as an industrial physicist immediately after graduating from Yale, I often consulted Fredrick Seitz’s classic text, “The Modern Theory of Solids.” In the 1990s, before a shoulder injury prevented me from hefting my own amateur Schmidt–Cassegrain telescope up on its mount, I read with wonder in Astronomy and Sky & Telescope magazines about how Sallie Baliunas was refitting the famous old 100 inch telescope atop Mount Wilson, and turning it back into a first class modern instrument. And as for Fred Singer, I remember reading about his MOUSE (Minimal Orbital Unmanned Satellite Earth) satellite in the Washington Post when I was a teenager. MOUSE was probably the first American design for a satellite; it was designed by Singer in 1951 or 1952, and it was small so it could be launched by the feasible rockets of the time.[102] And, although I did not know this until I started writing this article, he was an early advocate of weather satellites and the founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service.

In addition, I feel compelled to point out that associations like Singer’s with The Heartland Institute and Heartland’s International Conferences on Climate Change are NOT the mark of Cain. Quite respected climate scientists with minority dissenting views on climate change, scientists like John Christy and Roy Spencer who do not often engage in overly harsh polemics, are frequent speakers at Heartland’s International Conferences on Climate Change.[103] (I shall talk more about Christy and Spencer in the next chapter.) It is not about whom you sometimes associate with, but what you say and how harshly you say it, and Singer unfortunately fails this latter test.

Further, The Heartland Institute, for all its faults and transgressions both past and present, is NOT the abode of the Antichrist. While their rhetoric is often over the top, they were quite gracious when I requested permission to reproduce their billboard picture in chapter XXIII. The same is true for The Marshall Institute. I did not have to request copyright permission from them, but I did find that SOME of their Washington Roundtables were quite worthwhile, above and beyond what they might say about the politics of the Marshall Institute. In fact, I will even quote positively from a one of them in the next chapter.

We also need to remember that even shrill contrarian voices can, on occasion, make valuable contributions. Perhaps the best example of this is Singer’s invention of cap and trade, and a recent example is that of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, which contributed $150,000 to Richard A. Muller’s very valuable Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project.[104] We shall discuss Muller’s work in chapter XXIV, though we do not have the space to discuss the Koch brothers.[105]

Part III. Scientific dissenters and majoritarians.
It is tough being a scientific dissenter on climate change, and it is equally tough being in the scientific majority.

Chapter XIII. The scientific dissenters.

As we pointed out earlier, 90% of scientists believe global warming is real, and 82% believe human activity is a significant contributing factor (with oil company geologists the most numerous naysayers).[106] In short, this is now the scientific consensus. In an oft quoted essay, historian of science Naomi Oreskes made the claim that most scientists speaking as climate change contrarians have few, if any, credentials in climatology.[107] This is actually true but misleading. It turns out that there are a few serious scientists who dissent from the consensus about global warming, and a few of them are noted climatologists.

Perhaps the foremost among these is Richard Lindzen. He is a Sloan Professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has made important contributions to the theory of atmospheric tides (which don’t act quite like the Newtonian tides of the ocean), the superrotation of Venus’s upper atmosphere, and numerous other subjects, and he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.[108]

Lindzen holds that warming temperatures will decrease the formation of high cirrus clouds over the tropics. Low lying clouds reflect the Sun’s heat away from the Earth and on balance exert a cooling effect. But high cirrus clouds warm the Earth by absorbing infrared radiation, that is heat, radiated back from the Earth, and preventing it from escaping out into space. They act the same way greenhouse gasses like CO2 do. In Lindzen’s theory, warmer temperatures will cause a decrease in high cirrus clouds over the tropics and that will have the effect of cooling the Earth so it maintains a temperature closer to todays. He calls this negative feedback effect the “infrared iris,” and his theory is called “the infrared iris theory.”[109]

In our present state of knowledge, our computer climate models cannot predict how clouds will behave. We know warmer temperatures mean more moisture in the air, which could mean MORE, not fewer, high cirrus clouds over the tropics. OR, Lindzen could be right. Most climate scientists think Lindzen is wrong, but no one knows for sure.

Linzen has published several papers attempting to validate his theory, but mainstream climate scientists have not accepted his reasoning as correct. You would think that issues like these could be resolved by satellite measurements, and indeed Lindzen has tried to do so, but as the New York Times recently put it:

“Dr. Lindzen acknowledged that the 2009 paper <reporting on satellite measurements> contained ‘some stupid mistakes’ in his handling of the satellite data. ‘It was just embarrassing,’ he said in an interview. ‘The technical details of satellite measurements are really sort of grotesque.'”[110]

One test for whether a skeptic is a scientific dissenter or a crank is whether or not he can admit he is wrong. Lindzen, to his great credit, admits when he is mistaken, as the above quote shows.

John Christy is another scientific dissenter who must be taken seriously. He is a Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and the Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.[111] As he describes it, his “main research projects deal with building climate datasets from scratch to document what the climate has done and to test assertions and hypotheses about climate change.”[112] He often uses satellite data when building his datasets, and recently has been testing computer climate model predictions that the lower troposphere should be warming faster than surface temperatures.[113] He concludes that nature is not behaving the way climate models say it should, and he holds that this is evidence that there is something wrong with the models. He concludes that “climate model simulations on average are simply too sensitive to increasing greenhouse gases and thus overstate the warming of the climate system,”[114] and “if the country deems it necessary to de-carbonize civilization’s main energy sources, sound and indeed compelling reasons beyond human-induced climate change need to be offered.”[115]

Roy Spencer is “a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville,” and before that “was a Principal Research Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.” While at NASA, he and John Christy “received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites.” He continues to work at NASA “as the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite.”[116] Like Lindzen, he believes that clouds will cause future warming to be much less than predicted by the mainstream, but he comes at this, at least in part, through informed criticisms of satellite radiation budget measurements.[117] What is fundamentally at stake here is that, as Lindzen said, “the technical details of satellite measurements are really sort of grotesque.” So there is room for informed disagreement; nevertheless, mainstream climate scientists do not accept Roy Spencer’s analysis.[118]

Roger Pielke Sr. is “Senior Research Scientist, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado in Boulder” and “Professor Emeritus of the Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins”[119] Among other contributions, he published two influential papers using computer climate modeling which showed that the climate in Florida had become much hotter and drier, and that winter crop freezes were more frequent and severe, because most of the Everglades has been converted to cropland.[120]

His basic point of view is that land use policies are as important, or perhaps more important, than CO2 concentrations in causing climate change. Like Lindzen, Christy, and Roy, he believes that climate sensitivity has been overestimated. Climate sensitivity is measured by the number of degrees of warming caused by a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations, and the generally accepted figure is 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F). But Lindzen, Christy, Roy, and Pielke believe the figure is closer to 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F).

Pielke is clearly concerned that climate change may lead to ecosystem collapse. In a 2010 article, he and his coauthors wrote:

“On the basis of this science, we argue for a stronger integration of land-use and climate-change policies. These policies need to include a virtual halt to all deforestation and an acceleration of investment in strategic reforestation, supported by a comprehensive global forest monitoring program. Without these actions, the degradation of the Earth’s ecosystems will become exacerbated as their resilience is eroded by accelerated changes in temperature, precipitation and extreme weather events.”[121]

If we think about Pielke’s position, we can see that there is room for both views, the consensus view and his. While it is not possible to compromise the two divergent views of climate sensitivity, it is possible to adopt Pielke’s view that land use policy is important in climate change and needs to be prominently considered along with greenhouse gas concentrations. My personal opinion is that the forthcoming IPCC Assessment Report 5 should do just this.

In chapter II, we talked about the enormous Colorado and Wyoming forest fires that broke out this past June (2012). Their primary cause was severe heat combined with extreme drought, and global warming undoubtedly contributed to the record breaking heat. As for the severe drought, we shall have to wait on the results of careful attribution studies like the ones we described at the end of chapter VI, even though more frequent and severe drought in the West is what climate models predict we can expect from global warming. But the fires in Colorado and Wyoming are also a poster child for Roger Pielke Sr.’s position that poor land use policies will compound the effects of climate change. As the Los Angeles Times reported:

“Drought, rising temperatures, a century of fire suppression policies that allowed many forested areas to grow unnaturally thick with fuel, and more and more people living on the wilderness edge have thrust the West into this new era of bigger and fiercer burns.”[121a]

A recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study of the fire history of the Western United States over the past 3,000 years found that forest fire rates during the 20th and 21st centuries have been unusually low by historical standards, and there is now a “forest fire deficit” due to “the combined effects of human activities, ecological, and climate changes.”[121b] Prominent among these “human activities” is suppression of small fires, which leaves more material to burn in large conflagrations, and one of the authors warns:

“This divergence between climate and fire activity is unsustainable. Eventually, nature will catch up.”[121c]

Of course, one of the reason that the U.S. Forest Service carries out relatively few small controlled burns is that they menace the property of people who have moved into the wilderness edge. Thus poor land use policies are an important contributor to the disaster now happening in the West.

Chapter XIV. On the importance of contrarians.

Contrarian views are important in science, but, as the RealClimate blog wryly puts it, “past industry disinformation campaigns were not sincere explorations of the true uncertainties in climate science.”[122] In other words, contrarians, to be taken seriously, need to be genuinely attempting to reach the truth, not simply be attempting to persuade by artifice and deceit. The scientific dissenters clearly meet this test, even though the probability is that they are wrong.

The history of science shows that science progresses through contrarian views. We should not forget that Arrhenius’ view itself, that increased carbon dioxide would cause warming of the Earth, was for many years a contrarian view. My reason for including this section is that people like Sarah Palin who talk about “untrustworthy science”[123] simply do not understand, or choose for political reasons not to understand, that science is not a certain, authoritarian structure, but a voyage on the frontier of ignorance towards greater knowledge. There will ALWAYS be scientific contrarians, or at least there will be until a field has been firmly established for a generation or more.

Here are a few other examples of contrarian scientific views:

Continental drift. The theory of continental drift was proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1912. It did not meet with wide acceptance. In fact, geologist friends of my generation recall that the few who believed in continental drift were called “drifters,” and being a drifter was a sure ticket to tenure denial.

Shortly after we graduated from Yale, the prevailing geological orthodoxy about continental drift (it didn’t exist and couldn’t exist) was abruptly overturned by the discovery of sea floor spreading and plate tectonics.[124] The scientific consequences were enormous. For example, we now know that the ancient Earth during the Carboniferous period was not a steaming warm jungle, as we were taught in school. Instead, North America was near the Equator, and our great coal deposits from the Carboniferous period were laid down during an ICE AGE![125]

The “drifters” played an important role in science. They kept the theory alive (if just barely) until it could be revived and proved.

Eugenics. Eugenics is an example of a scientific consensus, and it was one of the saddest chapters in the history of science. It arose out of the militant interpretation of Darwinism, summarized by the phrase “the struggle for existence,” and leading to the (mistaken) belief that evolution was like a war between species. Although Social Darwinism, the application of Darwinian ideas in the social sphere, began before Darwin, after the appearance of “On the Origen of Species,” militant Darwinism and Social Darwinism became inextricably linked.[126] The eugenics movement, in its worst forms, attempted to purify the race by purging it of its weak and undesirable elements. In the United States, this led to the sterilization of those judged to be feeble minded in 29 states, most famously in California and Virginia. In fact, our eugenics laws and policies were so draconian that the Nazi’s envied us for a time because they thought we were ahead of them in eugenics! (Richard Conniff has an excellent article in the May 2012 Yale Alumni Magazine, “God and White Men at Yale,” that talks about this and about Yale’s role in the eugenics movement.[127]) In Germany, the Nazi’s extended their eugenics campaign and murdered those they judged to be congenitally ill or feeble minded, those they called “Lebensunwertes Leben” (“life unworthy of life”). And they cynically used this campaign to prepare the German people for the extermination of the Jews and Gypsies.[128]

The trouble was that in the United States as well as Germany, eugenics was the scientific consensus. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out eugenics research, and eugenics was supported by the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, the National Research Council, and the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations.[129]

Lindzen and some other climate change contrarians point to eugenics as a graphic example of the perils of basing public policy on a scientific consensus.[130] Where they miss the mark is in neglecting the obvious, that efforts to combat global warming do not threaten to murder millions of people, cost the American economy trillions of dollars, or imperil our basic liberties and way of life. On the contrary, as Bill Gates has shown us, and as we described back in chapter V, we can reduce our carbon footprint by 90% while providing abundant energy for ourselves and the world, if only we will get started working on it.

Peter Duesberg and the AIDS virus. If eugenics is an example of the perils of accepting a scientific consensus, Peter Duesberg’s theories about the AIDS virus provide a graphic example of the dangers of FAILING to follow a consensus. Peter Duesberg was a distinguished molecular biologist at Berkeley and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In the late 1980s, during the AIDS epidemic, Duesberg developed the theory that the AIDS virus was relatively harmless by itself, but that it took advantage of weakened immune systems to infect cells. He came to assert that the drugs administered to combat AIDS only made the problem worse because they were based on extremely toxic cancer drugs, in some cases drugs too toxic to be used for chemotherapy, and what they actually did, he asserted, was weaken the immune system and promote the spread of the disease. He even wrote a persuasive book about this with a laudatory forward by a Nobel Prize winner in medicine.[131]

Then doctors started curing people with AIDS (OK, just arresting the disease, but that was good enough). Case closed, Duesberg was wrong, or was he?

Well, Duesberg was wrong, but he wouldn’t give in. Unfortunately, one of the people who continued to believe Peter Duesberg was Thabo Mbeki, President of South Africa. Mbeki refused to have the South African government pay for AIDS therapy, a decision which cost hundreds of thousands of lives. They now do, but the harm has been done. This is an example of how the refusal to accept a scientific consensus can lead to disaster.[132]

There is no magic bullet that lets us decide whether or not we should follow a scientific consensus. The best we can do is observe that in the 20th century, the scientific consensus was right more often than not. But even if the global warming consensus turns out to be wrong, and the scientific skeptics turn out to be right, redoing our energy infrastructure as Bill Gates suggests will bring progress for all rather than causing grave harm to the Republic. On the basis of Pascal’s Wager,[133] we should act as though the global warming consensus is correct.

Chapter XV. The politics of dissent.

Every scientific field has its politics, and one is often reminded of Robert Maynard Hutchins’ famous comment about academic politics in general: “Why are academic politics so vicious? Because the stakes are so small.” Climate science is no different, but the academic political issues surrounding climate science have been magnified by the political controversy surrounding global warming.

The conflict between the dissenters and the mainstream climate science community came to a head when the Climategate emails, the emails between mainstream climate scientists stolen by a hacker from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in November 2009, were released.[134] (We shall discuss the Climategate emails in detail in chapter XXI.) The scientific dissenters had been complaining for some time about two issues: lack of data sharing, and a peer review process which they felt was skewed against them. In addition, they felt that the IPCC assessment process ignored their work, even when it had been published in highly respected scientific journals such as Nature. The Climategate emails confirmed their suspicions, and as Judith Curry, a respected climate scientist who straddles the line between both camps, put it:

“In my opinion, … there are two broader issues raised by these emails that are impeding the public credibility of climate research: lack of transparency in climate data, and ‘tribalism’ in some segments of the climate research community that is impeding peer review and the assessment process.”[135]

And Roger Pielke, Sr., one of the more moderate of the scientific dissenters, wrote:

“… there are serious issues exposed by the emails — including the goal of these scientists to prevent proper scientific disclosure of their data, as well as to control what papers appear in the peer reviewed literature and climate assessments. The IPCC assessment, with which major policy decisions are being made, involves the individuals in the emails who have senior leadership positions.”[136]

Even before the Climategate emails were released, they had personal experience with a selective IPCC process with respect to what peer reviewed and published research to include in IPCC assessment reports. For example, in May, 2009, Roger Pielke, Sr. wrote:

“I was involved in reviewing some of the 1992 material for a Supplement report with respect to an earlier IPCC report. I was asked to be a contributing author of the 1995 IPCC and, in both cases, I sent in some of the research work on land use effects, how it affects the climate, things like that. Every one of my comments was ignored, so I told them to take my name off this report because I found that they were cherry-picking and excluding information. This continued with subsequent reports. …”

“The IPCC and the CCSP assessments, as well as the science statements completed by the AGU, AMS, and NRC, are completed by a small subset of climate scientists who are often the same individuals. This oligarchy has prevented science of the climate system to be properly communicated to policymakers. I don’t question their sincerity or their scientific credentials, but it is analogous to doing a study of a cancer drug, for example, and the company who is developing the drug does the assessment of its efficiency. Regardless of whether they are right or wrong, it is not the way things should be done.”[137]

We can see bruised ego in this, but we can also see that Pielke raises a serious issue.

Pielke relates an interesting vignette concerning himself and Michael Mann, certainly one of the most mainstream of climate scientists, and someone who was at the center of Pielke’s “oligarchy:”

“There was a report done in 2005 that I participated in titled Radiative Forcing of Climate Change – Expanding the Concept and Addressing Uncertainties. It was signed off by an interesting group of people; Michael Mann was one of the signatories of this report. I would urge you to read the executive summary of the findings, because it was basically ignored by the IPCC and the CCSP reports.”[138]

Since Michael Mann was one of the people accused of controlling “what papers appear in the peer reviewed literature and climate assessments,” and in fact had to face a formal inquiry about this at Penn State where he is a professor — he was cleared[139] — it looks like getting your stuff omitted cuts both ways.

So does prejudice against the scientific papers of dissenters go beyond the normal give and take of the scientific marketplace of ideas? Unfortunately, the conflict has become so divisive that it probably does. Here are a couple of recent examples:

1. John Christy and Roy Spencer recently published a very sober and informed review of a paper[140] on the “analysis of a single satellite’s impact on the rarely-used, multi-satellite deep-layer global temperature of the mid-troposphere or TMT.”[141] Interestingly, they chose to publish the review on Roy Spencer’s Global Warming blog. While the reasons for publishing their review there rather than in a more formal journal seem to come down to the fact that the paper under review took issue with their older version 5.4 UAH dataset, whereas they are about to release version 6.0, their review contains the telling statement, “With us shut out of the peer-review cycle it is easy to assume an underlying bias <against the UAH dataset> of the authors.”

2. Roy Spencer and William Braswell recently published a paper in the journal Remote Sensing about analyzing satellite data concerning the Earth’s energy balance — the amount of energy received from the Sun vs. the amount radiated back into space.[142] Here is what Kevin Trenberth and John Fasull said in their opening paragraph on the RealClimate blog about Spencer and Braswell’s paper:

” … it is evident that this paper did not get an adequate peer review. It should not have been published.”[143]

What got them so upset was:

“News releases and blogs on climate denier web sites have publicized the claim from the paper’s news release that ‘Climate models get energy balance wrong, make too hot forecasts of global warming’.”

OK guys, it’s fine to trash the paper, but don’t you think “It should not have been published” is a little excessive? Couldn’t you have left it with your first sentence:

“The hype surrounding a new paper by Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell is impressive (see for instance Fox News); unfortunately the paper itself is not.”

and then gone on to offer the excellent substantive criticisms that you did? We do get the message that you don’t agree with the conclusions of the paper.

I don’t want to leave the impression that excessive overreaction is the exclusive province of mainstream climate scientists. Many dissenters, Lindzen in particular, have burned a lot of bridges. Consider, for example, this paragraph from a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed signed by Lindzen among others:

“This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.”[144]

Talk about over the top!

We will let Roger Pielke, Sr. have the final word on this:

“It <the debate over global warming> has been dominated for a number of years by people at the poles — the most activist scientists emphasizing alarm, versus the most ardent skeptics saying we don’t have to do anything. … This recent controversy <Climategate> has opened the eyes of a lot of people to a much richer tapestry of views on climate policy that are out there, which I think is a good thing.”[145]

Chapter XVI. A pause in the temperature rise.

Starting in 2002, rapidly rising surface temperatures leveled off. The temperature may have started to rise again because global average land temperatures for May and June of this year (2012) were the highest on record.[146] We shall have to wait and see what the rest of the year brings for 2012, but from 2002 through 2011, the rise in global average surface temperatures did level off. More strikingly for climatologists, the heat content of the top 700 meters of the ocean stopped rising. Anti-global warming cranks have seized on this as evidence that global warming is all baloney,[146a] while the serious scientific dissenters have suggested strongly that this indicates something may be seriously wrong with mainstream computer climate models.[147]

In fact, the majority community can account for this. James Hansen and his coauthors discuss why the temperature curve has flattened out in NASA’s GISS Surface Temperature Analysis for 2011.[148] (GISS stands for the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, where James Hansen has done much of the work on computer modeling leading to the conclusion that we are warming the Earth.)

The figure in the sidebar at the right illustrates the effect the cyclical warming and cooling of the surface waters of the Pacific, El Nino and La Nina, has on temperature. Global mean surface temperature lags El Nino and La Nina by about 4 months. What has happened is:

“… the 1997-1998 “El Nino of the century” had a timing that maximized 1998 global temperature. In contrast, the 2011 global temperature was dragged down by a strong La Nina. Indeed, the strength of the current double-bottomed La Nina, being based on ocean surface temperature relative to base period 1951-1980, is under-emphasized by the long-term trend toward higher temperature.”[149]

In other words, unusually strong El Nino and La Nina temperature oscillations of the surface waters of the Pacific has caused the flattening of the temperature graph. When Hansen and his coauthors add in the variation in the Sun’s output caused by the Solar cycle (the measured cyclical variations in the Sun’s output associated with the sunspot cycle), they obtain an even closer fit. If you want to get a sense of the painstaking attention to detail in modern climatology, take a look at the actual GISS Surface Temperature Analysis report by Hansen et al.[150] It is very readable.

Even with the leveling off due to the strong La Nina, 2011 was the ninth warmest year on record, and 9 of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred in the 21st century,[151] so leveling off does not equal getting cooler.

What climate modelers cannot do, at least not yet, is predict the El Nino-La Nina cycle, or the longer Pacific Decadal Oscillation, for more than a year out. So the measured past values for the El Nino-La Nina oscillation have to be put into the models as inputs. This is an important unsolved problem in climate science.[152]

Because solar variability is frequently used by climate change doubters in an attempt to debunk CO2 as a cause for global warming, we need to say a bit about that too. It took until 1988 to make the incredibly difficult measurements necessary to pin down the actual extent of solar variability. It turns out that the energy radiated by the Sun varies by only one part in a thousand from solar minimum to solar maximum.[153] The effect of this amounts to only 15 years of human emissions of CO2 at the present rate.[154] So while solar variability contributes to short term changes in warming, it does not affect the long term trend.

It is possible that in the past, solar variations have been more extreme. For many years, a prolonged solar minimun associated with the unusually long period without sunspots called the Maunder Minimum was suspected as a cause of the Little Ice Age,[155] but we are now fairly sure that the Little Ice Age was caused by volcanic eruptions rather than solar variation.[156] What may have happened in the more distant past is unknown.[157]

Chapter XVII. The scientific majority.

If it is difficult being a scientific skeptic about global warming, it can be even more difficult being in the scientific majority. The experiences of some of the more prominent members of the majority track amazingly closely the experiences of scientists prominently involved in two other controversies which involved a conflict between the public good and the interests of a few large companies.

The first conflict was over getting lead out of paint and gasoline. In the 1970s, Dr. Herbert Needleman found a link between problems with brain development in children and lead contamination. He went further than mere academic research, as threatening as that was to the lead industry, and founded the Alliance to End Childhood Lead Poisoning. The lead industry sponsored a charge of scientific misconduct against Needleman with the National Institutes of Health. Needleman fought back, insisted that the case be heard in public, and was exonerated.[158] Michael Mann, who has perhaps suffered more from unjust accusations of scientific misconduct than anyone in the climate science mainstream, wrote that “Climate scientists … find kinship with Dr. Herbert Needleman.”[159] Like Needleman, Mann himself has been exonerated, in fact in no less than two scientific misconduct hearings at his university.[160]

The second conflict was over eliminating freon and other chlorofluorocarbons used in everything from propellants in hairspray bottles to refrigerants in airconditioners and refrigerators. In the 1974, Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina found that these compounds could damage the ozone layer which protects the Earth’s surface from ultraviolet rays. DuPont and other chemical companies struck back, and in 1975, “DuPont ran a full-page advertisement in The New York Times with the headline: ‘You Want the Ozone Question Answered One Way or Another. So Does Du Pont.’ It continued, ‘Before a valuable industry is hypothesized out of existence, more facts are needed.'”[161] In other words, DuPont and its allies followed the tobacco companies’ strategy of casting doubt on the science, the very strategy which has been used so effectively to delay our response to climate change. And they used the more modern strategy of personal attack. For example, “A trade journal likened him <Rowland> to a K.G.B. agent.”[162] Then the ozone hole was discovered in 1985, and the Montreal Protocol limiting the use of chlorofluorocarbons was signed two years later.[163] For their work, Dr.’s Rowland and Molina received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1995.[164]

Michael Mann can relate to this too. He has been subjected to unrelenting personal attacks.

Mann is one of he originators of the famous “hockey stick” graph (we’ll discuss that in the next chapter) and a 1997 Yale Ph.D. graduate.[165] His contributions to climatology go far beyond his 1998 and 1999 papers with Bradley and Hughes, where they first presented their hockey stick graph.[166] He was recently awarded the Oeschger medal by the European Geosciences Union, and the RealClimate blog has a wonderful appreciation of him and his work in their article, “Another well-deserved honor: Oeschger medal awarded to Michael Mann.”[167]

James Hansen was a planetary scientist at NASA and ranks as one of the discoverers of global warming. In fact, the discovery of global warming is one of the gifts NASA’s planetary exploration program has given us. To quote Spencer Weart at the American Institute of Physics:

“One of the groups that undertook the task <of analyzing the global surface temperature record> was in New York, funded by NASA and led by James Hansen. They understood that the work by Mitchell and others mainly described the Northern Hemisphere, since that was where the great majority of reliable observations lay. Sorting through the more limited temperature observations from the other half of the world, they got reasonable averages by applying the same mathematical methods that they had used to get average numbers in their computer models of climate. (After all, Hansen remarked, when he studied other planets he might judge the entire planet by the single station where a probe had landed.) In 1981, the group reported that ‘the common misconception that the world is cooling is based on Northern Hemisphere experience to 1970.'”[168]

While Hansen’s group found that temperatures up until 1980 had not been appreciably affected by CO2 concentrations, he and his group “boldly predicted that considering how fast CO2 was accumulating, by the end of the 20th century ‘carbon dioxide warming should emerge from the noise level of natural climatic variability.'”[169] This happened faster than anyone expected, and by 1988 Hansen was ready to declare that our climate was warming due to greenhouse gasses. As Newsweek’s Sharon Begley describes the scene:

“It was 98 degrees in Washington on Thursday, June 23, 1988, and climate change was bursting into public consciousness. The Amazon was burning, wildfires raged in the United States, crops in the Midwest were scorched and it was shaping up to be the hottest year on record worldwide. A Senate committee, including Gore, had invited NASA climatologist James Hansen to testify about the greenhouse effect, and the members were not above a little stagecraft. The night before, staffers had opened windows in the hearing room. When Hansen began his testimony, the air conditioning was struggling, and sweat dotted his brow. It was the perfect image for the revelation to come. He was 99 percent sure, Hansen told the panel, that ‘the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.'”[170]

His 1988 model ran “a little warm compared to the real world,” which is not too surprising considering that the models used back then had to greatly oversimplify the behavior of the ocean.[171] Our computer climate models have been greatly improved since, and our current models (many of which Hansen contributed to) do a good job of predicting climate. The RealClimate blog has two excellent rundowns on how well Hansen’s 1988 model did, and how much better our current models are.[172] The figure in the sidebar to the right illustrates how the various measured temperature curves (colored curves) go right down the middle of the 95% probability range for the IPCC model predictions (black curve).

Hansen has been at the forefront of those warning about global warming ever since 1988. The George W. Bush administration tried to shut him up, but he wouldn’t keep quiet.[173]

James Hansen, though now retired, is still publishing and doing valuable scientific work. In fact, in the last chapter, we quoted from NASA’s GISS Surface Temperature Analysis for 2011 which he coauthored.

Part IV. The hockey stick wars.
How a simple scientific graph showing the unprecedented temperature rise in the 20th century became the battleground for the dispute over global warming.

Chapter XVIII. The opening salvo in the hockey stick wars.

It is odd that most of recent history, from the Age of Discovery and the Scientific Revolution through the first half of the Industrial Revolution, has taken place in the midst of a minor ice age, the Little Ice Age to be exact. The period before that, roughly spanning the Age of Chivalry, took place during an unusually warm period, the Medieval Warm Period. Just to orient you, the Medieval Warm Period was a period of relative warmth lasting from about 950 to 1250 AD, and the Little Ice Age was a much colder period lasting from about 1350 to 1850. Temperature reconstructions before 1850, when thermometers became common, are the domain of paleoclimatology. It is not unusual in anything beginning with the prefix “paleo” for reconstructions to differ, and paleoclimatic reconstructions are no different. (Did you know that Yale’s Richard Prum has discovered that Tyrannosaurus rex had feathers?[174] I’ll bet that reconstruction differs from what you thought you knew about paleontology.) The “spaghetti graph” in the sidebar on the right shows ten different reconstructions of the climate over the past 2,000 years, and while you can see that they differ, you can also see that they generally agree that the Medieval Warm Period was warm, the Little Ice Age was cold, and the late 20th century (when we have good records) was by far the warmest of all.

It is also odd that the the greatest controversy in the political battle over global warming has swirled around a seemingly arcane question from the field of paleoclimatology: exactly how warm was the Medieval Warm period compared to the present day? The climatologist Michael Mann, a 1997 Yale Ph.D. graduate, has found himself at the very center of this storm.[175] The dispute has become so vicious that he has been accused of lying, deliberately faking data, deliberately and falsely manipulating data, and hiding his nefarious activities by refusing to share data and procedures with his critics. He has even been investigated for fraud by the (Republican) Virginia Attorney General because he was partially supported by Virginia taxpayer funds while supposedly doing all of the above.[176] To listen to his conservative Republican critics, Michael Mann could give Billie The Kid a run for his money in the bad guy department.

So what did he do? In 1999, he and his coauthors, Raymond S. Bradley, and Malcolm K. Hughes, published a reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperatures, [177] containing the graph shown in the sidebar on the right. To quote Spencer Weart at the American Institute of Physics:

“The graph … was widely reprinted and made a strong impression. It was dubbed the “hockey stick” because it displayed a flat thousand-year trend followed by a sharp upward turn.”

“The ‘hockey stick’ graph was prominently featured in a report the IPCC issued in 2001. The image immediately became a powerful tool for people who were trying to raise public awareness of global warming — to the regret of some seasoned climate experts who recognized that, like all science at the point of publication, the graph was preliminary and uncertain. The dedicated minority who denied that there was any global warming problem promptly attacked the calculations.”[178]

So most of the political controversy over the science of global warming has centered, not on climate modeling and computer predictions which most of the critics like Sarah Palin and Senator James Inhofe can’t understand, but on paleoclimatology. For example, when Sarah Palin accuses “leading climate ‘experts'” of having “deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals,” and then one sentence later says, “some scientists had strong doubts about the accuracy of estimates of temperatures from centuries ago, estimates used to back claims that more recent temperatures are rising at an alarming rate,”[179] she is talking about one paper, and perhaps just one graph, in paleoclimatology. (She is also talking about the “Climategate” emails and conflating two emails 10 years apart. We will discuss that later in chapter XXI.) When Sarah Palin talks about being “without trustworthy science” as an excuse for doing nothing about global warming,[180] she is talking about paleoclimatology, not physics and space science based climate modeling and computer predictions. And when Senator James Inhofe says “the hockey stick is shattered beyond repair” and accuses IPCC scientists of hiding “the decline in temperatures,” he is talking about a graph from paleoclimatology (and again, conflating Climategate emails 10 years apart).[181] It is almost as silly as having a knock down drag out political fight over whether Tyrannosaurus rex had feathers, except that it is happening now and has delayed action on climate change for over two decades.

So let’s cut to the chase. Mann, Bradley, and Hughes’ original hockey stick graph had ERROR BARS, as you can see. The yellow shaded area are error bars. What they were asserting when they published those error bars is that there is a 95% chance that the actual temperature curve for the past 1,000 years lies within the yellow shaded area, with the most likely curve the one shown in black in the middle. All of the serious scientific challenges to their work by global warming skeptics have produced results that lie within their error bars, typically just a bit more than half way up the yellow shaded area from their curve. This means that there is almost a 14% probability that they obtained their divergent results simply as a result of chance. (13.6% of normally distributed data will lie between 1 and 2 standard deviations above the mean.[182] What the naysayers NEVER manage to mention is that Mann, Bradley, and Hughes original hockey stick curve, which we have reproduced here, has error bars. Tsk! Tsk!

In fields like extra-galactic astronomy, where measurements are almost as hard to come by as in paleoclimatology, disputes over results are not uncommon. They usually end after the conference with everyone going out to the bar to drink and argue, with as much friendly argument about important stuff like who’s better, Sox or Yanks, as about science. Of course, academics being academics, it is not unheard of for disputes to become bitter and personal. What is unique about the hockey stick controversy is the amount of venom developed by both sides. But before going into that, it is worth talking about the most striking and successful criticism, the one in 2005 by Canadian statisticians Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick.[183] This was really the first salvo in the “hockey stick wars.”

What McIntyre and McKitrick did was, first, show that the version of the statistical method used by Mann, Bradley, and Hughes can produce hockey stick shaped graphs around 30% of the time with random data, vs only 15% of the time with what they asserted was a more standard version of the method. They used this to dispute Mann, Bradley, and Hughes 1998 reconstruction of climate back to 1400.[184] (That’s just like the 1999 one a year later, but it only goes back to 1400.) Specifically, using what they claimed to be the correct statistical method, they claimed that the climate in 1400 was as warm as in the 1980s. There is real dispute over this, and if you want a readable account, I recommend the “Dummies Guide to the Latest ‘Hockey Stick’ Controversy” in the RealClimate blog.[185] If you read this, you need to bear in mind that if you use the analysis recommended in the RealClimate blog with 5 or 6 principal components, you include three so called “climate proxies” involving tree ring data, but if you only use 2 principal components as McIntyre and McKitrick did, you omit the tree ring data. (If you really want to know what “principal components” are, consult the excellent article in the Wikipedia.[186])

The statistical result of McIntyre and McKitric is actually very interesting as abstract statistics, but the real issue revolves around the use of “tree ring proxies.” Take away the tree ring proxies and the hockey stick goes away. In other words, it is a data problem, not a statistical problem, and the data problem is actually quite understandable. Tree rings, the rings you see in the wood if you look at a tree stump, are laid down year-by-year, and they tend to be wider in warm moister years but narrower in colder drier years. Some extremely long lived trees, like bristlecone pines, provide continuous records of climate over periods of 1,000 years or more. A record obtained from counting tree rings and their widths is called a “tree ring chronology.” It is called a “chronology” because the tree rings count years, year by year. Because the record of tree ring widths is correlated with temperature and rainfall, tree ring chronologies are “climate proxies.” We can’t get direct measurements of temperature or rainfall in the years 1400-1450, say, because people back then didn’t have thermometers or rain gauges, but we can use tree ring chronologies to get an idea of what the climate was like. Other climate proxies are, for example, the isotope ratios from ice recovered from boreholes in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets which we have discussed previously, and to which, as you will remember, Yale’s Karl Turekian contributed so much.

The first problem, as McIntyre and McKitric pointed out, was that some of the tree ring sequences Mann, Bradley, and Hughes used only had 1 or 2 trees 600 years ago. In the biological sciences, where there can be substantial variability in the responses of living organisms, there is a saying: “One mice is no meeses.” For the tree ring data from 600 years ago, Mann, Bradley, and Hughes violated that dictum. The second issue, as McIntyre and McKitrick again pointed out, was that tree ring sequences respond to precipitation as well as temperature.[187] But the most serious issue, as McIntyre and McKitrick again pointed out, was that during the 20th century tree rings did not behave the way they did in past centuries. In fact, “tree rings fail to record” “the LATE 20th century warming.” Stephen McIntyre has a rather polemical account of this, where he unfortunately takes every opportunity to trash Michael Mann, on his Climate Audit blog[188] However his blog piece does give a clear introduction to the problem, and it does include scientific references.

Those in the majority in the climate science community will likely hate me for saying this (in the unlikely event that they read this piece) but I have to say something nice about McIntyre and McKitrick: their two papers are rather good. Ultimately, I think their conclusions about past climate are wrong, but the papers raised important issues. However, the greatest defect of their papers was that they failed to talk about the ERROR BARS in Mann, Bradley, and Hughes graph. Tsk! Tsk!

Chapter XIX. Update on the current situation.

Here is a brief update on the the accuracy of the Mann, Bradley, and Hughes temperature reconstruction and other issues. In 2000, Huang, Pollack, and Shen used borehole temperatures to reconstruct past temperatures. (Boreholes, that is deep holes in the ground, preserve a record of past temperatures.) They concluded that temperatures in the past 500 years had been markedly colder than Mann, Bradley, and Hughes had estimated, and that the temperature increase from 500 years ago until now was larger than Mann, Bradley, and Hughes had reported.[189] In 2004, Hans von Storch and coworkers married computer climate modeling to reconstructions of past temperatures, and came to a similar conclusion. They concluded that either the “climate sensitivity” (to changes in climate forcing factors) was on the low end of possible values, or Mann, Bradley, and Hughes had underestimated cooling during the Little Ice Age by a factor of 2.[190] It is odd, considering McIntyre and McKitrick’s vociferous criticisms of Mann, Bradley, and Hughes hockey stick curve, that some later careful paleoclimatic work, using new and different methods, came to the OPPOSITE conclusion: that Mann, Bradley, and Hughes had UNDERESTIMATED the cooling in past centuries.

In 2003, Mann and Jones extended Mann, Bradley, and Hughes temperature reconstruction curve to the last 2,000 years. Though the reconstruction was based on more climate proxy data and different statistical methods than in 1999, the curve from 1,000 AD to the present tracked the 1999 curve almost exactly.[190a]

As we have already observed, it is not unusual in anything beginning with the prefix “paleo” for reconstructions to differ, and in 2008 we saw another good example of this. In 2008 Michael Mann and a number of coauthors (including Bradley and Hughes) produced two new temperature reconstructions dating back to 300 AD using a greatly expanded network of proxies. One, using the same statistical method as in 2003, resulted in a curve that almost precisely tracked the results from 1999 and 2003.[190b] However the second reconstruction, using a new statistical method called the “‘error-in-variables (EIV) regression method,” produced a new curve showing warmer temperatures during Roman times, the Medieval Warm Period, and the early part of the Little Ice Age.[190c] (Ironically, their result for the decade around 1400 was not that much different from McIntyre and McKitrick’s reconstruction.) Mann and his coauthors now believe that they:

“could arguably take these two reconstructions as end members that bracket the possible range for peak NH <Northern Hemisphere> mean Medieval warmth, lying somewhere between 0.4 degrees C colder and and 0.4 degrees C warmer than the modern reference period (1961–1990) mean, but still exceeded by the most recent decadal warming.”[190d]

In a second article in 2009, Mann and his coauthors were able to determine the SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION of temperatures from 500 AD to the present using the EIV method. They found that:

“The Medieval period is found to display warmth that matches or exceeds that of the past decade in some regions, but which falls well below recent levels globally. … The coldest temperatures of the Little Ice Age are observed over the interval 1400 to 1700 C.E., with greatest cooling over the extratropical Northern Hemisphere continents.”[190e]

They go on to say that the greatest warmth during the Medieval Warm Period occurred in “the North Atlantic, Southern Greenland, the Eurasian Arctic, and parts of North America,” whereas “central Eurasia, northwestern North America, and (with less confidence) parts of the South Atlantic, exhibit anomalous coolness.”[190f] So the Medieval Warm Period, despite its warmth in some regions, was not a global phenomenon as present day warming is. Put another way, a significant part of the warming during the Medieval Warm Period was due to a redistribution of heat, primarily by ocean currents, rather than a general increase in heat over the whole planet. Likewise, the Little Ice Age was characterized by “by pronounced cooling over the Northern Hemisphere continents, but with some regions—e.g., parts of the Middle East, central North Atlantic, Africa, and isolated parts of the United States, tropical Eurasia, and the extratropical Pacific Ocean—displaying warmth comparable to that of the present day.”[190g]

Climate change doubters have responded to these revisions of the famous hockey stick curve by claiming that climate scientists can’t even get their story straight, so why should we trust any of their predictions? One of the best replies to this sort of argument was made by Bob Ward, writing about the misrepresentation by a British tabloid of a recent (2012) climate science paper:

“Somewhat predictably, the press release <for the paper> was picked up by climate change ‘sceptics’, who are obsessed with the Medieval Warm Period in the profoundly mistaken belief that if it can be proved that global average temperature was higher than today about 1,000 years ago, it will overturn the many lines of compelling evidence that emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are causing the Earth to warm now.”[190h] (Italics added)

He goes on to say that of course, it wouldn’t. But what these revisions best illustrate is the ongoing, self correcting nature of science. What we know today may need correction tomorrow, though the general outline usually remains the same. Writing in the RealClimate blog, Gavin Schmidt summed this up well:

“What makes science different from politics? … the difference is that with time scientists can actually make progress on problems, they don’t just get stuck in an endless back and forth of the same talking points.”[190i]

Of course, the 2008 — 2009 revisions of the famous hockey stick curve by Michael Mann and his coauthors also illustrate that the statistics underlying these reconstructions are simply NOT robust. Where there is lots of data, from about 1600 on, the curves all agree quite closely. (You would expect that different statistical methods would give slightly different answers, and that, in fact, is what happens.) Where data is much sparser, before 1600, the temperature reconstruction curves diverge. Clearly, what we need to resolve these differences is not so much fancy new statistical methods but more and better data, and in their 2008 and 2009 papers, Michael Mann and his coauthors point to the necessity of improving proxy-climate networks for this very purpose.

This year (2012), there was an important technical advance in tree ring dating which may help do just that. The method was introduced by Jan Esper and his coauthors, and is called “N-scan.”[190j] It uses “maximum latewood density” (MXD) rather than tree-ring width to gauge past temperatures. (Maximum latewood density refers to the density of the last few cell rows of a tree-ring as determined by photomicrographs and X-ray densitometry.) The first advantage of Esper et. al.’s method is that it almost completely eliminates the “divergence problem,” that is the problem with tree-ring data that it has not responded to recent warming since 1980 as it did in the past. The second advantage is that it more readily captures low frequency (long term warming and cooling) signals. The one disadvantage is that it may only apply to Fennoscandian (high latitude) forests. Stay tuned for further progress.

Though we may have made scientific progress since 1999, we haven’t made much progress in the POLITICAL global warming debate, and trashing serious scientific papers studying paleoclimate continues to this day. This is especially true when they attract the attention of the global warming doubters by offering evidence that CO2 is important for global warming. A recent example is the reception received by a paper in Nature by Shakun and his coauthors[191] from some of the global warming doubters’ blogs. Shakun and his coauthors addressed the puzzling problem of why increases in CO2 concentrations lagged Antarctic warming at the end of the last Ice Age. As Chris Colose explains on the RealClimate blog:

“Variations in the <the Earth’s> orbit cause opposite changes in the intensity of solar radiation during the summer between the Northern and Southern hemisphere, yet ice age terminations seem synchronous between hemispheres. This could be explained by the role of the greenhouse gas CO2, which varies in abundance in the atmosphere in sync with the glacial cycles and thus acts as a ‘globaliser’ of glacial cycles, as it is well-mixed throughout the atmosphere. However, if CO2 plays this role it is surprising that climatic proxies indicate that Antarctica seems to have warmed prior to the Northern Hemisphere, yet glacial cycles follow in phase with Northern insolation (‘INcoming SOLar radiATION’) patterns, raising questions as to what communication mechanism links the hemispheres.”[192]

What Shakun and his coauthors did was analyse “80 proxy records from around the globe (generally with resolutions better than 500 years)” and “evaluate the changes occurring during different time periods in order to characterize the spatial and temporal structure of the deglacial evolution.”[193]

This provided support for the hypothesis that fresh water incursions from melting ice in the Northern Hemisphere — the ice began to melt because the Northern Hemisphere summer insolation increased due to orbital changes — caused a change in Atlantic circulation patterns which distributed Northern Hemisphere heat to the Southern Hemisphere and started Antarctic warming. It also pinned down the sequence of events, and showed that most of the global warming occurred AFTER CO2 began to rise. And this is what got the global warming doubters so upset, because Shakun and his coauthors concluded “this means the global greenhouse effect had an important role in driving up global temperatures and bringing the planet out of the last Ice Age.”[194]

“The doubters reacted as though Shakun and his coauthors had “thrown down the gauntlet.” To give but one example, a piece in former television meteorologist and global warming doubter Anthony Watts blog, “Watts Up With That?,” begins by saying, “Willis Eschenbach has dug deeply into the data used in the paper and shredded the conclusions in it … I thought I’d take a look at some of the assumptions and misconceptions that paper <Shakun, et. al.> is built upon.”[195]. One of the posts by Willis Eschenbach is titled, “Shakun Redux: Master tricksed us! I told you he was tricksy!” and begins by saying, “The quote above is from Lord of the Rings, an exchange between Gollum and Smeagol, and it encapsulates my latest results from looking into the Shakun 2012 paper …”[196] What is wrong with this is comparing Shakun with the pathetic and evil Gollum, a creature in J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings, who is consumed by desire for the “One Ring,” the “Ring of Power.” In the Tolkien novels, the malignant influence of the Ring has “twisted his body and mind, and prolonged his life well beyond its natural limits.” He is so evil that he brings prey to the giant spider Shelob, and his “malice gives him a strength hardly to be imagined.”[197]

If you read Willis Eschenbach’s beginning statement carefully, you realize that actually he is placing himself in the position of Gollum, and Shakun in the position of the hero Frodo. This is probably NOT what he intended, but his typical reader will, most likely, simply respond to the juxtaposition of Shakun and the evil Gollum. Eschenbach may have thought he was being clever, but mentioning in one breath Shakun and a creature who is Tolkien’s embodiment of the banality and corruption of evil is simply out of place. When the global warming doubters complain about the “politicization of science,” they should look to their own writings.

Chapter XX. A personal view.

Here is my personal view: I learned at my Mother’s knee about Eric the Red’s Viking colonization of Greenland, and Leif Ericson’s voyages to America 500 years before Columbus. (Mother’s side of the family was Swedish, so we heard a lot about the Vikings.) I also learned about the tragic end of the Norse colonists in Greenland, trapped in the ice by a rapidly cooling climate. The last Norse ship to sail to Greenland and return was in 1402. The last written record (they were a surprisingly literate society) dates from 1408; it is the record of a wedding. What happened thereafter we don’t know. All we know is that several Norwegian and Danish ships tried to sail to Greenland later and were turned back by the ice. In the 1540s, an Icelandic ship blown off course reached Greenland and did find the Greenlander Norse, or more precisely one of them, lying where he died on the beach, with his rusted knife not far away.[198]

McIntyre and McKitrick use their studies to claim that the climate in the early 1400s was as warm as today, or at least that it probably was as warm as today. The global warming doubters have used this to claim that we can’t trust the IPCC scientists, and we don’t have anything to worry about because the climate 600 years ago was warm just like today. But clearly the climate in Greenland in the early 1400s was very cold, much colder than now. It is justifiably held to be a great mistake in climatology to use cold in one part of the world to claim that the climate was cold everywhere, but I feel that the mute testimony of the ancient Norse shows the falsity of the claim that everything was warm and balmy in the early 1400s.

However, whatever the uncertainties surrounding the paleoclimate record, the plain fact of the matter is that the instrumental temperature record, the record of temperatures measured since 1850 by thermometers, shows a warming of unparalleled abruptness. And the computer climate models predict that this steep warming will continue for so long as we continue to pump excess carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses into the air. Uncertainty about the paleoclimate record is no excuse for not starting to act on global warming now.

Part V. The climategate scandal.
Embarrassing emails revealed, distortions by enemies, the fight really gets dirty, and a welcome breath of sanity.

Chapter XXI. Climategate.

Climategate refers to a hacking incident discovered on Tuesday, November 17, 2009,[199] in which a large trove of email messages between various members of the climate science community were stolen from a server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia.[200] All 160 megabytes or so of the Climategate emails were posted on a Russian server and promptly mirrored on several servers in the United States.[201]

The Climategate emails covered the period from 1996 to 2009, and some of it appeared to be extremely damaging to the reputations of prominent mainstream climate scientists like Phil Jones, the head of the CRU, and Michael Mann. Much of the what follows is taken from two excellent articles by Fred Pearce in The Guardian, “Emails Reveal Strenuous Efforts by Climate Scientists to ‘Censor’ Their Critics,”[202] and “How the ‘Climategate’ Scandal is Bogus and Based on Climate Sceptics’ Lies.”[203]

The two most repeated quotes from the Climategate emails were taken from two emails 10 years apart. In the first one, Phil Jones says on November 16, 1999:

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”[204]

and in the second one ten years later, Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, writes:

“The fact is we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”[205]

Sarah Palin and Sen. James Inhofe (R. Oklahoma), among many others, have falsely conflated these two messages, and accused the climate science community of fraudulently attempting to “hide the decline in temperatures.”[206] In fact, when the the first message from Phil Jones was sent, the previous year had been the warmest on record, so there was no question about a “decline” in temperatures. What Jones was referring to was the anomalous decline in tree ring widths after 1980 when the climate was warming, and his “trick” was to use the real temperatures from the instrumental temperature record from 1981 onwards on the front cover illustration of the report he was preparing, rather than tree ring sequence climate proxies.[207] Nor did Jones actually attempt to hide anything in the report he was preparing for the World Meteorological Organization. The use of instrumental temperature records in the controversial front cover illustration is explicitly mentioned on the front cover description on page 2.[208]

Ten years later, in 2009, Kevin Trenberth was referring to a leveling off of temperatures since 1998, but he certainly wasn’t trying to hide anything. As Fred Pearce puts it in The Guardian:

“Nothing was hidden. For months, Trenberth had been discussing publicly his concerns about the inability of scientists to pin down the precise reason for the ‘absence of warming’ since 1998. He had argued in the journal Current Opinion in Environmental Stability in early 2009 that ‘it is not a sufficient explanation to say that a cool year [he had 2008 in mind] is due to natural variability (pdf)’. Such explanations ‘do not provide the physical mechanisms involved’. This was the ‘travesty’ he was referring to in his email. He wanted scientists to do better. He said the best way to improve the explanation and make it more specific was to make better measurements of the planet’s energy budget. This would allow scientists to distinguish between any changes in the greenhouse effect, which would result in more or less heat overall in the atmosphere and oceans, and short-term natural cycles of variability, which merely redistribute heat. He was debating this with the former head of the Climatic Research Unit Tom Wigley, who took a different view. But their genuine scientific discussion has, since the publication of the emails online, been hijacked by ignorant or malicious invective.”[209]

It is not that the climate science majority were angels; they did say some extremely inappropriate and damaging things, and they may even have broken a few laws. Here is a sampling from the Climategate emails:

1. They suggested ousting a journal editor who published scientific papers by climate change skeptics who disagreed with them:

Tom Wigley to Michael Mann in 2005 after Geophysical Research Letters published one of McIntyre and McKitrick’s papers challenging the statistical methods Mann had used in his hockey stick papers: “This is truly awful … If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU <American Geophysical Union> channels to get him ousted.”[210]

Now disputes with editors are not unheard of in science, though usually they involve not publishing worthy papers rather than publishing stuff that people disagree with. For example, in my own field of mathematics, four prominent mathematicians in 2007 strongly protested the decision by the editors of the Journal of the American Mathematical Society to reject a paper which solved a deep 50 year old problem in lattice theory.[211] However, it certainly IS unusual, and a bit over the top, to talk about trying to get an editor fired as Tom Wigley did. It turns out that the editor in question, Saiers, filled out his complete term with no problems. In the aftermath of the Climategate emails, his comment on the incident was, “Wigley and Mann were too keen to conclude that I was in league with the climate-change sceptics. This kerfuffle could have been avoided if the parties involved would have done more to control their imaginations.”[212]

2. They suggested boycotting a journal that published papers with which they disagreed:

In 2003 when Climate Research published a paper[213] which asserted that the 20th century had not been the warmest in the past 1,000 years, the climate scientists feared that “a ‘coup’ had taken place, and that one editor in particular, a New Zealander called Chris de Freitas, was fast-tracking sceptical papers onto its pages.”[214] Their solution was to threaten a boycot of the journal.

Michael Mann to others in 2003: “This was the danger of always criticising the sceptics for not publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. Obviously, they found a solution to that – take over a journal!”[215]

Michael Mann to others in 2003: “I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues… to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.”[216]

This certainly seems over the top. Couldn’t Mann & Co. simply have IGNORED the paper, you ask? After all, in many fields lots of substandard stuff finds its way into the literature and is soon mercifully forgotten. Well, that’s what Michael Mann wanted to do at first, but after the paper was read into the Congressional Record by politicians intent on stopping action on global warming, he decided he had to do something. The next thing he tried to do was also quite reasonable: he assembled a group of prominent climate scientists who sent a negative report to Climate Research’s editorial board. The report examined the scientific substance of the paper and concluded that Soon and Baliunas had “cherry picked” their data.[217] Normally, when something like this happens, the editors arrange to have the negative comments edited (and perhaps toned down) and then published. But Climate Science never got back to Mann. It was only AFTER none of the more reasonable alternatives had produced any result that Mann resorted to suggesting a boycot of the journal.

What eventually happened was that several of the other editors became so upset at Chris de Freitas that they resigned in protest. We know this by THEIR account, even though the climate doubters have accused Michael Mann of engineering their departure. This forced Chris de Freitas to resign.[218]

Something similar happened recently in a field completely unrelated to climate science. We have already described the case of Peter Duesberg, the distinguished biological scientist and AIDS contrarian who managed to kill hundreds of thousands of people by refusing to admit he was wrong in the face of OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE, and convinced the President of South Africa to follow his ideas. Well, he and “a handful of other authors put together a paper that argued that the populations of African countries shouldn’t be increasing if the HIV infection rates and mortality are what they claimed to be.” They argued that this was evidence that “HIV is just a harmless virus that justs takes advantage of AIDS to infect immunocompromised individuals,” and got the paper published in an Elsevier journal called “Medical Hypotheses.” As John Timmer in Ars Technica describes it, “Complaints poured in to Elsevier, … which decided to act. It ordered its editor to institute peer review; when he refused, he was fired. Duesberg’s paper, along with another from a similar group based at the University of Firenze in Italy, were withdrawn from the literature. Many of the other people involved with the journal were asked to step down and complied.”[219] Of course, in this case the PUBLISHER forced changes and resignations, whereas in the case of Climate Research the resignations (except for de Freitas) were voluntary in protest of de Freitas’s actions.

The Climate Research “kerfuffle” surely had an unfortunate chilling effect on expressions of scientific skepticism about the dangers of global warming, but Michael Mann’s actions seem to have been justified. This has been validated by the conclusions of the final Penn State investigative report on the Climategate affair: Michael Mann was exonerated.[220]

3. They talked about discrediting an opponent’s doctoral dissertation.

Patrick J. Michaels is a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute. He is also a climate skeptic with real scientific credentials; he holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. He is not popular with the mainstream climate science community, and the Climategate emails show how much Pat Michaels managed to get under the skin of Messrs. Mann, Jones, etc.

Andrew Revkin reports in the New York Times that, “some messages mused about discrediting <Michaels> by challenging the veracity of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin by claiming he knew his research was wrong. ‘This shows these are people willing to bend rules and go after other people’s reputations in very serious ways,’ he <Michaels> said.” At least, that’s Pat Michaels’ account.[221]

There seems to be no evidence that anyone actually carried out any of these actions, but, to be honest, going after someone’s doctoral dissertation is one of the dirtiest, most underhanded things you can do in academia. I do know of a few cases. For example, at one of Central Connecticut State University’s sister campuses, there was a very unpopular university president who installed his wife in a high administrative position, where she proceded to prove her utter incompetence. A disgruntled anonymous faculty member checked the president’s doctoral dissertation and found large parts of it had been plagiarized. Goodbye Dr. Unpopular President, and goodbye to his doctorate and his academic career.

But we must remember that what the Climategate emailers can truthfully say in their defense is that they didn’t actually do anything; they were just grousing.

By the way, Patrick Michaels is no saint himself. Back in 1989 he had published an op-ed in the Washington Post “warning of ‘apocalyptic environmentalism,’ which he called ‘the most popular new religion to come along since Marxism’.” He also was paid more that $165,000 by “the coal industry’s Western Fuels Association … to produce a newsletter called World Climate Report, which has regularly trashed mainstream climate science.” And Michaels only revealed World Climate Report’s funding source “at a 1995 hearing in Minnesota on coal-fired power plants.”[222]

And in the aftermath of Climategate, he (Michaels) “published a long op-ed piece in the DC Examiner, slamming Mann for an email quote about keeping sceptics’ papers out of the IPCC report ‘even if we have to redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is’. Michaels is an old foe of Mann’s, but this genuinely damaging statement was actually made by Jones.”[223]

4. Which brings us to one of the two the most damaging items in the Climategate emails, the way Phil Jones suggested keeping results in the peer-reviewed literature OUT OF THE IPCC ASSESSMENT REPORTS:

Phil Jones to Michael Mann in July, 2004, subject “HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL”: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [TRENBERTH] and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”[224]

The context for this was, as Fred Pearce explains in The Guardian, the “bad blood” over the 2003 Soon and Baliunas paper combined with a paper by McKitrick and Pat Michaels which “returned to an old sceptics’ theme. It claimed to find urbanisation dominating global warming trends on land.” Unfortunately for the climate scientists involved in the email exchanges, “Jones and Trenberth, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, had recently become joint lead authors for a key chapter in the next IPCC assessment report, called AR4. They had considerable power over what went into those chapters, and to have ruled them out in such a manner would have been a clear abuse of the IPCC process.”[225]

Reaction to this has been harsh. In an interview in the Wall Street Journal, for example, Hans von Storch, one of the most respected of climate scientists, said Phil Jones and the other East Anglia researchers “violated a fundamental principle of science. … They built a group to do gatekeeping, which is also totally unacceptable. … They play science as a power game.”[226]

Phil Jones email message reinforced the IPCC “oligarchy” claims made by moderate global warming scientific skeptics like Roger Pielke, Sr.[227] But far worse, Jones’ email reinforced the intemperate “oligarchy” charges made by the extreme critics of climate science.

5. Phil Jones suggested deleting email messages subject to British Freedom of Information Act requests:

Phil Jones to Michael Mann, May 29, 2008: “Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.”[228]

“Gene” in the message is Eugene Wahl, and he denies deleting any email messages improperly. But, he confirms receiving “the email from CRU as forwarded by Dr. Mann.” He says “the forwarded message came without any additional comment from Dr. Mann; there was no request from him to delete emails.”[229]

Phil Jones also denies that any email messages were deleted, and he was cleared of this and all other charges charges by a Parliamentary committee and the Russell panel. But oddly enough, the Russell panel gave him a slap on the wrist for the “Nature trick” email. To quote the New York Times, “The Russell panel concluded that the data procedure he used was acceptable in principle, but should have been described more fully, and his failure to do so had produced a ‘misleading’ graphic.”[230] As we have seen, he did in fact reveal exactly what he did when he blended two datasets for the hockey stick graph on the cover of the 1999 WMO report.

Others were not so generous. George Monbiot, an ardent advocate of action on global warming, wrote in regard to deleting emails:

“He <Phil Jones> seems to be advocating potentially criminal activity. Even if no other message had been hacked, this would be sufficient to ensure his resignation as head of the unit.”[231]

After Jones was cleared, Monbiot apologized for reasons I don’t understand. I will leave it to the many lawyers in our class to decide whether Phil Jones would have fared as well had he sent that email message about deleting documents subject to an FOI request in the United States. Would he, and possibly Michael Mann for forwarding the email to “Gene,” have faced conspiracy charges, whether or not any messages were deleted? I hope not, but I do know that getting involved in any way with an attempt to destroy documents subject to discovery or an FOI request is a REALLY BAD IDEA.

Chapter XXII. Why Climategate happened.

As we have seen, the members of the mainstream climate science community had been subject to unrelenting accusations of politically motivated fraud, adherence to “apocalyptic environmentalism,” and comparisons to Marxists and eugenicists. Papers which they felt were deeply flawed were read into the Congressional Record and trumpeted by the Republican political opponents of action on global warming as evidence that nothing should be done. Naturally, they were not eager to share their data and methods with their critics, such as Stephen McIntyre. As Phil Jones said in an interview with the New Scientist before the Climategate scandal broke, “McIntyre has no interest in deriving his own global temperature series. He just wants to pick holes in those that do. I’m getting pretty fed up with this. It is time-wasting”[232]

Shortly before the Climategate scandal broke, FOI requests were threatening to bury the people at the CRU: “Between 24 July and 29 July of this year <2009>, CRU received 58 freedom of information act requests from McIntyre and people affiliated with Climate Audit.”[233]

So refusing to share was understandable, but, as it turned out, a big mistake. The Parliamentary and Russell reports criticized the CRU scientists for their refusal even as they cleared them of wrongdoing.[234] In one telling episode reported by the New Scientist, Phil Jones resisted FOI requests “from Douglas Keenan, a financial statistician turned independent scientist, for the location of Chinese temperature readings used in a paper co-authored by Jones 17 years before. Keenan won his FOI request and said it showed the data was flawed because some of the stations had been moved by the Chinese scientist who ran them. He said Jones’s reluctance to share the data was evidence of fraud.”[235] In response, “Tom Wrigley emailed Jones saying it would have been easier to admit the data’s shortcomings. ‘Why, why, why did you not simply say this right from the start.'”[236]

As a result of Climategate, many mainstream climate scientists such as Michael Mann are making their raw data and computer programs freely available.[237] What might have happened if the mainstream climate science community had simply made their data and computer programs freely available back in 2002 or 2003? Would much of the acrimony surrounding the global warming debate have vanished? Or might nothing have changed because Michael Mann was right when he initially described Climategate as “a high-level orchestrated smear campaign to distract the public about the nature of the climate change problem.”[238] History and paleoclimatology have this in common: we can’t run the experiment over again to see what might happen differently.

Chapter XXIII. Fighting dirty.

The majority climate science community and those advocating action to curtail global warming suffer from a fundamental disadvantage: they are not nearly as good at fighting dirty as their opponents.

For example, AFTER the Climategate emails had been made public, Michael Schlesinger, a climate scientist who unfortunately is at my graduate alma mater, the University of Illinois, sent out a message threatening New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin with “the “Big Cutoff” for various transgressions in his reporting from the Copenhagen conference. Here is the December 6, 2009 email, more or less in full, from Roger Pielke, Jr.’s blog:[239]

“Andy:”

“Copenhagen prostitutes?”

“Climate prostitutes?”

“Shame on you for this gutter reportage. This is the second time this week I have written you thereon, the first about giving space in your blog to the Pielkes“. (Italics added.)

“The vibe that I am getting from here, there and everywhere is that your reportage is very worrisome to most climate scientists. Of course, your blog is your blog. But, I sense that you are about to experience the ‘Big Cutoff’ from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you, me included.”

“Copenhagen prostitutes?”
“Unbelievable and unacceptable.”

“What are you doing and why?”

“Michael”

This would be funny if it weren’t so sad and stupid. What Michael Schlesinger did was SEND THIS THING OUT ON HIS MAILING LIST, and guess what, Roger Pielke, Jr., one of the very Pielkes mentioned in the email, was on that list! Talk about DUMB!

Andrew Revkin’s lighthearted blog piece,[240] to which Michael Schlesinger took such exception, included a few humorous bits from his twitter feed. Two of these were:

“My lord. Copenhagen prostitutes push back on warnings about their services & offer free sex for cop15? http://j.mp/cop15sex“

“My imagination, or is the apparent need to link everything to global warming utterly out of control? http://j.mp/hotSharks“

Other climate bloggers who hadn’t got the Climategate message went after Revkin for giving Roger Pielke, Jr. space on his blog. Here was Revkin’s response:

“As for Roger Pielke, Jr., he’s absolutely not a climatologist and noted at the outset that he’s an interested observer. You’re right that he’s not the ideal choice to be commenting on climate sensitivity issues, but to imply that he doesn’t deserve a seat at the table is troubling. Here’s why. He has been an author on dozens of peer-reviewed papers related to climate change, with a particular focus on the climate/hurricane/disaster losses arena. Just go to http://j.mp/PielkeGoog for a sample. Given how many climate scientists have begun speaking out about policy choices (Pielke’s realm) hard to see how he can be excised from discussions.”[241]

Golly Gee! By comparison, these guys make Sarah Palin look like an utter genius.

Fortunately, they seem to have learned since then, but the damage has been done. Here’s a choice bit from a recent piece in the conservative but well written Weekly Standard, titled “Why the climate skeptics are winning,” and charmingly subtitled “Too many of their opponents are intellectual thugs.” Most of the piece is devoted to Peter Gleick’s recent ham-handed release of purloined Heartland Institute documents, some of which were real but some of which turned out to be fakes. But the author can’t resist mentioning how Schlesinger went after Andrew Revkin, and just to rub it in, he runs this quote in a sidebar in large blue type:

“The serial ineptitude of the climate campaign shows that a tiny David doesn’t need to throw a rock against a Goliath who swings his mighty club and only hits himself square in the forehead.”[242]

So HOW DO climate change doubters manage to win enough arguments to stall action on global warming? Mistakes by the mainstream climate science community don’t help, but their real secret is that they REPEAT THEIR ACCUSATIONS OVER AND OVER AGAIN WITHOUT CHANGE.

As we learned from David Goldston, the Republican chief of staff for the House science committee until 2006, “There was a belief on the part of many members that the science was fraudulent, even a Democratic fantasy. A lot of the information they got was from conservative think tanks and industry.”[243] The accusations of fraud continue to this day, as in this from the American Thinker on April 15 of this year:

“… some scientists, using government grants, are fraudulently manipulating climate data and engaging in criminal activity …”[244]

Or consider this from the once distinguished scientist S. Fred Singer on April 5 of this year (2012):

“Puzzled by this disparity, I e-mailed Mann (then at the U. of Virginia) and politely asked about his post-1978 proxy temperatures. All I got in return was a nasty reply — which only served to confirm my suspicion that Mann was hiding the data because they disagreed with the widely accepted thermometer record, which had suggested the existence of global warming. I believe that this is the true meaning of the phrase ‘Mike’s Nature trick,’ used in the leaked Climategate e-mails — in conjunction with ‘hide the decline.’ It all suggests manipulation of crucial data.”[245]

Notice that Singer is still conflating the two Climategate emails sent 10 years apart, just as Sarah Palin and Sen. James Inhofe did in 2009.[246]

They have been repeating the accusation that controlling global warming is an “earth-worshiping religion”[247] comparable to Marxism ever since 1989, when Pat Michaels was “warning of ‘apocalyptic environmentalism,’ which he called ‘the most popular new religion to come along since Marxism’.”[248] And just this year (2012) W. A. Beatty wrote:

“It <global warming> is the top-down centralized government’s last best hope of controlling the masses. And like other forms of socialist totalitarian worldviews, it is a religion as well.”[249]

Climate change doubters repeatedly accuse mainstream climate scientists and their allies of being corrupt one-worlders — meaning they want a World Government under the UN, as in this 2010 quote from a piece by Fred Singer:

“But it is clear that this small cabal <of mainstream climate scientists> was able to convince much of the world that climate disasters were impending — unless drastic steps were taken. … In this enterprise, the group was aided not only by environmental zealots, anti-technology Luddites, utopian one-worlders, and population-control fanatics, but also by bureaucrats, businesses, brokers and bankers, who had learned how to game the system and profit from government grants and subsidies for exotic schemes to produce “carbon-free” energy and from the trading of carbon permits. Hundreds of billions have already been wasted — most of this in transfers of tax revenues to a favored few.”[250]

This passage also includes the frequently repeated charge of corruption–it is all just a corrupt enterprise to make money for the politically “favored few,” or sometimes just to provide climate scientists with fat grants at taxpayer expense.[251]

They also repeat, like a drumbeat, the message that the nefarious schemes of the evil climate “cabal” will cause, or are causing, misery and financial ruin for the U.S. economy, as in this from Singer:

“Time is becoming short. We’re reaching a tipping point — not of the earth’s climate, but of the financial schemes that permanently divert funds from productive activities into wasteful ones, all in the name of ‘saving the climate.’ The results are evident: higher levels of spending, deficits, or taxes; higher prices for energy and electricity and therefore for all manufactured goods; less productive activity; less employment; and more misery.”[252]

And, of course, they continue to insist that “the science is uncertain.” Consider, for example, this passage from an article currently (2012) posted on The Heartland Institute’s website:

“Scientists who study the issue <climate change> say it is impossible to tell if the recent small warming trend is natural, a continuation of the planet’s recovery from the more recent ‘Little Ice Age,’ or unnatural, the result of human greenhouse gas emissions.”[253]

But perhaps the apotheosis of this continuous fusillade of extreme accusations came this May, when the conservative Heartland Institute put up a huge billboard on the Eisenhower Expressway in Chicago, “featuring a mug shot of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski,” and “posing a question to drivers cruising toward the city:”

“I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?”[254]

It turns out that they had a major billboard campaign in mind to promote their forthcoming 7th International Conference on Climate Change, with future cameo appearances by “Osama bin Laden and James J. Lee, who was fatally shot by police in 2010 when he took hostages at the Discovery Channel’s headquarters in Maryland.”[255] And in the Heartland press release accompanying the billboard, Heartland President Joseph Bast said,

“The most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. … They are Charles Manson, a mass murderer; Fidel Castro, a tyrant; and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Global warming alarmists include Osama bin Laden and James J. Lee (who took hostages inside the headquarters of the Discovery Channel in 2010).”

“The leaders of the global warming movement have one thing in common: They are willing to use force and fraud to advance their fringe theory. …”[256]

They got socked hard for this. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R. Wisconsin), the Vice-Chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and one of their conference’s plenary speakers, said they had gone much too far and threatened not to show up if they didn’t take the billboard down.[257] They did take it down after only 24 hours, but this is what they say in their defense:

“[The billboard] was illustrating absurdity with absurdity that backfired because global warming alarmists weren’t put into a defensive position of explaining why the issue is on the verge of total collapse. As Rush Limbaugh noted recently, ‘you never descend to the level of your opponent or they win.'”[258]

Say what? Thanks Rush, and a tip of the hat to you for calling that young Georgetown Law Student a “prostitute.”[259]

Chapter XXIV. A welcome breath of fresh air.

In the midst of all this outrageous nonsense, the recent actions of a prominent scientific dissenter, Berkeley physics professor Richard A. Muller, provide a welcome breath of fresh air. We’ll let quotations from his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed tell the story:

“The temperature-station quality is largely awful. The most important stations in the U.S. are included in the Department of Energy’s Historical Climatology Network. A careful survey of these stations by a team led by meteorologist Anthony Watts showed that 70% of these stations have such poor siting that, by the U.S. government’s own measure, they result in temperature uncertainties of between two and five degrees Celsius or more.”

“We know that cities show anomalous warming, caused by energy use and building materials; asphalt, for instance, absorbs more sunlight than do trees. … Could that rise … have been unreasonably included in the global <temperature> estimates?”

“Analysis groups try to compensate for all this by homogenizing the data … These adjustments often result in corrections of several tenths of one degree Celsius, significant fractions of the warming attributed to humans.”

“Without good answers to all these complaints, global-warming skepticism seems sensible. But now let me explain why you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.”[260]

He goes on to describe how he and his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project used new statistical methods to “incorporate fragments of records” and use “data from virtually all the available stations” to avoid “data-selection bias.” He describes how he and his team “conducted a temperature analysis based solely on ‘very rural’ locations, distant from urban ones” to avoid heat bias from cities. And he and his team analyzed “the U.S. temperature record separately for stations with good or acceptable rankings, and those with poor rankings (the U.S. is the only place in the world that ranks its temperature stations). Remarkably, the poorly ranked stations showed no greater temperature increases than the better ones.” He concludes by saying, “Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.”[261]

And he finishes by saying, “Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate.”[262] Since his study, most climate doubters have stopped talking about how global warming is a fiction, and have concentrated on the two questions, how much is due to human activity, and how much should we expect in the future. That’s real progress.

Part VI. Water vapor and other greenhouse gasses.
Without water vapor, the Earth would be a frozen ball of ice. Without carbon dioxide, there would be no water vapor. With more carbon dioxide, there is more water vapor and a hotter Earth.

Chapter XXV. Water vapor and clouds.

So far, we have talked almost exclusively about carbon dioxide as the agent of global warming. But several other gasses also play an important role. In fact, the most important greenhouse gas is water vapor, followed by clouds which are, of course, formed from water droplets and ice crystals. Sometimes global warming doubters will take these undisputed scientific facts and try to twist them in debate, in order to poo-poo global warming by attempting to show that carbon dioxide is actually unimportant. As we shall see, nothing could be farther from the truth.

Water vapor. Our understanding of the importance of water vapor dates back to 1863, when John Tyndall, who was the first to observe the effect of water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane in blocking heat rays, wrote that water vapor “is a blanket more necessary to the vegetable life of England than clothing is to man. Remove for a single summer-night the aqueous vapour from the air… and the sun would rise upon an island held fast in the iron grip of frost.”[263]

In fact, Tyndall was right. Because the Earth is a wet planet and water vapor is so abundant, it dominates the greenhouse effect. The most recent 2010 estimate is that water vapor contributes about 50% of the greenhouse effect, clouds 25%, carbon dioxide 20%, and the other greenhouse gasses about 5%.[264]

So why bother about CO2 and the other greenhouse gasses at all? The reason is that, as Spencer Weart at the American Institute of Physics explains:

“Water cycles in and out of the air, oceans, and soils in a matter of days, exquisitely sensitive to fluctuations in temperature. By contrast CO2 (and other, less important greenhouse gases like methane) linger in the atmosphere for centuries. Thus it is these gases that act as the “control knob” that sets the level of water vapor. If all the CO2 were somehow removed, the temperature at first would fall only a little. But then less water would evaporate into the air, and some would fall as rain. With less water vapor (and also less clouds retaining heat at night) the air would cool further, bringing more rain… and then snow. Within weeks, the air would be entirely dry and the Earth would settle into the frozen state that Fourier had calculated for a planet with no greenhouse gases.”[265]

So CO2 and the other less important greenhouse gasses, by virtue of their long residence times in the atmosphere, act to stabilize our clement temperature at a level where there will be sufficient water vapor to warm the Earth. This is one reason why CO2 is important. But the second reason was pointed out by Arrhenius back in 1896. It turns out that the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere rises IN PROPORTION to the temperature[265a] because THE RELATIVE HUMIDITY STAYS CONSTANT. Thus increases in temperature due to increases in carbon dioxide are amplified by the resulting increases in the concentration of water vapor. It is this positive feedback which causes the climate sensitivity factor, the number of degrees C the average global temperature will be raised by doubling the amount of CO2, to be 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F) rather than a mere 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F).[266]

The scientific climate change skeptics, in particular the great climate scientist Richard Lindzen whom we discussed in chapter XIII, rightly challenged the assumption that the relative humidity remains constant. At the beginning, this was merely a simplifying assumption and clearly open to challenge. But recent satellite observations have confirmed Arrhenius’s assumption of constant relative humidity; the average relative humidity does remain roughly constant as the temperature rises. In fact, it appears that the relative humidity increases a little, so warmer temperatures mean that “a bit of extra vapor would accumulate in the atmosphere at higher temperatures, tending to accelerate the greenhouse warming.”[267] Unfortunately, we still find some global warming doubters who haven’t followed the recent literature and try to claim that the relation between increases in CO2 and water vapor is “uncertain science.”

Clouds. It is familiar to all of us that a winter night is less cold if it is cloudy because the clouds reflect or re-radiate the heat back to the ground. On the other hand, a crystal clear night is likely to be colder because there is a clear path for the heat the ground has absorbed during the day to be radiated back into space. So clouds can warm. On the other hand, a cloudy day is likely to be cooler because the clouds shade the ground and reflect much of the incoming sunlight back into space. So clouds can cool. It also makes a difference whether clouds are formed from water droplets or ice, and whether they are thick or thin. Thin, high cirrus clouds let most sunlight through but absorb and re-emit lots of infrared radiation (heat) back, so these clouds warm rather than cool. A proposed decrease in the formation of high cirrus clouds in the tropics is the basis for Richard Lindzen’s “infrared iris theory” which we discussed in chapter XIII. We need to stress that this theory, unlike his earlier theory that relative humidity does not remain roughly constant, has not yet been conclusively disproved by observation.

The current (2010) estimate is that clouds have a net warming effect and contribute 25% to the greenhouse effect.[268] However, cloud physics and the climate effect of clouds is an important ongoing area of research.[269]

Chapter XXVI. Aerosols.

Aerosols are finely suspended particles and liquid droplets in the air. We have already discussed clouds, which are water droplet and ice aerosols, in the last chapter. The haze and smog we sometimes still encounter on a bad day are another example of aerosols.

One of the most remarkable things about climate science is its scope; its investigations span the distant past of millions of years ago to contemporary space exploration, and everything in between. In chapter IV, we described how investigations of ice cores from distant ice ages provided crucial evidence for the correctness of Arrhenius’s theory of carbon dioxide and global warming. In the other direction, we first learned that aerosols can warm a planet in 1971, when the Mariner 9 spacecraft arrived at Mars. The NASA engineers and scientists saw nothing because the entire planet was veiled in dust by one of the great Martian dust storms. But they could measure temperatures while they waited for the dust to lift, and what they discovered was that the dust had warmed the planet by tens of degrees.[270]

Black carbon aerosols, also known as soot, have a particularly intense warming effect because black carbon is an excellent absorber of everything, sunlight, infrared radiation, etc.[271]

We found that aerosols can cool, and in fact can cause a large cooling effect, from a volcano. In 1991, Mount Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines, exploded. It hurled some 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the atmosphere. Jim Hansen and his group at NASA applied their climate models to this and boldly predicted that it would cause a half degree C cooling of the Earth, lasting for two or three years. In a triumph for climate modeling, their prediction was correct and the half degree C cooling, lasting for approximately 3 years, was observed.[272]

What happens is that the SO2 reacts with water vapor in the air to form an aerosol of dilute sulfuric acid droplets (the “cloud of sulfate aerosols” mentioned in the caption to the picture above), and this haze is what so effectively cools. It turns out that the haze which shrouds the planet Venus is also commposed of sulfuric acid droplets, and it too cools the planet, although not enough to compensate for the runaway greenhouse effect of Venus’s dense CO2 atmosphere. (The result is that Venus has a surface temperature of around 460 degrees C (860 degrees F), hot enough to melt lead.) In another connection with space exploration, it was his investigation of the atmosphere of Venus and its sulfate particle clouds which first led James Hansen to the conclusion that sulfates might seriously affect the climate of Earth.[273]

By the way, sulfur dioxide emissions are also what cause acid rain. If you have ever lived next to a copper refinery, as I did as a young man in El Paso, Texas, you know that SO2 is bad stuff.

To get back to Earth, from the late 1950s through the late 1980s, a “global dimming” in the Northern Hemisphere occurred due to the haze produced by air pollution. At times, this dimming reached the level of a 10% reduction in sunlight reaching the ground. Since then, and as a consequence of pollution controls which reduced sulfur dioxide emissions, a “global brightening” has occurred over much of the Northern Hemisphere outside of China and India. All of this happened because of increases, followed by decreases, in atmospheric aerosols.[274]

Despite the fact that aerosols can both warm and cool, the net effect of human aerosols is to cool,[275] and scientists have concluded that the cooling trend observed from the late 1950s through the late 1980s was due to industrial haze combined with volcanoes.[276] The cooling effect of aerosols worries some experts who think that this may have masked much of the global warming effect of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses. They worry that we may be unpleasantly surprised by the amount of global warming that occurs as we make further progress in global brightening by reducing aerosol pollution.[277]

Finally, a personal speculation: The rapid industrialization of China and India has caused an immense amount of air pollution covering a large part of Asia. Could cooling induced by this be the fundamental cause of the pause in the temperature rise since 2002 that we discussed back in chapter XVI? After all, a similar rise in air pollution over North America and Europe depressed global temperatures for nearly 30 years.

Chapter XXVII. Other greenhouse gasses.

So far, we have talked a great deal about clouds and water vapor, aerosols, and, of course, CO2. But there are other rare but long lived greenhouse gasses that account for about 5% of global warming.[278] The problem with these is that they are “super greenhouse gasses,” meaning that molecule-for-molecule, they contribute tens, hundreds, or even thousands of times as much to global warming as a molecule of CO2. While their contributions today may small because of their rarity, if we keep emitting them into our atmosphere, they will end up doubling or even tripling the warming caused by CO2, and this could spell real trouble.

The most worrisome of these super greenhouse gasses is methane (CH4). You are probably familiar with methane as natural gas. Though natural gas does contain other hydrocarbon gasses, methane is its principal component. There is so little methane in our atmosphere that its concentration is measured in parts per BILLION, but it currently contributes about 3% to greenhouse global warming.[279]

The reason methane contributes so much, despite its rarity, is that a gram of methane in the atmosphere produces as much global warming over a 20 year period as 72 grams of CO2. (We say methane has a “global warming potential” of 72 over a 20 year period.) Fortunately, methane reacts quite quickly with oxygen and so is rapidly removed from the atmosphere; its average atmospheric residence time is only 8 to 12 years compared to 100 to 1,000 years for CO2.[280] Nevertheless, there is a very real threat that an acceleration of NATURAL methane emissions due to continued global warming might trigger a catastrophic spike in temperatures amounting to double the CO2 greenhouse effect.[281]

There are enormous quantities of methane sequestered in the permanently frozen soil (the permafrost) of the Arctic tundra, and the amount of carbon stored there, both as peat and methane, amounts to twice as much as is presently in our atmosphere, and more than stored in all living things on Earth.[282] As the tundra warms and the permafrost melts, large quantities of methane are released (as well as CO2). Recent measurements show the methane release from some Siberian permafrost is up to 5 times higher than previously estimated.[283] This spells trouble on the global warming front.

What most worries climate scientists, however, is that there are even larger quantities of methane stored as unstable “methane clathrates” (also called “methane hydrates” or “fire ice”) under the shallow waters of the Arctic Ocean. Much of this is presently sequestered beneath the permafrost layer which covers the Arctic continental shelf. What some climate scientists fear is that warming of the shallow waters over the continental shelf might melt the permafrost beneath and allow the sudden, almost explosive, release of large quantities of methane. This is what would immediately double the greenhouse effect, and this might well lead to an irreversible runaway process where increased warming would cause even more methane releases, which would cause even more warming, etc., etc. This effect, within the realm of possibility but definitely not certain to occur, is called the “clathrate gun hypothesis” because “it would be as irreversible, once started, as the firing of a gun.”[284]

Most experts evaluate the likelihood of the “clathrate gun” going off as small, but a surge in natural emissions of methane is one of the most frequently cited causes of a sudden (in geological terms) spike in temperatures called the “Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum” 55 million years ago. The surge in methane emissions is believed to have been caused by the destabilization of methane clathrates from already occurring warming[285] This event raised the temperature of the Earth by 6 degrees C (10.8 degrees F) over a 20,000 year period, and even though the warming was glacially slow in ordinary human terms, it caused one of the Earth’s SIGNIFICANT EXTINCTION EVENTS.[286]

It is sobering to realize that we are projected to raise the Earth’s temperature by half that 6 degrees C, that is 3 degrees C or 5.4 degrees F, in just one century if we continue dumping increasing quantities of CO2 into the Earth’s atmosphere at present rates. In a mere two centuries, that would mean the same 6 degree C rise that caused the Paleocene-Eocene extinction event. While conditions are much different today than they were at the end of the Paleocene, for one thing average global temperatures are much lower, one has to ask, what would a 6 degree C rise 100 TIMES FASTER than during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum mean for life on Earth? Rapid environmental change and extinction events events are often good for up-and-coming organisms like the small mammals at the end of the age of dinosaurs, or early primates at the beginning of the Eocene, but they are usually bad for the top organisms. (Exactly how many non-avian dinosaurs have you seen recently? Not many, I’ll bet.) I don’t think we can take much comfort in the fact that primates became abundant during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum when today, WE ARE THE TOP ORGANISM, and we too could go the way of the dinos.

When people ask me if I really believe that the consequences of global warming will be bad, I point to the extinction event during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum and say, YES. And when they say, “Well, there will be winners and losers,” I point out that WE, that is the entire human race, could be among the losers. We can start to do something about global warming now, or wait two centuries and see exactly what are the consequences of a 6 degree C global warming, carried out 100 TIMES FASTER than during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum.

In the meantime, because we have little control over natural methane emissions, we need to do what we can to limit anthropogenic emissions. Our record on that has not been good. In the depths of the last glacial period, when glaciers covered much of the Earth, methane concentrations had dropped to around 400 ppb (parts per billion). At the peak of the most recent interglacial period, when the Earth warmed and the glaciers receded, methane concentrations rose naturally to 700 ppb, and they stayed there until the beginning of the industrial revolution. The current global average concentration is around 1750 ppb and has reached 1850 ppb in the Arctic.[287] So methane concentrations have risen by 150% since pre-industrial times. (We have 2.5 times as much methane in our atmosphere now as we did in pre-industrial times.) By contrast, CO2 concentrations were 280 ppm (parts per million) in pre-industrial times and now stand at 396 ppm, so they have only increased by 42%. (We have 1.42 times as much CO2 in our atmosphere now as we did in pre-industrial times.) Thus, while the absolute concentration of methane is much lower than that of CO2, the percentage increase has been much larger.[288]

The primary sources of human caused methane emissions in the United States are leakage from natural gas pipelines, and leakage from and oil and natural gas fields, followed by enteric fermentation. “Enteric fermentation” basically means cow burps and farts. Emissions from landfills and coal mines place third and fourth.[289]

Worldwide, rice paddies are one of the leading sources, but we can’t do much about that because people need to eat. The same is true for another super greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide (N2O), which we won’t discuss except to say that a major source is agricultural fields fertilized by manure or chemicals, and we can’t do much about that either because people need to add nitrates to grow crops.[290]

People worry that as much of the world becomes more affluent and can afford meat, methane production from cows will increase and add to the problem. There are efforts to change the internal bacteria of cows so the average cow will produce less methane, and some people advocate changing to kangaroo meat because much smaller amounts of methane are produced by the internal flora of roos. It appears that we may be able to ameliorate the problem but not solve it.

It turns out that methane production from animals causing global temperatures to rise may not be new. There is, in fact, the “dinosaurs breaking wind” theory of global warming during the Mesozoic Era. I kid you not, there actually is such a theory, and The Telegraph covered it in a, well mostly serious, article titled, “Dinosaurs passing wind may have caused climate change,” and subtitled, “Huge plant-eating dinosaurs may have produced enough greenhouse gas by breaking wind to alter the Earth’s climate, research suggests.” The greenhouse gas was methane, and the method of production was the same as with cows today, “methane-producing bacteria aided the digestion of sauropods by fermenting their plant food.”[291] The telegraph was reporting on a very serious article by a distinguished group of evolutionary biologists titled, “Could Methane Produced by Sauropod Dinosaurs Have Helped Drive Mesozoic Climate Warmth?”[292] The authors concluded that a typical 20 ton sauropod dinosaur produced lots of methane gas, enough so all the dinosaurs together may have raised global methane concentrations by as much as we humans do today. With a nod to Sarah Palin and other critics of global warming, I suppose you might call this “digestively unsettled science.”

Part VII. Ocean acidification and its consequences.
Ocean acidification, what may have caused the great Permian extinction, and some good news for once.

Chapter XXVIII. Ocean acidification.

The oceans seems so vast that there could be little man could do to harm them, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Of all the consequences of global warming, the most serious are likely to occur in the great oceans of our Earth.

Only about 60% of the carbon dioxide we pump into our atmosphere stays there; the remaining 40% is absorbed by various natural sinks, including green plants and the ocean. About 25% enters our oceans and makes them more acidic. The increase in acidity makes it more difficult for organisms like corals to make their calcium carbonate skeletons.[293]

It turns out that our oceans are being acidified at an unprecedented rate, and corals are already exhibiting signs of trouble.[294]

Coral reefs provide more than spectacular sights for snorkelers and scuba divers, as important as that is: they harbor an immense variety of sea life and are the most biologically productive areas of the seas. Take away the coral, you take away the fish, shellfish, plants, and other living organisms that depend on them, and the entire ecosystem of the oceans collapses. As marine biologist Charlie Veron put it in a recent interview,

“The future is horrific. … There is no hope of reefs surviving to even mid-century in any form that we now recognise. If, and when, they go, they will take with them about one-third of the world’s marine biodiversity. Then there is a domino effect, as reefs fail so will other ecosystems. This is the path of a mass extinction event, when most life, especially tropical marine life, goes extinct.”[295]

Of course global warming doubters like to poo poo such predictions of disaster, but the geological record provides some sobering evidence that such worries are realistic. There are troubling parallels between what is happening in todays oceans as a result of ocean acidification and what happened during “The Great Dying,” the greatest of all mass extinctions at the end of the Permian period which killed off 95% of all species on Earth. In a recent scientific paper, Jonathan L. Payne and Matthew E. Clapham examined cellular changes in marine animals during the Permian extinction, and concluded that immense CO2 eruptions from the greatest volcanoes of the past 500 million years, the Siberian Traps, acidified the seas and prevented organisms like shellfish and corals from forming their calcium carbonate skeletons. To quote Payne and Clapham,

“… changes in ocean oxygen levels, CO2, pH, and temperature can account for extinction selectivity across marine animals. These emerging insights from geology, geochemistry, and paleobiology suggest that the end-Permian extinction may serve as an important ancient analog for twenty-first century oceans.”[296]

One might think that puny man with his limited resources could never equal the damage done by the outpouring of carbon dioxide from the greatest volcanoes of the past 500 million years, but in fact the contrary is the case. As a recent article in the New York Times said,

“And he <Hans Portner> and Dr. Langdon noted that carbon was being injected into the atmosphere today far faster than during the Permian extinction. As Dr. Knoll put it, ‘Today, humans turn out to be every bit as good as volcanoes at putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.'”[297]

I have not yet mentioned temperature rises in this section. The reason is that EVEN if Lindzen and the scientific skeptics are right, EVEN if doubling CO2 concentrations only produces a 1 degree C rise in temperatures rather than the 3 degrees C rise that the majority of climate scientists believe is the correct figure, EVEN if Lindzen’s infrared iris theory is right and clouds will protect us from catastrophic temperature rise, we still have to limit our carbon dioxide output to prevent ecological catastrophe in the oceans. And the ecological catastrophe we have to prevent is not just some wishy-washy fear of the “tree hugging” fringe, it is the catastrophe of the collapse of life in the oceans, the collapse of all our fisheries, and the collapse of a significant fraction of our planet’s oxygen generating capacity.

I have implicit faith in the ability of American industry, but I draw a different conclusion from this than conservative think tanks like the Marshall and Heartland Institutes. I am sure that American industry is fully capable of dumping enough carbon dioxide into the seas and acidifying them enough so that by the end of the century we have another “Great Dying,” like the one at the end of the Permian period. But with appropriate government leadership and incentives, I am sure that American industry will be able to revolutionize the World’s energy infrastructure to such an extent that we will bring down our CO2 emissions and avoid catastrophe. And, as Bill Gates has shown us, we can do this without sacrificing our quality of life or our deeply cherished liberties. The fate of the oceans lies in our hands. What are we going to do about it?

Chapter XXIX. My favorite disaster scenario.

My favorite, or perhaps I should say most dreaded, disaster scenario is admittedly speculative. It is due to Peter D. Ward, a prominent paleontologist at the University of Washington. Ward studies mass extinctions, and he provides a frightening scenario for “The Great Dying,” the greatest of all mass extinctions at the end of the Permian period, which killed off 95% of all species on Earth. According to Ward, severe global warming caused a disruption in the global circulation of the ocean, which in turn caused the deep waters to be deprived of oxygen. Oxygen hating organisms thrived on the bottom and produced massive amounts of hydrogen sulfide, the poisonous gas which produces the smell of rotten eggs. This bubbled to the surface, poisoned the oceans and killed off most ocean life, then spread over land and killed off most land life too.[298]

In Ward’s scenario, the Siberian Traps are still the villain, but the mechanism of action is different, and even more frightening than the ocean acidification which doubtless occurred, and which we talked about earlier. If Ward is right, what happened is that life suffered a devastating one-two punch, with ocean acidification doing most of the damage to marine life, and then oxygen deprived waters and sulfur dioxide eruptions finishing the job on land and sea.

It turns out that sulfur dioxide eruptions occur naturally today on a very small scale. The NASA photograph to the right also appears in Ward’s Scientific American article,[299] and the caption reads, in part, “These regular local events, which result from buildup of hydrogen sulfide in sea-bottom sediments, offer a small modern taste of conditions during the global upwellings proposed for several ancient mass extinction periods: a sulfurous smell fills the air, dead fish litter the water, and oxygen-starved lobsters flee onto beaches trying to escape the poison.”

As Ward says in the conclusion to his article, “How soon after that <when carbon dioxide levels approach 900 parts per million> could there be a new greenhouse extinction? That is something our society should never find out.”

Chapter XXX. A brief reprieve?

There have been encouraging signs recently that the Earth’s ecosystem is more resilient than expected. Scientists felt corals were doomed by warming seas and ocean acidity, but it turns out that corals which survived previous heat stress have rapidly adapted to further warming.[300] Scientists also believed that in the Arctic,it would take centuries for existing forests to move North as the tundra warmed, and meanwhile the tundra would be a forlorn swamp, slowly defrosting while belching methane and CO2. But it turns out that low tundra shrubs in the Northwestern Eurasian Tundra have responded to warmer temperatures by growing into small trees. These unexpected “pop up” forests are converting the tundra into open woodland much faster than anyone thought possible.[301]

When corals are subjected to heat stress by unusually warm ocean waters, they suffer bleaching, which means that they expel their symbiotic algae, turn white, and usually starve to death. In 2010, there was a severe warming crisis off Indonesia, Maylaysia, and Singapore. The coral colonies off Indonesia were severely affected, as was to be expected, and 45% of all colonies died. But off Malaysia and Singapore, the most sensitive, fast growing corals sailed through a severe warming crisis, and the more heat resistant, massive, slower growing corals did well too. The overall death rate for all coral species was only 4% off Singapore and 15% off Malaysia. These coral colonies had previously been subjected to a severe warming crisis with high mortality back in 1998, and the hypothesis is that coral colonies subjected to previous warming crises rapidly adapt to withstand future crises.[302]

This is good news, and indicates that corals possess the adaptive abilities to survive future warming, up to a point. As the authors of the scientific article conclude:

“There are likely to be limits to thermal adaptation and acclimatisation, and these may incur costs in life history traits such as growth, fecundity and competitive ability. In addition, reefs continue to be threatened by numerous other factors including overfishing, pollution, disease, acidification, and severe storms.”[303]

To save the reefs and the oceans, we still have to curtail global warming and carbon dioxide emissions. But we may have a little more time than we thought.

The news from the Arctic is also good. Low tundra shrubs in the Northwestern Eurasian Tundra have responded to warmer temperatures by growing into small trees, and these “pop-up forests” are significantly altering the landscape.[304] This surprising response means that the conversion of tundra into savannah – open grassland punctuated by thickets of small trees – is happening much faster than expected, and much faster than could have occurred if existing forests had to move slowly North.

So far, this response is limited to the warmest part of the Arctic tundra, the NWET or North West Eurasian Tundra. But the authors of the scientific article regard this part of the tundra as a “bellwether region for future pathways of Arctic ecosystems.”[305]

The authors also describe what is happening in the NWET as “a large-scale shift towards a structurally novel ecosystem absent for millennia, which shares many characteristics with that described for Beringia in the early Holocene epoch.”[306] Beringia was the grassland steppe in the area around the Bering land bridge joining Siberia and Alaska during the last ice age. For various reasons, it was ice free and served as a “giant ecological refugium during maximal glaciation,” but was characterized then by “windswept Arctic desert conditions.” However, during warmer intervals, and especially at the beginning of our present epoch, the Holocene, “Clouds, rain and snow altered soils and drainage patterns. Fossil remains show that spruce, birch and poplars once grew beyond their northernmost modern range today,”[307] and the green landscape resembled the savannah and open woodland toward which the contemporary Arctic tundra is moving. It was through this early Holocene landscape that “a small human population of at most a few thousand <who> survived the Last Glacial Maximum in Beringia <moved> to populate the Americas sometime after 16,500 years ago … as the American glaciers blocking the way southward melted.”[308]

Exactly what effect the rapid reforestation of the Arctic tundra will have on global warming in uncertain. “The researchers foresee a substantial additional local warming influence from this change in landscapes, with the darker foliage absorbing sunlight that would otherwise be reflected back to space. But the fast-motion shift to forests will likely absorb carbon dioxide, as well.”[309] It may also stabilize the soil against CO2 and methane release from permafrost melting.

What we can take some comfort in is that a 1 or 2 degree C warming may restore conditions absent since the last interglacial climatic optimum, when nature and humanity flourished. But we have to remember that sea levels were up to 3 meters (10 feet) higher than today,[310] so everyone living on the coasts will have to move. (It is a good thing the stunning new gallery and sculpture terrace that Steve Susman donated to Yale is on the TOP FLOOR, because the bottom floors of the Yale Art Gallery are likely to be flooded.) And in a more serious vein, the large groups of people in Asia and Africa affected by harsh conditions like drought and desertification will not be able to migrate away, unlike what happened during the Holocene climatic optimum when the Earth was almost empty of people. So it is still crucial that we move to curtail carbon dioxide emissions and global warming as quickly as reasonably possible. But the good news is that we may have a bit more time that we thought, if only we will use that extra time well.

Part VIII. Conclusion.
How research on solar power can make nuclear power safer, and a path to solving the climate change problem without giving up our liberties, or radically changing our American way of life.

Chapter XXXI. Solar-nuclear synergy.

To curtail global warming and prevent disaster, it is imperative that we drastically reduce our CO2 emissions, but to do so we must replace fossil fuels with other sources of energy. We have now or are rapidly developing the technologies to do this, and as we described in chapter V, the two most promising of these technologies are nuclear and solar power. The most significant problem with solar power is that it is intermittent because the Sun only shines for part of the day, while the most serious problem with nuclear power is that if something major goes wrong, a disaster like the one at Fukushima ensues. It turns out that research on the power storage problem for solar power provides a possible solution to the safety problem for nuclear power.

Solar power and heat storage. There are two approaches to solar power, both of which have been significantly advanced through funding provided by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Incubator Program and SunShot Initiative.[311] (The Solar Incubator Program was actually launched during President George W. Bush’s administration,[312] so it has enjoyed unusual and welcome bipartisan support.) The approach to solar power we described in chapter V is based on solar cells. This is the most efficient and attractive approach, but it suffers from the energy storage problem. The other approach to solar power is based on “solar concentrators.” These are simply arrays of mirrors which concentrate sunlight on a tall tower filled with molten salt. The focused sunlight heats the molten salt to a high temperature, just as you (probably) set pieces of paper on fire when you were young by focusing the Sun’s rays through a magnifying glass onto the paper. Though less efficient than modern solar panels, solar concentrators have the great advantage that it is possible to store the heated molten salt in insulated tanks and use the stored heat to generate electricity even at night.[313]

Solar concentrators tend to be very large scale installations. They are good for providing steady electric power to the grid, but you are unlikely to have a solar concentrator on your rooftop any time soon.

To increase the efficiency of solar concentrators, we need to find salts that can operate at higher temperatures. (The physics reason is that higher temperatures result in greater thermodynamic efficiency due to Carnot’s theorem.[314]) We also need to find non-corrosive salts that operate at these higher temperatures because cost efficiency dictates that the piping must be made of ordinary materials like stainless steel rather than expensive alloys. Alternatively, we might find new inexpensive materials to contain the molten salts.[315]

A startup named Halotechnics has promising new molten salts nearing commercial applicability. As MIT Technology Review reports:

“Whereas conventional molten salts melt at 300 degrees C and can operate up to 565 degrees C, Halotechnics has developed a molten salt that has the same melting point, but can operate up to 700 degrees C. The material is being tested for long-term compatibility with the steel pipes and containers used in storage systems, and the company plans to start pilot tests in 18 months. While current materials limit solar-thermal plants to turbines that are about 42 percent efficient, this material could be paired with steam turbines that are 48 percent efficient. A storage system that will work with this material is being developed as part of an NREL project that’s part of the SunShot Initiative.”[316]

MIT Technology Review also reports that Halotechnics is developing a replacement for molten salt, a form of glass which melts at 400 degrees C and operates up to 1,200 degrees C. A solar concentrator system using this could “heat up air to drive a gas turbine, with the leftover heat used to drive a steam turbine, much as is done in a natural-gas combined-cycle plant. Such a system could be about 52 percent efficient using existing turbine designs.”[317] But as MIT Technology Review observes: “Operating at such high temperatures, however, will bring engineering challenges, including finding relatively inexpensive materials to contain the molten glass. Commercialization of this technology could be many years away.”[318]

Nuclear reactors and molten salt. All of this molten salt R&D can be applied to a SAFE nuclear reactor design called a molten salt cooled reactor.[319] Molten salt cooled reactors use a molten salt mixture rather than water to cool the reactor core and transfer heat to a steam or gas turbine. They have several great advantages over conventional water cooled reactors such as the GE design at Fukushima. First, they operate at a much higher temperature, resulting in increased thermodynamic efficiency, that is a reactor of a given size generates more electric power. Second, in the event of an accident, they are much easier to shut down, and in fact some designs “auto-shutdown.” Third, because they operate at much lower pressures than water cooled reactors, they are much less likely to explode.[320]

I need to add a cautionary note: Molten salt coolants for nuclear reactors have additional design constraints related to neutron capture and the suppression of unwanted radioactive byproducts.[321] So while research on molten salt (and molten glass) coolants will surely advance nuclear reactor design, a coolant which is perfect for a solar concentrator power plant may not be a good choice for a nuclear power plant.

The new nuclear reactor Bill Gates has invested in and is pushing, TerraPower’s traveling-wave reactor, is cooled by liquid sodium rather than molten salt. Sodium is a soft metal which “reacts exothermically with water, to the point that sufficiently large pieces melt to a sphere and may explode; this reaction produces caustic sodium hydroxide and flammable hydrogen gas.”[322] And sodium powder “may combust spontaneously in air or oxygen.”[323] So sodium is quite dangerous unless handled carefully.

Liquid sodium cooled nuclear reactors have been around for a long time; the second U.S. nuclear submarine, the USS Seawolf commissioned in 1957, used a liquid sodium cooled reactor.[324] Unfortunately, the history of liquid sodium cooled reactors is quite troubled, although the use of liquid sodium as a coolant is implicated in only one of the many mishaps, the major 1995 sodium fire in the Japanese Monju reactor. Fortunately, this fire occurred in the secondary cooling system, so there was no release of radioactivity.[325] The Seawolf had leaks in her “superheaters,” which were simply part of the steam propulsion system, not part of the reactor itself, and in 1958 when she went in for repairs, her liquid sodium cooled reactor was replaced by the newly standardized naval pressurized water reactor.[326] In 1966, the liquid sodium cooled Fermi 1 reactor outside of Detroit suffered a blockage in one of the spigots through which cooled liquid sodium entered the reactor, and the reactor overheated and suffered a partial meltdown. Though there was no release of radioactivity and no sodium fire, there was a book about this titled “We Almost Lost Detroit.”[327]

TerraPower claims their liquid sodium cooled traveling-wave reactor is extremely safe,[328] but it is clear that their design would profit from the replacement of liquid sodium with a much safer molten salt coolant.

So why did Bill Gates and TerraPower opt for a liquid sodium cooled design? The answer is so basic it could be covered in Engineering 101: when designing a radically new product like their traveling-wave reactor, it is best to use as much off-the-shelf technology as possible. There are two basic reasons for this: First, off-the-shelf technology is almost always cheaper than custom technology at the beginning, before a company can realize economies of scale. Second, you know off-the-shelf technology works, whereas custom designed technology is always suspect. Bill Gates and TerraPower were able to license elements of an existing Toshiba design, that of the Toshiba 4S (Super Safe, Small and Simple) liquid sodium cooled reactor.[329] Among other features, the 4S is designed to be sited in a sealed cylindrical vault 98 feet underground, so the 4S design, AND the TerraPower design, are probably extremely safe, even with a liquid sodium coolant. There is no reason why we should not build one or two SMALL TerraPower traveling-wave reactors at safe sites to gain design and operating experience. We shall discuss this further in the next chapter.

The Toshiba 4S design has safety features which should be incorporated into ALL NEW nuclear reactor designs, even those using molten salt. At Fukushima, water from the tsunami flooding the floor and basement of the reactor building caused the disaster. The water damaged the emergency generators, which were cleverly sited in the basement, cutting off power to the cooling system pumps. Without water coolant circulating, the reactors overheated. The high temperatures generated hydrogen gas within the reactor containment building, and the hydrogen exploded breaching the walls.[330] Unfortunately, even with molten salt coolants, water from a flood or tsunami hitting very high temperature molten salt will generate hydrogen which can then explode.[331] So in addition to burying future reactors underground, it will be important NOT to site them where they will be vulnerable to floods or tsunamis. A simple calculation shows that the minimum height above sea level for a safe reactor site located on a coast is, in round numbers, 100 feet (the depth of the containing vault) plus 100 feet (the maximum expected height of the largest tsunami), which equals 200 feet above sea level. Add another 20 feet for extra safety and you get 220 feet above sea level. A similar calculation needs to be applied to inland reactor sites which may be vulnerable to river flooding. The safest place to site an American nuclear reactor is in the great deserts of our Southwest, and that is where all initial implementations of new reactor designs should be sited.

Chapter XXXII. Conclusion.

With global warming, we are facing a crisis of global scale, a crisis more serious than that which we faced during the darkest days of the American Revolution or the Civil War. We seem politically paralyzed; we are doing little or nothing. As Al Gore said in a recent interview when asked how to avoid dangerous climate change, “the first imperative is to ‘punch through the massive denial and resistance’ that still exist in the United States.”[332]

As we have seen, the “massive denial and resistance” flows from the actions of a small group of conservative, mainly libertarian, think tanks, encouraged by funding from the fossil fuels industry, and abetted by an even smaller group of obstructionist scientists. The way to stop this is to build up countervailing power by encouraging the growth of corporations with interests diametrically opposed to those of the coal and oil industry. In a small way this is already happening with the natural gas companies, which sometimes oppose Big Coal and Big Oil. We need nuclear power companies, solar power companies, wind power companies, energy storage companies, and bio-fuels companies to become strong enough to enter the fray, because their economic interests surely do not lie in mining more coal and pumping more oil.

Encouraging the growth of such corporations will also help us develop the technology we need. In fact, encouraging the development of new energy technologies is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL if we are ever going to get out of this sorry mess. So I propose that we adopt Bill Gates idea of a 1% tax on energy to fund an additional 11 billion dollars of energy research. To move this research more rapidly to commercial application, I propose DOUBLING Bill Gates suggested tax to 2% on energy. That would give us 22 billion dollars in additional funds, 11 billion of which should go towards energy research, and 11 billion towards providing guaranteed markets for the fruits of new energy technology. The way we got commercial air transport off the ground in the 1920s was to provide a guaranteed market — airmail. While this might seem to be a radical idea, remember that REPUBLICAN Congresses and Administrations did it in the 1920s, and my point of view is that if it was sound enough for Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, it is sound enough for us.

More recently, in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, for national security reasons, the Department of Defense and NASA provided a guaranteed market for the newly developed (and expensive) integrated circuits, and jumpstarted the U.S. semiconductor industry. Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon were scarcely wild eyed radicals.

Now how can the U.S. Government provide a guaranteed market for anything? By using the purchasing power of the Department of Defense, NASA, and other agencies. The 11 billion could be added to the budgets of these agencies for the express purpose of purchasing energy produced by promising new technologies under 5 year contracts.

One of the first things such an agency should do is help promote the commercial development of new nuclear reactor technologies like Bill Gates’ and TerraPower’s traveling wave reactor. A guaranteed market for the electricity the first few reactors produced would make venture capitalists much more willing to invest in such reactors. But there is an additional problem that developers of advanced reactors face: licensing. As one clean-tech analyst and industry consultant put it:

“So even if you could build an unconventional reactor, you couldn’t run it as, even if the regulators did approve it, it would take seven to eight years for the registration process to be completed.”[333]

The good news is that the U.S. “Nuclear Regulatory Commission may be split into separate branches for conventional and unconventional nuclear to expedite the revolution, and that up to $904 million (£650 million) of US government funding for small modular reactors may be opened up to all reactor types.”[334] We should certainly do this. I am not advocating a suicidal loosening of nuclear regulation. What I have in mind is licensing one or two commercial copies of several small advanced reactor types, situating them in relatively safe places so if something goes wrong the disaster can be contained, building them, and seeing how they work.

Of course, solar power and bio-fuels MUST also be encouraged, as should the development of a better electrical grid to make large scale solar and wind power practical.

Out of military necessity, the armed services have been buying solar panels to deploy in Afghanistan. The reason is that “convoys of trucks bringing in oil—mainly to fuel the military’s own operations—cost a tremendous amount to maintain and secure, not just in money but in lives. (In 2007, insurgent attacks on fuel convoys were responsible for one-third of U.S. casualties—a bit of data that prompted the alt-fuels program.)”[335] And this has been effective: “A Marine company in Afghanistan cut its fuel consumption by up to 90 percent, thanks to portable solar panels and other alt-energy gear.”[336]

Although the Afghanistan deployments are a response to military necessity and are not part of a coherent program to support alternative energy by providing a guaranteed market, President Obama announced a mini version of just such a program in his 2012 State of the Union Address:

“And I’m proud to announce that the Department of Defense, working with us, the world’s largest consumer of energy, will make one of the largest commitments to clean energy in history -– with the Navy purchasing enough capacity to power a quarter of a million homes a year.”[337]

The Obama administration actually began implementing this program in 2009, when the Department of Defense began purchasing small quantities of biofuels for experimental purposes. The program has been effective; in 2009 “the Navy paid $424 per gallon for 20,055 gallons of biodiesel made from algae, which set a world record at the time for the cost of fuel.”[338] By December of 2011, the Navy purchased 450,000 gallons of biofuels for $26 per gallon.[339] Navy Secretary Ray Mabus plans to send an entire aircraft carrier strike group powered by a 50/50 mix of conventional and biofuel (with the carrier itself nuclear powered) on a full mission by 2016,[340] and on July 2 of this year, the “Great Green Fleet” set sail for two days of demonstration exercises off the coast of Hawaii.[341]. In addition, the Navy is “set to pour $170 million into an effort with the Departments of Energy and Agriculture” to help build biofuel refineries.[342]

But this good news was largely muted in May when the Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate voted to prohibit the Pentagon from buying renewable fuels more expensive than traditional ones.[343] Further, the Republican controlled House committee voted to exempt the Department of Defense from the provisions of The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which “forbids federal agencies from buying alternative fuels that are more polluting than conventional ones.”[344] This is doubly unfortunate because (1) it undercuts the national security argument for promoting biofuels by allowing the services to purchase fuel made from coal or natural gas, and (2) it opens the door for them to use the time tested Fischer-Tropsch process to make petroleum from coal and natural gas. The Fischer-Tropsch process allowed Nazi Germany to produce enough gas and oil to keep fighting throughout World War II, and it allowed Apartheid-era South Africa to survive international sanctions. And, as if this checkered history were not enough, using fuels made from the Fischer-Tropsch process results in even more emitted carbon dioxide than simply burning conventional fuels. As Wired reporter Noah Schactman put it:

“The armed services committee didn’t put limits on all alternative fuels — just the ones with environmental benefits.”[345]

On the Democratically controlled Senate side, the Armed Services Committee not only voted to scuttle the Navy’s plans to sail its “Great Green Fleet” by prohibiting the Pentagon from buying renewable fuels costing more than conventional ones, it also banned the Department of Defense “from helping build biofuel refineries unless ‘specifically authorized by law.'”[346] All told, this seems to be a triumph for sheer partisanship and the naked lobbying power of the fossil fuels industry against the public interest.

Despite all this, if we can set aside partisanship and come to our senses, we can work together to develop the technology we need to live comfortable lives with much smaller CO2 emissions, and APPLY IT to avoid greenhouse warming disaster. In fact, much of the technology, such as cheaper solar cells, hybrid vehicles, stunningly efficient indoor LED lighting, and affordable biofuels, is here or being rapidly developed today. While we may have to make some adjustments — fewer macho big pickup trucks and SUVs for instance — we can continue to live comfortable lives pretty much as we have been doing for most of the last 50 years. There need not be any radical change in American life, except possibly for the big coal and oil companies, and there certainly need not be any curtailment of our liberties.

The recent move by the EPA to regulate emissions of methane (a greenhouse gas 72 times more potent than CO2) from oil and natural gas wells is a good start,[347] as is the move to limit CO2 emissions from new power plants.[348] But far more remains to be done.

In the short run, we need to pass greenhouse gas cap and trade legislation, similar to that which successfully, and at minimal cost to the American economy, reduced acid rain by reducing sulfur dioxide emissions by 50 percent,[349] and reduced emissions of ozone depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) under the highly successful Montreal Protocol[350] We also need a carbon tax. But such measures, as helpful as they are, can only get us part way down the road to a 90% reduction in CO2 emissions, a level which would avert greenhouse disaster while allowing the impoverished millions in the developing world a chance at a better life. I am certainly not advocating that we try to lift the whole weight alone — the per capita emissions for us represented by that 90% reduction figure are the per capita emissions level the entire world must live at to stabilize carbon dioxide levels at a comfortable 12 percent above present levels, or 450 parts per million.

The American people have rallied before. The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin reminded us on “Meet the Press” on March 25, 2012, while reflecting on the present partisan impasse on almost everything, that during World War II ordinary people were rationed 5 gallons of gas per week, and really important war workers were rationed 10. Very important people had unlimited gas, and Congress voted themselves “very important people” so they could get all the gas they wanted. Congress got slammed for that and had to backtrack. Doris Kearns Goodwin ended by observing that politicians haven’t changed much over the years, but we could all work together back then, and we can do so now.

To quote Isaiah 1:18, “Come now, let us reason together.” We have worked together in the past to solve grave problems, and we can do so again.

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References.

1. “Puerco Pueblo” from the National Park Service “Petrified Forest” site at http://www.nps.gov/pefo/historyculture/puerco-pueblo.htm

2. “Ancient Pueblo Peoples, “Warfare and Cannibalism” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Pueblo_Peoples#Warfare_and_cannibalism

3. For draught and war, see “U.S.: Water may cause wars in coming decades,” AP via CBS News, March 22, 2012 at http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57402448/u.s.-water-may-cause-wars-in-coming-decades/. See also “Global Water Security,” Intelligence Community Assessment, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, ICA 2012-08, February 2, 2012 at http://www.dni.gov/nic/ICA_Global Water Security.pdf. For draught, see “Desertification: The Next Dust Bowl” by Joseph Romm, Nature vol. 478, October 27, 2011, pp. 450–451, doi:10.1038/478450a, at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v478/n7370/full/478450a.html. For coastal flooding, see “Surging Seas, A Climate Central Report,” Climate Central, March 14, 2012 at http://slr.s3.amazonaws.com/SurgingSeas.pdf. For fire, see “New Report Warns Mega-Fire Risk Is Global and Growing” by By Dina Fine Maron and ClimateWire, Scientific American, May 12, 2011 at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=new-report-warns-mega-fire-risk-global-warming and “Findings and Implications from a Coarse-Scale Global Assessment of Recent Selected Mega-Fires”by Jerry Williams, et. al., 5th International Wildland Fire Conference Sun City, South Africa, 9-13 MAY 2011, Commissioned by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations at http://www.eenews.net/assets/2011/05/12/document_cw_01.pdf

4. “2010 Russian wildfires” from the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Russian_wildfires

4a. “Crisis Map: Fires Across the Nation” from Google Crisis Response via the Los Angeles Times, June 27, 2012 at http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-crisis-map-fires-20120627,0,1897184.htmlstory

4b. “Summer 2012: Glimpse of Climate Change Effects?”, CBS News, July 3, 2012 at http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57465669/summer-2012-glimpse-of-climate-change-effects/, and “Waldo Canyon Fire” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldo_Canyon_fire

4c. “Record Heat Hampers Containment of Wildfires,” CBS News, June 26, 2012 at http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57460350/record-heat-hampers-containment-of-wildfires/

4d. Jonathan Overpeck, as quoted in “Summer 2012: Glimpse of Climate Change Effects?”, AP via CBS News, July 3, 2012 at http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57465669/summer-2012-glimpse-of-climate-change-effects/

5. The Truth About Denial” by Sharon Begley, Newsweek, August 8, 2007 via The Daily Beast, Aug 12, 2007, p. 2 at http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2007/08/13/the-truth-about-denial.html

6. “In Oregon, McCain Touts His Cap-and-Trade System to Fight Global Warming” by Hal Bernton, Seattle Times, May 13, 2008 at http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2004409844_mccain13m.html

7. “The Great Global Warming Swindle” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Warming_Swindle

8. “President’s Address,” Nina V. Fedoroff, AAAS President, AAAS 2012 Annual Meeting at http://www.aaas.org/meetings/2012/program/plenaries/fedoroff.shtml#headline

9. “Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report, Summary for Policy Makers” IPCC, 2007, p. 7, at http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf

10. For population estimates, see “2009 World Population Data Sheet,” Population Reference Bureau, p. 6 at http://www.prb.org/pdf09/09wpds_eng.pdf

11. “Great Oxygenation Event” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event

12. “Carboniferous” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous#Rocks_and_coal

13. “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground” by Svante Arrhenius, Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science (fifth series), vol 41, April 1896, pp. 237–275. Photocopy prepared by Robert A. Rohde for Global Warming Art from the original printed material now in the public domain at http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/1/18/Arrhenius.pdf, or from the Internet Archive at http://web.archive.org/web/20110718073236/http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/1/18/Arrhenius.pdf. See also, “Svante Arrhenius, Greenhouse Effect” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_effect

14. “Worlds in the Making, The Evolution of the Universe” by Svante Arrhenius, H. Borns trans., Harper, New York, 1908, available from Google Books at http://books.google.com/books?id=1t45AAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false. See also the introductory comments by Robert A. Rhode in “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground” by Svante Arrhenius, Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science (fifth series), vol 41, April 1896, pp. 237–275. Photocopy prepared by Robert A. Rohde for Global Warming Art from the original printed material now in the public domain at http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/1/18/Arrhenius.pdf, or from the Internet Archive at http://web.archive.org/web/20110718073236/http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/1/18/Arrhenius.pdf

15. As quoted in “The Discovery of Global Warming, The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect, Skepticism (1900-1940s)” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, February 2011 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm#Sk

16. “The Discovery of Global Warming, The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect, The Theory Restored (1950-1958)” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, February 2011 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm#S2

17. “The Discovery of Global Warming, The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect, The Theory Restored (1950-1958)” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, February 2011 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm#S2

18. As quoted in “The Discovery of Global Warming, The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect, The Theory Restored (1950-1958)” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, February 2011 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm#S2. The portion of this sentence without quotation marks is closely paraphrased from Spencer Weart, but additional quotation marks have been omitted for clarity.

19. “The Discovery of Global Warming, The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect, Keeling’s Curve” at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm#SKC

20. “Keeling Curve” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling. The April 2012 value is from “Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” NOAA Earth Systems Research Laboratory, May, 2012 at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo_growth

21. “The Discovery of Global Warming, The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect, The Theory Restored (1950-1958)” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, February 2011 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm#S2

22. “The Discovery of Global Warming, The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect, The Theory Restored (1950-1958)” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, February 2011 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm#S2

23. “The Discovery of Global Warming, The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect, Evidence from the Ice” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, February 2011 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm#SEI

24. “Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” by Peter T. Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, EOS, 90 (3), January 20, 2009, pp. 22-23, available at http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf

25. “Recent Mauna Loa CO2,” NOAA Earth Systems Research Laboratory at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo_growth

26. “Q&A: Bill Gates, The Cofounder of Microsoft Talks Energy, Philanthropy and Management Style,” Interview by Jason Pontin, MIT Technology Review, August 24, 2010 at http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/26112/

27. “TerraPower” in the Wikipedia, “The Traveling Wave Reactor” section at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower#The_Traveling_Wave_Reactor. For general information about traveling-wave reactos, see “Traveling wave reactor” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor

28. “One Year Later, ‘Inside Japan’s Nuclear Meltdown’,” Interview with investigative reporter Dan Edge. Fresh Air from WHYY, National Public Radio, February 28, 2012 at http://www.npr.org/2012/02/28/147559456/one-year-later-inside-japans-nuclear-meltdown. The print story mentions evacuating Tokyo; for the spent fuel rods, listen to the recorded program.

29. “Bill Gates and China in Discussions Over New Nuclear Reactor,” The Guardian, December 7, 2011 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/dec/07/bill-gates-china-nuclear-reactor

30. “The End of the Nuclear Renaissance” by John Quiggin, The National Interest, January 3, 2012 at http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-end-the-nuclear-renaissance-6325

31. “Slicing Silicon Thinner to Cut the Price of Solar Cells” by Matthew L. Wald, New York Times, March 13, 2012 at http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/slicing-silicon-thinner-to-cut-the-price-of-solar-cells/

32. “Startup Aims to Cut the Cost of Solar Cells in Half” by Kevin Bullis, March 13, 2012 at http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/39887/

32a. “New Solar Panels Blossomed Despite a Tough Year for the Industry” by Diane Cardwell, New York Times, March 14, 2012 at http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/new-solar-panels-blossomed-despite-a-tough-year-for-the-industry/. See also “Recovery Act, 1603 Program: Payments for Specified Energy Property in Lieu of Tax Credits,” U.S. Department of the Treasury, June 13, 2012 at http://www.treasury.gov/initiatives/recovery/Pages/1603.aspx. Solar power developers who started their projects from 2008 through 2011 can still apply for a 1603 tax grant upon completion of their projects.

32b. “U.S. Slaps High Tariffs on Chinese Solar Panels” by Keith Bradsher and Diane Cardwell, New York Times, May 17, 2012 at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/business/energy-environment/us-slaps-tariffs-on-chinese-solar-panels.html?pagewanted=all

32c. “Solar Panels From China,” On Point with Tom Ashbrook, May 22, 2012 at http://onpoint.wbur.org/2012/05/22/solar-panels-from-china. See also “Evergreen Solar Files for Bankruptcy, Plans Asset Sale” by Greg Turner And Jerry Kronenberg, Boston Herald, August 15, 2011 at http://bostonherald.com/business/technology/general/view/2011_0815evergreen_solar_files_for_bankruptcy_plans_asset_sale, and “Evergreen Solar” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Solar

33. “Q&A: Bill Gates, The Cofounder of Microsoft Talks Energy, Philanthropy and Management Style.” Interview by Jason Pontin, MIT Technology Review, August 24, 2010 at http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/26112/

34. “A Minute With Eric Snodgrass, Expert on Atmospheric Sciences,” University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, February 14, 2012 at http://illinois.edu/lb/article/72/59853

35. The comparison base period for the map is the 1961-1980 average, and the colors represent the 1991-2010 average number of days early. See the interactive map and accompanying article, “State-by-State Look at How Early Spring Has Arrived,” Climate Central, April 15, 2012 at http://www.climatecentral.org/news/State-by-State-Look-at-How-Early-Spring-Has-Arrived/

36. “Heated Warning” by David Funkhouser, The Hartford Courant, October 5, 2006 at http://articles.courant.com/2006-10-05/news/0610050019_1_warming-theory-greenhouse-gas-gas-emissions

36a. The U.S. Forest Service says, “a changing climate has resulted in mild winters, which have failed to keep beetle populations in check in the north. There are also signs the insects are moving up in elevation and attacking whitebark and other pine species that usually don’t have to contend with the pests.” See “Scientists Scrutinize Beetle-Fire Interplay” by Susan Montoya Bryan, AP via The Seattle Times, July 2, 2012 at http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2018585228_firebeetles03.html

36b. As quoted in “Scientists Scrutinize Beetle-Fire Interplay” by Susan Montoya Bryan, AP via The Seattle Times, July 2, 2012 at http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2018585228_firebeetles03.html

36c. “Scientists Scrutinize Beetle-Fire Interplay” by Susan Montoya Bryan, AP via The Seattle Times, July 2, 2012 at http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2018585228_firebeetles03.html

37. “Arctic Harvest, “Global Warming a Boon for Greenland’s Farmers” by Gerald Traufetter, Spiegel Online International (Der Spiegel), August 30, 2006 at http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,434356,00.html

38. For the Vikings in Greenland, see “Erik the Red” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_the_Red, and “The Fate of Greenland’s Vikings” by Dale Mackenzie Brown, Archaeology, February 28, 2000 at http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/greenland/

39. “Through Northwest Passage in a Month, Ice-Free” by Ames Brooke, New York Times, September 5, 2000 at http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/05/world/through-northwest-passage-in-a-month-ice-free.html?pagewanted=all, and “Arctic Shortcut Beckons Shippers as Ice Thaws” by Andrew E. Kramer and Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times, September 10, 2009 at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/science/earth/11passage.html

40. “The Discovery of Global Warming, The Modern Temperature Trend, The Hockey Stick and Beyond” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, February 2011 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/20ctrend.htm#heatcontent. For a discussion of why rising ocean heat content is the best indicator, see “The Discovery of Global Warming, The Modern Temperature Trend, The Hockey Stick and Beyond” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, February 2011 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/20ctrend.htm#S6

40a. “Global Warming Makes Heat Waves More Likely, Study Finds” by Justin Gillis, New York Times, July 10, 2012 at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/11/science/earth/global-warming-makes-heat-waves-more-likely-study-finds.html, and “Explaining Extreme Events of 2011 from a Climate Perspective,” Thomas C. Peterson, Peter A. Stott, and Staphanie Herring, eds., Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, July, 2012 at http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/2011-peterson-et-al.pdf

40b. “Explaining Extreme Events of 2011 from a Climate Perspective, Did Human Influence on Climate Make the 2011 Texas Drought More Probable?” by David E. Rupp, Philip W. Mote, Neil Massey, Cameron J. Rye, Richard Jones, and Myles R. Allen (Thomas C. Peterson, Peter A. Stott, and Staphanie Herring, eds.), Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, July, 2012, pp. 1052 — 1054, pp. 12 — 14 of the PDF at http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/2011-peterson-et-al.pdf

40c. “Explaining Extreme Events of 2011 from a Climate Perspective, Exceptional Warming in the Western Pacific-Indian Ocean Warm Pool Has Contributed to More Frequent Droughts in Eastern Africa” by Chris Funk (Thomas C. Peterson, Peter A. Stott, and Staphanie Herring, eds.), Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, July, 2012, pp. 1049 — 1051, pp. 9 — 11 of the PDF at http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/2011-peterson-et-al.pdf

40d. “Explaining Extreme Events of 2011 from a Climate Perspective, The Absence of a Role of Climate Change in the 2011 Thailand Floods” by Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, Anne van Urk, Myles Allen (Thomas C. Peterson, Peter A. Stott, and Staphanie Herring, eds.), Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, July, 2012, pp. 1047 — 1049, pp. 7 — 9 of the PDF at http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/2011-peterson-et-al.pdf

40e. “Explaining Extreme Events of 2011 from a Climate Perspective, Lengthened Odds of the Cold UK Winter of 2010/11 Attributable to Human Influence” by Nikolaos Christidis and Peter Stott (Thomas C. Peterson, Peter A. Stott, and Staphanie Herring, eds.), Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, July, 2012, pp. 1060 — 1062, pp. 20 — 22 of the PDF at http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/2011-peterson-et-al.pdf

41. “Q&A: Bill Gates, The Cofounder of Microsoft Talks Energy, Philanthropy and Management Style.” Interview by Jason Pontin, MIT Technology Review, August 24, 2010 at http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/26112/

42. There are other indicators of the large size of the U.S. energy market. For example, private expenditures for energy in the United States come to $428.2 billion — see “Table 1.5.5. Gross Domestic Product, Expanded Detail,” Survey of Current Business, National Data, Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S Department of Commerce, March 29, 2012, p. D12 at http://www.bea.gov/national/pdf/dpga.pdf

43. “Industrial Group Plans to Battle Climate Treaty” by John H. Cushman Jr., New York Times, April 26, 1998 at http://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/26/us/industrial-group-plans-to-battle-climate-treaty.html

44. “Industrial Group Plans to Battle Climate Treaty” by John H. Cushman Jr., New York Times, April 26, 1998 at http://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/26/us/industrial-group-plans-to-battle-climate-treaty.html

45. The text of the letter is available via The Guardian at http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2006/09/19/LettertoNick.pdf. The accompanying news story is “Royal Society Tells Exxon: Stop Funding Climate Change Denial” by David Adam, The Guardian, September 19, 2006 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/sep/20/oilandpetrol.business

46. “Why the Climate Skeptics Are Winning” by Steven F. Hayward, “The Weekly Standard, February 27, 2012, obtained via the American Enterprise Institute at http://www.aei.org/article/energy-and-the-environment/climate-change/why-the-climate-skeptics-are-winning/

47. “Smoking and Health Proposal” from Anne Landman’s Collection, Tobacco Documents Online, TobaccoDocuments.org at http://tobaccodocuments.org/landman/332506.html. This quote comes from a 1969 Brown & Williamson (B&W) memo probably authored by R.A. Pittman, Senior Brand Marketing Supervisor at B&W from 1968-70.

48. “The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America,” section on “Winning the Global Warming Debate — An Overview,” memo for Republican Party clients by Frank Luntz, Obtained from “Luntz Memo on the Environment,” The Environmental Working Group, March 2003 at http://www.ewg.org/project/luntz-memo-environment

49. “Frank Luntz, Global Warming” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz#Global_warming

50. “Pollster Frank Luntz Releases New Polling Results: Bipartisan Public Support for National Climate Legislation,” Environmental Defense Fund, January 21, 2010 at http://www.edf.org/news/pollster-frank-luntz-releases-new-polling-results-bipartisan-public-support-national-climate-le

51. “The Truth About Denial” by Sharon Begley, Newsweek, August 8, 2007 via The Daily Beast, Aug 12, 2007, p. 5 at http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2007/08/13/the-truth-about-denial.html

52. “The Denial Industry” by George Monbiot, The Guardian, September 18, 2006 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/sep/19/ethicalliving.g2. Double quotes mark Monbiot’s text, single quotes mark his quotations from APCO’s founding documents. Two of the actual documents are available from the Legacy Tobacco Library Documents, University of California San Francisco: the founding document from APCO, “N403” at http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/zcf57d00, and the document outlining Philip Morris’s funding, “TASSC / APCO 000111” at http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/umr30h00

53. “The Denial Industry” by George Monbiot, The Guardian, September 18, 2006 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/sep/19/ethicalliving.g2

54. “George C. Marshall Institute” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Institute

55. “Global Warming and Ozone Hole Controversies, a Challenge to Scientific Judgement” by Dr. Frederick Seitz, George C. Marshall Institute, 1994, obtained from the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, University of California, San Francisco at http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/documentStore/y/m/g/ymg14e00/Symg14e00.pdf

56. “While Washington Slept” by Mark Hertsgaard, Vanity Fair, May, 2006, p. 4 at http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/05/warming200605

57. “Interviews, Frederick Seitz,” PBS FrontLine, April 24, 2007 at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hotpolitics/interviews/seitz.html. See also “While Washington Slept” by Mark Hertsgaard, Vanity Fair, May, 2006 at http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/05/warming200605, where Hertsgaard says Seitz was PRESIDENT EMERITUS of Rockefeller University rather than PRESIDENT while he was being paid by R.J. Reynolds.

58. “Frederick Seitz, Physicist Who Led Skeptics of Global Warming, Dies at 96” by Dennis Hevesi, New York Times, March 6, 2008 at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/us/06seitz.html?_r=1

59. R.J. Reynolds memo: “RJR’s Support of Biomedical Research International Advisory Board” by Colin Stokes, November, 1979, TobaccoDocuments.org, Ness Motley Documents, at http://tobaccodocuments.org/ness/29154.html?pattern=frederick[a-z]*\W%2Bseitz[a-z]*&p7

60. “Interviews, Frederick Seitz,” PBS FrontLine, April 24, 2007 at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hotpolitics/interviews/seitz.html

61. “Interviews, Frederick Seitz,” PBS FrontLine, April 24, 2007 at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hotpolitics/interviews/seitz.html

62. “Frederick Seitz, Physicist Who Led Skeptics of Global Warming, Dies at 96” by Dennis Hevesi, New York Times, March 6, 2008 at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/us/06seitz.html?_r=1

63. “Ozone Depletion” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion

64. “A Reminder That Science Can Override Pressure” by Felicity Barringer, New York Times, Maarch 14, 2012 at http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/a-reminder-that-science-can-override-pressure/

65. “List of Nobel laureates in Chemistry” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Chemistry

66. “Sallie Baliunas” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sallie_Baliunas

67. “Mount Wilson Observatory, 100 inch (2.5 m) Hooker Telescope” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Wilson_Observatory#100_inch_.282.5_m.29_Hooker_Telescope. Curiously, the Wikipedia article does not mention Sallie Baliunas’s contribution; this comes from articles I read in Astronomy and Sky & Telescope magazines at the time.

68. “Sallie Baliunas” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sallie_Baliunas

69. “Climate History and the Sun” by Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon, The Washington Roundtable on Science and Public Policy, The George C. Marshall Institute, June 5, 2001, p. 13, p. 17 of the PDF at http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/90.pdf

70. “Scientific Integrity and Public Trust: The Science Behind Federal Policies and Mandates: Case Study 1 — Stratospheric Ozone: Myths and Realities,” Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment of the Committee on Science, U.S. House of Representatives, One Hundred and Fourth Congress, First Session, September 20, 1995 [No. 31], p. 130 (p. 136 of the PDF), available from the Open Library at http://openlibrary.org/books/OL573428M/Scientific_integrity_and_public_trust

71. “Ozone & Global Warming: Are the Problems Real?,” 1997 web page by Sallie Baliunas at the George C. Marshall Institute, accessed via the Internet Archive at http://web.archive.org/web/19971009161238/http://www.marshall.org/ozone.html. Note: This page contains the text of a Marshall Institute publication, “Ozone & Global Warming: Are the Problems Real?” by Sallie Baliunas, The Washington Roundtable on Science and Public Policy, George C. Marshall Institute, December 13, 1994.

72. “Five Good Things Cap-and-Trade Has Done For You” by Susan Kraemer, June 8, 2012, CleanTechnica, June 8, 2010 at http://cleantechnica.com/2010/06/08/five-good-things-cap-and-trade-has-done-for-you/

73. “The Global Warming Crisis, It is Time to Move Beyond Kyoto,” 1999 Marshall Institute web page, accessed via the Internet Archive at http://web.archive.org/web/19990129014205/http://www.marshall.org/globalfax.html

74. “The Global Warming Crisis,” 1999 Marshall Institute web page, accessed via the Internet Archive at http://web.archive.org/web/19990129014205/http://www.marshall.org/globalfax.html

75. “Evidence for Long-Term Brightness Changes of Solar-Type Stars” by Sallie Baliunas and Robert Jastrow, Nature vol. 348 (1990) pp. 520-23, available only in paper.

76. “Climate History and the Sun” by Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon, The Washington Roundtable on Science and Public Policy, The George C. Marshall Institute, June 5, 2001, at http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/90.pdf

77. “The Discovery of Global Warming, Changing Sun, Changing Climate?, More Sun-Climate Connections (1980s – 1990s)” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, February, 2011 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/solar.htm#S4

78. “Science Rejects Kyoto” by Sallie Baliunas, Capitalism Magazine, March 18, 2002 at http://capitalismmagazine.com/2002/03/science-rejects-kyoto/

79. “Proxy Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past 1000 Years” by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, Climate Research vol. 23 (2003) pp. 89-110, doi:/10.3354/cr023089, available at http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr2003/23/c023p089.pdf

80. “Emails Reveal Strenuous Efforts by Climate Scientists to ‘Censor’ Their Critics” by Fred Pearce, The Guardian, February 9, 2010 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/peer-review-block-scientific-papers

81. Indirect quote from “The Global Warming Myth?” by John Stossel, ABC 20/20, April 20, 2007 at http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=3061015&page=2#.T7Vw9r97DsE

82. “The Global Warming Myth?” by John Stossel, ABC 20/20, April 20, 2007 at http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=3061015&page=2#.T7Vw9r97DsE

83. “The Heartland Institute, Ideas that Empower People, Expert Search, Issue: Environment” at http://heartland.org/experts?page=1&issue_area_tid[0]=34

84. “Science, Economics, and Environmenal Policy: A Critical Examination, A research report conducted by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution,” August 11, 1994, p. 8, p. 13 of the PDF, available from Legacy Tobacco Library Documents, University of California San Francisco at http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/documentStore/d/v/r/dvr49b00/Sdvr49b00.pdf. Singer is actually listed as the “Principal Reviewer” of the report rather than the author.

85. “Fred Singer, Second-Hand Smoke” in the Wikipdedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Singer#Second-hand_smoke

86. “Science, Economics, and Environmenal Policy: A Critical Examination, A research report conducted by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution,” August 11, 1994, p. 24, p. 28 of the PDF, available from Legacy Tobacco Library Documents, University of California San Francisco at http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/documentStore/d/v/r/dvr49b00/Sdvr49b00.pdf

87. “Science, Economics, and Environmenal Policy: A Critical Examination, A research report conducted by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution,” August 11, 1994, p. 25, p. 29 of the PDF, available from Legacy Tobacco Library Documents, University of California San Francisco at http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/documentStore/d/v/r/dvr49b00/Sdvr49b00.pdf

88. “Scientific Integrity and Public Trust: The Science Behind Federal Policies and Mandates: Case Study 1 — Stratospheric Ozone: Myths and Realities,” Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment of the Committee on Science, U.S. House of Representatives, One Hundred and Fourth Congress, First Session, September 20, 1995 [No. 31], p. 54, p. 60 of the PDF, available from the Open Library at http://openlibrary.org/books/OL573428M/Scientific_integrity_and_public_trust

89. “Regulation Cannot Control Malignant Melanoma” by S. Fred Singer, American Thinker, May 21, 2011 at http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/05/regulation_cannot_control_mali_1.html

90. “Secondhand Smoke, Lung Cancer, and the Global Warming Debate” by S. Fred Singer, December 19, 2010 at http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/12/second_hand_smoke_lung_cancer.html

91. “Climategate Heads to Court” by S. Fred Singer, American Thinker, April 5, 2012 at http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/climategate_heads_to_court.html

92. “The end of the IPCC” by S. Fred Singer, American Thinker, February 10, 2010 at http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/the_end_of_the_ipcc.html

93. “Fake! Fake! Fake! Fake!” by S. Fred Singer, American Thinker, January 2, 2012 at http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/fake_fake_fake_fake.html

94. “Fake! Fake! Fake! Fake!” by S. Fred Singer, American Thinker, January 2, 2012 at http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/fake_fake_fake_fake.html

95. “7th International Conference on Climate Change, May 21 — 23, 2012, Chicago, Illinois, Speakers,” The Heartland Institute, at http://climateconference.heartland.org/speakers, and “Skeptics Dispute Climate Worries and Each Other” by Andrew C Revkin, New York Times, March 8, 2009, at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/science/earth/09climate.html

96. “The Heartland Institute, Smoking” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartland_Institute#Smoking

96a. “January 2006: Leave Those Poor Smokers Alone!” by Joseph Bast, Policy Documents, The Heartland Institute, January 1, 2006 at http://heartland.org/policy-documents/january-2006-leave-those-poor-smokers-alone. See also “Reply to Our Critics, Q. Is Heartland’s position on tobacco control ‘extremist’ or outside the scientific mainstream?,” The Heartland Institute, at http://heartland.org/reply-to-critics

97. “Re: Policy Group List,” available from Legacy Tobacco Library Documents, University of California San Francisco at http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/pmz88e00

98. “Skeptics Dispute Climate Worries and Each Other” by Andrew C Revkin, New York Times, March 8, 2009, at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/science/earth/09climate.html

99. “Skeptics Dispute Climate Worries and Each Other” by Andrew C Revkin, New York Times, March 8, 2009, at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/science/earth/09climate.html

100. “Emissions Trading, United States” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cap_and_trade#United_States, and “Five Good Things Cap-and-Trade Has Done For You” by Susan Kraemer, CleanTechnica, June 8, 2010 at http://cleantechnica.com/2010/06/08/five-good-things-cap-and-trade-has-done-for-you/

101. “Fake! Fake! Fake! Fake!” by S. Fred Singer, American Thinker, January 2, 2012 at http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/fake_fake_fake_fake.html

102. “Fred Singer, Design of Early Satellites” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Singer#1951:_Design_of_early_satellites

103. “7th International Conference on Climate Change, May 21 — 23, 2012, Chicago, Illinois, Speakers,” The Heartland Institute, at http://climateconference.heartland.org/speakers

104. “Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature, Financial Support” at http://berkeleyearth.org/donors/

105. If you really want to know who the Koch brothers are, a good, fairly non-biased account is “Political Activities of the Koch Family” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_the_Koch_family

106. “Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” by Peter T. Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, EOS, 90 (3), January 20, 2009, pp. 22-23 at http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf

107. “Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” by Naomi Oreskes, Science vol. 306, December 3, 2004, p. 1686, available at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/306/5702/1686.pdf

108. “Richard Lindzen” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_S._Lindzen

109. “Clouds’ Effect on Climate Change Is Last Bastion for Dissenters” by Justin Gillis, New York Times, April 30, 2012 at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/science/earth/clouds-effect-on-climate-change-is-last-bastion-for-dissenters.html

110. “Clouds’ Effect on Climate Change Is Last Bastion for Dissenters” by Justin Gillis, New York Times, April 30, 2012 at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/science/earth/clouds-effect-on-climate-change-is-last-bastion-for-dissenters.html

111. “Hearing, Climate Science and EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Regulations, Written Statement of John R. Christy” by John R. Christie, House Energy & Commerce Committee, Subcommittee on Energy and Power, March 8, 2011, p. 2, p. 1 of the PDF, at http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearings/hearingdetail.aspx?NewsID=8304

112. “Hearing, Climate Science and EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Regulations, Written Statement of John R. Christy” by John R. Christie, House Energy & Commerce Committee, Subcommittee on Energy and Power, March 8, 2011, p. 11, p. 10 of the PDF, at http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearings/hearingdetail.aspx?NewsID=8304

113. See, for example, “An Alternative Explanation for Differential Temperature Trends at the Surface and in the Lower Troposphere” by Philip J. Klotzbach, Roger A. Pielke Sr., Roger A. Pielke Jr., John R. Christy, and Richard T. McNider, Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 114, 4 November 2009, 8 pages, doi:10.1029/2009JD011841, available at http://blogs.agu.org/wildwildscience/files/2009/11/2009_Klotzbach_etal6.pdf, and the correction, “Correction to ‘An Alternative Explanation for Differential Temperature Trends at the Surface and in the Lower Troposphere'” by Philip J. Klotzbach, Roger A. Pielke Sr., Roger A. Pielke Jr., John R. Christy, and Richard T. McNider, Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 115, 12 January 2010, 1 page, doi:10.1029/2009JD013655, available at http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/r-345a.pdf. See also “Hearing, Climate Science and EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Regulations, Written Statement of John R. Christy” by John R. Christie, House Energy & Commerce Committee, Subcommittee on Energy and Power, March 8, 2011, p. 14, p. 13 of the PDF, at http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearings/hearingdetail.aspx?NewsID=8304

114. “Hearing, Climate Science and EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Regulations, Written Statement of John R. Christy” by John R. Christie, House Energy & Commerce Committee, Subcommittee on Energy and Power, March 8, 2011, p. 13, p. 12 of the PDF, at http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearings/hearingdetail.aspx?NewsID=8304

115. “Hearing, Climate Science and EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Regulations, Written Statement of John R. Christy” by John R. Christie, House Energy & Commerce Committee, Subcommittee on Energy and Power, March 8, 2011, p. 21, p. 20 of the PDF, at http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearings/hearingdetail.aspx?NewsID=8304

116. Roy Spencer’s blog, “Global Warming, Roy Spencer, Ph.D., About” at http://www.drroyspencer.com/about/

117. “On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” by Roy W. Spencer and William D. Braswell, Remote Sensing, vol. 3, July, 2011, pp. 1603-1613, doi:10.3390/rs3081603 at http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/8/1603/pdf

118. “‘Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedback'” by Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo, RealClimate, July 29, 2011 at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/07/

119. “Cires, Pielke Research Group, Roger A. Pielke Sr.,” at http://cires.colorado.edu/science/groups/pielke/people/pielke.html

120. For hotter and drier weather, see “The Impact of Anthropogenic Land-cover Change on the Florida Peninsula Sea Breezes and Warm Season Sensible Weather” by C. H. Marshall Jr., R.A. Pielke Sr., L.T. Steyaert, and D.A. Willard, Monthly Weather Review, vol. 132, 2004, pp. 28-52, available at http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/r-272.pdf. For more frequent crop freezes, see “Crop Freezes and Land-use Change in Florida” by C. H. Marshall Jr., R.A. Pielke Sr., and L.T. Steyaert, Nature, vol. 426, 2003, pp. 29-30, available at http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/r-277.pdf. See also the readable summary of these in “Considering the Human Influence on Climate” by Roger Pielke, Sr., Washington Roundtable on Science and Public Policy, George C. Marshall Institute, May 14, 2009, p. 17 ff., p. 21 ff. of the PDF, at http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/656.pdf

121. “More than CO2: A Broader Picture for Managing Climate Change and Variability to Avoid Ecosystem Collapse” by C. A. McAlpine, W. F. Laurance, J. G. Ryan, L. Seabrook, J. I. Syktus, A. E. Etter, P. M. Fearnside, P. Dargusch, and R. A. Pielke Sr., Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, vol. 2, 2010, pp. 334-336, available at http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/r-355.pdf

121a. “Long, Hot Summer: Wildfires Thrive on Drought, Heat and Wind” by Bettina Boxall, Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2012 at http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/02/nation/la-na-fires-ahead-20120702

121b. “Long-term Perspective on Wildfires in the Western USA” by Jennifer R. Marlona, Patrick J. Bartlein, Daniel G. Gavin, Colin J. Long, R. Scott Anderson, Christy E. Briles, Kendrick J. Brown, Daniele Colombaroli, Douglas J. Hallett, Mitchell J. Power, Elizabeth A. Scharf, and Megan K. Walsh, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 109, February 14, 2012, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1112839109 at http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1112839109

121c. Patrick Bartlein as quoted in “Western Fires: Payback Time?” by Tom Yulsman, The Daily Climate, July 12, 2012 at http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2012/06/wildfire-deficit

122. “Monckton’s Deliberate Manipulation” by Gavin A. Schmidt, RealClimate, May 2, 2009 at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/05/moncktons-deliberate-manipulation/

123. For example, consider Sarah Palin’s statement, “Without trustworthy science and with so much at stake, Americans should be wary about what comes out of this politicized conference. The president should boycott Copenhagen.,” in “Sarah Palin on the Politicization of the Copenhagen Climate Conference” by Sarah Palin, The Washington Post, December 9, 2009 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/08/AR2009120803402.html

124. “Plate tectonics, Development of the Theory, Summary” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics#Summary

125. “The Carboniferous Period,” University of California Museum of Paleontology, 2011 at http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/carboniferous/carboniferous.php

126. See “William Jennings Bryan’s Last Campaign” in “Bully for Brontosaurus” by Stephen Jay Gould, Norton, New York, 1991, pp. 421-427.

127. “God and White Men at Yale” by Richard Conniff, Yale Alumni Magazine, May/June 2012, pp. 44 — 51 at http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2012_05/feature_eugenics.html

128. See the excellent and accurate historical novel, “The Hour of the Cat” by Peter Quinn, Overlook Press, New York, 2005.

129. “Why Politicized Science is Dangerous” by Michael Crichton, excerpted from the novel “State of Fear” at http://www.crichton-official.com/books-stateoffear-policy.html

130. “Richard Lindzen, Views on Climate Change” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen#Views_on_climate_change. See also “Why Politicized Science is Dangerous” by Michael Crichton, excerpted from the novel “State of Fear” at http://www.crichton-official.com/books-stateoffear-policy.html

131. “Inventing the AIDS Virus” by Peter H. Duesberg, Regnery Publishing, Washington DC, 1996.

132. “Fighting On After the War Is Over, HIV Contrarian Publishes Yet Another Paper” by John Timmer, Ars Technica, January 10, 2012 at http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/01/hiv-contrarian-still-publishing-still-wrong.ars

133. For those who might have forgotten, Pascal’s Wager is described well in the article, “Pascal’s Wager” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager

134. “Climatic Research Unit Documents” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_documents

135. “Stolen E-Mails Sharpen a Brawl Between Climate Scientists and Skeptics” by Lauren Morello of ClimateWire, New York Times, November 24, 2009 at http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/11/24/24climatewire-stolen-e-mails-sharpen-a-brawl-between-clima-19517.html?pagewanted=all

136. “Pielke Sr.: Climategate Emails Just a Small Sample of a Broad Issue (PJM Exclusive),” Interview with PJ Media, December 2, 2009 at http://pjmedia.com/blog/pielke-sr-climategate-emails-just-a-small-sample-of-a-broad-issue-pjm-exclusive/

137. “Considering the Human Influence on Climate” by Roger Pielke, Sr., Washington Roundtable on Science and Public Policy, George C. Marshall Institute, May 14, 2009, p. 23, p. 27 of the PDF, at http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/656.pdf

138. “Considering the Human Influence on Climate” by Roger Pielke, Sr., Washington Roundtable on Science and Public Policy, George C. Marshall Institute, May 14, 2009, p. 15, p. 19 of the PDF at http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/656.pdf

139. “RA-10 Final Investigation Report Involving Dr. Michael E Mann, The Pennsylvania State University,” June 4, 2010 at http://live.psu.edu/pdf/Final_Investigation_Report.pdf

140. “A Bias in the Midtropospheric Channel Warm Target Factor on the NOAA-9 Microwave Sounding Unit” by Stephen Po-Chedley and Quang Fu, Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, to appear 2012, doi:10.1175/JTECH-D-11-00147.1 at http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JTECH-D-11-00147.1

141. “Our Response to Recent Criticism of the UAH Satellite Temperatures” by John R. Christy and Roy W. Spencer, Global Warming, May 9, 2012 at http://www.drroyspencer.com/2012/05/our-response-to-recent-criticism-of-the-uah-satellite-temperatures/

142. “On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” by Roy W. Spencer and William D. Braswell, Remote Sensing, vol. 3, 2011, July, 2011, pp. 1603-1613, doi:10.3390/rs3081603 at http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/8/1603/pdf

143. “Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedback” by Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo, RealClimate, July 29, 2011 at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/07/

144. “No Need to Panic About Global Warming,” Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal signed by 16 scientists, January 26, 2012 at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577171531838421366.html

145. “British Panel Clears Scientists” by Justin Gillis, New York Times, July 7, 2010 at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/science/earth/08climate.html?pagewanted=all

146. “Global Land Temperature in May 2012 Is Warmest on Record” by Dan Pisut and Susan Osborne, ClimateWatch Magazine, NOAA, June 14, 2012 at http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/image/2012/global-land-temperature-in-may-2012-is-warmest-on-record, and “Earth’s Fourth Warmest June on Record” by Dan Pisut and Susan Osborne, ClimateWatch Magazine, NOAA, July 17, 2012 at http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/image/2012/earths-fourth-warmest-june-on-record

146a. For example see the graph, “A long decline: 7 years’ global cooling at 3.6 °F (2 °C) per century” in the “Monthly CO2 Report” by Lord Monckton, February, 2009, Vol. 1, Issue 2 at http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/feb_co2_report.pdf

147. “Considering the Human Influence on Climate” by Roger Pielke, Sr., Washington Roundtable on Science and Public Policy, George C. Marshall Institute, May 14, 2009, p. 9 and 33, p. 13 and 37 of the PDF, at http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/656.pdf

148. “GISS Surface Temperature Analysis, Global Temperature in 2011, Trends, and Prospects” by James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato, and Ken Lo, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, January 18, 2012 at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2011/

149. “GISS Surface Temperature Analysis, Global Temperature in 2011, Trends, and Prospects” by James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato, and Ken Lo, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, January 18, 2012 at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2011/

150. “GISS Surface Temperature Analysis, Global Temperature in 2011, Trends, and Prospects” by James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato, and Ken Lo, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, January 18, 2012 at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2011/

151. “NASA Finds 2011 Ninth Warmest Year on Record,” NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies Research News, January 19, 2012 at http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20120119/

152. “El Nino-Southern Oscillation” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o-Southern_Oscillation, and “Pacific Decadal Oscillation” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_decadal_oscillation

153. “The Discovery of Global Warming, Changing Sun, Changing Climate?,” “More Sun-Climate Connections (1980s – 1990s)” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, February, 2011 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/solar.htm#S4

154. See the caption to the image at the bottom of “The Discovery of Global Warming, Changing Sun, Changing Climate?,” “More Sun-Climate Connections (1980s – 1990s)” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, February, 2011 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/solar.htm#S4

155. “Maunder Minimum” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum. The Wikipedia article DOES NOT include recent research results on solar variability or the causes of the little Ice Age.

156. “Abrupt Onset of the Little Ice Age Triggered by Volcanism and Sustained by Sea-Ice/Ocean Feedbacks” by Gifford H. Miller et. al., Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 39, L02708, 2012, 5 pages, doi:10.1029/2011GL050168 at http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2011GL050168.shtml, and the readable report, “Volcanoes, Rather than a Quiet Sun, May Have Triggered the Little Ice Age” by Scott K. Johnson, Ars Technica, February 6, 2012 at http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/02/eruptions-not-quiet-sun-may-have-triggered-little-ice-age.ars

157. In the VERY distant past, six hundred million years ago or more, the Sun was significantly less bright. See “Faint Young Sun Paradox” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faint_young_Sun_paradox

158. “Herbert Needleman” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Needleman

159. “Climate Contrarians Ignore Overwhelming Evidence” by Michael Mann, Letter, The Wall Street Journal, December 5, 2011 at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204449804577068211662483248.html

160. “RA-10 Final Investigation Report Involving Dr. Michael E Mann, The Pennsylvania State University,” June 4, 2010 at http://live.psu.edu/pdf/Final_Investigation_Report.pdf

161. “A Reminder That Science Can Override Pressure” by Felicity Barringer, New York Times, March 14, 2012 at http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/a-reminder-that-science-can-override-pressure/

162. “A Reminder That Science Can Override Pressure” by Felicity Barringer, New York Times, March 14, 2012 at http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/a-reminder-that-science-can-override-pressure/

163. “A Reminder That Science Can Override Pressure” by Felicity Barringer, New York Times, March 14, 2012 at http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/a-reminder-that-science-can-override-pressure/

164. “List of Nobel laureates in Chemistry” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Chemistry

165. For his Yale connections, see, for example, “RA-10 Final Investigation Report Involving Dr. Michael E, Mann The Pennsylvania State University,” June 4, 2010, p. 18, at http://live.psu.edu/pdf/Final_Investigation_Report.pdf

166. “Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing over the Past Six Centuries” by Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley, and Malcolm K. Hughes, Nature, vol. 392, April 23, 1998, pp. 779-787, available at http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/mbh98.pdf, and “Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations” by Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley, and Malcolm K. Hughes, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 26, pp. 759–762, 1999, available at http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/research/ONLINE-PREPRINTS/Millennium/mbh99.pdf

167. “Another well-deserved honor: Oeschger medal awarded to Michael Mann”, RealClimate, April 24, 2012 at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/04/another-well-deserved-honor-oeschger-medal-awarded-to-michael-mann/

168. “The Discovery of Global Warming, The Modern Temperature Trend, Warming Resumed (1975-1987)” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, February, 2011 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/20ctrend.htm#S3

169. “The Discovery of Global Warming, The Modern Temperature Trend, Warming Resumed (1975-1987)” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, February, 2011 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/20ctrend.htm#S3

170. “The Truth About Denial” by Sharon Begley, Newsweek, August 8, 2007 via The Daily Beast, Aug 12, 2007, p. 2 at http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2007/08/13/the-truth-about-denial.html

171. “Updates to Model-Data Comparisons” by Gavin Schmidt, RealClimate, December 28, 2009 at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/updates-to-model-data-comparisons/

172. “2011 Updates to Model-Data Comparisons” by Gavin Schmidt, RealClimate, February 8, 2012 at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/02/2011-updates-to-model-data-comparisons/, and the more punchy “Updates to Model-Data Comparisons” by Gavin Schmidt, RealClimate, December 28, 2009 at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/updates-to-model-data-comparisons/

173. “Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him” by Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times, January 29, 2006, at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/science/earth/29climate.html

174. “The Bird-Filled World of Richard Prum” by Cathy Shufro, Yale Alumni Magazine, November/December 2011 at http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2011_11/feature_prum.html

175. For his Yale connections, see, for example, “RA-10 Final Investigation Report Involving Dr. Michael E, Mann The Pennsylvania State University,” June 4, 2010, p. 18, at http://live.psu.edu/pdf/Final_Investigation_Report.pdf

176. “Science Under Attack,” Union of Concerned Scientists, June 7, 2011 at http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/abuses_of_science/cuccinelli-mann.html, and “Climategate Heads to Court” by S. Fred Singer, American Thinker, April 5, 2012 at http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/climategate_heads_to_court.html

177. “Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations” by Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley, and Malcolm K. Hughes, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 26, pp. 759–762, 1999, available at http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/research/ONLINE-PREPRINTS/Millennium/mbh99.pdf

178. “The Discovery of Global Warming, The Modern Temperature Trend, The Hockey Stick and Beyond” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, February, 2011 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/20ctrend.htm#S6

179. “Sarah Palin on the Politicization of the Copenhagen Climate Conference” by Sarah Palin, The Washington Post, December 9, 2009 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/08/AR2009120803402.html

180. “Sarah Palin on the Politicization of the Copenhagen Climate Conference” by Sarah Palin, The Washington Post, December 9, 2009 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/08/AR2009120803402.html

181. “Inhofe in Copenhagen: ‘It Has Failed … It’s Deja Vu All Over Again.'” by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla), U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, December 17, 2009 at http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Speeches&ContentRecord_id=9cac1e35-802a-23ad-4540-3e4706eab1bd&Region_id=&Issue_id=

182. “Standard Deviation” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation

183. “Hockey Sticks, Principal Components, and Spurious Significance” by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 32, 2005, 5 pages, available at http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/mcintyre-grl-2005.pdf, and “The M&M Critique of the MBH98 Northern Hemisphere Climate Index: Update and Implications” by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, Energy & Environment, vol 16, no. 1, 2005, pp. 69–100 at http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/mcintyre-ee-2005.pdf

184. “Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing over the Past Six Centuries” by Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley, and Malcolm K. Hughes, Nature, vol. 392, April 23, 1998, pp. 779-787, available at http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/mbh98.pdf

185. “Dummies Guide to the Latest ‘Hockey Stick’ Controversy” by Gavin Schmidt and Caspar Amman, RealClimate, February 18, 2005, at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/02/dummies-guide-to-the-latest-hockey-stick-controversy

186. “Principal component analysis” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis

187. For examples of the use of tree ring chronologies in studying prehistoric precipitation patterns, see the extremely readable overview, “North American Drought, the Last 2,000 Years, Multi-Millennial Dendroclimatic Studies from the Western United States” by Malcolm K. Hughes and Lisa J. Graumlich, NOAA National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/drought/drght_graumlich.html, and the scientific paper, “Multi-millenial dendroclimatic studies from the western United States” by M. K. Hughes and L. J. Graumlich, in “Climatic variations and forcing mechanisms of the last 2000 years,” NATO ASI Series, , vol 141, 1996, pp. 109-124.

188. “Severinghaus and ‘Hide the Decline'” by Steve McIntyre, Climate Audit, November 28, 2011 at http://climateaudit.org/2011/11/28/severinghaus-and-hide-the-decline/

189. “Temperature Trends Over the Past Five Centuries Reconstructed from Borehole Temperatures” by Shaopeng Huang, Henry N. Pollack, and Po-Yu Shen, Nature, Vol. 403, February 17, 2000, pp. 756 — 758 at http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/62610

190. “Reconstructing Past Climate from Noisy Data” by Hans von Storch, Eduardo Zorita, Julie Jones, Yegor Dimitriev, Fidel Gonza?lez-Rouco, and Simon Tett, Scienceexpress, September 30, 2004, no page numbers, 8 pages, doi:10.1126/science.1096109, available at http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/vonStorchEtAl2004.pdf

190a. “Global Surface Temperatures Over the Past Two Millennia” by Michael E. Mann and Philip D. Jones, at Geophysical Research Letters, Vol 30, No. 15, 2003, doi:10.1029/2003GL017814 at http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/mannjones03.pdf

190b. “Proxy-based Reconstructions of Hemispheric and Global Surface Temperature Variations Over the Past Two Millennia” by Michael E. Mann, Zhihua Zhang, Malcolm K. Hughes, Raymond S. Bradley, Sonya K. Miller, Scott Rutherford, and Fenbiao Ni, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 105, No. 36, September 9, 2008, pp. 13252-13257, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0805721105, at http://www.pnas.org/content/105/36/13252.long

190c. “Proxy-based Reconstructions of Hemispheric and Global Surface Temperature Variations Over the Past Two Millennia” by Michael E. Mann, Zhihua Zhang, Malcolm K. Hughes, Raymond S. Bradley, Sonya K. Miller, Scott Rutherford, and Fenbiao Ni, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 105, No. 36, September 9, 2008, pp. 13252-13257, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0805721105, at http://www.pnas.org/content/105/36/13252.long

190d. “Proxy-based Reconstructions of Hemispheric and Global Surface Temperature Variations Over the Past Two Millennia” by Michael E. Mann, Zhihua Zhang, Malcolm K. Hughes, Raymond S. Bradley, Sonya K. Miller, Scott Rutherford, and Fenbiao Ni, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 105, No. 36, September 9, 2008, pp. 13252-13257, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0805721105, at http://www.pnas.org/content/105/36/13252.long

190e. “Global Signatures and Dynamical Origins of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Anomaly” by Michael E. Mann, Zhihua Zhang, Scott Rutherford, Raymond S. Bradley, Malcolm K. Hughes, Drew Shindell, Caspar Ammann, Greg Faluvegi, Fenbiao Ni, Science, Vol. 326, November 27, 2009, p. 1256, doi:10.1126/science.1177303 at http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/MannetalScience09.pdf

190f. “Global Signatures and Dynamical Origins of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Anomaly” by Michael E. Mann, Zhihua Zhang, Scott Rutherford, Raymond S. Bradley, Malcolm K. Hughes, Drew Shindell, Caspar Ammann, Greg Faluvegi, Fenbiao Ni, Science, Vol. 326, November 27, 2009, p. 1259, doi:10.1126/science.1177303 at http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/MannetalScience09.pdf

190g. “Global Signatures and Dynamical Origins of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Anomaly” by Michael E. Mann, Zhihua Zhang, Scott Rutherford, Raymond S. Bradley, Malcolm K. Hughes, Drew Shindell, Caspar Ammann, Greg Faluvegi, Fenbiao Ni, Science, Vol. 326, November 27, 2009, p. 1259, doi:10.1126/science.1177303 at http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/MannetalScience09.pdf

190h. “The World’s Most Visited Newspaper Website Continues to Regurgitate Nonsense from Climate Change ‘Sceptics'” by Bob Ward, The Huffington Post UK, July 7, 2012 at http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/bob-ward/the-worlds-most-visited-n_b_1667338.html

190i. “Progress in Reconstructing Climate in Recent Millennia” by Gavin Schmidt, RealClimate, September 3, 2008 at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/09/progress-in-millennial-reconstructions/

190j. “Orbital Forcing of Tree-Ring Data” by Jan Esper, David C. Frank, Mauri Timonen, Eduardo Zorita, Rob J. S. Wilson, Jurg Luterbacher, Steffen Holzkämper, Nils Fischer, Sebastian Wagner, Daniel Nievergelt, Anne Verstege, and Ulf Buntgen, Nature Climate Change, 2012 doi:10.1038/nclimate1589 at http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1589.html

191. “Global Warming Preceded by Increasing Carbon Dioxide Concentrations During the Last Deglaciation”, J.D. Shakun, P.U. Clark, F. He, S.A. Marcott, A.C. Mix, Z. Liu, B. Otto-Bliesner, A. Schmittner, and E. Bard, Nature, vol. 484, 2012, pp. 49-54. doi:10.1038/nature10915 at http://sciences.blogs.liberation.fr/files/shakun-et-al.pdf

192. “Unlocking the secrets to ending an Ice Age” by Chris Colose, RealClimate, April 28, 2012 at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/04/unlocking-the-secrets-to-ending-an-ice-age/

193. “Unlocking the secrets to ending an Ice Age” by Chris Colose, RealClimate, April 28, 2012 at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/04/unlocking-the-secrets-to-ending-an-ice-age/

194. As quoted in “Did Shakun et al. Really Prove that CO2 Preceded Late Glacial Warming? [Part 1]” by Don J. Easterbrook, PhD., Watts Up With That?, posted on April 8, 2012 by Anthony Watts at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/08/did-shakun-et-al-really-prove-that-co2-precede-late-glacial-warming-part-1/

195. “Did Shakun et al. Really Prove that CO2 Preceded Late Glacial Warming? [Part 1]” by Don J. Easterbrook, PhD., Watts Up With That?, posted on April 8, 2012 by Anthony Watts at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/08/did-shakun-et-al-really-prove-that-co2-precede-late-glacial-warming-part-1/

196. “Shakun Redux: Master tricksed us! I told you he was tricksy!” by Willis Eschenbach, Watts Up With That?, April 7, 2012 at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/07/shakun-redux-master-tricksed-us-i-told-you-he-was-tricksy/

197. “Gollum” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gollum, or read the novels.

198. “The Fate of Greenland’s Vikings” by Dale Mackenzie Brown, Archaeology, February 28, 2000 at http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/greenland/. For more recent views of how they fared, see “Greenland, Norse Settlement” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland#Norse_settlement

199. “Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute” by Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times, November 20, 2009 at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/science/earth/21climate.html

200. “Climatic Research Unit Documents” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_documents

201. “Climatic Research Unit Email Controversy, Timeline of the Initial Incident” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy#Timeline_of_the_initial_incident. The best easily accessible organized collection of selected Climategate email messages is “Climate Science and Candor,” The Wall Street Journal, November 24, 2009 at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704779704574553652849094482.html. For the complete collection you have to download the entire zip file, available from “Post Your Favorite CRU Email/Docs Here” by Steve Gilbert, Sweetness & Light, November 22, 2009, at http://sweetness-light.com/archive/post-your-favorite-cru-emaildocs-here. Be careful and run a good virus scan.

202. “Emails Reveal Strenuous Efforts by Climate Scientists to ‘Censor’ Their Critics” by Fred Pearce, The Guardian, February 9, 2010 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/peer-review-block-scientific-papers

203. “How the ‘Climategate’ Scandal is Bogus and Based on Climate Sceptics’ Lies” by Fred Pearce, The Guardian, February 9, 2010 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/climategate-bogus-sceptics-lies

204. “How the ‘Climategate’ Scandal is Bogus and Based on Climate Sceptics’ Lies” by Fred Pearce, The Guardian, February 9, 2010 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/climategate-bogus-sceptics-lies

205. “How the ‘Climategate’ Scandal is Bogus and Based on Climate Sceptics’ Lies” by Fred Pearce, The Guardian, February 9, 2010 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/climategate-bogus-sceptics-lies

206. “Sarah Palin on the Politicization of the Copenhagen Climate Conference” by Sarah Palin, The Washington Post, December 9, 2009 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/08/AR2009120803402.html, and “Inhofe in Copenhagen: ‘It Has Failed … It’s Deja Vu All Over Again.'” by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla), U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, December 17, 2009 at http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Speeches&ContentRecord_id=9cac1e35-802a-23ad-4540-3e4706eab1bd&Region_id=&Issue_id=”

207. “How the ‘Climategate’ Scandal is Bogus and Based on Climate Sceptics’ Lies” by Fred Pearce, The Guardian, February 9, 2010 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/climategate-bogus-sceptics-lies

208. “WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999, WMO-No. 913, “World Meteorological Organization, 2000 at http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/wcp/wcdmp/statemnt/wmo913.pdf

209. “How the ‘Climategate’ Scandal is Bogus and Based on Climate Sceptics’ Lies” by Fred Pearce, The Guardian, February 9, 2010 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/climategate-bogus-sceptics-lies

210. As quoted in “Emails Reveal Strenuous Efforts by Climate Scientists to ‘Censor’ Their Critics” by Fred Pearce, The Guardian, February 9, 2010 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/peer-review-block-scientific-papers

211. “Is JAMS Area-blind” by Brian Davey, Melvin Henriksen, Petar Markovi?c, and Vaughan Pratt, Letters, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 54, no. 6 (June/July), 2007, p. 694, p. 1 of the PDF, at http://www.ams.org/notices/200706/tx070600694p.pdf

212. “Emails Reveal Strenuous Efforts by Climate Scientists to ‘Censor’ Their Critics” by Fred Pearce, The Guardian, February 9, 2010 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/peer-review-block-scientific-papers

213. “Proxy Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past 1000 Years” by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, Climate Research vol. 23 (2003) pp. 89-110, doi:/10.3354/cr023089, available at http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/060619_ushouse_energycommercehvs.pdf and many other places.

214. “Emails Reveal Strenuous Efforts by Climate Scientists to ‘Censor’ Their Critics” by Fred Pearce, The Guardian, February 9, 2010 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/peer-review-block-scientific-papers

215. As quoted in “Emails Reveal Strenuous Efforts by Climate Scientists to ‘Censor’ Their Critics” by Fred Pearce, The Guardian, February 9, 2010 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/peer-review-block-scientific-papers

216. As quoted in “Emails Reveal Strenuous Efforts by Climate Scientists to ‘Censor’ Their Critics” by Fred Pearce, The Guardian, February 9, 2010 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/peer-review-block-scientific-papers

217. “Emails Reveal Strenuous Efforts by Climate Scientists to ‘Censor’ Their Critics” by Fred Pearce, The Guardian, February 9, 2010 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/peer-review-block-scientific-papers

218. “Emails Reveal Strenuous Efforts by Climate Scientists to ‘Censor’ Their Critics” by Fred Pearce, The Guardian, February 9, 2010 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/peer-review-block-scientific-papers. The former editor-in-chief, Hans von Storch, wrote, “In fact, I left this post on my own, with no outside pressure, because of insufficient quality control on a bad paper …,” see “Good Science, Bad Politics” by Hans Von Storch, The Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2009 at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704238104574601443947078538.html. The rest of von Storch’s letter is extremely negative towards the mainstream climate scientists involved in Climategate.

219. “Fighting On After the War Is Over, HIV Contrarian Publishes Yet Another Paper” by John Timmer, Ars Technica, January 10, 2012 at http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/01/hiv-contrarian-still-publishing-still-wrong.ars

220. “RA-10 Final Investigation Report Involving Dr. Michael E, Mann The Pennsylvania State University,” June 4, 2010, p. 18, at http://live.psu.edu/pdf/Final_Investigation_Report.pdf

221. “Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute” by Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times, November 20, 2009 at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/science/earth/21climate.html

222. “The Truth About Denial” by Sharon Begley, Newsweek, August 8, 2007 via The Daily Beast, Aug 12, 2007, p. 3 at http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2007/08/13/the-truth-about-denial.html

223. “How the ‘Climategate’ Scandal is Bogus and Based on Climate Sceptics’ Lies” by Fred Pearce, The Guardian, February 9, 2010 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/climategate-bogus-sceptics-lies

224. As quoted in “Emails Reveal Strenuous Efforts by Climate Scientists to ‘Censor’ Their Critics” by Fred Pearce, The Guardian, February 9, 2010 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/peer-review-block-scientific-papers

225. “Emails Reveal Strenuous Efforts by Climate Scientists to ‘Censor’ Their Critics” by Fred Pearce, The Guardian, February 9, 2010 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/peer-review-block-scientific-papers

226. “Lawmakers Probe Climate Emails” by Keith Johnson and Gautam Naik, The Wall Steet Journal, November 24, 2009 at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125902685372961609.html

227. See “The IPCC … assessments are completed by a small subset of climate scientists who are often the same individuals. This oligarchy has prevented science of the climate system to be properly communicated to policymakers. I don’t question their sincerity or their scientific credentials, but it is analogous to doing a study of a cancer drug, for example, and the company who is developing the drug does the assessment of its efficiency. Regardless of whether they are right or wrong, it is not the way things should be done.” in “Considering the Human Influence on Climate” by Roger Pielke, Sr., Washington Roundtable on Science and Public Policy, George C. Marshall Institute, May 14, 2009, p. 23 ,p. 27 of the PDF at http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/656.pdf

228. As quoted in “Climate Science and Candor,” The Wall Street Journal, November 24, 2009 at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704779704574553652849094482.html

229. “Wahl-to-Wahl coverage” by Gavin Schmidt, RealClimate, March 9, 2011 at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/03/wahl-to-wahl-coverage/

230. “British Panel Clears Scientists” by Justin Gillis, New York Times, July 7, 2010 at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/science/earth/08climate.html?pagewanted=all

231. “Pretending the Climate Email Leak Isn’t a Crisis Won’t Make It Go Away” by George Monbiot, The Guardian, November 25, 2009 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/nov/25/monbiot-climate-leak-crisis-response

232. “Stand and Deliver Your Climate Data” by Fred Pearce, New Scientist, December 19, 2009, pp. 4–5. Available only in paper.

233. “McIntyre versus Jones: Climate Data Row Escalates” by Olive Heffernan, Nature Climate Change, Climate Feedback, August 12, 2009 at http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/2009/08/mcintyre_versus_jones_climate_1.html

234. “British Panel Clears Scientists” by Justin Gillis, New York Times, July 7, 2010 at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/science/earth/08climate.html?pagewanted=all

235. “Declare or Defend,” New Scientist, December 19, 2009, p. 4. Available only in paper.

236. “Declare or Defend,” New Scientist, December 19, 2009. p. 4. Available only in paper.

237. “Stand and Deliver Your Climate Data” by Fred Pearce, New Scientist, December 19, 2009, pp. 4–5. Available only in paper.

238. “‘Climategate’ Was PR Disaster that Could Bring Healthy Reform of Peer Review” by Fred Pearce, The Guardian, February 9, 2010 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/09/climate-emails-pr-disaster-peer-review

239. “Climate Scientist Threatens Boycott of NYT Reporter” by Roger Pielke Jr., December 6, 2009 at http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/12/climate-scientist-threatens-boycott-of.html

240. “Copenhagen, Climate Files, Hot Sharks” by Andrew C. Revkin, Dot Earth, New York Time, December 4, 2009 at http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/roundup-copenhagen-and-climategate/

241. “Who you gonna call?” by Eric Steig, “RealClimate,” December 5, 2009, Comment 50 at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/who-you-gonna-call/comment-page-1/#comment-147354

242. “Why the Climate Skeptics Are Winning” by Steven F. Hayward, The Weekly Standard, February 27, 2012 via the American Enterprise Institute at http://www.aei.org/article/energy-and-the-environment/climate-change/why-the-climate-skeptics-are-winning/

243. As quoted in “The Truth About Denial” by Sharon Begley, Newsweek, August 8, 2007 via The Daily Beast, Aug 12, 2007, p. 5 at http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2007/08/13/the-truth-about-denial.html

244. “The Religion of Global Warming” by W.A. Beatty, American Thinker, April 15, 2012 at http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/the_religion_of_global_warming.html

245. “Climategate Heads to Court” by S. Fred Singer, American Thinker, April 5, 2012 at http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/climategate_heads_to_court.html

246. Sarah Palin said: “The e-mails reveal that leading climate ‘experts’ deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperatures …” in “Sarah Palin on the Politicization of the Copenhagen Climate Conference” by Sarah Palin, The Washington Post, December 9, 2009 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/08/AR2009120803402.html. And Sen. James Inhofe said: “These emails apparently show the world’s leading climate scientists manipulating data … I could go on and on reading the emails, but it would take hours to finish. So here’s one example: ‘I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1980 onwards) and form 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.’ [From Phil Jones] Of course he means hide the decline in temperatures, which caused another scientist, Kevin Trenberth, to write: ‘The fact is we can’t account for the lack of warming, and it’s a travesty that we can’t.'” in “Inhofe in Copenhagen: ‘It Has Failed … It’s Deja Vu All Over Again.'” by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla), U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, December 17, 2009 at http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Speeches&ContentRecord_id=9cac1e35-802a-23ad-4540-3e4706eab1bd&Region_id=&Issue_id=

247. “Earth-worshiping religion” quoted from “The Religion of Global Warming” by W.A. Beatty, American Thinker, April 15, 2012 at http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/the_religion_of_global_warming.html

248. “The Truth About Denial” by Sharon Begley, Newsweek, August 8, 2007 via The Daily Beast, Aug 12, 2007, p. 3 at http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2007/08/13/the-truth-about-denial.html

249. “The Religion of Global Warming” by W.A. Beatty, American Thinker, April 15, 2012 at http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/the_religion_of_global_warming.html

250. “The end of the IPCC” by S. Fred Singer, American Thinker, February 10, 2010 at http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/the_end_of_the_ipcc.html

251. For fat government grants to climate scientists, see Sallie Baliunas’ “It’s the money!” reply to John Stossel in her ABC 20/20 interview: “The Global Warming Myth?” by John Stossel, ABC 20/20, April 20, 2007 at http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=3061015&page=2#.T7Vw9r97DsE

252. “Fake! Fake! Fake! Fake!” by S. Fred Singer, American Thinker, January 2, 2012 at http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/fake_fake_fake_fake.html

253. “Global Warming: Not a Crisis” by Joseph Bast and James M. Taylor, The Heartland Institute, Heartland Ideas, 2012 at http://heartland.org/ideas/global-warming-not-crisis

254. “Heartland Takes Heat over Billboard, Global Warming Ad Campaign Featured Notorious Figures” by Ryan Haggerty and Liam Ford, Chicago Tribune, May 6, 2012 at http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-05-06/news/ct-met-global-warming-billboard-20120506_1_future-billboards-global-warming-climate-change-conference

255. “Heartland Takes Heat over Billboard, Global Warming Ad Campaign Featured Notorious Figures” by Ryan Haggerty and Liam Ford, Chicago Tribune, May 6, 2012 at http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-05-06/news/ct-met-global-warming-billboard-20120506_1_future-billboards-global-warming-climate-change-conference

256. Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast, as quoted in the Heartland Institute press release, “‘Do You Still Believe in Global Warming?’ Billboards Hit Chicago” by Jim Lakely, The Heartland Institute, May 3, 2012 at http://heartland.org/press-releases/2012/05/03/do-you-still-believe-global-warming-billboards-hit-chicago

257. “Heartland Takes Heat over Billboard, Global Warming Ad Campaign Featured Notorious Figures” by Ryan Haggerty and Liam Ford, Chicago Tribune, May 6, 2012 at http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-05-06/news/ct-met-global-warming-billboard-20120506_1_future-billboards-global-warming-climate-change-conference

258. “Heartland’s ‘Unabomber’ Billboard and the Global Warming Alarmists’ One-Trick Pony” by Jim Lakey, Somewhat Reasonable, The Heartland Institute, May 2012 at http://blog.heartland.org/2012/05/heartlands-unabomber-billboard-and-the-global-warming-alarmists-one-trick-pony, quoting the Russel Cook article, “Heartland Institute ‘Unabomber Billboard’ Brings Out Global Warming Alarmists’ One-Trick Pony” by Russell Cook, American Thinker, May 10, 2012 at http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/05/heartland_institute_unabomber_billboard_brings_out_global_warming_alarmists_one-trick_pony.html

259. “Rush Limbaugh–Sandra Fluke Controversy” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Limbaugh%E2%80%93Sandra_Fluke_controversy

260. “The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism” by Richard A. Muller, The Wall Street Journal, October 21, 2011 at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204422404576594872796327348.html

261. “The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism” by Richard A. Muller, The Wall Street Journal, October 21, 2011 at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204422404576594872796327348.html. The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project itself, together with their scientific papers on temperature change, are at “Berkeley Earth Surface Tempeature” at http://berkeleyearth.org/. The list of donors is interesting. Bill Gates donated $100,000, but the ultra-conservative and climate change doubting Koch brothers contributed $150,000. See the list of donors at “Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature, Financial Support” at http://berkeleyearth.org/donors/

262. “The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism” by Richard A. Muller, The Wall Street Journal, October 21, 2011 at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204422404576594872796327348.html

263. As quoted in “The Discovery of Global Warming, Simple Models of Climate Change, Elementary Physics (19th century)” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, January 2012 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/simple.htm#S1e

264. “The Discovery of Global Warming, Simple Models of Climate Change, Note 16a” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, January 2012 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/simple.htm#N_16a_, and “Atmospheric CO2: Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature” by Andrew A. Lacis, Gavin A. Schmidt, David Rind, and Reto A. Ruedy, Science, vol. 330, no. 6002, October 15, 2010, pp. 356-359, doi:10.1126/science.1190653 at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6002/356.short

265. “The Discovery of Global Warming, Simple Models of Climate Change, Arrhenius: Carbon Dioxide as Control Knob” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, January 2012 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/simple.htm#S1A

265a. Actually, the amount of water vapor increases exponentially with temperature, so at constant relative humidity, the amount doubles for every 10 degrees C (18 degrees F). See “Relative Humidity, Other Important Facts” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_humidity#Other_important_facts. But the greenhouse effect of water vapor is to cause a linear increase in temperature whenever the amount doubles.

266. “The Discovery of Global Warming, Simple Models of Climate Change, Arrhenius: Carbon Dioxide as Control Knob” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, January 2012 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/simple.htm#S1A, and “Atmospheric CO2: Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature” by Andrew A. Lacis, Gavin A. Schmidt, David Rind, and Reto A. Ruedy, Science, vol. 330, no. 6002, October 15, 2010, pp. 356-359, doi:10.1126/science.1190653 at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6002/356.short. For the currently accepted climate sensitivity factor, see “Climate sensitivity, Equilibrium and Transient Climate Sensitivity” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_sensitivity#Equilibrium_and_transient_climate_sensitivity

267. “The Discovery of Global Warming, Simple Models of Climate Change, Simple Models vs. Skeptics (1990s-2000s)” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, January 2012 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/simple.htm#S5

268. “The Discovery of Global Warming, Simple Models of Climate Change, Note 16a” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, January 2012 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/simple.htm#N_16a_, and “Atmospheric CO2: Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature” by Andrew A. Lacis, Gavin A. Schmidt, David Rind, and Reto A. Ruedy, Science, vol. 330, no. 6002, October 15, 2010, pp. 356-359, doi:10.1126/science.1190653 at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/330/6002/356.short

269. “Clouds’ Effect on Climate Change Is Last Bastion for Dissenters” by Justin Gillis, New York Times, April 30, 2012 at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/science/earth/clouds-effect-on-climate-change-is-last-bastion-for-dissenters.html

270. “The Discovery of Global Warming, Venus & Mars” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, June, 2011 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/Venus.htm

271. “The Discovery of Global Warming, Aerosols: Volcanoes, Dust, Clouds and Climate, Calculating Aerosol Effects” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, June, 2011 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/aerosol.htm#s5. See also “Considering the Human Influence on Climate” by Roger Pielke, Sr., Washington Roundtable on Science and Public Policy, George C. Marshall Institute, May 14, 2009, p. 21, p. 25 of the PDF, at http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/656.pdf

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273. “The Discovery of Global Warming, Venus & Mars” by Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics, June, 2011 at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/Venus.htm. See also “Atmosphere of Venus, Clouds” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus#Clouds, and “Venus, Atmosphere and Climate” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus#Surface_and_atmospheric_science

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279. If we subtract the 1% contribution of the refrigerants CFC-12 and HFC-134, and the 1% contribution of nitrous oxide (N2O) from the 5% contribution of the other, long lived greenhouse gasses, we get 3% for the contribution of methane. For the contribution of the refrigerants and N20, see the Radiative Forcing table in “Greenhouse Gas, Natural and Anthropogenic Sources” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Natural_and_anthropogenic_sources

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331. “Molten Salt Reactor, Molten-Salt Cooled Reactors” in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor#Molten-salt_cooled_reactors

332. As quoted in “While Washington Slept” by Mark Hertsgaard, Vanity Fair, May, 2006 at http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/05/warming200605. The quote is from Hertsgaard’s text in the Vanity Fair article; Al Gore’s actual words are in single quotes.

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336. “Navy’s Big Biofuel Bet: 450,000 Gallons at 4 Times the Price of Oil” by Noah Shachtman, Wired, Danger Room, December 5, 2011 at http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/12/navy-biofuels/

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339. “Navy’s Big Biofuel Bet: 450,000 Gallons at 4 Times the Price of Oil” by Noah Shachtman, Wired, Danger Room, December 5, 2011 at http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/12/navy-biofuels/ and “US Navy’s ‘Great Green Fleet’ Sets Sail for Pacific,” Reuters via The Guardian, July 2, 2012 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/02/us-navy-green-fleet

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