Climate Change

Not so fast. The claim that Rock Port is fully wind-powered may be, at best, a bit exaggerated.

The mainstream press has picked up this report from the University of Missouri Extension office (reported by Science Daily) claiming that Rock Port, Missouri is the first 100% wind-powered city. On paper it looks all well and good, but when it comes down to the specifics, it simply isn’t true (emphasis mine):

Rock Port Missouri, with a population of just over 1,300 residents, has announced that it is the first 100% wind powered community in the United States. Four wind turbines supply all the electricity for the small town.

Rock Port’s 100% wind power status is due to four wind turbines located on agricultural lands within the city limits of Rock Port (Atchison County). The city of Rock Port uses approximately 13 million kilowatt hours of electricity each year. It is predicted that these four turbines will produce 16 million kilowatt hours each year.

While it may be the case that the wind turbines will, over the course of one year, generate as much power as the community will use in one year, it simply isn’t true that the town could go “off the grid” entirely.

Wind turbines generate power on an intermittent basis. When the wind is blowing, the turbines spin and spit out a nice stream of electricity. But on calm days (or wind speeds below a given threshold), the turbines generate little to no electricity. The power output generated by a wind turbine is far from constant, and as such, it simply cannot be utilized as the only source of power for a community. In the current Rock Port setup, when the wind turbines generate power in excess of what the town is utilizing at the time, the excess power is “sold” to the grid:

Excess wind generated electricity not used by Rock Port homes and businesses is expected to be move onto the transmission lines to be purchased by the Missouri Joint Municipal Utilities for use in other areas.

Alternatively, when the wind is calm, the town does not go dark. That connection to the grid is not one way. The 1,300 residents then depend on pulling power from the rest of the grid (power not generated by wind but rather from more traditional sources) to sustain a constant flow of electricity. As such, absent the use of multiple, gigantic, expensive batteries to store the excess electricity generated on windy days to tap when the wind is calm, it cannot be claimed the city is “100% wind powered” under the current scenario.

Furthermore, such development is simply not economically viable in its current state. While funding sources have not been entirely transparent, it has been reported that the wind farm that is powering Rock Port (built by Wind Capital Group) required $90 million dollars in start-up capital. Divided among the 1,300 residents of Rock Port, that would necessitate an up-front investment of nearly $70,000 per resident to say nothing of ongoing maintenance costs.

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For more on the original report:
University of Missouri Extension (2008, July 16). Rock Port, Missouri, First 100 Percent Wind-powered Community In U.S.. ScienceDaily. Retrieved July 16, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/07/080715165441.htm

The claims against anthropogenic global warming skeptics are often the same: they’re all shills for big oil or other industry wishing to poke holes in the ‘consensus theory’ of global warming (which isn’t a consensus at all). Under the so-called “politicization of science” program, George Soros’ (the favorite fundraiser of many democrats) has reportedly given as much as $720,000 to Hansen to help package his alarmist claims and get them pushed by the mainstream media (The Soros Threat to Democracy):

How many people, for instance, know that James Hansen, a man billed as a lonely “NASA whistleblower” standing up to the mighty U.S. government, was really funded by Soros’ Open Society Institute , which gave him “legal and media advice”?

That’s right, Hansen was packaged for the media by Soros’ flagship “philanthropy,” by as much as $720,000, most likely under the OSI’s “politicization of science” program.

So he got some big paychecks from Soros - but was there a quid pro quo? The evidence certainly indicates as much:

That may have meant that Hansen had media flacks help him get on the evening news to push his agenda and lawyers pressuring officials to let him spout his supposedly “censored” spiel for weeks in the name of advancing the global warming agenda.

Hansen even succeeded, with public pressure from his nightly news performances, in forcing NASA to change its media policies to his advantage. Had Hansen’s OSI-funding been known, the public might have viewed the whole production differently. The outcome could have been different.

Did Soros’ funding pay off? You be the judge. Do a quick google search on James Hansen to read any of the thousands of mainstream media stories touting Hansen’s claims of censorship by the Bush administration. This wouldn’t be the first time credibility questions have been raised regarding Hansen and his alarmist claims [see "When does 1,400 Media Interviews = Muzzled" (03/20/07)].

[Update 12:51pm CDT]  This document pulled from the George Soros website devoted to his “Open Society Institute” admit his affiliation with James Hansen and his media blitz (see page 15):

…The Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower protection organization and OSI grantee, came to Hansen’s defense by providing legal and media advice.

But the alarmist’s favorite poster-boy James Hansen is hardly the only benefactor of Soros’ funding designed to get more media play for politicized topics important to the left - check out the full article for more on the non-disclosure disclosures regarding immigration and other big topics of the day.

In a matter of just a couple of weeks, a single, seemingly minor error in climate data calculations has spawned a heated discussion on the issue, leading to retractions of alarmist claims and corrections of global warming data by NASA and its prominent global warming alarmist James Hansen.

A prominent scientist in the global warming debate, Steve McIntyre has discovered that James Hansen’s NASA office made a mistake in how they applied a mathematical filter to several years of surface station temperature data from the USHCN data network between the years 2000-2006. This mistake had the effect of erroneously exaggerating surface temperature averages for the US during the period. Not only did that alter the data for those years, but also the analysis of surrounding years was forced into revision. The earlier widespread claims that 1998 was the hottest year on record for the US are now incorrect (it was 1934).

This issue has received very little mainstream media attention. A google news search for the terms “Global Warming GISS Error McIntyre” yields only 7 results as of 08/13/07. Ironically, the issue may be getting more play in McIntyre’s hometown of Toronto, Canada, as published in the Toronto Star today (Red Faces as NASA over Climate Change Blunder):

In the United States, the calendar year 1998 ranked as the hottest of them all – until someone checked the math.

After a Toronto skeptic tipped NASA this month to one flaw in its climate calculations, the U.S. agency ordered a full data review.

Days later, it put out a revised list of all-time hottest years. The Dust Bowl year of 1934 now ranks as hottest ever in the U.S. – not 1998.

More significantly, the agency reduced the mean U.S. “temperature anomalies” for the years 2000 to 2006 by 0.15 degrees Celsius.

NASA officials have dismissed the changes as trivial. Even the Canadian [McIntyre] who spotted the original flaw says the revisions are “not necessarily material to climate policy.”

You may remember Steve McIntyre as the one who called into question the reliability and robustness of the infamous, disputed Mann “Hockey Stick” global warming graph which I discussed earlier (The Impossibility of Prediction).

In discovering this surface station data error, Steve McIntyre has, in my view, shed light on a bigger question: how reliable is this data after all? If such an error could so easily have been overlooked, what other errors exist? What other implications are there to the changing environments of these data collecting stations?

Background

Early in 2007, the website surfacestations.org was born. The mission of surfacestations.org, as it states, is:

Via collaboration, creation of a publicly available photographic database of weather stations and weather station metadata.

Unstated in its mission, but nonetheless, a significant driving factor for the volunteers and editor of this database project, the website has brought to the attention of climatologists and meteorologists how questionable the environmental placement of the USHCN surface weather stations may be. From moving temperature sensors near airport runways an asphalt parking lots, to placing them within feet of massive air conditioner exhaust units, the changes in environmental conditions in the immediate vicinity of these data collection stations over the past century is evidenced by photographs of the stations. Check out some of these particularly odd and irregular placements. The eventual goal is to get as many stations as possible chronicled in the online database (it currently stands at around 23% as of 08/13/07). Not only is the current placement of such stations brought into question, the changes that have been made to the immediate environments of these stations during the period of time that data has been recorded from each site is also being analyzed.

(Note: In the months following the debut of surfacestations.org, NOAA abruptly and without notice removed a great deal of the station location information (latitude/longitude coordinates) from the once publicly-available database, hindering the work of surfacestation.org contributors who are seeking to document the environment and condition of these stations. NOAA has apparently done so under the guise of protecting the privacy of the volunteers who house these data collecting stations. If they are volunteering to collect and provide the data, they also volunteer that location information for public scientific scrutiny, in my view. Otherwise, this reeks of yet another attempt to silence the skeptics.)

An Error Discovered

A couple of weeks ago, the latest addition to the online surfacestations.org database was a surface observing station from Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. The graph of temperature data from this station showed a curious jump in the late 1990s:

Along with the graph of the temperature data, a photograph of the station was added to the database, showing the proximity of the station to two large air conditioner exhaust units.

Steve McIntyre and those involved in the surfacestations.org project recognized the instrument placement problems immediately. But this is nothing new - several other stations are placed in even more questionable locations. Many surfacestations.org readers became curious about that jump in the temperature record. Was it due to a change in the placement of such influencing factors as the AC units? A review of maintenance records from the site indicated the temperature jump did not coincide with the AC placement, so McIntyre delved deeper.

The temperature data is only valuable to the end that it correctly evidenced the discrete temperature of that exact location on earth during that point in time. This discussion is not about instrument error, it is about an error in analysis and application. Any analysis of the trends of such temperature data over time is worthless. There are no mathematical models, no computer simulation, no data extrapolation exercises, no manipulation what so ever that would allow one to statistically negate the effects of the changes in the immediate station environment as to allow the “true” trends of temperature data (independent of effects by such changes as the AC units) to be shown.

As discussed in several posts on McIntyre’s own blog, the NASA department responsible for the manipulation of surface temperature data does not make their methods publicly available. Surface station data must be adjusted to allow for analysis between stations and over time. Such changes include accounting for the time of day of each observation. If one station reports at 13:53 and another at 14:00 each day, those data points are not directly comparable without some sort of manipulation to negate that time difference. As such, McIntyre was forced to reverse-engineer NASA’s data correction methods. After doing so, he realized that the GISS office has erroneously applied their formula to the data from 2000-2006. The correction of this error resulted in a decrease in the calculated temperature anomalies of about 0.15 C. This may not sound like much, but in the world of climate analysis, just one tenth of a degree is very significant.

After contacting NASA about the error, Steve McIntyre discussed this process further in several blog postings. Over just a few days’ time, NASA quietly corrected the erroneous data online with no statement of correction applied to each data set. But these corrections had some significant impact on the global warming “leader-board”: The list of the hottest years in the US since records have been kept (a fraction of 1% of the time the US has existed, mind you), namely that 1998 is no longer considered the hottest year in the history of records. Other changes to the leader-board also took place (See the corrected list of temperature anomalies via NASA: Contiguous 48 U.S. Surface Air Temperature Anomoly (C))

James Hansen did take the time to respond directly to Steve McIntyre in a derogatory email (A Light On Upstairs?) but has made no other public statement on the issue.

There is no evidence that any attempt was made by NASA to contact those scientists who may have used such data in scientific analyses in the past. McIntyre discusses the changes to the data (absent any public statement on the issue) in Will the Real USHCN Data Please Stand Up). One is left to wonder how many previous climate change studies have been influenced by the erroneous data.

The Big Picture

This event brings several important points into the forefront:

1. Why have such surface stations been granted validity in the scientific community when it comes to statistical analysis of climate data? A main tenet of even middle school science is that you can only change one variable at a time. Presumably, temperature is the variable being examined…one must not then change the environmental conditions immediately surrounding the equipment if one hopes to complete a robust analysis of large-area trends (admittedly, data will be applicable to an examination of the small-scale changes to the localized environment…but that is not what global climate change is about).
2. How are such “correction” schemes applied to the data by NASA’s USHCN data set and others?
3. Should such (unknown) data manipulation schemes be granted the status of “correcting” the climate data in a way that allows for detailed statistical analysis?
4. If such statistical errors exist on this level, is it appropriate for social, political, and governmental policies to be shaped around such data?

The author offers a great opening abstract of his research:

The mud at the bottom of B.C. fjords reveals that solar output drives climate change - and that we should prepare now for dangerous global cooling

Earlier this year, I examined the connections between solar variability and climate change in great detail (On Solar Variability and Global Warming). Further research into the sunspot activity and terrestrial climate change is revealing some astounding correlations, as published recently by the Financial Times: Read the Sunspots. Written by R. Timothy Patterson, the chief researcher of the project, the article starts out by summarizing the well-known and universally-accepted variability of the Earth’s climate nicely:

Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now [ed. margin note: How did those stranded polar bears survive then?]. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thou-sand-year-long “Younger Dryas” cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade — 100 times faster than the past century’s 0.6C warming that has so upset environmentalists.

And then it tackles the solar variability issue. By measuring sediment, diatom and fish-scale records well-preserved in mud, the authors were able to track yet another climate proxy (be sure to read the full article text to understand the detailed analysis of the data that was completed). Via computerized analysis of the fossil record, scientists have been able to identify periods of warmer, abundant growth:

Specifically, we find a very strong and consistent 11-year cycle throughout the whole record in the sediments and diatom remains. This correlates closely to the well-known 11-year “Schwabe” sunspot cycle, during which the output of the sun varies by about 0.1%. Sunspots, violent storms on the surface of the sun, have the effect of increasing solar output, so, by counting the spots visible on the surface of our star, we have an indirect measure of its varying brightness. Such records have been kept for many centuries and match very well with the changes in marine productivity we are observing.

 

But one question constantly remained - the same core evidence that many doubters of the theory that climate change is driven by solar variability had claimed: the solar variability is not great enough to be the primary driver of terrestrial climate change:

…Even though the sun is brighter now than at any time in the past 8,000 years, the increase in direct solar input is not calculated to be sufficient to cause the past century’s modest warming on its own. There had to be an amplifier of some sort for the sun to be a primary driver of climate change.

Indeed, there must be another piece - some stronger force at work that could be responsible for terrestrial climate change. The correlation between solar variability and climate change has long-since been established, it is the causation that has been saught after in the current research - and it is exactly what they may have found (emphasis mine):

In a series of groundbreaking scientific papers starting in 2002, Veizer, Shaviv, Carslaw, and most recently Svensmark et al., have collectively demonstrated that as the output of the sun varies, and with it, our star’s protective solar wind, varying amounts of galactic cosmic rays from deep space are able to enter our solar system and penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere. These cosmic rays enhance cloud formation which, overall, has a cooling effect on the planet. When the sun’s energy output is greater, not only does the Earth warm slightly due to direct solar heating, but the stronger solar wind generated during these “high sun” periods blocks many of the cosmic rays from entering our atmosphere. Cloud cover decreases and the Earth warms still more.

The opposite occurs when the sun is less bright. More cosmic rays are able to get through to Earth’s atmosphere, more clouds form, and the planet cools more than would otherwise be the case due to direct solar effects alone. This is precisely what happened from the middle of the 17th century into the early 18th century, when the solar energy input to our atmosphere, as indicated by the number of sunspots, was at a minimum and the planet was stuck in the Little Ice Age. These new findings suggest that changes in the output of the sun caused the most recent climate change. By comparison, CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales.

As a footnote, a message to those who belief Global Warming is a no longer up for debate (emphasis mine):

In some fields the science is indeed “settled.” For example, plate tectonics, once highly controversial, is now so well-established that we rarely see papers on the subject at all. But the science of global climate change is still in its infancy, with many thousands of papers published every year. In a 2003 poll conducted by German environmental researchers Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, two-thirds of more than 530 climate scientists from 27 countries surveyed did not believe that “the current state of scientific knowledge is developed well enough to allow for a reasonable assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases.” About half of those polled stated that the science of climate change was not sufficiently settled to pass the issue over to policymakers at all.

An impressive research project indeed…we can only wait and see if it gets the time of day from the global-warming-alarmist-obsessed mainstream media.

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Previous:

• February 3, 2007: Stranded Polar Bears? Read On
• March 3, 2007: On Solar Variability and Global Warming
• March 19, 2007: ‘Stranded Polar Bear’ Photographer Speaks Out

A huge untapped market is now being realized with corporations targeted a new breed of consumer: the guilty global warming alarmist. As recently published by the NYTimes:

A largely unregulated carbon-cutting business has sprung up. In this market, consultants or companies estimate a person’s or company’s output of greenhouse gases. Then, these businesses sell “offsets,” which pay for projects elsewhere that void or sop up an equal amount of emissions — say, by planting trees or, as one new company proposes, fertilizing the ocean so algae can pull the gas out of the air. Recent counts by Business Week magazine and several environmental watchdog groups tally the trade in offsets at more than $100 million a year and growing blazingly fast.

Carbon offsets, while well intentioned, are a scam. But that isn’t stopping them from gaining traction. From standard household offsets, to airlines, to hotels, offsets are being marketed to consumers the world over. But the fact remains: They do not produce a net benefit to the environment, as is claimed by those selling such certificates. An entire industry has quickly sprung up and millions are being spent - and made - by those involved. This ranks right up there with paying a website to name a star for you - it’s a huge fraud.

Planting trees, reducing oil dependency, improving energy efficiency, and a host of other “green” ideas are great in and of themselves - few would disagree. But to do so in the name of offsetting carbon emissions is disingenuous, at best. It gives the perception that one can continue to produce carbon emissions guilt free, as they are undoing them elsewhere. This simply isn’t the case.

Furthermore, even if you buy into the premise that the offset is a legitimate way to neutralize one’s emissions, the math is, as some would say, is “fuzzy”. Unless they find ways to turn carbon dioxide from the atmosphere back into underground oil deposits, the offsets are far from neutralizing the liberated carbon. As CorporateWatch put it (emphasis mine):

‘Carbon neutral’ implies that an exact estimation of both carbon emitted and carbon locked up (or ’sequestered’), is possible and verifiable. It also implies that the carbon sequestered in trees is equivalent to the coal/gas carbon extracted from deep in the earth.

The first of these assumptions is highly contested ; and the second is just plain wrong. Claiming that carbon stored by trees is safely locked away, as it was under the earth, is simply not true. Carbon in trees is part of the active carbon pool, and moves freely between the forests, oceans and air, whereas fossil carbon is from a very inert underground carbon pool and once released cannot return to it for millennia.

They also offer yet another golden analogy:

Cambridge landscape historian Oliver Rackham described the idea of telling people to plant trees as carbon sinks as having all the practical effect of drinking more water to keep down rising sea levels .

This process of offsets gives wealthy individuals and corporations a veil of legitimacy in their continued use of fossil fuels and other carbon-emitting ways.

Even the New York Times, as mentioned previously, has gotten up to speed (Carbon-Neutral Is Hip, but Is It Green?):

“The worst of the carbon-offset programs resemble the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences back before the Reformation,” said Denis Hayes, the president of the Bullitt Foundation, an environmental grant-making group. “Instead of reducing their carbon footprints, people take private jets and stretch limos, and then think they can buy an indulgence to forgive their sins.”

“This whole game is badly in need of a modern Martin Luther,” Mr. Hayes added.

As details of the lack of regulation or transparency has received increasing media scrutiny, some carbon credits companies have shunned any examination of their methods by failing to participate in research, or even more boldly, lobbying against an examination of their methods (MSNBC: Carbon offset market raises questions) (emphasis mine):

When the environmental group Clean Air-Cool Planet commissioned a study on carbon offsets, communications manager Bill Burtis was surprised to find how few groups offered transparent details of their projects or had set up any process of independently verifying their environmental benefits.

“It was pretty startling,” he said.

Some offset retailers did not even return the study’s questionnaire, and one provider, which Burtis wouldn’t identify, actually lobbied against the release of the report.

Clean Air–Cool Planet hired an independent firm to do the study because it has ties to a carbon offset provider called NativeEnergy.

If the industry won’t police itself, it appears as though congress will (Probe carbon offsets, congressmen say):

The burgeoning carbon offset industry needs more oversight, say two members of Congress. In a letter to the Government Accountability Office, Republican Reps. Tom Davis of Virginia and Darrell Issa of California asked for an investigation into emission offset programs. About 60 different companies sell carbon offsets to U.S. consumers but operate under virtually no standards, the congressmen said. They cited reports alleging that some organizations get money for emissions that don’t exist and that others make large profits on cleanups that would have taken place anyway. Those who support offsets say they offer the reward of “carbon neutrality” without a reduced standard of living. To critics, offsets allow guilt-free pollution. Full Story

This carbon offset / carbon credits concept should quickly be lost on any student of science. You simply cannot undo the use of carbon once it is liberated. When engaged in marathon training, it’d be great if I could pay someone else to complete the long runs - those 20-milers are a killer - and yet still benefit from the endurance training toward my eventual goal of running the full 26.2!

Technorati Tags: Global Warming, Climate Change, Carbon Credits, Carbon Offsets, Carbon Neutral