This discussion is getting interesting, especially Entropic Man's "what are we arguing about?". It's a simple but good question, as I suspect there is much misunderstanding all round regarding the other "side's" point of view.

For my part, I accept that the earth is getting warmer (though I do question some of the temperature adjustments and the extent of the warming) and I accept that man-made CO2 emissions might be contributing to it (though I doubt that we are solely responsible, and I also assume a natural element, given that over 4.5 bn years the earth has warmed and cooled many times, always naturally, until now).

I object to things like Mann's hockey stick (and his predilection for litigating against critics), Climategate and the corruption of science. Science, and the scientific method, should be sacrosanct to us all.

I doubt that AGW is catastrophic. Phil's question ("What global temperature rise (above pre-industrial) would qualify as catastophic, and why?") is an extremely good one, to which I don't know the answer, but nothing in the reality of climate change to date, nor even in most alarmist warnings, cause me any alarm. On the contrary, the prospect that really scares me is the risk of a new ice age. If you read about the Little Ice Age, it's a pretty terrifying prospect - a new Little Ice Age is something that really WOULD be catastrophic.

I object to the policy prescriptions that follow from the alarmism and the determination to reduce our CO2 emissions (as if we could, in a world with a rapidly increasing human population and third world countries which, perfectly understandably, wish to industrialise in order to improve their living standards - which I wholeheartedly support).

I object to a $1trn p.a. industry revolving around climate change.

I object to the lunacy of subsidising wind turbines and solar panels (especially in the UK, where solar panels contribute next to nothing) in a way which redistributes money from some of the poorest in society to some of the wealthiest, and the blight they cause to our beautiful landscape (I weep every time I drive up the M74 for a spot of Munro-bagging, and weep all over again on the top of many Munros when I look out over a previously pristine view now blighted by what has become an industrial landscape).

I object to the pauperisation of the poorest in society who are crippled by needlessly high energy prices. I object to the destruction of British industry (what little is left of it) thanks to needlessly high energy prices. I shake my head in despair when I think that although we may have achieved a modest reduction in our CO2 emissions, we have done so at a very high price (in more senses of the word than one); that we have in any event just exported those CO2 emissions to countries with lower environmental standards, such as China and India; and I wonder why the hell we in the UK feel we have to "lead the world" when our CO2 emissions amount to less than 2% of humankind's emissions globally, when humankind's emissions are not the total of CO2 emissions, and the rest of the world is not following our "example". I object to our energy supply being increasingly unreliable, and increasingly dependent on foreigners. I think our politicians are mad, and they have failed us grievously.

I think that's what we're arguing about, or at least it's some of it.

Aug 31, 2016 at 11:22 AM | Unregistered Commenter Phil Clarke:

I gave you a link to a graph from the IPCC page 1011, you gave me an update from an unknown source.

From a team member maybe?

Can we have an IPCC ref please.

For my part, I accept that the earth is getting warmer at a rate faster than any we are aware of in the planet's history, and I accept that man-made GHG are the biggest driver. There's evidence that natural forcings recently have been negative so the anthropogenic fraction of the warming may in fact be > 100%.

I object to so-called sceptics unquestioningly regurgitating myths about things like Mann's 98 study, such as the one about it generating hockey sticks from random input. As if a single, repeated result were any more than a sideshow in the multiple strands of evidence for AGW.

I'm not keen on phrases like 'the corruption of science' being deployed based on no more than selectively leaked communications among a handful of scientists - scientists who have been repeatedly and thoroughly investigated ("the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact" to quote one panel) and found to have performed no scientific fraud or malfeasance.

I do not favour the word 'catastrophic' as it requires a value judgement, and at the very least a definition. However, the effects of raising the global temperature by a further 2C on weather patterns and ecosystems is unlikely to be minor and unlikely to be benign. Estimates put the economic costs at 4-5% of GDP, a lot more than the costs of mitigation. The humanitarian and economic effects will fall disproportionately on the poorest.

I object to people referring to a '$1trn p.a. industry revolving around climate change'. To get anywhere remotely near that number I suspect you have to include the costs of running satellites, which are used for a lot more than just climate research, and include the cost of every energy-saving policy and every energy efficient vehicle (not every Prius is bought for Green reasons) and building, while excluding the value of any benefits, which aside from not cooking the planet, include energy efficiencies, cleaner air and a non-acidifying ocean.

I'm not keen on relying on imported oil and gas, and the vagaries of the international market. Between November 2004 and November 2005, the average wholesale price of electricity rose by 71%. In the 12 months to February 2006, the wholesale price of natural gas in the UK rose by 75%. In the three years to that date, it rose from under 20p a therm to 70p – an increase of 350%. Not all this rise was passed on to the consumer, of course but the costs of the various 'green' levies are small by comparison to the gyrations in the global energy market. Similarly the decline of manufacturing industry has little to do with green energy levies (electricity is 6-8% of steelmaking costs for example, small in comparison to the effects of steel dumping on world markets, differentials in labour costs and exchange rates).

The political response to the impending crisis has been woeful and contradictory, we need a response closer to that mobilised in wartime, with a few honourable exceptions I think our politicians are mad, and they have failed us grievously.

Kim, Phil does not demonstrate any ability at all to think about what increases in CO2 implies for plant life, along with a complete lack of critical thinking. For him to have not read the multiple sources documenting the increase in the biosphere can only be a result of careful effort by Phil.

I gave you a link to a graph from the IPCC page 1011, you gave me an update from an unknown source.

I think it was the third time I've linked to it in this thread. It is from RealClimate

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2016/08/unforced-variations-aug-2016/

The post is labelled 'Team' but I suspect that graph was put together by Gavin Schmidt, of NASA.

You could easily do your own version using the CMIP or KMNI sites, it would show the same thing.

Hunter - feeding an additional billion people - an extraordinary claim - implies an increase in crop yields, not just more vegetation area in the deserts and rainforests. I haven't checked (CBA) however I think the cited increase is the area that has shown some 'greening' not the % increase in Leaf Area Index.

Whatever, if you had clinked on the link to an actual study of climate on crop yields from 1980 to 2008 you'd find that 'global maize and wheat production declined by 3.8 and 5.5%, respectively, relative to a counterfactual without climate trends. For soybeans and rice, winners and losers largely balanced out.'

Planet Kim is cooling and has a billion fewer hungry people due to CO2. It is not the planet that we inhabit, alas.

Hunter

It is the skeptical position that has multiple converging lines of evidence. Historical records, successful predictions, data points that all point to the failure of the climate consensus.

Could you give us more detail, please. Links to the multiple lines of converging evidence would be of particular interest.

Radical Rodent

Links, please.

the data obtained from proxies cannot give us rates any finer than over a century

Tree ring proxies have annual resolution (think about it).

A different matter is the current rate of warming. Are more rapid global climate changes recorded in proxy data? The largest temperature changes of the past million years are the glacial cycles, during which the global mean temperature changed by 4°C to 7°C between ice ages and warm interglacial periods (local changes were much larger, for example near the continental ice sheets). However, the data indicate that the global warming at the end of an ice age was a gradual process taking about 5,000 years (see Section 6.3). It is thus clear that the current rate of global climate change is much more rapid and very unusual in the context of past changes. The much-discussed abrupt climate shifts during glacial times (see Section 6.3) are not counter-examples, since they were probably due to changes in ocean heat transport, which would be unlikely to affect the global mean temperature.

Further back in time, beyond ice core data, the time resolution of sediment cores and other archives does not resolve changes as rapid as the present warming. Hence, although large climate changes have occurred in the past, there is no evidence that these took place at a faster rate than present warming. If projections of approximately 5°C warming in this century (the upper end of the range) are realised, then the Earth will have experienced about the same amount of global mean warming as it did at the end of the last ice age; there is no evidence that this rate of possible future global change was matched by any comparable global temperature increase of the last 50 million years.

https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-6-2.html

Phil, consider your 'natural forcings may be negative'. So we're barely hanging on at this temperature despite pouring increasing amounts of CO2 into the air? What's next? Particularly if we stop pouring increasing amounts of CO2 into the air?

Instead of looking at your models of yields, look just at yields. There is the attribution problem here, too; how much of increased yield is CO2 fertilization and how much other factors. However, the increased yield over the last 50 years is feeding a lot more than a billion people. So, there's that.

Do you have any idea how much this year's impressive El Nino cooled the ocean? Los Ninos increase heat loss from the earth because of the warmer atmosphere.

You cannot be certain the earth is not presently cooling. The two best data streams, ARGO and the tropospheric satellite series are pretty flat.
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Heh, if you think tree rings show an annual resolution for temperature, I have a tree to sell you in Yamal.
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Also, you don't even need proxies to say that the Earth isn't getting warmer faster now than it has in the past. You can look at the temperature record and see three episodes of warming at the same rate in the last century and a half.

It is smoothing of proxy reconstructions that has hidden temperature variability in the past. This is why Marcott is so unpersuasive.
======================

I could fisk more of your 10:17 PM comment, but figure I ought to give others a chance. I do appreciate your spelling out your beliefs. They are not unreasonable, given the propaganda of the last quarter century, but they are much mistaken.
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Oh, well, one more. The way in which you answered my claim of a billion extra is indicative of the way you have either been deceived or the way in which you deceive yourself. Instead of approaching it with an open mind, you've found a modeled alarmist study which appears pretty weak.

Phil, I didn't make up the figure, but I can't presently source it. With your google skills you ought to find it fast, if you can find a phrase of mine in a minute.

By the way, how did you know to google that phrase? Naw, don't tell us.
===================

Ah, a Green Revolution denier.

...what has happened so far, this century (CO2 continuing to rise; negligible temperature rise),

The data says different: The trend in the UAH tropospheric satellite
data since 2000 is 0.1C/decade, in the NASA surface data 0.18C / decade. Pretty much unchanged from the trends that started in the mid-1970s

click

To quibble, I think the 5C is from pre-industrial so factoring in warming to date it would require an acceleration in the linear trend to 0.47C / decade, over the remaining 84 years, unlikely but not inconceivable. A simple continuation of the recent surface trend gets us to around 2.5C above pre-industrial by 2100. I won't be around to see what that looks like but my descendents will.

Phil

I confess to being a little disappointed by your response at 10.17pm yesterday. Just when I thought we might be able to have a constructive discussion, with both sides reaching out to understand each other, you do seem rather to have reverted to type. Perhaps it was a little scary to see that people over here are not mad and actually have some sensible and interesting points to make?

"I accept that the earth is getting warmer at a rate faster than any we are aware of in the planet's history, and I accept that man-made GHG are the biggest driver. There's evidence that natural forcings recently have been negative so the anthropogenic fraction of the warming may in fact be > 100%."

There are so many things wrong with this. You and I (and no doubt others) have debated before about the allegation that the earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Radical Rodent deals with that in her response, and I've had at you about it before too. There is absolutely no credible evidence that it is true, nor do we realistically have any way of knowing if it's true. The earth is, we are told (and I have no reason to doubt it) 4.5 billion years old. The best we can do is make intelligent guesses about what might have happened in the last few hundred thousand years, or maybe a few million, being optimistic. That's a long time in the life of arrogant man, but the blink of an eye in the life of the planet. We (or rather you, and people who think like you) need to stop thinking in man's timescales, and start thinking in the planet's timescales. If natural forcings really have been negative recently (evidence, please), then you're going a long way to make my argument for me. Without man-made CO2 emissions, in other words, the planet would be getting colder. I repeat, another Little Ice Age is an extremely alarming prospect.

"I object to so-called sceptics unquestioningly regurgitating myths about things like Mann's 98 study, such as the one about it generating hockey sticks from random input. As if a single, repeated result were any more than a sideshow in the multiple strands of evidence for AGW."

Since that was obviously aimed at my comment, I have to respond. Why "so-called sceptic"? You give away your bias there. As you do by repeatedly defending Mann (or at least by criticising those who criticise him). If there are "multiple strands of evidence" as you allege, then you would do a lot better to discard Mann and his dodgy hockey stick as doing your cause a dis-service. But you can't ditch the poster boy who did so much to kick it all off, can you?

Your reference to "selectively leaked communications", when discussing Climategate, also gives away your bias. I don't see how the block-leaking of thousands of communications can be described as "selective" unless you're desperately seeking to defend the people exposed by them. Even the word "leaked" exposes your mind-set. There's always a sense on "your side" that the leaking was somehow illegitimate, even though it did the world a service. When people leak dodgy things about banks, goings-on in the NHS or elsewhere we call them whistle-blowers and fete them as brave heroes standing up for the truth. But not in the world of climate science - they're nasty "leakers" and the information they revealed must somehow therefore be ignored. As for the greenwash reports you rely on to defend these people - come on, really!

More bias on display in this paragraph: "I do not favour the word 'catastrophic' as it requires a value judgement, and at the very least a definition. However, the effects of raising the global temperature by a further 2C on weather patterns and ecosystems is unlikely to be minor and unlikely to be benign. Estimates put the economic costs at 4-5% of GDP, a lot more than the costs of mitigation. The humanitarian and economic effects will fall disproportionately on the poorest."

Estimates made by committed climate alarmists like Stern really need to be taken with a pinch of salt. They are based on nothing but one-sided speculation. They find the results they are looking for. What we do know is that the current warming isn't causing the problems you, and people like Stern, fear. What we also know is that the humanitarian and economic effects of current mitigation efforts are already falling disproportionately on the poorest and disproportionately benefiting some of the wealthiest. That is happening now. It isn't speculation about what might or might not happen in the future. But that doesn't seem to bother you.

The $1 trillion climate change industry figure isn't mine, it's one that comes from the Climate Change Business Journal. Now isn't that astonishing? It's such big business, there's even a journal devoted to it. A journal which makes money out of it, of course...The Washington Times puts the figure at $1.5 trillion p.a.

I'm relieved that you didn't even try to defend the madness and environmental damage caused by wind turbines and solar panels. I'm pleased that you didn't argue about our export of CO2 emissions to countries with worse environmental standards than ours. I'm pleased that you didn't seek to critique my suggestion that it's mad for the UK to cripple its energy-generation and reliability while achieving nothing in terms of global CO2 reductions. Maybe I'm wrong to take your silence on these points as agreement, but even if you can only bring yourself to see something in these arguments, why do they not weigh in the balance with you?

By the way you're wrong about steel and the impact of electricity prices on the steel industry. I know ACK was hauled over the coals for making a statement, and saying that we just had to trust him, but I'm going to do the same. A good friend of mine is a director of a UK steel company (one of the few that are left) and he confirmed to me that energy prices represent one of their gravest issues. The conversation was not one I said I would report to others and I don't have his permission to use his name or that of his company. So you can choose to believe I'm making it up if you want, but I'm not, I know, based on hard evidence, that you're wrong.

If you want to talk about energy prices,go over to Paul Homewood's site where he reproduces Ed Hoskin's excellent analysis here: https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2016/08/30/the-cost-of-solar-power-ed-daveys-vanity-project/

Gas produces 27.7% of UK electricity generation, while costing 5.5% of total generating costs. For coal the figures are 20.9% and 12.5%. For renewables the figures work the other way - wind generates 11.1% but costs 24.3%; solar generates 2.1% and costs 16.5%. Food for thought, surely?

Ah, yes, Norman Borlaug. Do you know, Phil, that if all the energy that reaches the Earth from the Sun were dedicated to the sustenance of human life, at 100 W/human, then the Earth could support humans in the quadrillions, approximately a million times as many people as at present. This is a theoretical maximum, practically impossible, but it illustrates that a tiny percentage increase of our use of the sun, a la Norman Borlaug, would support many more people than are presently sustained here on Earth, and in a style to which we would all like to become accustomed. So no Norman Borlaug denier here.

You have dodged contemplating how many more are now being fed by the CO2 fertilization. Where's your famed google-fu?

And Stern? Please, you've struggled so hard for a little credibility. Don't throw it away again, and again, and again.
===================

Mark Hodgson. I have no possible reason to doubt what you report about costs of producing steel, even though you feel unable to substatiate your conversation. The reason: I cannot conceive of any possible reason why you would get any benefit from lying. I only wish those who "hauled me over the coals" had made similar judgements. But: water under bridges.

I also greatly appreciate your efforts here. Ignore RR, it's pure envy!

The $1 trillion climate change industry figure isn't mine, it's one that comes from the Climate Change Business Journal

I know, and it is such an obviously made-up headline-grabbing number (Where's the 'scepticism' now?) I cannot believe you believe it. I cannot find the text of the report, however from the write-up, the 'climate change industry' includes

• climate change consulting
• solar energy & wind power
• carbon trading
• carbon capture & storage
• bioenergy: biomass & biofuels
• energy efficiency & demand response
• consulting & engineering
• green building
• renewable energy consulting
• climate change adaptation

So if I drive a hybrid, insulate my loft and install solar panels I am part of this 'industry', even if my motivations had nothing to do with climate change.Humbug.

I see your publicity-shy steelman and raise you Richard Warren of EEF

The share of electricity in steel production costs is around 6%, according to oneestimate for blast-furnace steel production, used at most major steelworks. The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) says energy makes up 5.2% of costs for “basic metals”, which includes steel. The CCC says it is around 6% for integrated steelworks like Port Talbot.
EEF’s Warren confirms this. He tells Carbon Brief that electricity accounts for around 6-8% of UK steel production costs. Of the UK electricity cost for heavy industry, he says that about a third — £31.50 per megawatt hour (MWh) — is due to policy costs during the 2016/17 financial year. Wholesale costs, transmission and distribution costs and power company profits make So, perhaps 2-3% of UK steel production costs might be down to government policy. In fact, the steel industry does not have to pay the full costs of government policy. It receives compensation that offsets 60-70% of cost of CO2 pricing, says Warren.
Compensation for 85% of the cost of low-carbon energy subsidies started in February 2016 and will be backdated to December. This reduces the total policy costs faced by much of the steel industry to around £7/MWh, according to EEF. This amounts to much less than 1% of production costs.
After this compensation is taken into account, UK electricity costs for steel firms are around £70/MWh. This is still high relative to many other EU countries. Even if all green policy charges were scrapped, however, UK prices would remain higher than for most EU competitors.

 I don't see how the block-leaking of thousands of communications can be described as "selective" unless you're desperately seeking to defend the people exposed by them.

The email archive was selectively released, based on a keyword and person search. Subsequent bulk releases have been made without the thief even reading them. Not something anyone could condone, surely? Perhaps you could share say, the three emails that you believe revealed the worst scientific malpractice?

 But you can't ditch the poster boy who did so much to kick it all off, can you?

Which part of the word 'sideshow' is giving you the problem? What is amusing is the obsession with this study, more than a decade after the event, and the completely uncritical and yes, unsceptical acceptance of false criticisms. The reality is that none of the flaws in the study (and yes as the first of its kind it was not perfect, Mann has admitted that he would do it differently today) materially affect the basic result of anomalous recent warmth, which has been confirmed by every subsequent reconstruction.

And AGW would still be a problem if it had never been published.

No you should not construe my silence as agreement, quite the contrary. I may respond in detail later, but real life is calling.