Of temperature and coal supply predictions

It seems that while in my own professional life I had to change my opinion on several occasions, as new facts and experimental results showed that some our ideas were incorrect, that a willingness to change future projections of future energy supplies and their impact on the climate is less prevalent among the most quoted sources of opinion on these topics, even as the facts change over time.

This, of course, has some relevance to the many discussions that one might read on climate change, where model predictions usually assume that the same mix of fossil fuels will exist well beyond the year 2100, despite the future scenarios put forward increasingly by major oil companies that the mix will change and the role of oil and coal will diminish in the future. Part of this, in the case of the climate science modelers is perhaps because they have enough problems dealing with concerns over clouds and aerosols, without needing the additional needs to correct future prognostications for changes in the fuel mix that produces the greenhouse gasses of concern.

In this regard I was struck, in reading the testimony of witnesses at the Workshop on the American Physical Society Climate Change Statement Review about their inflexibility in changing future projections despite current data availability.

For example in the discussion following Dr. Santer’s presentation (page 255 line 18 and thereafter) it is noted that:

DR. KOONIN: But here, evidently IPCC needs to scale in order to match the observations; second, that many of the scaling factors are not consistent with one; they are smaller than one. The tightest ones are smaller than one. And there is a fair bit of variability in them. . . . But then I go to the centennial projections in chapter 12 and it says that, "The likely ranges do not take into account these factors because the influence of these factors on the long-term projections cannot be quantified." So, to me, it looks like they set a calibration against the historical data and then they wiped out that calibration in doing the centennial projections resulting in probably a 25, 30 percent over-prediction of the 2100 warmings. 1. . . . . . At least I conclude now from what I understand that the centennial scale projections temperatures are probably high? . . . By 30 percent, at least for RCP8.5 which is dominated greenhouse gases?

To which he did not get a responsive answer from those espousing the greater effects of greenhouse gases on the environment.

There is much in the discussion that is interesting, including the comment that if the hiatus continues for another 3 years then the predictive models of future temperature growth will have to be revisited, but then a time limit has been set before and then ignored after it passed.

It is, unfortunately, this illustrated inflexibility in the scientific mind that makes it difficult to predict the true likelihood of significant temperature increase within the next few decades, since the need for scaling of the greenhouse effect (perhaps down to 70% or lower) and the phasing out of fossil fuel use (in part because we are going to run out of oil) are both ignored by those whose opinions are most quoted in the press and by the government.

On the other hand there are those who predict that we will run out of coal much sooner than the industry (or myself) believes and predicts. The latest perhaps of these is the report by Leslie Glustrom “Warning: Faulty Reporting of US Coal Reserves,” for Clean Energy Action. The report is summarized as:

The belief that the US has a “200 year” supply of coal is based on the faulty reporting by the EIA of US coal deposits as “reserves.” Most US coal is buried too deeply to be mined at a profit and should not be categorized as reserves, but rather as “resources.” All decision makers should begin taking a hard look at coal cost and supply issues considering both geology and finance and begin thinking about scenarios that require moving the US beyond coal in significantly less than 20 years. Since coal is non-renewable, analyses should be based on recent trends—not those of the 20th century, which are not likely to be repeated.

This is actually an interesting point of view, since in my opinion much of the coal around the world is not even considered as a resource at the present time, let alone the reserve that it ultimately likely to become prior to use to solve the energy needs of countries that can no longer afford the higher prices of alternate fuels.

One of the problems that I have with the report is the lack of understanding of how incredibly simple and inexpensive it is to mine the surface coals of Wyoming and Montana. In essence large shovels just dig the coal out of the ground, put in trucks, transfer that to rail cars, and off it goes. It is hard to beat the simplicity and low cost of this operation. (Yes there are related costs for blasting and reclamation among others but it nevertheless remains cheap).

The assumption seems to be made that when coal seams get deeper, then the costs will rise rapidly. For the record I should point out that in the summer of 1963 I worked in the Snowdown Colliery of the Kent coal field mining a seam of about 6 ft thick IIRC at a depth of 3,000 ft. That coal seam stretched for miles, and was not the only coal within the stratigraphic column. It became too expensive to mine that, and the coal at other mines I worked in below 1,000 ft (and at seam heights down to one foot eight inches) because oil and gas in the North Sea became much more readily available at a lower price. Prior to their arrival the coal was a viable fuel. Thus after natural gas and oil begin to deplete the conditions will revert to those prior to the development of the North Sea fields. And, in the interim, there has been significant advance in the technologies that can be applied to extract the coal at lower cost – particularly with the increases in automation and remote control that are increasingly being used underground.

But I shall discuss this in more detail in a following post on the topic.

Gentle Cough - The Post Dispatch and Cherry-picking data

It has been a little while since I wrote anything about the Global Warming situation. Not that there is not an ongoing series of messages about how we are going to be drowned by increased glacial melting, or that extreme events might become more prevalent, and that we need to take precautions in case they do. Of course there is not a lot of evidence that the rate of extreme event occurrences has been increasing, but the alarmists feel that there is some need to drive home the message that the world has to be concerned about Global Warming, even when the globe isn’t warming. And so this post, which first notes why I wrote the last sentence, and then comments on how the media message is changing so that, by cherry picking data, alarm can still be spread.

So first let us look at the Global Warming situation. It has received very little coverage in the United States, and barely rated a mention in the UK, but the recent release of a new plot of global temperatures by the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) is worth putting up, purely as a matter of record.

Figure 1. Global average temperatures over the past 15 years (British Daily Mail ).

This Met Office release (on a Friday) has largely been ignored by a scientific community that only exists in its current form as long as the reality that this graph presents remains ignored.

There was an immediate controversy in the UK (but not here, where it remains largely unknown) and there was a follow up report the following Sunday. But, even while ignored, the lack of increase in global temperature over the past fifteen years is surely some indication that the models widely used to predict an exponentially increasing global temperature, are falsified.

So what can a good alarmist do? Well consider the headline in the St. Louis Post Dispatch on November 26th. “2012 so far the warmest year on record in parts of Missouri.” So let me talk about this for a minute.

Notice that this does not say that the entire state is at its warmest. Rather it reports that Jayson Gosselin of the National Weather Service has noted that this was the warmest year on record for St. Louis and Columbia.

The average temperature in St. Louis so far this year is 63.4 degrees, a full degree higher than the 62.4-degree average seen in the previous warmest year, 1921. In Columbia, the previous warmest year as of Nov. 24 was in 1938, when the average was 61 degrees. This year, the average is 61.7 degrees. In Kansas City, Mo., it has been the fourth warmest year on record so far, with an average temperature of 61.3 degrees, Gosselin said.

He goes on to be more specific about when the heat wave occurred (in case we missed it!)

Gosselin, who works in the Weather Service's office near St. Louis, said the "meteorological spring" _ March through May _ was far and away the warmest ever in St. Louis with an average temperature of 61.1 degrees. Second warmest was 1910, when the average was 57.5 for the spring months. Summer also was unusually warm. Average temperatures in March, May and July all set records in St. Louis, he said.

For those who forget, I took a look at the Missouri State Temperatures first back in February 2010, when I first became curious as to whether our state was showing the global warming that everyone was talking about.

I found the location of all the US Historical Climate Network sites for Missouri and determined their location (latitude and longitude) elevation and population. Now as it turns out that there are 26 stations in Missouri, and so I took the average temperature for each station each year (this was the “homogenized” temperature in that initial post) and was able to plot the average state temperature over time.


Figure 2. Average “USHCN homogenized” temperatures for the state of Missouri (USHCN)

And if you look at that plot the state temperature has barely risen (less than half a degree Fahrenheit in 115 years) since official temperatures have been recorded, and the hottest years were in the 1930’s in the dust bowl years.

But there was something missing from the data table and it turns out that three of the largest cities in the state, Columbia, Springfield, and St. Louis were not tabulated in this network, but are, instead, part of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) network that Dr. James Hansen used for his work.

And, being further curious, I then combined the two sets of data and obtained a plot for temperature as a function of population.


Figure 3. Temperature as a function of population size around the station. This conclusion, that there is a log relationship is not new. To quote from that post:

Oke (1973) * found that the urban heat-island (in °C) increases according to the formula –

➢ Urban heat-island warming = 0.317 ln P, where P = population.

Thus a village with a population of 10 has a warm bias of 0.73°C. A village with 100 has a warm bias of 1.46°C and a town with a population of 1000 people has a warm bias of 2.2°C. A large city with a million people has a warm bias of 4.4°C.

It is interesting to note that his coefficient is 0.317 and the one I found is 0.396.

( * Oke, T.R. 1973. City size and the urban heat island. Atmospheric Environment 7: 769-779.)

But then I revisited the state later in time, after the USHCN started also providing the raw and Time of Observation Corrected data (TOBS). And I found a few more interesting facts.

Firstly I compared the difference between the GISS data for the three large cities with the state average temperatures for both the raw data, and the “homogenized” data.


Figure 4. Difference between the average temperature in the large cities, and that of the average temperature in the State. The blue line is for the homogenized data, the red is for the raw.

I then went on to compare the TOBS average to that of the largest cities and this is what I got:


Figure 5. Difference between the average temperature in the large cities of the state, and that of the average temperature in the state using the TOBS data.

A slight upward trend, but not that significant. As for the temperatures in Missouri, over the past 100 years, with the correction – really there is no trend, it has been relatively stable:


Figure 6. Average TOBS temperature for the state of Missouri over the recorded interval.

I did note that the highest temperatures were some decades ago.

Oh and the correlation with population held up with the TOBS data, the coefficient was 0.327, and the r^2 value was 0.14.

Now I finished the entire contiguous United States some time ago, and that temperature relationship to population held up quite well, as the individual state reports listed on the rhs side of the blog show.

So what do we learn from this? That alarmist rhetoric is continuing with an embarrassing lack (for those of us who are scientists) of balance in the reporting. Data now has to be carefully cherry-picked to still be able to convey the message that the world is warming. One wonders how long they will be able to get away with this before they are called out by more prominent folk?

Predictions of climate change

There are a couple of controversial items that have made it into the mainstream press recently that seem to have stirred a little controversy, and which are worth at least a mention. (And please note that the original post has been updated).

The first was the Opinion piece in the WSJ back in January in which 16 scientists wrote that there was no need to panic over Global Warming. They note, in their letter

Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.

Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.

Their letter received a response from a group that included some of the more prominent (and funded) of the climate change advocates, which avoided the discussion of funding, but rather spoke to the eminence of those who are forecasting gloom.

Do you consult your dentist about your heart condition? In science, as in any area, reputations are based on knowledge and expertise in a field and on published, peer-reviewed work. If you need surgery, you want a highly experienced expert in the field who has done a large number of the proposed operations.

You published "No Need to Panic About Global Warming" (op-ed, Jan. 27) on climate change by the climate-science equivalent of dentists practicing cardiology. While accomplished in their own fields, most of these authors have no expertise in climate science. The few authors who have such expertise are known to have extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert. This happens in nearly every field of science. For example, there is a retrovirus expert who does not accept that HIV causes AIDS. And it is instructive to recall that a few scientists continued to state that smoking did not cause cancer, long after that was settled science.

(You will note the little unsubtle ad hominem at the end.)

The original authors have now replied. I will quote the reply under the fold, but the first part of their response points out that, for major surgery, it is often best to get a second opinion, and to look at the record of the proposed scientists. They then put up a graph of the accuracy of the IPCC predictions for temperature rise, which I thought worth repeating.

IPCC projections for temperature rise, against reality. (WSJ)

UPDATE There is a response to the more recent letter on RealClimate which complains that the WSJ plot does not include error bars, and that, when those are included, that recent temperature plots fall within the range of the predicted models. I have appended that plot to the end of this post.

Te response begins thus:

We agree with Mr. Trenberth et al. that expertise is important in medical care, as it is in any matter of importance to humans or our environment. . . . . . . . . .In this respect, an important gauge of scientific expertise is the ability to make successful predictions. When predictions fail, we say the theory is "falsified" and we should look for the reasons for the failure.

They point out that the heat that was to have raised the temperature has now been suggested as having gone, instead, into the oceans, but point out that there is no evidence to sustain that theory.

They note that the Earth has been warming since the Little Ice Age (for which there is much evidence) and prior to the LIA there was the Medieval Warming Period, and before it the Holocene Climate Optimum, neither of which can have been caused by greenhouse gases but which instead point to a natural cycling of temperature, which current science has not disproved as a cause of the current warming period. And they also express concern about the statement that "decarbonization would drive decades of economic growth."

Of course a wind farm, or solar farm employs significantly less workers than a coal mine (though arguably more than an oil or gas well - though not if one includes the refineries - since when it gets to power station levels both should surely balance out). I rather suspect that this is not the end of the discussion, and that the debate is starting to get a little more public exposure than it has been able to achieve in the past.

In passing I should note the small furor about the release of some of the documents from the Heartland Institute, mastered by one Peter Gleick, who was a MacArthur Fellow, has confessed to dishonestly obtaining and then releasing them. Not apparently that this is stopping the climate change advocates from pointing out the money that the Heartland Foundation has (though virtually none report on the relatively roughly hundredfold larger size of the sums of money being put into work that advocates climate change - but with money comes power and access, and the Heartland group has much less). I guess just because you're a recognized genius doesn't mean that you can't do stupid things.

However, the other thing that is worth a comment is that there seems to be a growing recognition that biofuels may not be the savior of the atmosphere that they have been purported to be. Apparently the Friends of the Earth have issued a report which indicates that switching to biofuels won't have much effect on cleaning up the air, in fact the switch may make things worse. At the same time the switch may cost drivers in Europe something on the order of $24 billion a year. And in the process of looking into the topic there is another new report (unfortunately behind a paywall) which suggests that much of this was known before the regulations were put in. Bishop Hill has a post on the report, which suggests that some un-named, but central and powerful individual, was able to manipulate the EU into making the moves that have led to the adoption of the 10% biofuel requirement, without adequate consideration of the evidence. Apparently none of the non-supportive data was made available. I wonder why that sounds familiar?

And in passing, and closure, I wrote, in the past about Dr. Hansen's predictions of global warming that were one of the seminal events that got the climate change movement the financial success that it has since achieved. It is interesting to take the graph he used, and add some of the data from the plot above. It would appear that more than one computer model has been falsified. Because Dr. Hansen's models seem to use a different zero, I have slightly adjusted the values from the curve above to extend the data on actual temperatures relative to those predicted. You can see that they are starting to fall below the values that Dr. Hansen predicted would only be achieved if there was a radical reduction in carbon dioxide and the greenhouse gases - which hasn't happened, and so would perhaps indicate that the effects of said gases are less than he was predicting.

Projected temperature rise anticipated by Dr Hansen (Dire Predictions)

The plot which RealClimate have used as a rebuttal is this one.

Real Climate plot showing the error bars that they state exist for the models.

It is an interesting point though since all the model error bars are conflated makes it difficult to see how much validity there is to the argument.

Incidentally Profesor Lindzen gave an excellent talk (pdf) at the Houses of Parliament in the UK the other day. It got favorable coverage in the Independent.

UPDATE: There have been a couple of posts over at Watts Up With That? (WUWT) that provide better versions of the plots than the one I gave above. The first points to a presentation by Dr. Evans, which contains this plot:

Temperatures as measured by satellite against Dr. Hansen's predictions in 1988.

The other compares the IPCC predictions with actual temperature data, and quotes a post by Clive Best, that contains this plot:

IPCC predictions of long-term temperature change.