It's Going To Get Awful Hot In The USA This Century
Politics / Climate Change Jun 26, 2014 - 02:08 PM GMTMore Deadly Than The US Has Ever Seen
Bloomberg sites are giving wall-to-wall coverage to the latest “shock report” on global warming. The report titled “Risky Business” was commissioned by Michael Bloomberg himself – helping explain its promotion by Bloomberg sites - and his tight-knit group of former and present business and political associates, including ex-Treasury secretaries Henry Paulson, George Schulz and Robert Rubin. The report kicks off the Doomster list with predictions that “by the end of the century, between $238 billion and $507 billion of existing coastal property in the U.S. will likely be subsumed by rising seas, and crop yields in some breadbasket states may decline as much 70 percent”.
Heatstroke deaths in the US will soar. About 95 000 MW of new power capacity will be needed only in the 25-year period to 2039 to turn the fans and air chillers in homes and businesses. US labor productivity growth – which was already falling or stalling – will turn to outright decline of output producing a “far bigger productivity slowdown than any of the 20th century”.
Curiously enough, the featured articles listed with this story on Bloomberg sites of course include triumphal Told You So articles about how hot it was in May 2014, worldwide, and Tesla batteries for Low Carbon motoring, but also included The World's 10 Leading Beers (which aren't the ones you thought they were). Presumably, they mean chilled beers. Keep it cool but don't have one on me.
Evolutionary Leaps
It is strange to think that even in late April, Bloomberg and other US financial sites were saturated with articles foretelling GDP doom (explaining why the Obama recovery is a fake) due to extreme and exceptional cold weather in the US. But Obama's chief science adviser John Holdren was quick to tell us all that Global Warming causes Global Cooling, in the US at least, in winter months, sometimes, and that cooling has unfriendly impacts on economic growth.
Now we are safely into late June. Obama and a shrinking band of other heads of state, with the co-opted UN system and its agencies can now tout the bad news of heat doom for the planet, just like old times! Learn nothing. Forget nothing.
Henry Paulson, back in late-2007 made forward-looking predictions about a complex non-linear system with multiple feedback – that is the financial markets – which he said would and could only prosper with artificially lower interest rates. The actual result did not need any climate warming or cooling. There was a complete debt induced collapse and the Obama depression starting by 2009 in which we are still embedded. Side issues like Niagara Falls freezing over early this year are pure and simple statistical noise. Our problem is that global cooling is always inevitably just as plausible, and just as possible as global warming.
The longer one trend digs in, the more likely it will be replaced.
Paulson believed that unlike CO2 you can never have enough debt. The solution to too much debt is more debt, as automatic as that, like lowering CO2 levels will automatically lower future temperatures. The exact opposite is just as plausible, due to complex feedbacks.
Exactly like periodic cyclic financial and economic crises – which are “always a surprise” and are secondly always disputed as to their exact origins – all we know for sure is that they happened. Likewise we know there were long-term glacial periods, the most recent ending about 10 000 years ago, and we have ice core samples going back in time 1 million years, but they only enable us to know that both CO2 and temperatures changed. Simply the end of a glacial period or era can release CO2, for example, but it wasn't the CO2 which caused the warming. It can or might reinforce the post-glacial temperature recovery, but we aren't sure. Human beings can no more influence the future climate than Paulson could control financial markets in 2008.
And Black Swans
The most unhealthy direct results of the elite stampede into a wildly exaggerated version of Svante Arrhenius' CO2-global warming theory of 1908 are now everywhere. Arrhenius, for starters, was glad about human CO2 emissions possibly causing global warming because he hoped that would stave off the arrival of another glacial era. His earlier versions of the same theory went as high as a 6 degC rise in world temperatures – over “1000 years or so” - but he was forced to cut back on that estimate due to justified criticism by other contemporary scientists like Anders Angstrom. Over 100 years ago.
Obsessional fear about warming results in obsessionally trying to find – or fabricate – evidence to prove it is happening. Believing that only human CO2 emissions are causing the hoped-for but also-feared warming makes all and any other theory or observation suspect. In other words, elites and the elite-controlled media have created a context where Black Swan climate change is the default. To use Nassim Taleb's definitions, this is a “tail end statistical probability event”, that is events which are of extreme-low probability and are therefore totally discounted. Talking about them is eccentric. Peer group pressure in scientific circles further seals out any countervailing hypothesis or observation.
Professor Les Woodcock the doyen of chemical thermodynamics at Manchester University UK calls this scientific idiocy the “orbital teapot syndrome”. Only CO2 can change climate and only towards further warming. Nothing else. The massive but invisible teapot orbiting close to the Earth is the cause – and you have to prove it doesn't exist!
Bloomberg's predictably hysterical, but also self-righteous 'Risky Business' report melds together all and any “supporting hypotheses” for the CO2 story line, especially “high or extreme humidity”, which is going to kill Americans along with the heat.
The IPCC, in its own furtive and dismissive way has to admit that especially oceanic cloud cover has been increasing, possibly very fast, for at least 30-40 years but has “pulled” the more sensational reports and studies that it published on the subject pre-2007. It says: “Cloud feedbacks are the primary source of inter-model differences in equilibrium climate sensitivity, with low cloud being the largest contributor”. In other words if cloud cover rises, most extremely in nuclear winter-style, temperatures will fall and the IPCC will be out of business.
Cloud cover increase due to burning coal and ejecting dust and SO2, as well as CO2 into the atmosphere is OK for the IPCC because its is due to Demon Coal. CO2 levels will rise, causing warming, and overbalance any cooling due to rising cloud cover. The warming doom will continue.
The insane sensitivity of scientists about “climate sensitivity” or the response of climate to changes of any factor able to influence climate, was shown in 2011 by the European CERN nuclear research centre giving a special conference before publishing reports on its CLOUD experiment. The Director General of CERN actually said that the CLOUD team’s report “should be politically correct about climate change”! Do not rock the boat.
Basically CERN wanted to be 100% sure they would on no account endorse “the Danish heresy” – Henrik Svensmark’s hypothesis developed by himself and colleagues since the late 1990s, that most of the global warming of the 20th Century can be explained by a reduction in cosmic ray density due to livelier solar activity, deflecting cosmic radiation and resulting in less low cloud cover and warmer surface temperatures. Being exact about his theory, and taking only solar sunspot cycles as the main cause of a “solar shield” deflecting CR (cosmic radiation), this process would have started seriously declining, due to weaker sunspot cycles by the late-1960s or 1970s. However, CR intensity is itself highly variable or able to vary.
Exactly how CR does increase cloud cover, especially over oceans, is part of Svensmark's “heresy” and IPCC-approved scientists were quick to dismiss the theory – for example on the grounds that CR effects on water, clouds, ice particles, and airborne chemicals will be in the nanometric and related sub-millimetric domain, with little or no chemical action in the oceans, and therefore no long-term ability to reduce global warming due to CO2. Svensmark and his colleagues completely disproved this counter argument, for example the production of ammonia with either the certain, or probable increase of oceanic plankton activity in two modes. The defence mode – shielding themselves from increased CR by emitting water vapour screens, and the growth mode – increasing in numbers and density due to increased nutrients. The net final result is more oceanic cloud cover and lower temperatures. The only subject to define is the delay period for the changeover from a warming cycle to a cooling cycle.
Always The Knife Edge
We can't expect either former US Treasury secretaries or Michael Bloomberg to have the time and make the effort to wade through scientific theory concerning any kind or type of complex multivariate system or process with large numbers of dependent and independent feedbacks exposed to those uber-famous “sills and thresholds”. If they did, they would know the Earth's climate is always finely balanced but has its own protective subsystems.
Catastrophic climate change – nothing to do with human CO2 – can and does provenly happen, however. Apart from “mechanical and chemical” catastrophic change due to so-called Milankovitch cycles and asteroid or bolide impacts, and volcanic-tectonic and orogenic events, there are also GRB-gamma ray burst events.
The type of GRB event hitting our planet in the late Ordovician (about 440 million years ago) was an example. The architecture of “our” galaxy, at the time, permitted a GRB event to “fry the planet” wiping out 75%-95% of all existing life. And the event probably only took either seconds or minutes to trigger a nuclear winter-type sudden and massive fall of world temperatures that endured for thousands of years, due to climate feedbacks.
Because GRB events happen about once every 30 years in “our” galaxy we have to be thankful that galactic architecture almost but not quite always protects us from being fried. Changes of the atmosphere's chemistry of the type that human CO2 emissions are able to cause, are vastly smaller than the above examples. Increasing CO2 levels may only be due to post-glacial temperature recovery and the increase may only be partly-due to human fossil fuel burning.
Nevertheless climate is changing and will go on changing. Generating a massive doomster media and political campaign to capitalize on public fear, and use this for corporate and personal profit, and scientific kudos, is not only morally degenerate but deflects public attention to the real subject of climate change and its real causes.
By Andrew McKillop
Contact: xtran9@gmail.com
Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights
Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012
Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.
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