The ethanol gravy train rolls on by Paul Driessen

Opponents make compelling case but can’t derail or even slow this well-protected industry

Like most people I’ve spoken with, I have no innate, inflexible antipathy to ethanol in gasoline. What upsets me are the deceptive claims used to justify adding mostly corn-based ethanol to this indispensable fuel; the way seriously harmful unintended consequences are brushed aside; and the insidious crony corporatist system the ethanol program has spawned between producers and members of Congress.

What angers me are the legislative and regulatory mandates that force us to buy gasoline that is 10% ethanol – even though it gets lower mileage than 100% gasoline, brings none of the proclaimed benefits (environmental or otherwise), drives up food prices, and damages small engines. In fact, in most areas, it’s almost impossible to find E-zero gasoline, and that problem will get worse as mandates increase.

My past articles lambasting ethanol (here, here, here and here) addressed these issues, and said ethanol epitomizes federal programs that taxpayers and voters never seem able to terminate, no matter how wasteful or harmful they become. That’s primarily because its beneficiaries are well funded, motivated, politically connected and determined to keep their gravy train rolling down the tracks – while opponents and victims have far less funding, focus, motivation and ability to reach the decision-making powers.

Ethanol got started because of assertions that even now are still trotted out, despite having outlived their time in the real-world sun. First, we were told, ethanol would be a bulwark against oil imports from unfriendly nations, especially as the USA depleted its rapidly dwindling petroleum reserves. Of course, the fracking (horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing) revolution has given America and the world at least a century of new reserves, and the US now exports more oil and refined products than it imports.

Second, renewable fuels would help prevent dangerous manmade climate change. However, with the 2015-16 El Niño temperature spike now gone, average global temperatures are continuing the 20-year no-increase trend that completely contradicts alarmist predictions and models. Harvey was the first major hurricane in a record twelve years to make US landfall. And overall, the evidence-based scientific case for “dangerous manmade climate change” has become weaker with every passing year.

Moreover, the claim that ethanol and other biofuels don’t emit as much allegedly climate-impacting (but certainly plant-fertilizing) carbon dioxide as gasoline has also been put out to pasture. In reality, over their full life cycle (from planting and harvesting crops, to converting them to fuel, to transporting them by truck, to blending and burning them), biofuels emit at least as much CO2 as their petroleum counterparts.

Ironically, the state that grows the most corn and produces the most ethanol – the state whose Republican senators had a fit when EPA proposed to reduce its 2018 non-ethanol biodiesel requirement by a measly 315 million gallons, out of 19.3 billion gallons in total renewable fuels – buys less ethanol-laced gasoline than do average consumers in the rest of the USA. That state is Iowa.

In fact, Iowans bought more ethanol-free gasoline in 2016 than what EPA projects the entire United States will be able to buy in just a few more years, as the E10 mandates ratchet higher and higher.

And so this past week, after months of battles, debates and negotiations, President Trump hosted a White House meeting with legislators The purpose was to address and compromise on at least some of the thorny issues that had put Ted Cruz, Joni Ernst and other politicians at loggerheads, as they sought to reform some aspects of the Renewable Fuel Standards (RFS) system while protecting their constituents.

In an effort to expand the reform agenda, by making legislators and citizens better informed in advance of the meeting, 18 diverse organizations wrote a joint letter to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, underscoring why they believe broad and significant RFS reform is essential. Signatories included major national meat and poultry producers and processors, restaurants, marine manufacturers, small engine owners, consumer and taxpayer organizations, and conservation and environmental groups. They were especially worried about the prospect that the Congress and Administration might allow year-round sales of 15% (E15) ethanol blends in gasoline, but they raised other pressing concerns as well.

* As large shares of domestic corn and soy crops are now diverted from food use to fuel production, poultry, beef, pork and fish producers (and consumers) face volatile and increasing prices for animal feed.

* Ethanol wreaks havoc on the engines and fuel systems of boats, motorcycles and lawn equipment, as well as many automobiles, which are not capable or allowed to run on E15. Repair and replacement costs are a major issue for marine and small engine owners (as I personally discovered when I owned a boat).

* Consumers and taxpayers must pay increasing costs as biofuel mandates increase under the RFS.

* Millions of acres of native prairie and other ecosystems have been turned into large-scale agricultural developments, because the RFS encourages farmers to plow land, instead of preserving habitats. This endangers ecosystems and species, exacerbates agricultural run-off and degrades water quality.

* Biofuel demand promotes conversion of natural habitats to palm oil and other plantations overseas, as well as domestically. Their life-cycle carbon dioxide emissions rival or exceed those of oil and gas.

* Expanding markets for corn ethanol by increasing E15 sales ignores and exacerbates these problems – while benefiting a small subset of the US economy but negatively impacting far more sectors, including the general public and the industries and interests represented by signatories to the Pruitt letter.

Following the meeting, several signatories expanded on these concerns – and noted that the compromise did increase E15 sales, while reducing the RFS impact on small refineries that were being forced to buy paper biofuel certificates because they weren’t making enough gasoline to need mandated real biofuel.

   

Requiring every American to buy ethanol gasoline “isn’t good enough” for biofuel companies anymore, the National Council of Chain Restaurants remarked. “Now they want a waiver from federal clean air laws so they can sell high blends of ethanol, which pollutes the air in warm weather months, year round.”

“Arbitrarily waiving the E15 [ozone emissions] restriction and permitting year-round E15 sales, without comprehensive reform of the RFS,” merely boosts ethanol sales and justifies future government-imposed increases to the ethanol mandate, the National Taxpayers Union noted. These “hidden taxes,” damage to small engines, and lower gas mileage are “a direct hit” on family budgets, especially for poor families.

The new year-round E15 policy will “cause serious chaos for recreational boaters,” the National Marine Manufacturers Association stated. Over 60% of consumers falsely assume any gasoline sold at retail gas stations must be safe for their equipment. It is essential that EPA launch “a public awareness campaign, improved labeling standards, and new safeguards at the pump that protect American consumers.”

“Granting a Clean Air Act waiver for the corn ethanol industry … would mean doubling down on a policy that has already been a disaster for the environment,” the National Wildlife Federation said. Congress needs to … reform the ethanol mandate before it does more damage.”

“US farmers are in a severe crisis and millions of people around the world are forced to go without food,” ActionAid USA pointed out. “We need policies that guarantee everyone enough food to eat, fair prices for farmers, and protect our environment. Biofuels don’t do that.” In fact, they make the situation far worse.

Unfortunately, a deal was struck. The noisiest and best-connected warring factions got what they wanted. These other pressing concerns were ignored, as the can once again got kicked down the road.

Refiners will now save hundreds of millions of dollars a year, by not having to buy ethanol that they don’t need to blend into the smaller quantities of gasoline they are refining. Corn farmers and ethanol producers will rake in hundreds of millions more a year. All that is good for those industries, their workers and investors, and the politicians who get their campaign contributions.

But what about the rest of America? The Congress, White House and EPA need to address our environmental and pocketbook concerns, too. When will the next negotiating session be held?

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy and environmental policy.

My Comments:

I have noted over and over that such special interest legislation and rulings are the standard once the People have accepted the idea that government should hurt some to help others, whether those others are a majority,  underdogs in a society, or the well-connected to government power-holders.  This ancient vision of the purpose of government was replaced in our Declaration of Independence with the principle that government derives its powers from the People for the purpose of protecting their equal, inalienable rights.  By preventing some of the People from exercising their rights for the benefit of some others of the People, the government is violating its legitimate purpose of protecting everyone's equal rights.  Once that principle of equal protection of individual rights is abused, one will always get government destructive of the interests of most of the people most of the time as special interests become the customary beneficiaries, just as they usually were before the American Principle of equal rights for everyone.

The ethanol mandates are one particularly clear case of special interests taking advantage of most of the people and violating their broad right to purchase the goods of their own choosing in a free market.  The fact that the government is so willing to violate this critical principle and impose higher costs, greater inconvenience, and greater environmental damage on the People generally so that some businesses might make more money is an especially egregious example of government that has lost its way.  It is all too clear that this is an example in which many Republicans are very guilty of failing to understand the legitimate function of government.  While I think the Democrats are worse in abusing government power, the Republicans are plenty bad themselves.  Good government only results from a strong commitment by the People to the recognition that government's only legitimate function is to protect every individual's equal right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.  We all have very broad rights to engage in trade, to freedom of conscience, and to freedom of association.  We all have the right to choose our own values and to manage our own lives.  Government exists to prevent the initiated use of force and to minimize the overall use of force within our society.  That is how it achieves the General Welfare -- that is the welfare of each and every American.

As I have proven many times and many ways, the science behind the claims of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis is clearly wrong.  Before such an idea is used to destroy American industries, American jobs, investment value, and to greatly increase consumer costs and inconveniences, it ought to have to prove itself true beyond any reasonable doubt.  It ought to have to answer my critical analysis of its failures to abide by known physics.  The proponents of that theory have never addressed my arguments, though they have called me many names which are meant to be unflattering.

Pipeline and Coal-Fired Power Plant Alarmism

In view of the recent controversy about the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Paul Driessen post I just recently put up called Pipeline Anarchy, I want to refer back to a post of mine in November 2011 called Democrat Socialism, Energy, and Pipeline Hysteria.  One of the points I made was that the U.S. was already extensively filled with oil and gas pipelines.  Many of them were old and were not nearly as safe as the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline or as the Dakota Access Pipeline.  It makes little sense to prevent the building of these pipelines on safety or environmental grounds, since they are improvements in the system.  I also pointed out that most any aquifer was already crossed by less superior pipelines.  Now we learn from Driessen's article that the Dakota Pipeline in the only area unconstructed is running parallel to an already existing pipeline.

From my earlier post:

In 2009, there were 148,622 miles of oil and oil product pipelines in the U.S.  There were also 1,539,911 miles of natural gas pipeline in the U.S.  The Keystone XL project wanted to add 1,661 miles of oil pipeline to this massive network of pipelines.  Some of the major pipelines now in existence are shown in the map below.

The green-coded pipelines are major oil pipelines, the red lines are major gas pipelines, and the blue lines are product pipelines. 

Returning to the present:

The pipeline case in which a safer pipeline is denied while less safe ones continue in use has an interesting parallel in the case against coal fired power plants.  The Obama EPA established a regulation that required power plants to release much less mercury than they do into the atmosphere.  The claim was that despite the low concentrations of mercury, a pregnant woman eating a constant diet of fish from nearby rivers might suffer some health problem based on cherry-picked studies of islanders who ate nothing but seafood from the ocean with its 200 ppm of mercury.  There have long been recommendations that pregnant women not eat too much seafood, as an abundance of caution.  But, pregnant women are presumably thought incapable of following a similar recommendation for avoiding too much fish from rivers as an abundance of caution.

See my posts Coal-Fired Power Plants Produce Insignificant Mercury and Evaluating the Mercury Emissions Danger from Coal-Fired Power Plants.  It is clear that many areas of the country should be evacuated due to the overwhelming concentrations of mercury from natural sources of mercury, such as the mineral cinnabar if the mercury from coal-fired power plants is a problem.  If it is safe to live in much of the American Southwest and the southern Great Plains states, then it is generally immaterial whether one lives near a coal-fired power plant as far as mercury exposure is concerned.

It is also of no significance that coal-fired power plants produce more carbon dioxide than do natural gas power plants or than wind generators do for reasons described in Why Greenhouse Gas Theory is Wrong -- An Examination of the Theoretical Basis.

But, we must have many horrors, terrors, and alarms from which ever bigger government can pretend to save us.

26 Nov 2016:  10 other fossil fuel pipelines cross the Missouri River upstream from the Dakota Access Pipeline already.

Hiding the Decline - Not Since 1997, Since 1921

I have concentrated on revealing the mistakes in the physics that is used to explain the so-called greenhouse effect of infra-red active gases in recent times, because Tony Heller at the blog Real Science has done an excellent job revealing the massive data manipulations in the temperature data.  His plot of the raw thermometer data since 1921 and the highly manipulated and published data since then is shown here:

The raw temperature data over this time shows a decline in the average temperature, while the manipulated data shows a large increase, especially since 1977.  Most of the discussion of a "Pause in the Temperature Increase" is simply addressing the highly manipulated data of the last 17 years, during which time the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has increased, but the temperature has not.

The thermometer readings come from the USHCN stations across the USA shown on the map below:

The temperature data manipulators claim that much of the earlier 20th Century data has to be shifted downward because the stations reported the same high temperature two days in a row.  Now this assumes that the station managers were incredibly dumb and failed to notice that there was an unbelievable incidence of daily high temperatures that were the same due to the time of day at which they reset the temperature recorders to report the high temperature of that daily time period.  Assuming such overwhelming stupidity of Americans lies at the core to the Progressive Elitist ideology and justifies strong and intrusive rule by politicians and bureaucrats of elevated intelligence and who have been well-indoctrinated in our Progressive education system.

Tony Heller has also revealed that increasing portions of the temperature data record have no actual thermometer temperature reading behind them at all.  More and more often, it is said that the stations do not report the data and so a program runs an algorithm to generate a replacement temperature.  The reason for the failure to report the temperature data is unknown, as is the nature of the algorithm that replaces the missing data with some calculated number.  Tony Heller has provided the following horrifying plot of the rapidly increasing percentage of missing temperature data replaced by the algorithm of our most untrustworthy bureaucrats.

Tony Heller also says that almost all of the temperature increase claimed since 1990 is the result of the temperature data added to the record to replace the missing raw data.  Frankly, I would not be surprised if there was not a concerted effort on the part of the catastrophic man-made warming alarmists to throw out station data that does not fit their agenda of rising temperatures.  In addition, it would not be surprising to find out that the algorithm to replace the missing data is biased to generate hotter temperatures.  In fact, the fact that almost all of the temperature increase since 1990 is due to the algorithm-produced data is proof that the algorithm does have such a bias.

The physics of the catastrophic man-made warming alarmists is dishonest.  The temperature data they publish is dishonest.  Honest temperature data would provide the experimental proof that the theory of catastrophic greenhouse warming was wrong.  The physics knowledge needed to understand why their explanations for the physical basis of catastrophic man-made global warming are wrong is beyond most scientists, let alone the general public.  That fact keeps the alarmist somewhat protected on the theory side of this equation.  But, without the massive fraudulent manipulation of the temperature data on the experimental side of the equation, the massive fraud would be immediately exposed to a much larger fraction of the People.

Obama and much of his Democrat Socialist Party base are still very determined to use this fraud to provide a basis for a massive invasion against individual rights, especially economic rights.  It allows them a reason for further expansion of the control of the People and a rich mother lode for extortion and pilfering of businesses.  Similar special interests are found in countries around the world and the latest Synthesizing Report of the latest IPCC report of the UN shows how committed they are to continuing the fraud.  That fraud is unraveling rapidly now.

One of the many things the new Republican majority in the Senate should make possible is a renewed effort to push along and promote the unraveling of the catastrophic man-made global warming fraud.  I hope the newly re-elected Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma will continue to promote reason and science with respect to man-made global warming, energy, and environmental policies as he has and that he will have many more active allies in the Senate and the House of Representatives.  It is critical to keep the US from signing international treaties on these issues and to maintain our sovereignty and our constitutional management of our internal affairs.  We must not be sucked into UN claims that we must aim toward zero carbon dioxide emissions or the planet is doomed!

The Unsettled Science of Global Warming Revealed by the Climate Models

The last 15 or so years of stasis in the global temperatures, is making it very obvious that the settled science we are told is so well-known and so well-executed in the climate models is full of holes.  Yet, Obama and many others claim that 97% of scientists are blind to these obvious problems.  Well no, 97% of scientists are not that blind and that claim of settled science and a consensus on it is hogwash.

Dr. Roy Spencer recently discussed a plot of the early fits and later predictions of 44 climate models for the lower troposphere temperatures for comparison with the University of Alabama Huntsville and the RSS satellite observations.  The plot was provided by John Christy based on data from the KNMI Climate Explorer.  Dr. Spencer's post was entitled Global Warming Slowdown: The View from Space.

The plot of the 44 climate model results for the temperature in the lower troposphere with comparison to the UAH and RSS satellite observations:

The heavy black line is the average of the 44 climate models.  The UAH satellite measurements are in blue and the RSS measurements are in red.  Both the UAH and RSS satellite measurements are now at lower temperatures than any of the 44 climate models predicted.  To be sure, a few models might say that they are still within their expected errors.  However, it is an obvious conclusion that the settled science of climate represented both by the average and by the wide dispersion of the results, is a myth cultivated by a tireless propaganda machine.

It is likely that most of the developers of these models believe in catastrophic man-made global warming due to man's emissions of carbon dioxide from his use of fossil fuels.  That belief is pretty much a requirement to get funding from governments around the world to develop these models.  This must certainly result in a significant bias of the average result of these models.

The UAH lower troposphere measurement has risen compared to the zero baseline temperature only 33% of the rise predicted by the model average.  The RSS lower troposphere measurement has risen only 28% as high as the model average.  Saying that climate science is settled in this case is like saying that the average of 44 models for the gravitational acceleration at the surface of the Earth is 32.1 m/s^2, but those doggone measurements keep coming up 9.8 m/s^2.  Despite that difference, there is a consensus among scientists that the science of gravity is well-understood and settled science!  It is not important whether the gravitational acceleration is 32.1 or 9.8 m/s^2 when we measure out gold for sale!

The settled science is also so well-known that the predicted temperature change in the lower troposphere for 2025 for the highest prediction based on the well-known and settled science is 2.63 times the lowest predicted change.  Even a non-scientist should be able to easily see that this implies a great disagreement in the science between these model-builders.  It implies a large uncertainty about the science the respective models believe they know well enough to try to incorporate into their models.

In fact, there are many uncertainties that are actually known and many others that may well be unknown.  Predicting the future solar insolation is not all that well known.  The effects of aerosols and of blown dust are not well-known.  The factors that change the degree cloud cover and type of clouds over time are not well-known.  These models have a bias toward assuming that radiation transport of energy in the lower troposphere is greater than it actually is.  They underestimate the energy transport effects of water evaporation and of air convection.  They do not understand the cycles in the oceans sufficiently well.  Thermal inputs from ocean vents and volcanoes and from solar wind and electromagnetic field effects are not well-known.  The large numbers of bacteria in the atmosphere came as a recent surprise.  How do they affect solar insolation and longwave IR scattering?  The non-human sources of CO2 are still not well-understood and this affects predictions of natural CO2 emissions over time.  For that matter, the amount of man's CO2 emissions over time and the time that CO2 remains in the atmosphere is not well-known in these climate models either.

So how do these government-funded and coddled global warming alarmist scientists, most of the print media, and the Obama administration get away with claiming that the science of catastrophic man-made global warming is settled?  How can they believe and expect anyone else to believe that 97% of scientists are on-board with this hogwash?

They ought to be laughed at were the consequences not so dire.  But, they advocate so many limits on our freedoms and so much economic damage in the name of this scientifically bogus theory that it is hardly a laughing matter.  What is more, it is very harmful to the respect that real science should be given.

NASA Alters Iceland Temperature Record to Produce Warming

Steven Goddard at Real Science has an interesting post that provides the changes by NASA in the temperature records for Reykjavik, Iceland.

Apparently, NASA is convinced that Icelanders misread their thermometers by as much as 2.4 C in 1940 and 1941 and subtracted that huge correction to those years.  From 1955 to 1963 NASA subtracted about 1.2 C from the temperature record.  Since 1993 they added to the temperatures.

One might think a correction to the temperature record for the purposes of gaining a better sense of the change in global temperatures generally would be appropriate.  This change would be a correction for urban heat island effects.  The correction that NASA made would be of the correct sense if the population of Reykjavik, Iceland had decreased greatly since the start of this record in 1901.  If the population had increased, then the correction should be to subtract from the measured temperature as the population increased.

Surprise!  The population of Reykjavik did not shrink greatly from 1901 until now!  No, it actually increased by a factor of 18.8.  Since 1940, the population increased by a factor of 3.1.  Throughout this time, the population of Reykjavik increased except for the loss of a few hundred people since 2008.  So, NASA did not make these corrections to correct for the urban heat island effect.

The net effect is to create the illusion of a rise in temperatures in recent years to comply with the catastrophic AGW agenda due to man's emissions of CO2.  This appears to be why the temperature corrections were made.  If not, it sure would be great to learn what the reason was.

United Nations Does Not Take Global Warming Seriously

The United Nations IPCC has issued four reports claiming that mankind faces a catastrophe due to man-made global warming from CO2 emissions.  Five years ago, Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. Secretary General, issued a mandate to U. N. organizations to develop plans to reduce their carbon footprints.  To date, only 10 of the 49 U.N. organizations, employing 220,000 people, have management-approved carbon reduction plans in-place.  As Donna Laframboise points out, this is proof the United Nations does not take the UN IPCC man-made global warming catastrophe claim seriously. 

Unfortunately, the UN IPCC Report 4 is nonetheless the authority cited by the USA EPA as the justification for declaring CO2 a pollutant subject to the anti-air pollution regulations it issues.  The EPA is acting without the approval of Congress on this matter, so it is also putting the UN ahead of our own elected representatives.  How odd it is that the UN is enthusiastic about the power it will acquire as the monitoring organization for energy use, but not equally enthusiastic about reducing its own CO2 emissions.  Or is it odd?  It would be odd only if the UN were nominally a rational organization which was actually concerned with acting morally.

An Unsettling Removal of Atmospheric CO2 by Plankton

Adam C. Martiny and a crew of mostly researchers from the University of California - Irvine have just published a study in Nature Geoscience that indicates that phytoplankton in warm ocean waters use up far more of the so-called greenhouse gas CO2 than had been previously thought.  The overall result is that about twice as much CO2 is taken up by plant life in the oceans as had been previously thought.

Many textbooks and practitioners of ocean biogeochemistry have long thought that phytoplankton, their excretions, and dissolved nutrients in the ocean interior maintained a ratio of carbon to nitrogen to phosphorus of 106:16:1.  This is known as the Redfield ratio, which Alfred Redfield established in 1934.

Martiny, et al., showed experimentally that this ratio varies considerably in the oceans, mostly as a function of latitude.  They observed carbon enrichment in the phytoplankton as high as 195:28:1 in warm, nutrient-deprived low-latitude areas with closed-loop circular currents.  In warm, nutrient-rich upwelling areas, the ratio was 137:18:1.  In cold, nutrient-rich high-latitude areas, the ratio was 78:13:1.

Some models had shown the possibility of such variations of the Redfield ratio and some field and laboratory measurements had shown differences with the Redfield ratio.  But, this large sample study should put that persistent ratio into retirement.  The settled science has another unsettling reality check!

I am of the opinion that while the first little bit of CO2 may contribute to warming, additional CO2 with common water vapor concentrations, does not cause significant Earth surface temperature change.  Insofar as it does, it is likely to act as a coolant to the surface, even as it raises the temperature of air at altitudes above the main water vapor concentration top.  This is because the much ignored absorption of solar insolation by added CO2 is greater than is appreciated and this cools the surface.

The IPCC claim of catastrophic CO2-induced warming depended upon an assumption that increased CO2 had caused all of the warming since the end of the Little Ice Age (or the dawn of the Industrial Age) and a posited positive feedback by increased water vapor due to the warming said to be caused by increased CO2.  The assumption that CO2 had caused all the warming since the Little Ice Age was extremely questionable and therefor a likely exaggeration.  The positive feedback due to increased water vapor due to warming is looking more and more to be a mild negative feedback, making the Earth's climate a lot less unstable.

Increasing the partial pressure of CO2 over the oceans will cause them to absorb more CO2, which is another negative feedback mechanism.  Now we find out that increased CO2 is used up by ocean phytoplankton in greater quantities than previously thought and that the warmer the ocean the more CO2 is used up.  This again is a negative feedback mechanism.

The Earth and its ecosystems do not seem to want to cooperate with the catastrophic predictions of the settled science of the Earth's climate based on man-made global warming.  It appears they have a proclivity toward much more stability.  Although we must note that this means that a more stable climate creates a most unstable status for the settled science!

The Ocean Acidification Myth

Professor Cliff Ollier of the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Western Australia has written an interesting and entertaining article on the myth of ocean acidification.  The oceans are always alkaline or basic, not acidic.  The acidity or alkalinity of water is measured on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 14, with 7 being neutral.  This is the pH scale and basic pH is greater than 7, while acidic pH is less than 7.  The oceans are commonly about pH 8.2 and it is very difficult to reduce the basic water even to neutral water because this is a logarithmic measurement.  Through at least the last 600 million years the oceans have not been acidic.  The most added dissolved CO2 does to the oceans is make them less basic or alkaline.

Among Professor Ollier's interesting comments:

• CO2 is critically needed by coral, shellfish, and marine plants.
• A volcanic vent bubbling huge amounts of CO2 to the surface is a favorite of divers because of the thriving life there, including corals.  The water there is fully saturated with CO2.
• Ocean pH varies by 0.3 by region and seasonally by 0.3 in a given area.
• The day to night variation in a coral pool was found to be 9.4 to 7.5, making claimed variations due to atmospheric CO2 look very inconsequential.
• Marine life evolved at much higher atmospheric concentrations of CO2 than we have now or would have if CO2 atmospheric concentrations doubled.  As is the case with land plants, it appears that marine life is better served by higher CO2 concentrations.
• Under good conditions, a coral reef can grow by 2 cm a year and added CO2 helps.  [From 1870 to 200, the average rate of sea level rise is claimed to be 1.5 mm a year.  Faster rates of as high as 3.3 mm a year have been claimed for 1993 to 2009, but coral reef islands can keep up.  Indeed, they have to have had this capability to deal with past climate changes over the last few hundred million years.]  Most atoll islands are doing well in keeping up.
• Human additions of CO2 to the atmosphere compared to what some plants and animals have removed in making limestone are trivial.  There is far more CO2 in limestone than there is in the oceans and the atmosphere combined.  Because the oceans remain alkaline, this stored CO2 in the form of limestone is not released and the result is a CO2 deprived planet.

CO2 Increases Lag Temperature Since 1982

It has long been known that over the last 400,000 years CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere broadly lagged temperature changes by hundreds of years.  This made sense, since it took long periods of time to warm the oceans to considerable depth and as the oceans warmed CO2 became less soluble.  The warmed oceans emitted CO2 into the atmosphere.  More recently then, it is reasonable to suspect that the increase in atmospheric CO2 since the end of the Little Ice Age has been largely or almost entirely due to the gradual warming of the oceans since then.

Catastrophic man-made global warming advocates have claimed that while this may have been the case in the past, since 1975 the warming has been caused by, and therefore preceded by, increases in atmospheric CO2 due to man's use of fossil fuels.  However, actual evidence that the general temperature increase since 1975 was actually caused by increases in atmospheric CO2 was severely wanting.

So has the recent increase in atmospheric CO2 preceded or followed the recent increase in temperature?  A relatively recent paper by Humlum, Stordahl, and Solheim entitled The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature published in Global and Planetary Change, Vol. 100, January 2013, p. 51-69 answers this question.

They found that since 1982, atmospheric CO2 concentration changes lagged:

• global sea surface temperature changes by 11 to 12 months.
• global surface air temperature changes by 9.5 to 10 months.
• global lower troposphere temperature changes by 9 months.

They also found that while the correlation with changes in ocean temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentrations was high, ocean temperature did not explain all of the CO2 changes.

Figure 1.  The upper panel plots the 12-month change in CO2 (NOAA, green) for each month minus that same month 12 months earlier compared to the same 12-month change in sea surface temperature (HadSST2, blue) and the 12-month change in global surface air temperature (HadCRUT3, red).  The lower graph plots the difference of a 12-month average with the previous 12-month average for the same CO2 concentration, sea surface temperature, and global surface air temperature series.  It is clear that the changes in CO2 come after the changes in temperatures.

If atmospheric CO2 increases lag temperature increases both in the recent warming since 1982 and warming periods over the last 400,000 years, then increased CO2 in the atmosphere is caused by the warming.  There is no case for the hypothesis that increased atmospheric CO2 is the cause of warming.

Adding this observation to the failure of temperatures to increase over the last 13 years even as atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased must be very disturbing to the climate alarmists.  The settled science of catastrophic man-made global warming due to CO2 emissions is becoming so unsettled that we have to conclude that the hypothesis has failed.  That it has failed comes as no surprise given the basic physics of the climate which I have recently explained here.

There is no case based on climate catastrophe for forcing man to stop using reliable and inexpensive fossil fuels in favor of unreliable and very expensive energy sources such as biomass, wind generation, and solar photovoltaic or concentration plants.  This is no excuse here for destroying the coal industry and killing coal-fired power plants, discouraging oil pipelines and drilling for oil and natural gas, and condemning commercial and residential consumers to spending much more on energy that is much less reliable.

Obama NASA Adjusts Temperatures Again to Increase Rate of Rise

The claim that global temperatures are rising at unprecedented and disastrous rates due to fossil fuel use lies at the root of numerous Obama policies harmful to our economy.  Among them are:

• Forcing coal-fired power plants to implement much more rigorous efforts to remove trace amounts of mercury and to sequester CO2 emissions.  Though these regulations are not to take effect until after the election, they are forcing the shutdown of power plants and coal mining operations now.
• The refusal to approve the building of the Keystone XL pipeline.
• The slowdown and minimization of permits to develop oil and gas on federal lands, which are extremely large areas of the Western US.
• The prohibition of offshore leases off the Pacific, Atlantic, and Eastern Gulf of Mexico.
• New federal regulations on fracking which were issued in April.
• New regulations on emissions from refineries, causing them new expenses.
• The new CAFE requirement that cars and light-duty trucks must average 54.5 mpg by 2025.
• Heavy subsidies for electric cars that no one wants even given the subsidy, thereby forcing DOD and other government agencies to buy these undesirable cars.
• Heavy subsidies and mandates requiring the use of electricity from wind, solar, biomass and other green energy which are greatly increasing electricity costs and decreasing the electric grid reliability.

These policies are all made to seem more justified if the rate of the temperature increase in the more recent years can be enhanced and prior temperatures can be suppressed.  In light of this, Randell Hoven very recently discovered that NASA changed their database of global temperatures, once again, going back to 1880.   Some time between early July and September 2012, NASA changed the entire temperature record going back to 1880, with no announcement and no statement with the database.  The biggest changes were to the data prior to 1963 and those changes were generally decreases in the temperature.  The post-1963 temperatures were mostly increased.  This caused the 131-year trend to increase from 0.60 to 0.64 C per century.  While this is a small change, it replicates many earlier temperature adjustments, which generally depressed the earlier temperatures and raised the more recent temperatures.  There appears to be a systematic bias in the temperature adjustments.

Note that the direction of these changes seems very improbable. One would think one of the biggest effects that would require temperature adjustments would be the urban heat island effect.  The population around the world has generally increased greatly since 1880, so there should be downward corrections to compensate for that effect on weather stations in populated areas as the populations grow.  The urban heat island effect adjustments should be all the greater on recent temperature data since many rural temperature stations have been removed from the sensing system and urban stations are now a much increased fraction of the stations submitting data.  Among my earlier posts dealing with the problems of urban heat island effects and adjustments to skew the record toward greater relative temperature increases in recent times are those here, here, here, here, and here.

Hoven notes that despite the temperature changes, the first 8 months of 2012 make it the tenth hottest year in the 131 year record, every month of 1998 was hotter than the corresponding month of 2012, except for tied records in May, and the global trend since 2002 is one of cooling.  And Antarctica has the highest sea ice record ever observed.

The pressure on the Obama NASA to make temperature adjustments to help justify his many economy killing actions might well be very severe in these final weeks before the November election.  At this point, after years of opaqueness on the part of the Obama administration, it is no surprise to have another surprise adjustment of the temperature record to hype the alarmist claims of catastrophic man-made global warming.  After all, one really does need a justification for putting hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of people out of work or preventing them from getting the jobs that would be created if we took good advantage of America's abundant fossil fuel energy resources.  For more on how abundant our fossil fuel resources are, see here, here, and here.

Back-Radiation and the Highly Fallacious Kiehl-Trenberth Energy Budget

The usual greenhouse gas calculation such as is offered up by the various Trenberth diagrams is highly dominated by the radiative transport of energy in the Earth’s atmosphere.  It leads to an unreasonable result for the situation I am going to describe here.

But first, my approach to the back-radiation problem was always to show that it was unrealistic on many levels.  One cannot make a net gain of heat energy in a surface by returning a portion of the energy lost from a surface to it.  This is especially true of any process that is said to lose half of the surface emitted energy to space immediately and to only re-absorb some part of half of the energy that was returned to the surface.  I went further and explained that only a small fraction of the energy emitted as radiation from the surface was re-emitted as radiation from an absorbing water or CO2 molecule.  With just these considerations alone, the upper limit on once radiated energy from the surface which is re-absorbed by the surface would be:

(0.5) f,

where the 0.5 is the half of any IR absorbing molecule radiation which was not radiated into space and is radiated toward the surface.  The fraction f is the fraction of the IR energy lost by the surface and absorbed by an IR absorbing molecule which is re-emitted before collisions have dissipated the energy absorbed.  The fraction f is much less than one because most often the IR absorbing molecule undergoes collisions with other molecules and transfers much of the IR absorbed energy to other molecules before re-emission occurs.  These other molecules are rarely water or CO2 or other IR emitting molecules, so that energy is not returned to the surface as IR radiation.  Thus much of the surface emitted IR radiation is dissipated to the 99.97% of the atmosphere molecules which are nitrogen, oxygen, or argon and are not IR emitters.

Let us estimate the value of f.  At sea level, the mean gas velocity is 459 m/s, the mean free path or distance between collisions is only 6.6 x 10^-8 m or 66 nm, and the collision frequency is 6.9 billion/s.  At an altitude of about 4000 m, the radiative transfer of energy competes about evenly with transfer by collisions.  At 4000 m altitude, the frequency of gas molecule collisions is about 4.4 billion/s.  We can use the equivalency of energy transfer by radiation and gas molecule collisions at the 4000 meter altitude to estimate the fraction of energy transfer by radiation of the total of energy transferred by radiation plus gas molecule collisions. At sea level, energy transfer by radiation is equivalent to about 4.4 x 109 collisions per second, so the fraction of energy transferred by radiation is about 4.4/(4.4 + 6.9) = 0.39 of the total by gas molecule collisions and radiation.  This suggests that about 1.5 times as much energy is transferred by gas collisions as by radiation at sea level.

So at this point, the upper limit on IR radiation emitted from the surface which can be returned to the surface and absorbed by it is about:

(0.5) (0.39) = 0.195

It also has to be remembered that this is the upper limit for that portion of the IR radiation from the surface which can be absorbed by an IR-absorbing molecule such as water or CO2.  Much of the surface-emitted IR radiation is of such wavelengths that no IR-absorbing molecule can absorb it in the first place.  If one takes this fact into account, the 0.195 upper limit is a hugely generous upper limit.

But, it does not follow that simply because this much back-radiated IR is incident upon the surface that it will be absorbed by the surface.  During the roughly 8 hours of a day when the surface is warming under increasing sunlight and with a 2-hour lag for warming the ground, water, or air in a vicinity, none of this radiation may be absorbed, except when a cloud casts a shadow on a part of the area or at such points under the shadow of a tree of some such object.  The absorbing ground has to be cooler than the ground from which the photon was emitted and subsequently absorbed by an IR-absorbing molecule in the atmosphere.  During the remaining cooling hours of the day, roughly 16 hours, the surface is more likely to absorb such back-radiated energy.  As a mean value for re-absorption of IR back-radiation over the daily cycle, the value of 0.95 is often used.  I believe that value is much too high.

Let us look at one of the Kiehl-Trenberth energy budgets for a moment:

According to this diagram, 67/ 342 = 0.196 of the incoming solar radiation is absorbed by the atmosphere.  77/342 = 0.225 is reflected by clouds and aerosols.  The surface reflects 30/(30 + 168) = 0.152 of the solar radiation incident upon the surface.  Thermals cooling the surface dissipate 24/168 = 0.143 of this incident radiation.  Let us note that the surface emits a flux of 390 W/m^2 of IR radiation and according to this diagram the atmosphere has absorbed a highly efficient 324 W/m^2 of this or 83.1% of this.  Yet, above I showed in very simple terms that 19.5% is more than the upper limit by far of the amount of IR radiation that the atmosphere can return, which is not from IR-absorbing gas molecules that are substantially cooler than the Earth's surface.

Now let us consider a midday calculation of the surface and do so where there is no cloud cover and where it is so dry that there is no evapotranspiration.  What kind of surface temperature will we have.  Since there are no clouds and I think clouds are the better part of the summed cloud and aerosol effect, let us assume the aerosol effect alone is 0.08.  The midday radiation incident on the upper atmosphere is 1367 W/m^2.  Note that at midday, the incident radiation path length through the atmosphere is shorter than it is for the average daily values normally used, so losses in the atmosphere should be lower than these numbers.  I will use them nonetheless.

The radiation upon the ground is then:

(1 - 0.196) (1- 0.08) (1 - 0.152) (1 - 0.143) 1367 W/m^2 = 734.8 W/m^2

The ground temperature is then found from:

734.8 W/m^2 = ε σ T^4,  ε = 0.95

T = 341.8 K = 68.6̊C = 155.5̊F

But if you believe that the upper limit amount of back-radiation is 95% absorbed by the surface, then the incident radiation is:

(734.8 W/m^2) (1 + 0.195(0.95)) = 870.9 W/m^2

T = 356.6 K = 83.4̊C = 182.2̊F

Now this is clearly much too hot and implies that even the addition of this upper limit of back-radiation which is much smaller than the back-radiation in the Kiehl-Trenberth diagram and energy budget is not physical.  In reality, air convection or thermal effects are more important in cooling the surface than the Kiehl-Trenberth energy budget allows for.  The same is true of water evaporation, transport, and condensation effects.

Note that I did not follow the Kiehl-Trenberth diagram in subtracting the emitted radiation that corresponds to the Earth’s surface temperature.  They subtract 390 W/m^2 and add back in 324 W/m^2 of back-radiation for their mean daily calculation.  This would imply that if we had no atmosphere with IR absorbing gases in it, then there would be no back-radiation, so the total energy budget would look like:

(168 - 24 - 78 - 390) W/m^2 = -324 W/m^2,

which is nonsense.  Of course you might say that the thermals would be different and if I have no absorbing IR gases, then I certainly do not have water evaporation and movement.  This perhaps is a muddled situation.

So let us consider the equivalent calculation technique for an isolated black body radiator in space with incident energy flux of Ii and an emitted radiation of Ie.  But Ii = Ie, so then this approach would have us fallaciously conclude that

Ii - Ie = 0 = σ T^4 and T = 0 K.

The temperature of the isolated black (or gray) body is determined by the incident radiation on it.  The basic approach of the Kiehl-Trenberth diagram to radiation is nonsense.  The energy budget is a farce based on bad physics.  Indeed, when challenged on this issue, many proponents of man-made catastrophic global warming back down and say that the General Circulation Models are calculated primarily as air and water vapor circulation models and are not really consistent with the several variations of the Kiehl-Trenberth Energy Budget.  Yet it is such fallacious energy budgets that the public has been fed as the basis for the claim that there are substantial effects on the Earth's surface temperature due to man's emissions of CO2.  Government websites have been full of these energy budgets, as have college classes.  For their part, the range of results in the GCM computer models is too large to be consistent with the idea that climate science is settled and everyone agrees that it is understood.

Prof. Mike Hulme: Only a Few Dozen Scientists Backed IPCC Claims on Man-Made Global Warming

Mike Hulme is Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia.  He was the IPCC co-ordinating Lead Author for the chapter Climate Scenario Development in the third assessment report and a contributing author on several other chapters.  He now says that "only a few dozen experts" backed the claims of the IPCC AR3 report on man-made global warming in a paper coauthored by his student Martin Mahony and published in Progress in Physical Geography.  The paper says:

Claims such as '2,500 of the world's leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate' are disingenuous.

Mischief of US Climate Change Science Project

Dr. Patrick Michaels is a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute. In a commentary published on 31 August in the Washington Times, he writes about having reviewed a report called Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program. This report concluded that "Aggressive near-term actions would be required to alter the future path of human-induced warming." The "product lead" is Tom Karl, who heads the Commerce Department's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. and Michaels says he is a very politically savvy guy.

He says the report implies that only bad results come from global warming. This is not the case. Growing seasons become longer and higher CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere cause plants to grow better. Americans like warmer climates so much, they often choose to move to warmer areas of the country. It claims that the elderly are especially vulnerable to extreme heat, but Phoenix and Tampa have many elderly inhabitants and very few heat-related deaths. Generally, the report is very unscientific according to Michaels.

This is not surprising. The senior editor is Susan J. Hassol, who wrote the HBO global warming documentary "Too Hot Not to Handle," and is not a climate scientist. The executive producer is Laurie David, who orchestrated Al Gore's inconveniently false "An Inconvenient Truth." She was also the executive producer of the HBO documentary. With these two producing this document, it is hardly surprising that it is science fiction.