The skeptical environmentalist returns

The Skeptical Environmentalist, Bjørn Lomborg, has a new book out on "global warming" - take a look at the Amazon page for Cool It!, which features a positive review from Michael Crichton.

Lomborg was previously author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, a book worth reading in its own right, along with the books of Gregg Easterbrook - environmental journalist (one of the few sensible ones), technogeek, football aficionado, and all-around Renaissance man.

And here's more wisdom, from economics writer and unusually knowledgeable and sensible journalist Robert Samuelson. Plus see comments from Instapundit and Ann Althouse.

Follow-up on New Republic scandal

Pajamas Media has some great coverage of the New Republic faked-journalism scandal, starting here.

At this point, it's make-or-break for TNR.

Kavanna on vacation again

Kavanna is on vacation again, but will return soon after Labor Day! And this time, with pictures ....

Have a great holiday weekend.

Edward Hopper: An appreciation

For readers lucky enough to live in Boston, you had the opportunity to view the Museum of Fine Arts' exhibit of works by Edward Hopper that is about to close. Hopefully, other cities will get something like it soon.

Hopper is an American icon, and his pictures are well-known - in a few cases, like Nighthawks, almost clichés. He's usually classified as a realist, painting at a time when the dominant artistic trends were moving towards abstraction and expressionism. But his paintings, which have few people in them, have a strong abstract flavor to them, being dominated by Hopper's highly individual and instantly recognizable language of shape, light, and color. His human subjects are well-known for their seeming lack of connection with one another, as if each cannot get out of his or her private world of thought. Hopper was also influenced by, and influenced in turn, the language of cinema. The moments captured in his paintings leave a strong impression of being times in the middle - as if something important has already happened and something else is about to happen, but the quiet moment in between is what we see.

One example of Hopper's influence is the way he changed how people look at the ordinary. His mature works painted in the 1920s and 30s on the New England coast were the stimulus for later appreciation of Victorian mansions and lighthouses, for example - now we have all those calendars of rugged New England locales thanks to Hopper. But that's what great artists do: change how we see things.

Day, night, and the turn of seasons: Variations

What happens to these daily and annual variations, their symmetries and subtle differences, if the infrared (IR) opacity of the atmosphere is increased?

The key to answering this question is the earlier conclusion about the heightening and reduction of spatial temperature differences: more IR opacity means overall enhanced vertical temperature differences (lapse rate) and diminished horizontal temperature differences. The daily and annual variations are modulated by the basic latitudinal variation of insolation: the equator gets the most, the higher latitudes less, progressively up to the poles. Standing at one point in space on the surface or in the atmosphere, we should expect reduced daily and annual variations. But the effect is not symmetric between day and night, or between summer and winter. Nighttime temperatures are increased, if we compare temperatures from one night to another at the same time and at the same spatial point; wintertime temperatures are increased, if we compare temperatures from one winter to another at the same day of year and at the same spatial point. OTOH, daytime temperatures aren't changed as much, compared from one day to another at the same hour and at the same spatial point; summertime temperatures aren't changed as much either, compared from one summer to another at the same day of year and at the same spatial point.

These comparisons are made across time, without moving in space and being sure to compare like with like: the same hour of the day or the same day of the year. The former comparisons is done between points in space (actually, different latitudes) without regard to time. These properties of climate under increased IR opacity allow us to extend the "differential diagnosis" technique outlined earlier. The earlier conclusions were comparisons in space irrespective of time. Let's now expand the list by systematically examining temperature differences measured over and over at the same point in space.

1. The daily range of temperatures decreases. The daytime temperatures change only a little; the diminution of range is due to increased nighttime temperatures. The day-night gap narrows, even as the overall 24-hour-averaged temperature rises.

2. The seasonal range of temperatures decreases. The summertime temperatures change only a little; the diminution of range is due to increased wintertime temperatures. The summer-winter gap narrows, even as the overall 365-day-averaged temperature rises.

Simultaneously, temperature variation by latitude is diminished. We now have to imagine the whole temperature distribution in space and time - four dimensions!* Fasten your seatbelt.

1. Overall, temperatures go up.

2. The temperature contrast by latitude is weakened.

3. The temperature contrast by altitude is enhanced.

4. The temperature contrast by day and by season is redcued, with the colder hours and seasons experiencing the main increase and the warmest hours and seasons experiencing the least increase. These conclusions merge in the polar regions, where night=winter and day=summer.

All in all, a climate dominated by increasing IR opacity (due to increased atmospheric concentrations of IR-active gases like water vapor and carbon dioxide) has a highly characteristic profile of change. If the Earth's climate exhibited all these changes together over years and decades, then we would know: "global warming" in its popular sense would be happening. If the Earth's climate were moving in the opposite direction, then "global cooling" (reduced IR opacity). If the Earth's climate shows a mixed picture (as it actually is), then IR opacity might be going up - but the climate is dominated by other causal factors, and the "global warming" one (if it is happening at all) is not dominant.
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* Actually, only three - we're ignoring variation by longitude, since that's (almost) equivalent to variation by hour, as the Earth rotates on its axis.

Day, night, and the turn of seasons: Subtleties

Usually, we think of daily and seasonal variations in terms of the lower atmosphere, since that's where "weather" happens, as we understand it. But there are important cyclical variations in the upper atmosphere associated with the daily period of the Sun and the monthly cycle of the Moon. The important physical forces driving these changes are variations of gravity and the solar ultraviolet (UV) radiation introduced earlier as the key energy source that makes the upper atmosphere thermally and chemically different from the lower atmosphere.

The strongest gravitational force affecting both oceans and air is that of the Earth. It's almost perfectly spherically symmetric in its influence, and its pulls solid earth, ocean water, and atmospheric air into almost perfect spheres (isostasis). But the Sun and the Moon also exert significant gravitational influence on the Earth - about equally, actually.* The influence manifests itself in modifying the Earth's overall motion, but also differentially, in the sense that the Moon and Sun are a little closer or a little farther away from the Earth's surface, depending on the time of day and month. It's this difference of gravitational pulls between near side and far side of the Earth (as seen respectively by the Sun and the Moon) that gives rise to ocean tides. The tides are complicated by the presence of two bodies acting with two characteristic periods: day and month.

While the ocean tides are the most obvious consequence of differential gravity (tidal forces), the solid earth and the atmosphere also experience the same differential pulls. Solid earth doesn't bend as much under the same tidal forces, but tides can influence cracks in the solid and trigger earthquakes. The atmosphere also gets pulled into a ellipsoidal (football) shape, just the like the oceans. Gravity doesn't care about the distinction of upper and lower atmosphere, and in fact, tidal variations are largest in the upper atmosphere. But there is some detectable tidal effect all the way down to the surface. We can integrate the hydrostatic equilibrium condition [slope of pressure = -density*(gravitational acceleration)] from the surface to the top (where the pressure is very small) for an atmospheric column of cross-sectional area A and mass M,

   P(surface) = P(top) + (gM/A) ,

assuming g is constant with altitude. Over the course of a day or a month, M is assumed not to change, even if the distribution of mass (given by the density as a function of altitude) does change. The resulting gravitational tidal variations in pressure are about one part in 10,000.

The Sun has another effect in this connection. Earlier, the ultraviolet part of the insolation that's captured by the upper atmosphere was treated as constant. Of course, it varies over the day and contributes an additional expansive and heating effect on the upper atmosphere. Late at night, the effect is subdued. Thus the full phenomenon of atmospheric tides is a result of tidal forces from the Sun and the Moon, with the Sun having an additional daily effect of pumping UV radiation into the upper atmosphere during daylight hours. This pressure variation is actually much larger than the gravitational effect, about 15 parts in 10,000.

The Sun's UV output is strongly modulated by another cycle so far unmentioned, the solar magnetic cycle. Unlike orbital motion, this cycle is not exactly periodic, but has a varying period ranging from 9 to 11 years. The UV effect on the Earth's upper atmosphere itself varies not only by day, but also over the heliomagnetic cycle. It's impossible to say, without a detailed understanding of heat transport in the upper atmosphere, what the parallel temperature variations will be exactly. But naively we expect a range roughly the same relative size, about 1-2 parts per 1000, or about (1-2)(300 ^oK)/1000 = 0.3-0.6 ^oC.**

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The simple binary contrast of day and night might lead to the conclusion that climate is symmetric between the two. In some ways, it is. But overall, day and night are asymmetric.

The Sun is the energy source for climate. The most basic asymmetry is the difference between day and night: the presence or absence of the Sun. For half the day, light is flowing in as heat flows out; for the other half, only heat flows out.

A more subtle but important asymmetry is associated with clouds. Crudely speaking, clouds block out light by day (by upward reflection), but hold in heat at night (by absorption and downward re-emission). But they provide efficient convective upward heat transport both day and night. Overall, putting day and night together, the net effect of clouds is cooling.

Gravity is symmetric in its tidal effects between nighttime and daytimes sides of the Earth. But the UV enhancement of upper atmospheric tides happens only by day. So its impact on surface pressure and temperature is mainly a daytime effect.
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* The Moon is 1/81 the mass of the Earth; the Sun is much farther away, but its much larger mass almost exactly compensates for its larger distance. The two bodies end up exerting almost equal gravitational pulls on the Earth. For that reason, the Earth-Moon system is really a double-planet system.

** The atmospheric gravitational tides are a simple prediction of Newtonian gravity and were first measured in the 19th century. But the larger solar effect was not fully understood at the time, since UV radiation was just being discovered and the nature of atomic and molecular absorption had barely been guessed at. It wasn't until the 1960s that this mystery was fully unraveled.

Day, night, and the turn of seasons: Basics

So far, most of the climate postings here have been about a cartoon of real climate, an "average" world of spring and fall, early morning and early evening. Real climate is not like this; it's a chaotic system always varying, although remaining within a "band." As a rule, averaging climate, especially in space, is not legitimate; it's better to think of this "band" or range as "climate," rather than any average.

Averaging in time is justified, if the average is taken over a fixed time period fundamentally independent of the climate dynamics. Daily and yearly averages, over 24 hours and 365 days, respectively, are the most basic climate averages.* These periods are properties of Earth's orbit and revolution having nothing to do with climate. They do influence climate, of course, but climate doesn't influence them. They're autonomous properties of the Earth that can be taken as independent clocks. Their influence on climate is obvious if you analyze climate variations in time, with the possibility of an infinite spectrum of such periods. The daily and annual cycles are almost always the strongest signals resulting from such an analysis.**

A time average of a function of time f(t) over a period T is: av(f, T) ≡ ∫_t^t+T dt f(t)/T .

We're all familiar with many of the changes associated with these periods, the cycle of day and night, and the cycle of seasons. The Earth's axis is titled with respect to its orbital plane (by about 23.5^o) and the plane of the Sun's motion through the sky (ecliptic). The tilt is fixed with respect to the distant stars, but not with respect to the Sun. As the Earth orbits the Sun over a year, the Sun's daily orbit through the sky changes its angle relative to vertical, depending on latitude. These changes affect the insolation the Earth's atmosphere and surface receive. And the insolation changes over the course of the day, reaching its maximum at local noon and its minimum at local midnight. Because of the lag of hours, these are not the hottest and coolest times of the day. The land, water, and air take time to respond to the inflow of heat. The hottest and coolest times are typically 4 hours after noon and about 4 hours after midnight, respectively. The annual insolation variation reaches its maximum at summer solistice (June 21) and minimum at winter solistice (December 21). The lag of seasons means that the hottest and coldest times of year come about 8 weeks afterwards; mid-August and mid-February, respectively.

While the daily variation of insolation would happen regardless of Earth axis tilt (unless the tilt were 90^o), the exact variation by season depends strongly on the tilt. In fact, seasons wouldn't occur at all without tilt, and the tilt creates a connection between geographic latitude and seasonal variation that doesn't exist for daily variation. Not surprisingly, the mildest annual variations are experienced by the tropical latitudes. They get the most insolation over the course of the year. The largest relative variation occurs in the polar regions, and they receive the least insolation over the year. The surface inside the polar circles (the latitudes around the poles within the tilt value of 23.5^o) go through 6 months of the year with no sunlight. Within the polar circles, night=winter and day=summer.

Other differences between day and night are coupled to differences between land and sea, or land and air, or sea and air. The switching of convection, temperature inversion, and evaporation between day and night was mentioned earlier. By day, the surface layer of atmosphere over water exhibits a temperature inversion connected to a downward heat flow that supports evaporation; while over land, the air exhibits a steep temperature lapse rate that supports strong upward convection. This difference is the source of cooler daytime air temperatures over water and the formation of summer thunderstorms over land. By night, the situation is reversed. Over water, the temperature inversion switches to a strong lapse rate that supports a strong upward heat convection that cools the ocean off. (Water cools off more slowly than air.) The land experiences a temperature inversion in the surface air layer, as the ground cools off more quickly than does air. Nighttime air temperatures over water are higher than over land. These differences in heat flow and temperature explain the cycle of winds on the coast: landward (ocean breeze) by day, seaward (land breeze) by night.

The next two climate postings will take a closer look at the consequences of these cyclical variations, both in terms of "normal" climate and as focal points for understanding what happens if the atmosphere accumulates more infrared (IR)-active gases (water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane) and acquires a larger IR opacity.

POSTSCRIPT: The peculiar persistence of molecular oxygen (O2) in the atmosphere was mentioned earlier. It seems every number and every molecule gets its own book these days. Thus oxygen gets Nick Lane's fine if curious Oxygen: The Molecule That Made the World.
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* We could also consider the lunar month (29.54 days) as an another fundamental astronomical cycle. But the Moon's light, reflected from the Sun, is not a significant energy source for the Earth's climate. The Moon does influence the tides of both oceans and atmosphere.

** A branch of mathematical physics called Fourier analysis does just that: break complex motions down into a sum of simple cyclical motions, each with a different period. In general, there are an infinite number of such periods; the relative strength of each period's contribution to the motion is called the Fourier or frequency spectrum of the motion. Future postings will introduce Fourier analysis as a tool for breaking down complex time evolution into simple parts, while also emphasizing the limitations of Fourier analysis if the motion is chaotic.

How does opacity work exactly?

One more time: a final pass through the mysteries of opacity and radiative transport. Our climate is only mildly affected by opacity: clouds mostly opaque in the visible and a lower atmosphere mildly opaque in the infrared (IR). But the whole of "global warming" reduces to the possibility that our climate might be more strongly affected by IR opacity. So we'd better understand it thoroughly.

Opacity carries units of [area/volume] or [area/mass]. It's the effective opaque cross-sectional area, per mass or per volume of opaque "stuff," presented to a radiation beam making its way through the atmosphere. The IR opacity of water vapor is about 0.01 m²/kg; of carbon dioxide, about a quarter of that (per mass).*

Opacity is a bulk property of matter, in that it represents a macroscopic average, over many molecules, of something happening at the microscopic level: the continual absorption and re-emission of radiation as it tries to make its way through the atmosphere. Because the absorbing and re-emitting molecules are themselves subject to random thermal heat (they have a temperature), they tend to re-emit radiation that they absorb in pretty much any direction, no matter how directionally focused the incoming radiation is. Furthermore, because photon number is not conserved, one photon can get converted into multiple photons, each of lower energy than the original. (Total energy is conserved, but not photon number.) The overall effect is that, while opaque matter does not on net absorb, trap, or redirect radiation, it does make it harder for a directional beam of radiation to get where it's going. It imposes randomness on the streaming radiation, even if the latter started with no entropy - like a determined single-file group of marchers jostled by a randomly-moving crowd. So it's a manifestation of the Second Law. Similar things happen with other heat transport mechanisms - thermal conductivity for heat diffusion in matter (due to just molecule-molecule collisions - no photons involved) and convective efficiency for heat convection (larger "blobs" or parcels that are overheated relative to their surroundings).

Opacity is the radiation analogue of resistance in electrical circuits. Resistance is also a bulk property of matter. Current flows when an electric field is applied to a conductor. But the matter it flows through has some random thermal energy (has a temperature). When the electrons moving through the conductor collide and scatter off the conductor's molecules, they tend to be scattered willy-nilly in all directions. On net, the flow is still moving in its original direction. But that macroscopic average washes out all the random motion going on at the molecular level. The higher the resistance, the more external work must be provided to keep the flow of electrons moving at its original rate. With higher resistance, more of the electrons' originally directed kinetic energy is wasted in random motion that gets them, on net, nowhere. That external work is provided by the imposed electric field, which is just the voltage difference across the circuit divided by the distance travelled. So maintaining a constant current in the face of higher resistance requires a larger voltage difference.

Similarly with radiation in a medium: higher opacity, combined with the requirement of a fixed energy flow, requires a larger temperature difference, if the heat has no other way of flowing. In the atmosphere, the radiation temperature at the top is fixed by the incoming flux and by the reflectivity of clouds. So it's the temperature below the top that has to increase. (In fact, the whole temperature profile or gradient gets steeper - its lapse rate increases.) If the atmosphere starts with an insufficient temperature, the radiation flow readjusts itself until the temperature rises to the new, higher level to maintain steady flow in = steady flow out. The Earth's temperature profile is dominated by effects of gravity and water condensation. But more IR-active gases increase the importance of the small but significant effect of opacity.

This is "global warming" in a nutshell. You should recall enough of everything else going on in the atmosphere to remember that everything else will not remain the same. More clouds will mean a reduced radiative flow coming in to start with. A steeper temperature gradient provokes more upward convection, a separate heat transport mechanism in its own right that gets rid of heat in a different way. Convection in clouds in turn provides an additional efficient escape route for heat flow. All of these mitigate the basic temperature-gradient steepening of increased opacity, and on net the effect is blunted.
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* Convert molecular weights by noting that H2O is 18, while CO2 is 44.

Trouble at the New Republic

It seems the New Republic is in trouble again with faked reporting. The last incident was the 1997 Stephen Glass episode that proved highly embarrassing, especially as it came not long after the firing of editor Michael Kelly. This case couldn't come at worse time for TNR, which is facing declining subscriber base, readership, and advertising revenue. The whole world of conventional journalism seems to be dying, in fact. Publications can't coast the way they did even ten years ago. We no longer live in a cozy world of clubby journalism, where major mistakes in reporting can be overlooked. Online journalism, including bloggers who are often as good as and sometimes better than "professional" journalists, will swarm all over you and fact-check your ass before you even can get a word in. This phenomenon is accelerating conventional journalism's decline. If the news media were any other industry, the news media would be demanding that it be regulated to death by government. That wouldn't solve journalism's problems, which stem from its increasingly concentrated and homogenized business structure, personnel, and worldview, along with its dependence on advertising for revenue.

Some of the New Republic's problems are peculiar to it. It was owned for over three decades by Martin Peretz, before he recently opted for a three-way co-ownership deal. It's clearly been owned and dominated by one person for too long. Like a once-great sports team, the magazine is well past its glory days of the 1980s and early 90s when it enjoyed a set of brilliant editors and writers and unusual influence in politics and culture. Andrew Sullivan was the editor at the end of this period and started off well, but the magazine began to drift when he withdrew from it for health reasons. The late Michael Kelly (later editor of the Atlantic) replaced him in 1996. Older and more experienced, he brought a definite point of view and antagonized Peretz with his criticism of Peretz's former student, Al Gore. After Kelly's firing in 1997, the magazine began its downward drift. Kelly was replaced by a succession of editors younger and less experienced - for that reason, less threatening to Peretz, but also less able to give the magazine a definite direction. It also increasingly suffers from an identity crisis. The magazine's niche was "neoliberal" before that became the dominant Democratic paradigm under Clinton. In the late 70s, it was new and dazzling. In the 80s, it hit its stride. By the late 1990s, it seemed stale, and since 2000, it has come under powerful assault by the left wing of a shrinking Democratic party, enraged by Bush and the rise of neoconservatism, which provides a more appealing big-government synthesis than liberalism.

TNR's response has not done it any good. In spite of his generally sound political instincts, Peretz cannot shake his obsession with proving that he's still a liberal believer, his tiresome name-dropping, and his infaturation with Gore. The last hurrah of neoliberalism was its initial support, later retracted (over and over), for the Iraq war. The editors cannot seem to shake the need to prove its left-wing bona fides (over and over) to its predominantly liberal readership impatient with TNR's three decades of foreign policy hawkishness. Its domestic political reporting has degenerated into narrow partisan hackery and has to compete with the more seasoned political reporters of the Weekly Standard. Even TNR's once-vaunted books and arts section shows increasing weakness - flabby writing, narrowing scope of interests, petty obsessions elevated beyond their limited importance.

The larger problem is that TNR, to survive in a much more intensely partisan Washington, has to toe the Democratic line and less and less follow its own independent thinking. To operate in conventional political journalism in Washington, its writers have to follow the herd of overwhelmingly liberal conventional journalists. These forces can't help but to kill its independence. Increasingly, it sounds little different from the poorly informed, liberal-cocoon chatter you get from the New York Times.

That's how it was snookered into the current scandal of fake Iraq war reporting. See here, here, here, here, and here, for a round-up, in which TNR exhibits all of the worst features of left-liberal establishment journalism. If TNR does not disown this journalistic malpractice, it's finished as a serious publication.

If you pay attention only to conventional journalism these days, you're living in cloud-cuckoo land. If you pay attention to both it and to the best independent voices of the blogosphere, as well as read some conservative and center-right publications, you'll be far better informed about the world, even if you suffer from some cognitive dissonance. A more radical step would be to stop paying attention to conventional journalism at all, at least as far as politics and related topics go. You'll seem oddly out-of-the-loop on the latest scandal (more likely, pseudoscandal) or flipped manhole cover on the local interstate (that's what local news is for). But you will slowly purge your mind of the poisoned junk food that is mainstream political journalism today. Nutritious food will replace it, and you'll start to think for yourself again. Think of it as a fasting-colonic regimen for mental hygeine.

Meanwhile, what TNR needs is new owners and more experienced editors. It needs to more aggressively position itself as straddling the print and online worlds, with an injection of fresh blood from the latter. Above all, it needs to consider the opposite of what the venerable Atlantic did recently when it moved from Boston to Washington: move outside the Beltway to somewhere saner.

Shaft of light, stage left

If conservatives are getting mildly panicked about climate in their flagship journal, National Review, what's happening elsewhere? We know what conventional mainstream liberal publications usually say about "global warming."

But further on the Left, there are surprises. The biggest that has come to our attention are the recent "Beat the Devil" columns by Alexander Cockburn, in the Nation, of all places. I have to pinch myself as I write this - I can't quite believe it - but Cockburn's recent column (June 25) is one of the best summaries of the issue outside of the science world I've seen in a long time. In one page, he concisely states all the serious problems with the "global warming" hysteria, both empirical and theoretical.* It's like spending a hot, muggy, dusty day outside - then entering into a cool room filled with pure, dry air.

Maybe Cockburn is like his former colleague, Christopher Hitchens - an admirable journalist in a world of generally low journalistic standards - in that he actually believes ... horrors ... in reason, science, and ... progress. In this funny Orwellian world we live in, adjectives like "progressive" and "liberal" are frequently applied to people who are neither. Cockburn throws in some left-wing bromides that don't quite jibe (the power industry is actually very wary of nuclear power, having been burned before). But it's nice to see an older sensibility, more rational, less cynical, that once characterized people who actually did believe in progress.

I'm still pinching myself.

POSTSCRIPT: Cockburn's column has set off some cognitive dissonance from a conservative news source (NewsBusters): see this article by associate editor Noel Sheppard.

Sheppard is certainly right: Cockburn comes loaded for bear and doesn't leave empty-handed. And it is true: computer climate modeling, fatally flawed as it is, is a $2-billion/year industry worldwide, and its product is viewed by everyone else in science with deep skepticism, or even derision, as sporting splashy and outlandish claims of having solved the hardest problem in physics (fluid turbulence). The self-promotional and careerist aspects of climate hysteria are significant, as is the "porky" nature of the publicly-funded part - points we'll return to later.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Manzi has added a new comment to the previous posting, "Heat and Light." You might think we're all saying different things. Actually, what Manzi and Cockburn are saying is congruent with the argument here. It's all more or less equivalent to these propositions:

• Computer climate models are in their infancy and can't be taken seriously as real predictors at this time.
• There's no significant human-induced "global warming" now or in the recent past - at least, nothing that can be distinguished against the much larger climate variability due to other factors, like climate oscillations (e.g., El Nino) or solar variability.
• A mild human impact on climate is likely over the next couple centuries. But no more than mild, as we know from the ice cores.
• Mitigating feedbacks will be moderate to large, in comparison to the factors that enhance temperature, but are not well-understood at this time.

Claims to the contrary have no scientific foundation. They're deliberate and hysterical attempts to short-circuit normal scientific process with junk science (the "hockey stick") and confuse in the general public's mind real climate with faulty and very preliminary computer model results.

My only real bone to pick with Manzi at this point is that the ice core and solar variability aspects of this issue are more certain than he seems to believe. They're about as certain as one can be with a non-laboratory science. The solar variability part can be studied in real-time and shows up in every detailed time-sequenced climate variable (not just temperature - cloudiness and rainfall, for example). These climate changes have the right periodicity and a small but consistent delay relative to the solar driver (solar magnetic cycle). Only the causal details of how changes in the Sun translate into climate changes are incomplete. The ice core studies involve reconstructions of the past, but can be cross-checked by comparing different chemical concentrations and different ice core samples from different spots in the polar regions. The evidence is reassuringly consistent.

What's funny (or outrageous) is that fairly well-established results like these are often criticized as not being from "gold-standard" controlled experiments - which is true - while absurdly inadequate computer models and transparently wrong nonsense like the "hockey stick" are touted as the last word on the subject - even though they have, respectively, flimsy and nonexistent bases. That's the politics of "global warming" - normal scientific standards and protocols are suspended if the argument is about climate.

Manzi's article is surprising considering its venue. But compared to the tidal waves of drivel published on the subject, it's sober and sane.

POST-POST-POSTSCRIPT: A reader was disturbed by the fact that the Cockburn article was not linked on the Nation site (where it requires a subscription to view), but on Counterpunch. The latter is a well-known anti-Israel publication, but it's the only place on the Web where Cockburn's article is available for free. Caveat emptor.
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* I wish I could be that concise, and so probably do some of my readers :)

Heat and light

Like climate itself, these debates often start with light and degenerate into heat. But here the opposite might be happening. Jim Manzi was good enough to comment on the previous posting, "Climate of Confusion." You can see his comments by clicking on the comments link at the end of the posting. He likes the general thrust of my posting, which I did not expect.

As Manzi says, there's probably less disagreement between us than apparent at first sight, and I have probably exaggerated his acceptance of the IPCC's would-be orthodoxy on the issue. His qualified concern about infrared-active (greenhouse) gases is that they pose a "risk" in the next couple centuries, not a near-certain disaster in the near future.

At this point, the debate becomes an issue of estimating how large and how fast the changes in temperature and temperature distribution might be. We've only discussed some of these issues on this blog, and there's more to come. (The change in temperature distribution in time and space is coming up shortly.) Based on what the blog has exposed so far, identifiable and significant changes in climate due to CO2 emissions are about a century and a half to two centuries off. The size of the change is bounded by what we know from ice cores. As we'll see soon, the most striking thing will be a small but noticeable change in temperature distribution. A little later, we'll see that many of the supposed disasters of "global warming" will not happen - in particular, more frequent and violent major storm systems are out (precisely the opposite will happen), and even the loss of ice volume is open to question.

I can only reiterate my earlier point, that the changes that are probable are not large and, given a one to two century timescale, energy sources and distribution will change anyway and for other reasons. What's needed in the immediate future is to abandon the cult of computer models and move simultaneously in two opposite directions: scratch our heads to understand the important but theoretically hard aspects of climate (clouds and precipitation, especially); and measure and experiment far more in connection to plants, clouds, and oceans, as well as study those ice cores even better.

Climate of confusion

It's been asked multiple times now - what about that article, by Jim Manzi, on "global warming," in the conservative National Review (June 25)? It advocates that human-caused "global warming" is real, significant, and needs to be managed, that we've moved beyond uncertainty.

Unfortunately, the article is fundamentally misguided, as it takes "global warming" as popularly conceived for granted - which is wrong. Manzi starts with the science, incorrectly explained, assumes that carbon dioxide (CO2) is the atmosphere's major infrared (IR)-active gas (it isn't), and repeats the widespread confusion between computer model predictions of climate and actual climate behavior. He's apparently into techno-wonkery, thinking that better computer models and data collection will make the remaining climate uncertainty go away. Again wrong: the computer models are fatally flawed and don't reflect anything like the complete theory of climate. Manzi forgets the old computer science motto: garbage in, garbage out (GIGO). When you have butchered the full theory of radiation and atmosphere into a computer model, better computers and more data can't save you. Better computers just commit the same mistakes faster and more reliably.

Manzi takes at face value the IPCC's executive summary picture: a +3 ^oC for a doubling of CO2 concentration, which is at least two to three times too big, as the ice core measurements imply, and ignores the scientific meat of the IPCC's reports. In fact, in the future, a sign of seriousness with these masterpieces of deception, double-counting, and manipulation will be ignoring the IPCC executive summaries and paying attention only to the "scientific annexes," which contradict or throw into serious doubt much of what it is in the summaries. Nothing shows more clearly the way in which climate science and scientists have been wittingly or unwittingly turned into ventriloquist's dummies by this issue.

The specific and crucial pieces of climate dynamics poorly understood or missing are clouds and plants, and to a lesser extent convection and oceans, as explained earlier on this blog. The core of the misguided theoretical scare is driven by the fact that the temperature-enhancing factors are easier to estimate: they include the opacity of CO2 and the evaporation and opacity of H2O. This easier-to-estimate physics is the origin of the wrong, panic-provoking estimates of +1.5-3 ^oC. But there are other major factors not well-understood but which can be crudely estimated to be of roughly the same size: convective heat transport (small), geophysical absorption by oceans (moderate), clouds (major), and plants (major). All of these are mitigating, but serious open questions remain about these, especially clouds and plants.*

Incredibly, Manzi also dismisses the Sun-climate coupling as an important factor in multidecadal and multicentennial temperature variations, in spite of the overwhelming evidence supporting such a connection. He doesn't seem to realize that the modern 150-year northern hemisphere temperature record indicates that surface temperatures have not consistently gone up everywhere or that the composite indexes based on them are highly questionable: they assume you can spatially average temperature, which is not legitimate; and they hide the fact that the most reliably measured temperatures (in Euope, North America, and Japan) have shown no net increase. (The net increase comes from the less accurate and more spotty records in other parts of the world.) At least he doesn't drag out the fraudulent and discredited "hockey stick." In fact, most of the apparent increase in the last 150 years happened before 1950 and the start of major anthropogenic CO2 emissions. The relation of both pre-1950 and post-1950 temperature variability to the variable solar magnetic cycle is beyond any doubt. As we'll learn later, the Sun-climate coupling is established going back thousands of years, through their mutual connection with cosmic rays.

Manzi's piece is better on the economics and politics of the "global warming" hysteria, but overall, this is much-ado. He comes to a completely wrong conclusion, that the "problem" needs to be "managed," and that conservatives are being "left behind" on the issue, because it's moved "beyond doubt and skepticism." In fact, his timing could not be worse. Skepticism and opposition to the hysteria have now passed beyond critical mass. The staggering costs and potential economic damage of Kyoto-like CO2 emission reductions are clear. Doubts, both economic and scientific, are spreading everywhere and becoming increasingly public. He should pay attention to what's already happened in Europe, were strong doubts have emerged in the last few years about both the science and the drastic measures contemplated. Never mind the fact that Europe will never meet its Kyoto quotas. Manzi takes the Kyoto Accord for granted, when in fact it's already dead.

What's really happening now is the danger predicted earlier, that the "global warming" cause would float free of the science, and the politico-journalistic-activist side would insist that "something must be done," regardless of science or cost.

Conservatives, as Manzi writes, have emphasized uncertainty too much. They have correctly pointed out the large holes in the case and the need to fill them with real scientific knowledge and not dogmatic, blind jumping-to-conclusions. But there are other things we can be certain about that the IPCC has gotten wrong: the largest relative changes in an opacity-dominated climate would be in the polar regions, not the tropics; the 150-year northern hemisphere record of rising temperatures is questionable; the "hockey stick" made for and used by the IPCC is junk; climate models that fail to properly include the effect of clouds and plants (which is to say, all computer climate models) are missing major effects, perhaps even the main show; solar variability is not negligible - it's one of the main components of climate variability identified so far; IR-active gases like CO2 and CH4 are secondary details (at most) in explaining the Ice Ages - orbital and ocean current changes are the main ones; and so on.

Conservatives after all were the ones who got a similar message across: societies aren't simple, linear systems that can be taken apart and reassembled like a car or a radio. They're nonlinear and chaotic, with complex histories, facts puncturing what Hayek called the fantasy of prediction and control needed for centralized social planning. The climate is a very similar issue. Conservatives were also among the first to identify and oppose the reactionary fantasies of the "limits to growth" crowd, an earlier stage of the environmentalist movement. This is what the post-modern left is about: not progress, but regress; not abundance, but imposed scarcity. Trying to grab control of energy production and distribution is just their latest gambit. Conservatives also made the corruption of official bodies like the UN's Iraq-Oil-for-Food program an issue. Similar things need to be done in the climate area. The UN's IPCC should be disbanded - it just keeps committing the same crime over and over. Its M.O. ("consensus" or "official" science - that is, propaganda and intimidation) is intellectual poison. After disbandment, the affair needs thorough investigation, just like Oil-for-Food.

Manzi is wrong to think conservatives need to jump on this bandwagon or make "realistic bargains" - they're not getting ahead of an issue when there's nothing to get ahead of. What needs to happen is that the cult needs to be stopped dead in its tracks. Conservatives helped to do this in the early 90s to political correctness - and ridicule and satire are par for the course now, as they were then. PC continues to grip academia, but conservatives and others who opposed it helped to rescue those trapped in academia who otherwise had no escape. The "global warming" hysteria will continue to grip large parts of the environmentalist movement and influence the left wing of the Democratic party. There's no reason for it to grip anyone else. Just stopping the cult's attempt to take over policy and science is enough. With that intellectual space opened up, the normal scientific corrective of hypothesis, experiment, and critical evaluation (short-circuited for almost two decades) can again go to work, and the ventriloquist's dummies can get up and walk away from this miserable fiasco.

POSTSCRIPT: Manzi's article is available from at the Web site of Senator John Kyl (R-Arizona) here (PDF). National Review itself maintains a blog on the "global warming" hysteria, devoted more, it seems, to the political fanaticism associated with the cause than the science.
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* The estimate here arrived at +0.3-0.4 ^oC, the major anti-enhancing effect being due to increased cloud cover, but the picture used was simple-minded. At least it does include clouds, which is more than can said for the computer models that Manzi scares himself with. Loosening the assumptions on Kavanna's Climate Cartoon supports a temperature increase as large as +0.8 ^oC. This doesn't each reach the canonical +1.0-1.5 ^oC that many climate scientists think of as a reasonable-to-extreme upper bound, not to speak of the IPCC's ridiculous +3 ^oC. And remember this estimate did not include the critical mitigating mechanisms reducing the CO2 level, that is, plant and ocean absorption.

I'm with Barack

Barack Obama seems to stumble into truth periodically, and he's done it again recently. Michael Kinsley once defined a gaffe as a moment when a politician accidentally speaks the truth. Perhaps this qualifies.

What did he do? He didn't speak accidentally, but quite deliberately:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Wednesday that he would possibly send troops into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists, an attempt to show strength when his chief rival has described his foreign policy skills as naive.

The Illinois senator warned Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf that he must do more to shut down terrorist operations in his country and evict foreign fighters under an Obama presidency, or Pakistan will risk a U.S. troop invasion and losing hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid.

Hmm ... not a bad idea. It strikes me that Obama is rather naive about Iraq - he seems not to realize that al Qaeda couldn't function in Iraq or anywhere else without support from Pakistan and the Gulf States - but he does get it about Pakistan. I wonder if he also gets it about Saudi Arabia.

Obama's speech provoked a lot of blogosphere comment: interesting thoughts from Nick Schweitzer about how everyone nowadays is an interventionist, but that Republicans are just more honest about it. (BTW, I'm not sure that's true.) The always-intelligent Ann Althouse has some sharp insights as well.

She talks about generations traumatized by Vietnam, with the conventional thinking that the Baby Boomers are that generation. But it seems to me that it was the Greatest Generation, the one in leadership that conceived and put American intervention in Vietnam in motion (there was already a war going on there), who were seriously traumatized by the unexpected and terrible consequences. We tend to think of the Boomers as all hippies and protestors, but that's far from the truth. A significant number of Boomers served in the military, some in Vietnam, in that period, and contrary to stubborn, entrenched, and widespread myth, they and their larger age cohort were no more traumatized by Vietnam than, say, the World War II or Korean War soldiers. It's just a myth. Unfortunately, the media keeps repeating it - they largely started it - and takes it for granted as obvious. But it ain't so. I'm also just old enough to remember the last part of the Vietnam war and have cousins who served there (one in heavy combat). Certainly, the Boomers experienced an exceptional level of frustration and disorientation, but that's more because of the dramatic political and social changes that happened in America between 1965 and 1980 - not because of what a subset of them experienced in Vietnam. It was about as horrible an experience as any war is, less destructive than most modern wars, and they benefited from a military that, since World War I, has become far more advanced in combat medicine, especially in limiting the mental damage that war does. Since then, they have suffered from no higher level of mental illness, suicide, or unemployment than veterans of any war before or since.

Meanwhile, I guess I'm supposed to be with Fred, but for now, Barack is my beau.

POSTSCRIPT: Speaking of Fred and Saudi Arabia, there's apparently a problem: not with Fred himself, but with his acting campaign manager, Spencer Abraham. It's not pretty. What's weird is that Abraham is a Lebanese Christian and really should know better.

Read Debbie Schlussel for more. Nice to see conservatives policing their own here. And trust me: Thompson is an online dead-end for conservatives.

Is Hillary a neoconservative?

That question was the title of a recent article from the libertarian Cato Institute, which pointed out the similarities of Clintonian neoliberalism and the big-government Republicanism sometimes called "neoconservatism." Activists on the left wing of the Democratic party often feel the same way about both Clintons. They're on to something.

The main obstacle to seeing this is the misunderstanding of "neoconservatism" as a form of conservatism. As with any word, the meaning of "conservative" depends on its context. In modern Anglo-American political usage, it expresses a simultaneous belief in traditional forms of society, a slow pace of political change, and opposition to large government, combined with a strong skepticism about politics and politicians. It's as much an attitude as an ideology. In a general way, conservatism sees society as more important than government, custom as more important than law, and culture as more important than politics. Before the 1920s, the traditional opponent of conservatism was classical liberalism (today called "libertarianism"), which emphasized limited government as well, but for the sake of individualism and greater individual freedom. At the same time, there was a significant overlap between the two. Indeed, the founding figure of Anglo-American conservatism, the Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke, was a Whig - in 18th century terms, a liberal.*

Modern connotation of the term "liberal" began around World War I and has evolved into something that has only a vague connection to its classical meaning. In American usage today, it means something roughly like what Europeans call "social democracy" - short of real socialism (government ownership of the means of production), it supports a large and powerful welfare-regulatory state and a "mixed" economy. This type of liberalism had its origins in the era of the "new liberalism" in Britain and the Populist and Progressive movements in the US. While rejecting the Marxist concepts of historical determinism and class warfare, the "new liberals" perceived a basic failure in the notion of society (shared by both classical liberals and traditional conservatives) as largely self-regulating. Instead, a stronger and much larger government would be needed to regulate and guide an increasingly complex society. Society itself would have to become more conformist and egalitarian for this vision to work - 19th century notions of laissez faire would have to go.

This modern liberalism carried the day in the 1930s and indeed got an enormous boost from the two World Wars and the Depression. Techniques of wartime government control and emergency economic stimulus seemed ready for use in non-emergency peacetime. The trend reached its height between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, before falling apart under assault by a younger generation (the Baby Boomers) impatient with its conformist demands. At the same time, this generation was also bewitched (at least for a while) by a whole range of radical, totalitarian ideologies and cults. Then they grew up, got jobs, and had to start paying rent. But the basic tension that caused the collapse of modern liberalism remains even now: fervent belief in ever-expanding government combined with an anti-authoritarian suspicion of government as it actually exists - a mentality faithfully reflected in the news media. It means, for example, you can believe simultaneously in socialized health care and belong to the ACLU. It provides no coherent basis for a successful politics.

When modern liberalism fell apart between 1965 and 1980, it not only left an irreparable breach in the Democratic party. It also spun off a heresy, a "right-wing liberalism" - or better, a "right-wing social democracy." Certain beleaguered liberals, flummoxed by student rebellions, a general collapse of social authority, and the implosion of the conformity needed to run modern government, perceived that what the Democratic party needed to save itself was to shed its "progressive" utopianism and develop a firmer defense of the post-New Deal, Cold War state.

Thus was born "neoconservatism." It was popular too - large pieces of the Democratic party - Catholic and white Southern voters - responded strongly to the first, half-conscious attempts at putting together a "neoconservative" coalition by Nixon in 1968 and 1972. But the US failure in Vietnam, the Watergate scandal, rising inflation, and slow economic growth (the price of ballooning government) stopped this coalescing tendency, discredited establishment Republicans, and gave an unexpected chance to the conservative wing of the Republican party, who quickly found their champion in Reagan. But the "neoconservative" tendency remained strong, if sidelined. It reflects a sound understanding of the connection between a moralistic and authoritarian politics and a large, powerful state.

The late Cold War period and the decade immediately following seemed to be moving in a very different direction - towards a synthesis of conservatism and libertarianism. The Democrats, wanting to regain the White House, were forced to invent "neoliberalism" in response and run a "neoliberal" candidate, Bill Clinton, in 1992. Once in office, Clinton tried one final time, with his wife's socialized health care plan, to impose a mid-century conformist-statist solution to what was widely viewed as a crisis. That proved the final undoing of what was left of modern liberalism; it led to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 and to the transformation of Clinton into the most conservative Democrat since Grover Cleveland: while there's no longer a gold standard, Clinton strongly supported the globalization trends and market liberalization-low inflation policies that started in the 1980s, combined with a clear commitment that America would remain the world's main security pillar.

In order to succeed at modern big government and live up to America's present role as globocop, any successful Democrat will have to adopt something like a "neoconservative" approach. So of course Hillary is headed in that direction - she wants to succeed, and she wants to prove that a Democrat in the White House will not be clone of Pelosi and Reid (feckless and clueless) and not a repeat of Carter (both sanctimonious and ineffectual).

A new binary fault line is developing in American politics that will soon completely displace the older liberal-conservative fault line (which itself has become more and more blurred in the last 40 years). This fault line divides populist, moralistic, and authoritarian approaches to politics, in support of big government, from skeptical and individualist approaches in opposition to big government. Among the big losers will be religious conservatives who still believe in limited government. The other losers will be the left-liberals - the ones who simultaneously believe in government control of everything and remain paranoid about government control of everything. Both groups have been able to maintain their illusions only by not having significant power. Once you've got power in a democratic society, political reality intrudes and forces you into trade-offs and responsibilities.

One small sign of this is the recent Ron Paul boomlet. Ron Paul is an anti-abortion, isolationist paleoconservative, a less grating version of Pat Buchanan. He has no chance of winning anything beyond his Texas congressional seat. But he's become an unexpected focal point for the conservative and libertarian discontent with Bush, neoconservatism, and big-government Republicanism. The boomlet will end when serious presidential campaigning starts next year. But it exposes the new fault line plainly.

So is Hillary Clinton a neoconservative? What's in a name? "Neoconservative" has a number of shifting and partly overlapping meanings. But in practical political terms, it means "mildly authoritarian welfare state-globocop" - having your big government cake and eating it too. The Democratic version will be called something else, only vaguely religious, and friendlier to Democratic special interest groups. The Republican version is simpler and broader, with a stronger religious tinge. However you may think of neoconservatism as failed or unpopular now, it is here to stay - whether it's called that or something else.

POSTSCRIPT: Another conservative throws in the towel on Bush Jr. and the Republicans: Victor Gold, who helped Bush Sr. write his autobiography, co-wrote a novel with Lynne Cheney, and worked for both Goldwater and Reagan, has just released his Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy-Rollers and the Neo-Cons Destroyed the GOP. Correctly, he understands that the problem isn't just Bush Jr.
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* For example, Burke was an early convert to abolitionism and an opponent of the London government's policies in the American colonies. (Burke was an Anglican, but perhaps a bit of his Irishness was slipping in here.) But he later became a famous and bitter opponent of the French Revolution. Seems like a puzzle - and it seemed so at the time too. It's really not, as Conor Cruise O'Brien explained in his thematic biography of Burke, The Great Melody.