Explaining Richard Tol and Bjorn Lomborg

Eli would like to help the bunnies understand economics.  James Boyce at Naked Capitalism explains it all at Naked Capitalism.  He points out that there are choices to be made about how to adapt to climate change and it won't be cheap.

A thought experiment illustrates the choices we face. Imagine that without major new investments in adaptation, climate change will cause world incomes to fall in the next two decades by 25% across the board, with everyone’s income going down, from the poorest farmworker in Bangladesh to the wealthiest real estate baron in Manhattan. 

Adaptation can cushion some but not all of these losses. What should be our priority: reduce losses for the farmworker or the baron? 

For the farmworker, and a billion others in the world who live on about $1 a day, this 25% income loss will be a disaster, perhaps the difference between life and death. Yet in dollars, the loss is just 25 cents a day. 

For the land baron and other “one-percenters” in the U.S. with average incomes of about $2,000 a day, the 25% income loss would be a matter of regret, not survival. He’ll find a way to get by on $1,500 a day. 

In human terms, the baron’s loss pales compared with that of the farmworker. But in dollar terms, it’s 2,000 times larger. 

Conventional economic models would prescribe spending more to protect the barons than the farmworkers of the world.

As Boyce points out what clearer explanation of how economists think than the Summers World Bank Memorandum

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate[sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate[sic] cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.

Of course, when this was leaked Lawrence Summers claimed that it was just a joke.

House Rules

There is hilarious twittering going on

@theresphysics @VariabilityBlog No I dont take responsibility for comments. I delete comments that violate blog rules http://t.co/QfHmesUccd
— Judith Curry (@curryja) December 29, 2014

Now Eli is an old bunny and he thought to hisself, where have the Rabetts heard this before?  So courtesy of UTube and Clip It and for the entertainment of all those out there

So Eli asks who plays Dean Wormer?  Eli knows who plays Otter in this dust up. 

Odd Ends

So Eli has been accumulating a bunch of stuff over the last few days and needs to get at least some of it off his tab bar.  Without further ado, let the Rabett start with a something from Goldman Sachs via Bloomberg that explains quite a lot about what is going on with oil prices

How Profitable is $70 Oil

Obviously, the boys from Alberta are up against it with oil where it is, and if oil goes up, then they are up against it from renewables.   The Keystone demos were/are basically a holding action until the market woke up.  Bloomberg figures there is something like a trillion in stranded investments.

Somewhere back in the past, Eli pointed out that the play was a lot like the late 1970s, where OPEC shut down renewables by dropping the price, except now, even in Saudi Arabia, the price of lifting the oil is a lot higher than then.  So as China and India grow, and demand increases, if the demand for energy has to be met by oil, the price has to move up considerably.  As Al Gore says (red flag warning)

“Investors who haven’t yet come to grips with the stranding problem are like the classic scene in the Road Runner cartoons where the coyote runs off the edge of the cliff, and his legs keep moving for quite a long time before gravity takes hold,” Gore said by phone from Nashville, Tennessee. “There are investors out there whose legs are moving in mid-air.”

Next something from Wikipedia which shows the US inflation rate as a function of time

as the observant might note, positive inflation has only been a given since about 1950.  Before that inflation only really was significant during wartime.  A better view of this is available at Visualizing Economics with the wars labelled.  Given that inflation is running today and for previous years at ~ 1.5% the arguments for a discount rate about a percent or less when discussing the costs of climate change and how to deal with it appear ahistorical.  Nick Stern was righter than many give him credit for.

OTOH, if you think about the cold war, that might explain 1950 -  .  Keeping a large standing army and munitions industry going puts a lot of pressure on the economy.  Just sayin

Next, something interesting from the Great Orange Satin.  Markos Moulitsas Zúniga aka kos has built a webempire that makes about all of the others look tiny.  Doing so required a fair amount of smarts and obsession.  He has become obsessed with energy efficiency and is writing an excruciatingly detailed account of how to do so, and how doing so not only saves energy, but also money.

Hi, my name is Markos, and I am an energy efficiency junky. I am obsessed with it. I'm downright OCD about it. It consumes a huge part of my life. I bored my wife talking about it, I bored my co-workers talking about it, I bored my friends talking about it, and I might even bore you talking about it. 

But if I'm going to go all crazy over something, what could be better than focusing on eliminating my carbon footprint? Heck, I don't want to eliminate it, I want to go carbon negative—generating more energy than I consume, at home and in the supply chain of the goods and services I use.

Kos has three principles for his energy diet

1. I do what I do to protect my world. The decisions I make, the actions I take, all have an impact on the world around me. I consider it a duty to minimize the impact I make. THAT is my primary motivation. That said, there's no way I would be doing all I'm doing if my efforts weren't essentially paying for themselves, so ...
2.  Saving money is important.  Even if you're like "fuck baby seals," who doesn't want to save money? Maybe the guy still driving the Hummer. But if we want to motivate the general public to lower consumption and make environmentally friendly consumer and lifestyle choices, it has to be financially beneficial to them.
3. Don't sacrifice comfort. Sure, I can reduce my energy expenditures a great deal if I lowered my thermostat to 63 during the day, made everyone wear sweaters and hats at home. But that's not going to happen. Not only do I personally like a toasty house, but more importantly, so does my family. And if I want to have carte blanche to make efficiency gains around the house, I need to keep the family that lives in that house happy. In online forums, it's called the WAF (wife-acceptance factor), and it's a real thing. Thus, I won't be line-drying the laundry anytime soon, or eating only raw foods, or buying a smaller TV. Sure I could make major efficiency gains by doing certain things, but I'm well on the way toward a negative-carbon lifestyle without sacrificing comfort. It's not an either-or proposition.

Part II is about reducing electrical consumption by optimizing lighting.  No real surprises except the amount of money that can be saved by careful evaluation of current energy use and choice of LED bulbs (they are all not the same).

Part III is about killing the standby kilowatt vampires which eat your wallet while waiting for you to turn something on.  Smart toasters burn money.

Not yet posted are how to minimize the costs of big electrical power draws, home renewable energy (solar in his case), cutting the cord, reducing natural gas usage and water consumption.  Worth reading even if you don't or cannot go the whole way.

Best
Eli

Yuletide

Sam and Dave

Time for some music

What We Have Here Is a Failure To Communicate

So Willard Tony still thinks it's a cool idea to give Tim Ball the keys, and Tim, well Tim has some limits.  The latest is that the first results are in from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, OCO-2 the first having crashed and burnt on launch. 

This would be no surprise to anyone who has been following the literature or the results from the orbiting SCIAMACHY instrument, but, to do the Sou thing,Tim Ball is dancing in the street

Preliminary evidence essentially exonerates humans as the source of CO2. That is a narrative unacceptable to the IPCC and all their media supporters. As a result the BBC, whose lack of journalistic integrity and political bias, was exposed in the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), are obliged to spin the evidence. One comment in the article says,

It is possible to see spikes, too, on the eastern seaboard of the US and over China. These probably include the additional emissions of CO2 that come from industrialisation. 

This misinformation is contradicted by the lower than average levels over the UK and Europe. Another comment on Figure 1 says, 

Also apparent are the higher concentrations over South America and southern Africa. These are likely the result of biomass burning in these regions. 

This misinformation is a contradiction because the area of southern Africa is mostly grasslands and desert. How does that generate “biomass burning”? Figure 2 shows a map of the climate zones of Africa, ironically, it appears in an article pleading for financial help to deal with climate change.

The claim that South American levels are due to forest burning is ridiculous. At any given time, only a small area of the forest is being burned. It was higher in the past because countries like Brazil were encouraged to provide tax incentives to farmers to clear land, with help from the World Bank. The idea was that a country must have a solid agricultural base for a viable economy. The practice was stopped when the environmental finger of rainforest destruction was pointed.

So thence commences the waving of hands for which Tim and Willard Tony are famous, but, dear reader, Eli has a question.

Biomass burning tends to be associated with fires and one of the things that satellites can do is look down and map fires, so what does a map of fires between October 12 and 26 (roughly the same as the first OCO results show?  Not too hard to find.  NASA has a real time web applet to map the fire data from Terra and Aqua and what do you know, Tim has balled it all up again

 Of course, if like the SCIAMACHY team, you monitor for a decade or so (2002-2012) why yes, Virginia, you can see the anthropogenic CO2

Eli knows, all that anthropogenic CO2 is from the beer brewers in Belgium

In the Free Market Everything Has a Price

Some are just cheaper than others.

Eli has shown before that tobacco is really the original sin, responsible for much seemingly unrelated evil in the world, created in an effort to distract others from the problems associated with smoking.

Jules' Klimaatblog has dredged another piece of reality out of the tobacco archive which he modestly calls (Ab)using Libertarians as Useful Idiots.  Eli holds there is useful debate about one of the last two words. The memo is from the Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco aka FOREST, an astroturf group, still going today, set up in 1978 by the tobacco lobby to oppose tobacco regulation.  The memo is from 1996, when tobacco regulations started to bite.  They saw trouble on the horizon from the younger generation who were growing up knowing that smoking was dangerous, but

The world still abounds with reactionaries, and in many ways, the 'fogey' strand of public opinion is probably destined to become even more prominent in the next few years, as the baby boom becomes irretrievably middle aged and gives up trying to pretend oterhwise.  The spinsterish attck on smoking and the 'wicked uncle' defenders of it (and of sedentary self indulgence generall) are both likely to gain in prominence and to quarrel with one another ever more publically.  Already the health and fitness craze has abated considerably

But there was hope

However we do not believe that the industry should despair, that the struggle for the right to smoke is destined for eventual defeat.  There is one major opportunity that FOREST has neglected in recent years, and this is the intellectual (as opposed to fogey/reationary) defense of individual liberty that has been dragged into public prominence on the coat tails of the classicla liberal or libertarian critique of the welfare state.  However in the last few years the obvious commonality of interest between FOREST and the youth wing of the libertarian/classical liberal revival has not resulted in an great active cooperation in this area

A situation they sent out to change by coopting the young libertarian wing of the Conservative Party in the UK.  Why, because politics was their only way out

What other argument is there?  Although we can and do vigorously refute the passive smoking hysteria, the primary health argument has been lost.  There is no way any feasible public case can be argued in medical terms.  While there are clearly perceivable psychological benefits from smoking, the evidence of risk to personal health is difficult to challenge.  Further, since the general population recognize these dangers our argument that smokers do exercise and "informed choice" is much stronger.

and

Moreover the freedom case also proactively strengthens us if the worst should happen:  if it were conclusively, scientifically demonstrated that passive smoking constituted a major health threat in normal social circumstances.  The libertarian case already argues, to use the jargon of the economists, that "externalities" are best "internalized" by the voluntary means of property rights.  In other words it would be up to individual property owners to establish smoking rules on their own property, not for the state to set down an absolute law applicable to all places.

 Permayhap bunnies recognize the similarity to how libertarians have been coopted by fossil fuel interests.  Perhaps they might recognize the same on two recent discussion threads, one at ATTP, and the other at the Good Bishops.  Perhaps.

The Shy Pacific

James Acker, a friend from USENET days writes from the Goddard Earth Science Data and Information Services Center about some recent results

The Pacific Ocean has been remarkably shy about its intentions this year, as many of the watched indicators have for months hovered close to (but not over) the edge of definitive El Niño conditions. Despite this uncertainty, the generally warmer-than-average waters of the Pacific have contributed to record high global surface temperatures in several recent months.  These warm waters are a significant factor if 2014 ultimately becomes the warmest calendar year ever recorded (instrumentally).

While, for the most part,  El Niño or not El Niño conditions are monitored by following physical conditions, such as sea surface temperature and height differences between the western (near Asia) and eastern Pacific (near South America).  In general sea surface temperature will rise in the central and eastern Pacific during an El Niño.

There is also an noticeable biological change associated with El Nino, a change in the color of the surface due to decreased biological activity as upwelling is limited, and fewer nutrients are found at the surface.  This reduces the amount of chlorophyll.  The associated color change can be observed from space and tells a strange tale.  There has definitely been strong surface warming extending from the western to central (Niño 4) Pacific and from there to the eastern Pacific (Niño 3 and 3,4) but the region closest to the South American coast near Peru and Ecuador has not warmed at all (Nino 1,2) which is fine for those who fish in those waters and depend on the upwelling nutrients to feed the fish they seek to catch.

Niño 3

Nino 1,2

This looks much more like what has come to be called a warm pool, central Pacific or Modoki El Niño, perhaps extending a bit more towards South America than usual (or a bit less as compared to the El Niño that your grandmother knew).  In an El Niño Modoki, the west coast of the US is hotter and drier than normal, exactly the opposite from the traditional El Niño.

Hot Times

NOAA, in their conference call to discuss weather in November, put down a pretty strong marker that 2014 is going to be the hottest year on record.   It's actually a proposition, and Eli is not one to want an ear full of cider, so the Bunny recommends going out there and putting a few cans of shinola on it with your friendly local climate change deniers, whom, as every lagomorph knows can't tell shit from shinola.

Anyhow, Jake Crouch from NOAA points out that right now we are at the 6th warmest land temperature anomaly of 1.71 ^oF (don't you just hate, hate customary units, but it is the US) for Jan - November and the record warmest ocean temperature anomaly of 1.03 ^oF.  This, since the oceans are about 2/3 of the surface, makes for the warmest Jan-Nov period with an anomaly of 1.22 ^oF.

About the only places that are cool are eastern North America and the tip of South America.

Based on the NOAA record, for 2014 NOT to be the warmest ever, December would have to be the 21st coolest December on file.

However, since the oceans have a ginourmous thermal inertia, and it is the warmth in the oceans that is driving the record temperatures, that is, not very likely, as in bet that it won't happen.

Another part of the briefing dealt with the issue of whether an El Nino is developing in the Pacific, and the answer was, who knows, driven mostly by the observation that the whole damn tropical Pacific is hot, there is no gradient between the western and eastern parts to drive the trade winds.  This may indeed be a Strange New Climate with the heat from the oceans just rising to the surface, not your fathers kid.

A Purposeful Avoidance of the Truth Is Sufficient to Establish Actual Malice

So Eli hied hisself down the DC Court of Appeals and picked up a copy of the oral argument in CEI and National Review vs. Michael Mann.  Having a new toy, the Bunny is now pleased to present a piece from Michael Mann's attorney, John Williams, somewhat in response to what was written at National Review on line by Charles Cooke

Judge Easterly, meanwhile, wanted to know how the plaintiffs could demonstrate “actual malice” if the defendants “genuinely” believe that “[man-made] climate change is a hoax.” “We don’t have to get to the question of whether climate change is real to look at the accusations,” Williams shot back. This did not seem to convince. “You need clear and convincing evidence for malice,” Easterly said. Simply stating that your critics disagree with you is insufficient. 

This description has caused great rejoicing amongst the Steyn Simberg crowd, but maybe no

As to what Eli thinks is going to happen, well, as National Law Journal points out, the court has to figure out if they are going to allow immediate appeals of SLAPP suit rulings, 

In May, the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that an anonymous Wikipedia editor could appeal a judge's order denying a special motion to quash a subpoena for his identity. In that case, local attorney Susan Burke sued the editor over information posted on her Wikipedia page that she argued was defamatory. Judge Catharine Easterly (at left), one of the judges hearing Mann's case, wrote the opinion.

Lawyers for the defendants sued by Mann pointed to Burke's case in arguing that the court should allow immediate appeals for denials of special motions to dismiss. The D.C. government has supported that interpretation of the law. 

As the federal and local courts sort out the practical realities of the anti-SLAPP statute, cases testing the law continue to trickle up. On the heels of the Mann case in the D.C. Court of Appeals is a defamation lawsuit filed by a local doctor against a former patient who wrote a negative review on Yelp. A judge partially granted a motion to dismiss under the anti-SLAPP law. The case is being briefed.

So probably yes, immediate appeals will be allowed, but to avoid being snowed under, they are going to have to define the grounds for dismissing under the SLAPP law in detail.  Given that, the court will, IEHO and EINAL, either affirm the ruling of the court below, or set out clear rules and toss it back.

We Have Not Inherited the Earth From Our Ancestors, We Are Stealing It From Our Children

Kate Sheppard writes at the Huff Post about the destruction of Shishmaref

Eight years ago the bunnies  read about how this Alaskan village on the shores of the Chukchi Sea is being devoured by climate change.  Indeed, in 2007 the AAAS even made a video about how it was the canary in the coal mine, a precursor to the fate of nations and this was featured at their annual meeting

As early as 2002, it was clear that the village was doomed and plans were drawn up to move to the mainland, but alas, the plans required money, and as Kate Sheppard writes, they required a site that was also not subject to climate change

Within a couple of years, however, the plan to move to Tin Creek fell apart. Subsequent feasibility studies revealed problems with the site. It too sits on permafrost -- which, in a melting Arctic, likely means that its days as a suitable location are also numbered. The town had to select a different location.

and the plan also required a couple of hundred million dollars, for a small village, with a small population, in the middle of nowhere.

So, Eli has a question.  How can our civilization adapt to climate change if we cannot even save a small village?

Shoving the Overton Window Towards Reality

Aaron Sorkin, creator and maybe most everything else of the HBO series Newsroom has groked Richard Alley, who of very anodyne hearings on climate change said:

This is certainly not both sides. If you want both sides, we would have to have somebody in here screaming a conniption fit on the red end, because you are hearing a very optimistic side

Sorkin has given use a useful reading of the red side, and yes the vision is deeply troubling. Improbable at this time, but not as improbable as the fantasies of climate change deniers.  Below  a small clip from the show

You can view the entire scene on YouTube

Randy Malamud at the Huff Post says we really are in the end times, Dave Roberts at Grist more or less concern trolls the show, and Eli, Eli is with Ugo Bardi, at Cassandra's Legacy who points out that

So, we have always been careful to follow the instructions: avoid scaring people, avoid looking like scaremongers, avoid even hinting that things may be worse, much worse than anyone could imagine. We have been careful to end all warnings with a list of solutions; saying that, sure, it looks bad, but the problem will go away if you just insulate your home, buy a smaller car, and turn off the lights when you leave a room. What we need is just a little bit of good will.

To no avail: the climate problem is still there, bigger and more fearsome everyday. Nothing changes, nothing moves, nothing. Nothing even remotely comparable to the scale of the threat. And, sometimes, you feel that you have had enough; you feel like screaming that this is NOT a problem you can solve with double-paned windows and smaller cars; it is NOT a problem for the next century; it is NOT a problem for another generation, It is here, it is now, it is big, it is damn big, and it is out of control. You feel like screaming that aloud.

Now the busy bunnies on the denial of climate change side, somehow, Eli notices, they never shrink from telling everybunny near and far that if we do something effective about climate change, well the world will collapse, the economy will die, the commies will take over and everyone will be screwed.

There is a certain asymmetry about this, and it is high time to make it clear that climate change ain't beanbag.

As Rick Perlstein has pointed out the long con is based on a theology of fear or better put, on arousal of fear in the audience, and based on recent voting, a successful one, Anybunny on the mailing list of the National Review, Mark Steyn, or any "conservative" think tank gets their fund raising emails each morning, designed to get the blood rising and the money flowing.

So tell again, why Sorkin's shot is futile?

Plenty of Trend at the Bottom

With all the talk about the pause, the plateau, new record surface temperatures and more, Eli was looking at something from his friend Rob Honeycutt which explained the world according to Judith Curry

when the Bunny noticed an interesting thing

Lots of trend at the bottom, and maybe even something to think about.

Ozone Photochemistry - Part 2

The purpose of this series of posts is to discuss the photochemistry leading to formation of tropospheric ozone and smog.

In Part 1 Eli discussed how tropospheric ozone forms and how photolysis of ozone leads to formation of HO radicals.  The story starts with the photodissociation of NO2 below 420 nm to form O atoms and NO.  The O atoms react with O2 molecules (plenty of them) to form ozone, O3.  Ozone it self is not the greatest thing in the world to breathe, and photolysis of ozone produces excited O(¹D) atoms, which either react with water vapor to form HO radicals or are collisionally quenched back to O(³P), which, in turn reacts with O2 to reform ozone. 

Wither HO (or OH, depends on your age and field).  Let's start by not worrying about hydrocarbons.  In that case, in a really clean atmosphere the OH will react with carbon monoxide, CO  to form hydrogen atoms and CO2.  The carbon in CO2 is fully oxidized and that is the end of that.  The hydrogen atoms react with O2 to form hydroperoxyl radicals, HO2.  HO2 is a lot less reactive than HO, so as a general rule the atmosphere has a lot more HO2 than HO, but HO2 does react with NO and that reforms NO2

Eli is quite happy with the figure above, moving NO2 to the center emphasizes the intermingled NOx and HOx cycles.

There are a few things left out here.  The major one, of course, is reactions with volatile organic molecules including methane, CH4.  Eli has discussed that previously.  For another HO2 can react with ozone to form two molecules of O2 and HO, but that is roughly three orders of magnitude slower than the reaction with NO.  There are also some termination steps.  For example, the reaction of NO2 with HO yields nitric acid HNO3, which can rain out.  For another, HO + HO2 --> H2O + O2.  And then, of course, there is deposition.  Ozone hitting the ground will never rise.  Same for most of these other molecules.

Next we will discuss the implications of this chemistry for ozone in the unpolluted troposphere.

In the Beginning. . it was deja vue all over again

Jacquelyn Gill touched off a twitter storm of memories about climate blogging in the old days (11 years is old for a Bunny).  The Weasel has something, and so does David Appell.  It was more or less agreed that David's Quark Soup lead the way, if not then Tim Lambert @ Deltoid.  So Eli went to the science blogs and tried to find when Tim started blogging.

Not so simple.  He has moved his archive to science blogs when he moved Deltoid there.  Tim started writing for the net on gun and gun control.  There are articles there back to 1991 but it looks like they were posts or email exchanges with no comments.  The first commented posts appear in Fall 2003, and the first post about climate. . . . a keeper from March 2004, emerging from the nexus of tobacco control and climate change denial.  Tim had written about how The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition was an astroturfing operation of the tobacco industry (Steve Milloy, check) and Chris Mooney had an article in the Washington Post (told you nothing changes) on the sounds like science stuff.  Of course, the sounds like guys set one of them on Chris and somehow climate change got dragged in along with Richard Lindzen.  Tim, in his usual way just dug in.

I’ve been reluctant to write anything about the climate change debate because there is a daunting amount of material on the matter, and I don’t feel that I’ve read enough of it to make any kind of useful comment. However, the heart of Murray’s piece is the claim that Mooney misrepresented what the NAS report on climate change found. To see whether that claim is true you don’t have to read the entire literature, just the mercifully brief here. Lindzen (Richard Lindzen, check) writes: 

[I]t is quite wrong to say that our NAS study endorsed the credibility of the IPCC assessment report. We were asked to evaluate the IPCC “Summary for Policymakers” (SPM), the only part of the IPCC reports that is ever read or quoted by the media and politicians.

In fact, right in the very first paragraph of the report you find:

In particular, the written request (Appendix A) asked for the National Academies’ “assistance in identifying the areas in the science of climate change where there are the greatest certainties and uncertainties,” and “views on whether there are any substantive differences between the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] Reports and the IPCC summaries.”

The panel was asked to look at the reports and the summary and give their views on whether their were differences. Section 7 of their report is devoted to this. Lindzen was one of the panel members. How could he possibly be unaware of what the panel was supposed to do?

Lindzen continues:

The SPM, which is seen as endorsing Kyoto, is commonly presented as the consensus of thousands of the world’s foremost climate scientists. In fact, it is no such thing. Largely for that reason, the NAS panel concluded that the SPM does not provide suitable guidance for the U.S. government . . .

This is pretty well the opposite of what the panel concluded. In section 7 they actually report:

After analysis, the committee finds that the conclusions presented in the SPM and the Technical Summary (TS) are consistent with the main body of the report.

Again, Lindzen is one of the authors of the report. How can he say that the report says the opposite of what it actually says?

Lindzen continues:

The full IPCC report, most of which is written by scientists about specific scientific topics in their areas of expertise, is an admirable description of research activities in climate science. It is not, however, directed at policy. The SPM is, of course, but it is also a very different document. It represents a consensus of government representatives, rather than of scientists. As a consequence, the SPM has a strong tendency to disguise uncertainty, and conjures up some scary scenarios for which there is no evidence.

Scary scenarios, where has Eli seen this recently

I suppose it is possible that this is true, but it is not what the NAS report says. The panel checked with the scientists and found “that no changes were made [to the SPM] without the consent of the convening lead authors”.

Lindzen continues:

Similarly, in the case of our NAS report, far too much attention was paid to the hastily prepared summary rather than to the body of the report. The summary claimed that greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Yet, the full text noted that 20 years was too short a period for estimating long term trends, a crucial point that the summary neglected to mention.

What? There are only 20 years of data for surface air temperatures? That doesn’t sound right. Let’s see what the full text really says:

Although warming at Earth’s surface has been quite pronounced during the past few decades, satellite measurements beginning in 1979 indicate relatively little warming of air temperature in the troposphere. The committee concurs with the findings of a recent National Research Council report, which concluded that the observed difference between surface and tropospheric temperature trends during the past 20 years is probably real, as well as its cautionary statement to the effect that temperature trends based on such short periods of record, with arbitrary start and end points, are not necessarily indicative of the long-term behavior of the climate system.

Wow. Global warming skeptics have been pointing at the satellite data and arguing that it shows that there is no warming going on. The NAS panel points out that 20 years of satellite data is probably not enough to judge long term trends, so it should be treated with caution.

And right they were

Lindzen then pretends that the caution about the satellite data was meant to apply to the panel’s statement that greenhouse gases were causing global warming. It clearly was not meant to apply to that statement and it doesn’t even make sense if you try to apply it to that statement, since surface temperature data goes back at least one hundred years. Again, Lindzen is one of the authors of the report. I can’t think of any excuse for what he wrote here, can you?

Lindzen goes on to claim:

Our primary conclusion was that despite some knowledge and agreement, the science is by no means settled.

Well, no. Their primary conclusion is expressed at the beginning of their summary:

Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability. Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to continue through the 21st century.

Natural variability, hmm. . . .

It is possible that their conclusion is wrong, but they certainly didn’t throw up their hands and say that the science wasn’t settled as Lindzen claims.

I find Lindzen’s systematic misrepresentation of the report that he helped author completely inexcusable. As for Murray, after endorsing Lindzen’s remarks, he very commendably offered a link to the report so that his readers could check for themselves, so I don’t know what to make of what he has done. Didn’t he read the report himself? To compound the problem he has used the same Lindzen quote to attack a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Murray wittily calls a group containing twenty Nobel Prize winners the “Union of Crackpot Scientists”.

Nothing new under the rug.

Ozone Photochemistry Part I.

Over the US Thanksgiving holiday, well, actually in the news hole right before it, on Wednesday afternoon, US EPA announced new rules for ambient ozone, dropping the current limits from 75 ppb to 65-70 ppm with fairly long timelines to meet those limits. What the EPA means by such a standard is that
the

an area would meet the primary standard if the fourth highest maximum daily 8-hour ozone concentration per year averaged over three years  is equal to or less than the standard

 Neela Banerjee and Tony Barboza in the LA Times describe the new rules and the reaction to it, principally from the usual suspects who have never been right when they declared the end of the world as we know it due to some environmental improvement.  They have a pretty good Mom Rabett level explanation of how the ozone is formed

Ozone is created when unstable gases are released during combustion, whether at power plants, factories or in vehicle engines. The pollutants react with sunlight to create ozone, which can trigger asthma attacks, worsen heart and lung disease and lead to premature deaths.

Because so many sources emit those ozone components, the effect of an ozone standard is far-reaching, which has made politicians leery of regulating it. The Bush administration rejected EPA science advisors' recommendation six years ago for a tougher limit. The Obama administration vowed to implement a tighter standard, but the president shelved it and let the Bush-era limit remain at the start of his reelection bid.

The operation of the rule would take a while

Once finalized, the ozone standard would not go into effect for years. States are given three years to collect air quality data before their status is determined. They then have years to devise a plan to cut pollution and force industry and communities to comply.

The worst-polluted regions in the U.S., including Los Angeles, would have until 2037 to meet a new standard.

Ozone is not good for anyone's health and smog produced as a by product is also not good for living things.

Eli would like to take a few minutes of your time to discuss the chemical mechanism driving ground level ozone formation and its relationship to smog.

At root, three things are necessary, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from combustion and natural sources (think fossil fuel combustion and pine forests), reactive nitrogen oxide emissions (think fossil fuel combustion) and sunlight (think sunlight).  Oh yeah, you also need some humidity and some oxygen.

But let Eli start with NO2, using the MPI Mainz UV-Viz spectral data base

 NO2 is one of the few molecules found in the atmosphere that absorb strongly in the visible and near UV region.  The thermochemical limit for dissociation into NO and O atoms is roughly 400 nm for ground vibrational level NO2 but because low lying vibrational and rotational levels are thermally excited in the atmosphere, the effective boundary for photodissociation is about 425 nm.  Since the solar spectrum at ground level extends down to about 300 nm,

during the day NO2  will be efficiently dissociated.

 NO2 + hν ∠ 426nm  → NO + O(³P)   [1]

O(³P) is the ground (lowest) electronic state of the oxygen atom.  The next one up as it were, is O(¹D) and Eli will explain why that is important in a moment.  The average time that an NO2 molecule lasts at the surface is of the order of an hour less during the summer when sunlight is more intense, more during the winter and so forth.  

The O(³P) produced in Reaction 1, then combines with oxygen to form ozone

O(³P) + O2 + M  →  O3 + M     [2]

When the oxygen atom and molecule come together they form a reaction intermediate which has enough energy to immediately fall apart.  The role of the third reactant, M, is to carry that energy away leaving a ground state ozone molecule, O3.  Without that no ozone would be formed

In the troposphere NO2 photolysis is the dominant source of ozone.  The ozone absorption spectrum is practically the mirror image of the NO2 absorption spectrum

For the troposphere, the important part of this spectrum is the region to higher wavelengths because the ozone layer in the stratosphere blocks everything  below ~290 nm and that is being generous, but there is some that leaks through above that limt as can be seen in this figure from Slaper, et al, showing the solar spectrum near 300 nm in Bilthoven, Netherlands with two different solar zenith angles.

Time of day and time of year play important roles in how much light is available below ~320 nm and it is only the light between the upper limit of the ozone absorption spectrum and the stratospheric ozone cut off that can be absorbed by tropospheric ozone created in Reaction 2

Oxygen atoms created by photolysis of ozone come in two flavors, ground state oxygen atoms O(³P), and excited state oxygen atoms O(¹D).  In addition to the issue of the decreasing ozone absorption coefficient at wavelengths above 290 nm, the quantum yield of O(¹D) decreases with increasing wavelength as discussed in Matsumi, et al.

Why is this important.  Well, it turns out that O(¹D) from ozone photolysis is the principle source of HO radicals in the troposphere, and HO radicals, sometimes called the atmosphere's vacuum cleaner, are what degrades the volatile organic molecules coming out of fossil fuel combustion and those killer trees.

O^*(¹D) + H2O → HO + HO   [4]

Electronically excited O(¹D) is mostly quenched to O(³P) by collisions with other O2 and N2 molecules which are much more common than water vapor.  However, O(³P) produced will simply cycle back to ozone via reaction [2] keeping the ozone concentration roughly constant.

The rest of the story (stay tuned) is the interplay between NO2, the VOCs, and HO that control ozone concentration and the generation of smog.

Eli's Thanksgiving Gift to Sou

Well, ok, Eli is on occasion a trouble maker.  This all started when Willard Tony gave the keys to Tim Ball, the elder northern bunnies may remember him.  Well in the grand tradition of the Good Lord, Monckton (and anybunny following that link will understand why Eli calls him "Good Lord," maybe with a comma in there)  when you are on the grift you have to keep accelerating the crazy to move the crowd to the next level otherwise the well dries up.

So anyhow, Ball went full Godwin at WT's not only that but Agenda 21 and  Maurice Strong, international man of luggage made guest appearances.  Eli understands that Stephan Lewandowsky has down loaded the post and comments and put them under armed guard.  It was all there and more, maybe no moon landing but not much else was missing in the Thanksgiving melange.

Victor Venema brought this to the attention of Eli on ATTPs fairwell tour (how many times have the Rolling Stones milked that cow?):

Victor Venema says:November 23, 2014 at 11:12 pm[Mod: Agreed, thank you]Meanwhile in the real world, TIm Ball is citing from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf to explain to his faithful how it was possible that all climate scientists would conspire against humanity and are trying to install a socialist world government via the UN. 

Do also read the comments. Almost all WUWT-er are swallowing it hook line and sinker. One person links to his own post called “adolf-hitler-the-most-lied-about-man-in-history/”. I did not dare to click on it. Seems to be acceptable at WUWT. MCourtney is the local voice of some reason and ask people not to blame to “ethno-Bolsheviks”, but to honestly call them Jews. 

Enjoy. The self-deconstruction of the mitigation sceptics. 

Have asked Anthony Watts on twitter whether he read the post before publishing it. He did not respond yet. Would be nice to get a: I am Anthony Watts and I approve this message.

Sou, of course had already seen the post, and WT's first attempt to pull the foot out of his blog.  Eli pondered this a bit or there was some other thought of evil which gave him the prod.  Hmm saith the bunny, maybe we should ask the let's be friends crowd what they though of this.  So he did:

@richardabetts @flimsin Suggestion has been made that perhaps you might want to read http://t.co/BFk6njJMod U have been concern trolled
— eli rabett (@EthonRaptor) November 24, 2014

and received a reply from Richard Betts:

@flimsin I suspect @ethonraptor is raising / relaying concern about dining with people who put this stuff on their blog?
— Richard Betts (@richardabetts) November 24, 2014

at which point Eli decided to give Sou a hammer:

@richardabetts @flimsin More like people whose life revolves around trashing you & your colleagues. Even masochists have safe words
— eli rabett (@EthonRaptor) November 25, 2014

Before getting to the nuclear weapons exchange this set off, Eli would like to explain that the Rabett has never exactly been of the camp that believes people in the real middle of the road aim their weapons only in one direction.  In fact, as readers might expect, he has often pointed this out about Ethon's favorite lilly liver treat, but if you think Ethon is looking for calories, take a look at Bart's Number 9.  That, dear bunnies, is a sure tell, so Eli set a little test, and mirth and laughter exploded.  His gift to Sou.

Tamsin Edwards and Richard Betts contacted Willard Tony Watts and he agreed to post their take on the matter:

Dr Tim Ball’s blog post “People Starting To Ask About Motive For Massive IPCC Deception” – drawing parallels between climate scientists and Hitler – doesn’t do anyone in the climate change debate any favours: in fact it seems a big (goose) step backwards. It’s especially frustrating to see him write this so soon after the productive dinner at Nic Lewis’s place, where the attendees agreed on the need to depolarise and detoxify the climate discussion. Anthony Watts wrote an extremely positive blog post about the evening, and there were many favourable comments from WUWT readers saying how great it was to have a more civilised conversation.

continuing in forlorn hope:

. . . We were also disappointed that so few commenters below the post distanced themselves from his views. We hope this is merely selection bias, and that many of you are simply sighing and moving on to the next post.

Some of the usual suspects try and keep their act clean, but others just can't help themselves.  Eli leaves the choice nut pickings to Sou.  Oh well, resisting is not something Eli is good at so just one:

Sorry I do not see how Dr Tim Ball’s post is in anyway offensive and neither did he call the alarmists Nazi’s as implied by Dr Betts and Dr Edwards.

He used an example of how people could be fooled by a big lie he could have used any other example from the Stalin era or middle ages where the King or Pope is God’s anoninted representative on earth.

The IPPC reports may well be the state of the art in man made global warming, although better men and women than me have shown otherwise. What cannot be called into question is the deception created by the summary for policy makers.

I paraphrase ” Hey guys get those names no ones going to check whether they have pHd’s or not.  

This was pre Kyoto. 

I pose one other queation imagine if all the billions wasted on climate change research and subsidies had been spent saving lives in the third world would it be tens of people or millions of people?

The big lie of the Nazi’s, Stalin, Pol pot resulted in millions of dead.<

The big lie of the climate change community resulted in ????????? still counting?

Oh, and most of them don't like Tamsin and Richard's science much.  But the best, the best dear bunnies is happening over at the tweets.

There are lessons in this.  One of them is break bread with anyone, but bring a GC/MS

Now Where Has Eli Heard This Before

In the comments at Pro Se, Eli read what Rob wrote

The issue is that Steyn et al published articles stating that Mann's work was fraudulent. That requires understanding the actual research.

Steyn is trying to claim that free speech means he can say absolutely anything he likes. It's even been stated by the ACLU that Steyn's writing cannot possibly be construed as having any basis in reality. But you, yourself, are ample evidence that is incorrect. YOU have actually come to believe that Mann's work is fraudulent in spite of the fact that numerous investigations and subsequent research have shown otherwise.

That is the very heart of the libel case.

Well, not quite, the ACLU and those that joined with them said that it was Steyn's opinion and opinion has no requirement to conform to reality.  Still and Eli wondered where he had heard that before.  Oh yes

Bjorn Lomborg as the Wikipedia puts it

In January, 2003, the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD) released a ruling that sent a mixed message, finding the book to be scientifically dishonest through misrepresentation of scientific facts, but Lomborg himself not guilty because of lack of expertise in the fields in question.  That February, Lomborg filed a complaint against the DCSD's decision, with the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MSTI), which had oversight over the DCSD. In December, 2003, the Ministry annulled the decision made by DCSD, citing procedural errors, including lack of documentaion of errors in the book, and asked the DCSD to re-examine the case.

They demurred, on the grounds that the outcome would be the same.

Solar Blue Rays

Blue Ray is was an optical disc technology that was a bit denser than dvds but not that much.  Of course density is a function of the pit size and the imprinting pattern and it turns out that the pattern for imprinting blue ray disks makes a wonderful (Eli is tempted to say idea) stamp for visible light collection because of the good match to the wavelength of visible light.  Technical details can be found at Extreme Tech.   Folks at Northwestern have used this to raise the efficiency of solar cells by 20% or a bit more.  FWIW, they used Police Story 3 for their stamp.  Somebunny wanted it out of the house 

As IEEE Spectrum points out, the stamping technology is already available, and with the death of Blue Ray or at least its moribund status up for sale cheap.   The destructive creativity of the market at work.

Pro Se CEI NR Michael Mann

So Eli went down to the DC Court of Appeals to listen to CEI and NR tell why they are allowed to tell lies (or at least opinionated prefabrications) about Mike Mann in the pursuit of the First Amendment.  The First Amendment was hiding out in the coffee shop across the street hoping not to be recognized.  There was some interesting stuff, not all of it concerning climate change.

The Court of Appeals is housed in the original city hall which has been fantastically restored.

Before Eli gets to fillet the arguments a brief aside about the first case to be heard, an an appeal Vasile Graure vs. the United States.  Graure, after being tossed out of a strip club came back and set the bouncer Vladimir Djordjevic on fire, gravely injuring him.  Graure was convicted and sent to jail for essentially forever, but when Djordjevic died two years later Graure was tried on a charge of murder.  Seems like Mark Steyn is not the only one to think representing himself was a good idea, and Graure did.

The appeal of his conviction was on a strange ground.  It seems that at trial, when Graure was being transported from the jail, the marshall only allowed him to take one inch of paper from the bankers box in which he was storing his material.  The attorney representing Graure on appeal took this to be a reversible error (there was a few minutes of muttering at the end about whether the murder charge was double jeopardy but no one took that very seriously.  Anyhow, turns out that the judge offered Graure a couple of choices, to have someone else move the box every day, or for him to get copies from the prosecution and Eli forgets the third.  Somehow Graure's attorney forgot to mention that in her presentations.  Eli has learned to his cost that you listen to what lawyers don't say, not to what they do say, which is the point of this small digression.  The only prediction of the day that the Rabett will offer is that  Graure will spend the rest of his life in jail and that is no problem.

Which brings us to Competitive Enterprise Institute and National Review vs. Mann.  The court was not jam packed but about a third filled with lots of folks in suits and a few scraggly bloggers, Eli amongst them, so you may be hearing more of this elsewhere.  As a marker of how the law has changed, the three judges and the three lawyers in the first case were all women.  The three judges stayed the same, but the second case was argued by Andrew Grossman, and Michael Carvin, for CEI and NR and John Williams, for Michael Mann.  Williams was accompanied by a woman lawyer but she did not present.  For those of you interested in change of life issues, Eli suggests the twitter hashtag #feministhackerbarbie cause this is just gonna be same old same old.

What was impressive was how well informed the judges were about the general issues surrounding the case, perhaps not the science part but certainly the public to and fro.

There was a short digression while Mumbles from the DC Government made a presentation about whether the Court was correct in hearing a direct appeal of a ruling based on the DC Anti-Slapp Statute.  He said yes, but the judges were much more interested in talking about what the standard should be for granting such a motion for dismissal based on the law.  There was back and forth about smell tests, likelihood to prevail criteria and more.

This got hammered in the presentations by the others.  CEI made an interesting claim that in the interest of First Amendment Freedom to tell lies (or at least prefabrications) the DC Council accepted that some valid law suits would be quashed that would have prevailed if allowed to come to trial.  CEI also conceded that where material facts are in dispute the trial judge will have to weigh the evidence.  Something that the trial judges specifically did in denying the Anti-SLAPP motion.

Everyone pretty much agreed that no matter what the standard for allowing a libel suit to go forward, the standard for proving malice should be much higher.  Frankly no one actually had a cut and dried answer for what the standard should be, and this is something the Court of Appeals is going to have to settle if it allows (and it seems it has based on some earlier cases) appeals from Anti-SLAPP statute cases to go forward.  The court kept trying to get a clear statement, asking for comparisons with the standards for other motions to dismiss and frankly got nowhere.  They are going to have to do it themselves probably settling for preponderance.

To give a flavor of the back and forth, CEI asserted that there was nothing to distinguish Simberg from any other pundit in the newspapers or on the internet.  That what he wrote was a matter of subjective interpretation, and over there the Climategate Emails.

One of the judges broke in and pointed out that Simberg said Mann was a falsifier, to which the CEI lawyer hemmed: "Not really".  The judge then pointed out that the trial judge has said as much in his ruling, receiving in return the haw that what Simberg wrote was a subjective interpretation of facts.  The judge asked if subjective interpretation was opinion, and was told that interpretation was too subjective.  The CEI lawyer was then asked if the distinction was that opinion required a factual basis.

The reply to this was that opinion is supportable when the writer reveals the facts on which the opinion is based and this immunizes the writer from libel suits.  We then went down the Climategate Email hole for a while.  The Court asked if the Emails were the facts.  CEI responded that the Emails were evidence of conspiracy and pulling tricks.  The Court pointed out that this reply was the equivalent of accusing Mann of fraud, and the response was read the Emails, which, of course was not a response because, as the bunnies will see, most of CEI and NR's pleading is that juries should not be asked to draw conclusions about such things because they are matters of dispute not facts.

NR was next up, and FWIW, the NR lawyer, called NR hereafter, was much better at pleading his case.

To give nothing away, Eli heard time and again that NR was not claiming that Michael Mann falsified the data, rather that he messed with it.  Of course, a constant reprise of how dishonest Mike's trick, joining the dendrology data to the instrumental record, was.  No one pointed out that the instrumental data is the most reliable data we have.  NoNoNo, and the Court appeared to miss this too, also that the instrumental data shown in the various figures extended back to 1880 or so.   This is rather an own goal because both NR and CEI in their pleadings denied that there has been any change in global temperature since like forever, or a millennia (OK, lawyers, not bloggers).

The Court pointed to a couple of places where whether writing by Steyn and Simberg on its face claims that Mann has committed provable fraud, but with a charitable reading would only be a caustic claim of opinion.  Much back and forth on this, an injection from NR that if their appeal is not granted, that their writers frequent claims that Obama committed this or that would clog the courts.  Besides which Climategate and Michael Mann distorted and cherry picked the data,

Since this is an appeal against the denial of relief under the anti-SLAPP statute, the court asked, ok, why not let a jury decide if this was distortion or not?  NR said that, well we don't let juries decide about whether one opinion or the opposite is correct and then the Court brought the hammer, pointing out that Rich Lowry had written in NR challenging Mann to meet NR in court so what are they doing here in the Court of Appeals.

Well harumphed the NR, these are not objectively verifiable things, or at least not objectively verifiable as a matter of opinion, and in that case as far as the law is concerned they are not objectively verifiable and therefore cannot be decided by a jury.

The Court had some thoughts on the matter, for example, does that take science out of court, well yes says NR.  Does that mean there is a First Amendment exception for science asks the Court, well only for matters of public concern.  The Court points out that accusations of academic misconduct and calling for investigations are not debates about science.  NR says, yes they are.  The Court demurs softly.  NR goes full Climategate and says anyhow, the stuff they imagine in those Emails, whether that happened or not is not for juries to decide.

So thence comes John Williams (JW) who has 30 minutes, and a good lawyer he is.  Speaks slowly but continually which limits the opportunity of the Court to throw questions at him, and frankly they appeared less interested in doing so than for the other two.  Williams starts by pointing out that the NSF IG report specifically cleared Mann of "falsifying data, concealing, deleting or otherwise destroying emails, information or data, misusing privileged information or seriously deviating from accepted practices for proposing, conducting or reporting research and other scholarly activities", which, of course NR and CEI in their presentations did accuse him of, well maybe not the first.

JW pointed out that Simberg continuously said the nasty about Mann and that CEI's complaints to the EPA about Mann were accusations of mopery and more.  So what about all those investigations asks the Court.  NR and CEI believes they are all whitewashes.  JW points out that in their briefs neither CEI or NR argue that their charges against Mann are true.  Well, he says a bit later in response to the Court pointing out that neither NR or CEI believe that humans cause climate change, that does not immunize them.  Purposeful avoidance of truth is sufficient to establish actual malice.

The rebuttal by NR degenerated into table pounding on the WMO report cover, perhaps a sign that he knew they were in trouble, but the Court needs sufficient background to see through it.

And so to bed.

SMALL FACTUAL UPDATE:

Green dots show the 30-year average of the new PAGES 2k reconstruction. The red curve shows the global mean temperature, according HadCRUT4 data from 1850 onwards. In blue is the original hockey stick of Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1999 ) with its uncertainty range (light blue). Graph by Klaus Bitterman.

PAGES 2k is the most recent and complete multiproxy paleoclimate reconstruction of global temperatures in the last millenia.  MBH 99 was the first.

UPDATE:  Somebunnies have been posting some of the stolen Emails as proof of whatever.  A number of the folks who comment here regularly  object to this as encouraging thievery.  Having been involved in sharp Email exchanges in real life, Eli kind of agrees, so if the fences want to post elsewhere (Eli is sure they can find places and link back to their now defenestrated headers, that's OK.

Black's Lament

Eli, having grown up in a neighborhood where certain words were used as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs as well as conjunctions and pronouns, often in a single sentence, was not quite as observant about Louis Black's rant on Republican not climate scientists.

The bunny was quite surprised by the response.

So to show you what Eli hears, here is Louis Black on climate change again (maybe the last couple of minutes tomorrow).  There is a rhythm to it.

Republicans who aren't scientists when it comes to climate
I love the fact that they say that “I am not a scientist”
Well, I'm not a doctor.
That's why we have scientists 

As soon as you say that "I am not a scientist, but . ."
That's why we have them
You don't have to do it
We don't expect you to do it 

What I do expect leadership to do is to listen to the scientists
I expect that because they, like us, went through an education process
And then we got to chemistry, like I did
And I said I can't do this 

I burned my hand on a Bunsen burner
Titrate?  What's titrate? 

They're scientists.
I hear this time and again and I am tired of it
It's an argument that comes up time and time again 

96% of the world's scientists agree there is climate change
That, whether you like it or not
It's a fact 

I have spent way to much time researching this
It is exhausting as a comedian when I have to look this stuff up 

Forty times to get forty things
And then people tell me that it is not true
And you tell me your 4% is right 

Look it's scientists, not a coven of witches
They are not back there double double toil and trouble
Newt of eye, you fool 

You know what they know how to do
They know how to do the metric system
Something you could learn. 

There is climate change
I don't argue it anymore
I don't discuss it anymore 

When I watch the chunk of one of the poles just drop off and float away
And didn't even  say goodbye
Greenland is down by 20%
Greenland icy Greenland cold Greenland 

Even if they are wrong
Even if they are wrong.

One of the things we might want to do as a people is to treat the planet
In a fashion that we care for it 

I don't know about these people
I know that I read the Bible
And the Bible told me 

And even though I might not believe in a lot of it
One of the common sense things is that 

This is a garden that we were given to care take

But if you need a profit
If you need to get that profit
Just barrel through 

Don't worry about your children
Or your children's children 

Worry about how much money they are going to have
Because they are going to need that money to pay for the damage
That we're doing now 

The effects of human induced climate change are being felt in every corner of the United States
With water growing scarcer in dry regions
Torrential rains increasing in wet regions
Heat waves becoming more common and more severe
Wild fires growing worse
And forests, forests dying under the assault of heat loving insects 

That's the one that worries me
I do not know that insects experienced the emotion of love
How scary is that
And not even for another insect
For heat

How to Talk to Someone Who Denies People Are Driving Climate Change

Well, Louis Black is a bit pithier than Eli, there are some words here that the young bunnies should not hear

UPDATE:  See Black's Lament  for a translation from the vernacular that you can read to the young ones.

And Then There Was Golf

ATTP is threatening to leave blogging for more time on the links and in the lab.  Eli understands he got a call from Rachel M and some other friends.

Mike Nichols did