Tag Archives: Climate change

Climate Alarmists Admit: They’re Flummoxed

Posted on June 11, 2013 by James A. Bacon| 26 Comments

warmingby James A. Bacon

Well, well, well, Justin Gillis with the New York Times has acknowledged an inconvenient truth: “The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace.”

What is a climate alarmist to make of such a revelation? Gillis admits that climate scientists are stumped. (I may be wrong about this, but I do not believe that the New York Times is subsidized or controlled by the climate change-denying Koch Brothers, so Gillis’ reporting cannot be impugned.)

The slowdown is a bit of a mystery to climate scientists. … Given how much is riding on the scientific forecast, the practitioners of climate science would like to understand exactly what is going on. They admit that they do not, even though some potential mechanisms of the slowdown have been suggested. The situation highlights important gaps in our knowledge of the climate system, some of which cannot be closed until we get better measurements from high in space and from deep in the ocean.

Despite the “important gaps in our knowledge of the climate system,” Gillis remains ever-optimistic that the world climate remains on a disastrous trajectory. One theory for the lull in rising temperatures is that “aerosols” — particulate pollution — from China are reflecting sunlight that otherwise would have warmed the atmosphere. Another is that the heat is hiding in the ocean deep, where our sensors cannot readily detect it.

The stubborn refusal of temperatures to rise as forecast by climate models may mean that climate processes are a tad more complex than previously thought. “In a climate system still dominated by natural variability,” Gillis writes, “there is every reason to think the warming will proceed in fits and starts.”

If past is prologue, this current plateau will end at some point, too, and a new era of rapid global warming will begin. That will put extra energy and moisture into the atmosphere that can fuel weather extremes, like heat waves and torrential rains.

We might one day find ourselves looking back on the crazy weather of the 2010s with a deep yearning for those halcyon days.

A man can always dream, can’t he? It’s hard to imagine a fate worse than being forced to concede that Rush Limbaugh was right!

In all seriousness, do 15 years of stagnant temperatures prove that global warming is a hoax? Not at all. Gillis actually might be right on this point: The lull may reflect natural variability. The points that I would emphasize are this: (1) The stagnant temperatures were not predicted by the climate models, and (2) our understanding of climate dynamics is incomplete.

It would be folly to conclude on the basis of current evidence that human-influenced global warming is not occurring. As I’ve always said, follow the science. But one conclusion I feel safe in drawing is this: The science is not “settled.”

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Posted in 2013, Environment

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A Tale of Two Controversies… or Really Only One?

Posted on November 29, 2012 by James A. Bacon| 25 Comments

Michael Mann. Photo credit: Popsci

by James A. Bacon

There is a fascinating sidebar to the Teresa Sullivan firing/rehiring at the University of Virginia that has gone unremarked upon in the Virginia press yet has inspired articles and blog posts among journalists and commentators following the Global Warming debate, including, recently, the Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom.

The question is this: Was the Board of Visitor’s move to demand President Sullivan’s resignation linked in some way to the decision to hire or not to hire climatologist Michael Mann to UVa’s Department of Environmental Sciences?

Robert P. Geraci, a UVa history professor, explored the connection in an article published by the Guardian. Before getting to his article, let me first provide some background.

Teresa Sullivan

While employed by the University of Virginia, Mann authored the highly controversial “hockey stick” graph that purported to show a dramatic increase in average global temperatures in recent years, thus supporting the claims of many scientists that human-induced climate change was accelerating. During his tenure, Mann also engaged in correspondence with other Global Warming alarmists — and I use the word “alarmist” in the kindest sense, as in, he is alarmed by Global Warming (GW). Some of that correspondence subsequently was made public in the so-called Climate Gate scandal, which revealed how scientists in the Warmist camp conspired to suppress the views of skeptics. Mann later decamped to Pennsylvania State, where he continues to teach environmental science. A number of investigations have cleared Mann of wrong-doing, although GW skeptics ridicule them as biased and incomplete.

In April 2010, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli requested UVa to hand over Mann’s email records, as part of an inquiry to see if he had committed fraud in the conduct of state-funded research projects. Many observers hoped for, or feared, that a data dump would reveal a mother-lode of emails in the same scandalous vein as Climate Gate. UVa officials refused. Cuccinelli’s quest for the Mann emails subsequently was picked up by the American Tradition Institute by means of a Freedom of Information Act request.

Now, back to Geraci’s narrative… In 2011, UVa’s Vice Rector Mark Kington and his wife donated $1.5 million to endow a chair in “environmental change.” That gift was matched by a contribution from UVa alumnus and hedge fund investor Paul Tudor Jones. In the spring of 2012, the Department of Environmental Science attempted to rehire Mann as the first Kington professor. That choice by a four-person search committee was confirmed by a majority of the department’s faculty members. Here’s where it really gets juicy. Writes Geraci:

But Mann never received an offer. According to a source in environmental sciences, the dean of UVA’s college of arts and sciences, Meredith Woo, refused to approve it. Such an intervention is a rare event. The department chair later revealed that Woo had indicated even before the vote that she would oppose hiring Mann. Some department members went over the dean’s head and appealed to Provost John Simon, but Simon supported the dean’s decision. (In June, Simon appeared to co-operate with the board, before switching his support to the protesting faculty.)

In protest, Geraci writes, an unnamed climate change researcher resigned.

It was soon thereafter, in June, that the UVa Board of Visitors demanded Sullivan’s resignation. By that time, Sullivan had spent $600,000 contesting the email requests. The Mann matter was never mentioned in the board’s official pronouncements, nor in any of board member emails uncovered through the FOIA process. Instead, the board cited Sullivan’s unwillingness or inability to craft a strategic plan that addressed pressing challenges facing the university, most notably online learning. However, two of the most vocal proponents of change were… Mark Kington and Paul Tudor Jones.

Coincidence? Geraci thinks not. “The possibility of a relationship between the two scandals, no doubt, warrants close investigation. Those who assume that the June coup was only about online education or business models because those concerns appear in board members’ emails need to remember that no communication bearing on personnel matters (either Sullivan’s or Mann’s) is subject to FOIA disclosure.”

Bacon’s bottom line: I am no fan of Mann’s, as faithful readers of this blog know. While his work may or may not be scientifically valid — I lack the credentials to judge — I do feel safe in characterizing him from his writings and interviews as an ideologue and a  blowhard. I fully support ATI’s right to access his email, and I am resentful of the University’s expenditure of $600,000 to block the FOIA request. (For what it’s worth, about $100 a year, I have ceased donating to my alma mater for this very reason.) Furthermore, I was one of the few commentators to support the Board of Visitors assessment of the “existential threat” facing UVA, even if I did not approve of the shabby manner in which Sullivan was treated.

Be that as it may, I cannot help  but share Geraci’s suspicion that there was a tie-in between the Mann matter and Sullivan’s hiring. The coincidence of timing and the involvement of both Kington and Jones seems too extraordinary to attribute to mere chance. Of course, coincidence does not constitute proof. But my instincts as a journalist tell me that there is more to the story than has been revealed so far. And the story is far too important to go untold.

Update: In response to reader feedback I have deleted any mention of a widely made claim that UVa turned over the emails of GW skeptic Patrick Michaels in response to a Greenpeace FOIA request. The University of Virginia denies the claim. Unable to independently verify it, I therefore omit it.

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Posted in 2012, Education (higher ed)

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‘Nuff Said!

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 17 Comments

See: Article

Full Disclosure: BusinessWeek is my former employer.

– Peter Galuszka

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Posted in 2012

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Moral Hazard and the Federalization of the Disaster Business

Posted on October 31, 2012 by James A. Bacon| 11 Comments

According to a graphic displayed on the “Morning Joe” show on MSNBC this morning,  Hurricane Sandy will be the second most expensive hurricane in United States history, after Katrina. The usual suspects will use information like this to argue that a bigger, stronger federal government is needed (a) to respond to natural disasters, and (b) to combat climate change. But the horrendous expense of the hurricane clean-up is better seen as an indictment against an all-intrusive Uncle Sam.

Writing in New Geography, Matthew Stevenson has this to say about the “federalization of the disaster business”:

Previously storm damage and the costs of clean up were the responsibilities of states and municipalities, who in the first place made the decisions to allow homeowners to build houses and businesses on barrier islands, sand dunes, and low-lying waterfront property.

For much of the twentieth century, insurance companies refused to write flood or hurricane policies for stilted houses perched precariously on Cape Hatteras or wherever, which angered wealthy political donors, who equate their life successes with owning beachfront property.

Enter the federal government into the realm of disaster indemnification, when Congress passed the National Flood Insurance Program in 1968, to mandate that vulnerable home owners in potential flood zones purchase adequate insurance that private companies were refusing to cover. Think of it as Obamacare for beachfront homes.

Although the legislation was designed to cover the undue risks of shore properties, it also gave the political parties a mechanism that would allow (for all those waterfront contributors) a building boom on hurricane-exposed barrier islands. …

Not only was the federal government complicit in allowing places like Myrtle Beach to become housing projects (the poet Robert Watson called it “white Harlem by the sea”), it also assumed that its job performance could be measured by the number of blankets and water bottles that reached those crazy enough to “ride out” a major storm in their seaside mobile homes.

As Stevenson observes, the local political forces — property owners, the construction lobby and the rest — are powerful enough as it is. Once state and local governments are relieved by the federal government of a significant burden of responding to and indemnifying against disasters, local authorities have even less reason to push back against those who would develop vulnerable coastlines.

If you believe that anthropogenic climate change is contributing to the increase in ferocity and frequency of hurricanes (I’ll sidestep for now the issue of whether that’s true), the last thing you should want is a bigger, stronger FEMA. You should do everything in your power to halt subsidies of lunatic development in vulnerable, flood-prone areas.

– JAB

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Posted in 2012, Disaster planning, Environment

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A Rising Tide Raises… Questions. Lots of Questions.

Posted on October 9, 2012 by James A. Bacon| 2 Comments

A new William & Mary Law School clinic will address prickly legal and policy questions arising from endemic flooding in Virginia’s vulnerable Tidewater lowlands.

by James A. Bacon

No one knows how fast the sea level off Virginia’s coast will rise by the end of the century. It could be more than a foot, if the trend of the last century prevails. It could be closer to three feet, if some of the more pessimistic warnings come true. Whatever the future portends, almost everyone agrees that storm surges and high tides are inundating more of Virginia’s low-lying land than in the past. Hampton Roads — after New Orleans, the metropolitan region in the United States with the lowest elevation — is at tremendous risk, even if the more ominous predictions are decades away.

Rising sea levels — or, if you find that phrase too ideologically loaded, recurrent flooding — confronts Virginia with a host of engineering, political and legal questions that few Americans have given thought to. As Wetlands Watch Executive Director Skip Stiles puts it, most law and public policy assumes a static coastline. “Our law doesn’t deal with a shoreline that moves.”

Shana Jones, director of the newly created Virginia Coastal Policy Clinic, hopes to help the commonwealth grapple with a wide range of policy and legal issues relating to the increase in inundations. Working with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) and Old Dominion to gather relevant scientific and technical information, the clinic has the goal of providing lawmakers “the best information we can.”

Lawmakers need help, for questions abound. What options do local governments around Hampton Roads and the Chesapeake Bay have to cope with the rising tide? How much will it cost to harden the coastline? What changes should localities make to building codes, zoning codes and comprehensive plans? What role should the state play in regulating flood insurance — and to what effect? What rights do property owners have to build in flood-prone zones that governments cannot economically serve? “They are very thorny questions,” says Jones.

Adding another layer of complexity is Virginia’s state constitution. The Old Dominion is a Dillon Rule state which allows local governments only those powers expressly granted them by the General Assembly. What authority should the legislature grant local governments in harm’s way? Would those newly created powers set precedents that other jurisdictions, further inland, might find obectionable?

The coastal policy clinic, based in the College of William & Mary Law School, is receiving funding from the Virginia Environmental Endowment. Executive Director Gerald McCarthy describes it as one of the most exciting and potentially significant programs he has underwritten in three-and-a-half decades of running the endowment.

The sea level has been inching higher since Virginians first began measuring it in the 1920s. Although the rise has been slow, little more than an inch a decade, it adds up over the generations. “People think of sea-level rise as like sitting in a slowly rising bathtub,” says Jones. “The problem comes when we get a nor’easter, a full moon or a hurricane. It’s the surge that is problematic.” Read more.

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Posted in 2012, Budget, Disaster planning, Economic development, Environment, Infrastructure, Insurance, Land use & development, Planning, Taxes

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The Madness of Building in Flood-Prone Areas

Posted on September 6, 2012 by James A. Bacon| 6 Comments

Flooding in downtown Norfolk. Photo credit: The Virginia Severe Weather Page.

My skepticism of Global Warming alarmism is well documented on this blog. But being skeptical of chicken-little, the-world-is-going-to-end hysteria is very different from being skeptical of the fact that global temperatures are rising and so is the sea level along with it.  We can argue how rapidly sea levels are rising but not the fact that they are rising. Anyone who denies that fact out of a blind ideological reaction against GW alarmism is committing a grave and costly mistake.

As sea levels rise, whether due to higher global temperature or subsidence of the East Coast tectonic plate, flooding is becoming worse. As flooding becomes worse, insurance companies — who are not motivated by ideology — charge more for flood insurance. Writes Scientific American in its August issue:

Major insurance companies like Allstate, Nationwide, and State Farm have quietly stopped writing new policies in many zones near shore, says Wetlands Watch. Most of Norfolk’s waterfront lies in areas that the Federal Emergency Management Agency designates as 100-year flood zones – i.e., that have a one percent chance of flooding yearly [PDF]. Owners there can buy coverage from the National Flood Insurance Program.

Meanwhile, local governments are giving serious thought to the implications of rising sea levels. According to Scientific American: “Norfolk is spending more than $27 million this year on culverts, restored shorelines and street curbs to channel water and improve drainage. … Studies commissioned by the city have recommended more than $140 million in larger projects for just four neighborhoods, including floodgates and pumping systems. ”

Here’s my question. If flooding is demonstrably getting worse — for whatever reason — why is the federal government subsidizing property owners who want to build in flood-prone areas? This is madness! If flooding is demonstrably getting worse, why aren’t local governments in Hampton Roads “blue lining” flood-prone areas where they will no longer invest in building new infrastructure?

Surely environmentalists and free-market conservatives can unite to oppose insanely wasteful public- and private-sector investment in areas that will  become only more vulnerable to flooding over time.

– JAB

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Posted in 2012, Environment, Infrastructure, Land use & development

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Record Heat Wave? Not in Virginia.

Posted on July 14, 2012 by James A. Bacon| 43 Comments


The U.S. State Climate Extremes Committee established by the National Climatic Data Center has updated and refined its national database of climate extremes. Now anyone can conduct a Web search to find the dates of extreme climate records in their home state. The chart above shows the numbers for Virginia.

Notice how the hot-weather extremes occurred in 1900 and 1954, the cold-weather extreme occurred only 27 years ago, while the extreme rain and snow events occurred in the 1990s. Whatever may be happening to the world as a whole, Virginia does not seem to be suffering any undue extremes of heat and drought.

No meaningful lessons can be drawn from this data regarding climate change globally — Virginia constitutes too small a percentage of the earth’s surface. What the data should do, however, is inoculate people against drawing conclusions (as a certain other blogger who shall go unnamed, but whose initials are PAG has done) based upon this summer’s heat wave. Yeah, it’s hot. But it’s been hotter before.

– JAB

Update: I have changed the headline because the original lent itself to the misleading impression (as seen in the comments) that I was denying that temperatures were rising in Virginia. I don’t know if average temperatures are rising or not. I am saying that our recent heat wave is not unprecedented.

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Posted in 2012, Environment

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Academic Freedom Requires Academic Accountability

Posted on April 10, 2012 by James A. Bacon| Leave a comment

David Schnare — from his Facebook page

Should public university faculty email be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act? So asks the Roanoke Times in dueling op-eds from David W. Schnare with the American Tradition Institute (ATI) and Kate Westcott with the American Association of University Professors.

ATI sued the University of Virginia to gain access to the emails of a climatologist Michael Mann, a former professor who devised the controversial “hockey stick” graph so well known in the Global Warming debate. Westcott argued that professors’ scholarly work should be protected from FOIA on the grounds of academic freedom. Most people would agree that academic freedom is a value worth protecting.

While Schnare acknowledges the value of academic freedom, he also contends that the tax-paying public has the right to know how university faculties at public institutions “spend the peoples’ money.” The Climategate emails recovered from an English university exposed how a professorial clique (of which Mann was a member) manipulated scholarly institutions to suppress opposing points of view. Another FOIA request showed how a North Carolina professor used grant funds for projects other than those intended.

And then, writes Schnare, there was this: “A recent Virginia FOIA request found that at one university, of 15 professors conducting research, not one kept a research log. In one case, a professor could not duplicate his findings for lack of such research discipline. Without FOIA, this execrable faculty misbehavior would never have been uncovered.”

Does the public have a right to know if publicly funded scientists at Virginia universities are following basic protocols so their research findings can be examined and replicated? Isn’t that central to scientific inquiry? Or should university professors be entitled to “academic freedom” without “academic accountability”?

– JAB

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Posted in 2012, Governance reform, Science & Technology

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Tracking Sea-Level Rise on Virginia’s Coast

Posted on March 20, 2012 by James A. Bacon| 41 Comments

by James A. Bacon

Dead trees on a hummock in the York River. (Photo credit: Times-Dispatch.)

Scientists Scott Hardaway and Bryan Watts, both affiliated with the College of William and Mary, have made a specialty of studying hummocks along the Chesapeake Bay coastline. Hummocks, which are stands of trees growing in patches of dry land surrounded by marsh, are a visible gauge of rising sea levels. As the water level creeps higher every year, the hummocks get more water-logged and the trees die, leaving stands of ghostly white spires. “We can show tide-gauge data until we’re blue in the face, and sometimes that doesn’t work” to convince the skeptics, Hardaway told Rex Springston in the Times-Dispatch.

Rising sea levels — or sinking land, take your pick — is a reality along Virginia’s Atlantic Coast. The sea level in the Chesapeake Bay rose about 1 1/2 feet over the past century. About half of that came from a natural subsidence of the land in southeastern Virginia. The other half came from rising sea levels globally. Larry P. Atkinson, an Old Dominion University oceanographer, suggests that half of the sea level rise can be attributed to natural warming underway for thousands of years and the other half from human causes.

You can dispute Atkinson’s estimate for the extent to which human activity is to blame, along with even more dire prognostications that human-caused global warming will accelerate, triggering a massive melt-off of glaciers and icecaps and pushing sea levels two to seven feet higher by 2010. What you can’t dispute is that sea levels along Virginia’s coastline have risen at a rate averaging one tenth of an inch per year over the past century and that there is considerable evidence that they continue to rise.

According to Springston, a sea-level increase of only one foot could damage or destroy $187 million to $249 million in houses, roads and wetlands in the Middle Peninsula alone. Local government officials in flood-prone areas are giving more thought to how to cope with the rising tide, whether by dikes and levees, flood-proofing houses or restricting development in low-lying areas.

As I have made abundantly clear in previous posts, I am skeptical of many of the claims made about Global Warming. I am open to propositions that are based on science (of which I am respectful) and contemptuous of assertions based on economics and public policy (much of which I regard as social engineering run amuck). While I acknowledge that scientists are as vulnerable to group think as anyone else and might be wrong about accelerating rates of sea level rise, I would suggest that anyone who dismisses their fears out of hand is just as guilty of pre-judging the science as those they criticize. Prudent people will keep an open mind and endeavor to gather the facts…. if only we could determine them with a high degree of assurance.

Which brings me to the North Carolina Sea-Level Rise Assessment Report, which aimed to measure sea-level rise in the Tarheel state, Virginia’s next-door-neighbor. The 2010 report forecast that sea levels could rise between 15 and 55 inches by 2100. One can characterize those projections as exaggerrated, as the American Tradition Institute has done, on the grounds that local tide-gauge measures are too crude to be reliable, satellite measurements have been available for only 10 years, and so on. But even skeptics like ATI concede that sea levels may be rising in the long run.

Lawmakers, very few of whom are climate scientists, have no way to authoritatively judge which side is right. In our ideologically polarized society, Democratic politicians will likely side with the Warmists no matter what, and Republicans will side with the skeptics. As an empiricist, I personally prefer to side with the evidence. It would take a modest investment to design and maintain a system of tide-measuring stations on the Atlantic and Chesapeake Bay that can measure the rate at which Virginia’s coastline is disappearing under the waves. My friend Steve Nash, who is researching a book about Global Warming and sea-level rise in Virginia, suggests that air-borne laser-based LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology can map the entire coastline for several million dollars. That sounds like cheap insurance. For a small investment we can ascertain definitively what is happening and provide our coastal communities solid data upon which to inform their actions.

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Posted in 2012, Environment

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Cooch Loses a Case, but Hockey-Stick Man Not Off the Hook

Posted on March 2, 2012 by James A. Bacon| 4 Comments

Michael Mann: victim or fraud?

The Supreme Court of Virginia has ruled against Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s bid, on the grounds of investigating fraud, to obtain the email files of former UVa climatologist Michael Mann. The court stated that the university and other state agencies cannot be considered “persons” under the Virginia’s Fraud Against Taxpayers Act.

“From the beginning, we have said that we were simply trying to review documents that are unquestionably state property to determine whether or not fraud had been committed,” said Cuccinelli in a prepared statement.  “Today, the court effectively held that state agencies do not have to provide state-owned property to state investigators looking into potential fraud involving government funds.”

Frankly, I’m a little bit relieved. Although I sympathized with Cuccinelli’s aim of exposing Mann, the global warming zealot who concocted the famous hockey stick graph purporting to show an unprecedented spike in global temperatures, I was uncomfortable with the means. Cuccinelli tried to use an anti-fraud statute to probe the flaws in Mann’s work. That set a dangerous precedent for politicizing scientific research in Virginia universities. I certainly wouldn’t like it if a liberal AG was probing a conservative scholar. Hopefully, the court ruling will eliminate any future temptation to meddle in this way.

The proper way to expose Mann is through the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, which the American Tradition Institute (ATI) is doing. Alas, the University of Virginia, which reportedly turned over the emails of global warming skeptic Patrick Michaels to Greenpeace without a peep of protest, has steadfastly resisted doing the same in Mann’s case.

Here is an ATI update on that matter. After a year of legal wrangling, UVa has turned over 1,700 emails but withheld 12,000 others that allegedly contain “proprietary” information. We’re not talking about technology with commercial potential here. ATI is seeking to understand how Mann devised his hockey stick graph — information that, according to ATI, he has so far refused to make public. So much for the ideal of subjecting one’s scientific work to peer review.

As far as I can see, UVa’s logic is as bogus as Cuccinelli’s. Either the administration is worried that the emails might embarrass Mann and thus the university, or it is caving into faculty pressure to protect “academic freedom,” which apparently is something granted only to liberal scholars, not conservative ones.

Mann was a central figure in the so-called “Climate-gate” email scandal. The emails revealed how Mann and others had acted to squelch the views of scientists skeptical of the more alarmist view on global warming. Access to Mann’s UVa emails could shed more light on the extent to which he might have fudged his hockey-stick result or otherwise corrupted the scientific process. This is a proper matter for citizens and scholars to look into, using FOIA. Let’s hope it doesn’t take a Virginia Supreme Court ruling to get UVa to turn the emails over.

– JAB

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Posted in 2012, Courts and law

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