Carlin Economics and Science

In recent years interest in geoengineering has centered on the possibility of substituting it for reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions widely promoted as a solution to hypothesized global warming/climate change. Although it could be both more effective and cost-effective than GHG emission reductions for this purpose, a more fundamental question needs to be answered before geoengineering is seriously considered: Is it likely to be needed and under what circumstances?

I presented a paper at a conference in Moscow in 2011 on this topic. I explored the likely causes, primarily astronomical in nature, of climate change, summarized new observationally-based forecasts of future global temperatures based on recently proposed solar cycles which provide amazingly accurate hindcasts over the last 10,000 years, and then used these forecasts, as well as previous knowledge of ice age cycles, to suggest when geoengineering might be useful in avoiding climate destabilization. I argued that a new Ice Age is inevitable over the next few millennia unless humans undertake counter measures using geoengineering given the minor effects of changes in CO₂ levels. A new ice age would be catastrophic both environmentally and for human welfare, particularly for countries in the northern latitudes such as Canada, Russia, and the US.

Although the causes and timing of ice ages need to be still better understood, Greenland ice cores indicate that Earth’s temperatures have been dropping for over 3,000 years, as in previous interglacial periods. I proposed that the next ice age is most likely to start when the cyclical temperatures are likely to be lowest–near the middle of each millenial solar cycle. It is therefore vital that we better understand these cycles and formulate plans to reduce the chances of a new Ice Age onset before this catastrophe happens. Together with an analysis of temperatures during previous interglacial periods, this suggests that the next ice age may start between about 500 and 2,500 years from now.

My presentation can be found on pages 24-34 of a section of the conference proceedings, which became available last week. The 2011 Moscow Conference was on Problems of Adaptation to Climate Change and sponsored by the Russian Fedeation Government. The reference for the section proceedings is Yu. A. Izrael, A. G. Ryaboshapko, and S. A. Gromov, editors, Investigation of Possibilities of Climate Stabilization Using New Technologies, Proceedings of International Scientific Conference, “Problems of Adaptation to Climate Change” (Moscow, 7–9 November 2011), Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 2012.

Anyone interested in viewing a succinct statement of the skeptic case with regard to global warming/climate change can find three short videos outlining the case here. This was presented to a film crew from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation making a documentary on climate skepticism but completely edited out in making the final version aired on ABC television recently.

Ever wonder why there was a Little Ice Age or a Medieval Warm Period? Or why global temperatures increased slightly in the late 20th Century? On March 8 a preprint of Nicola Scafetta’s new paper entitled “Multi-scale Harmonic Model for Solar and Climate Cyclical Variation Throughout the Holocene Based on Jupiter-Saturn Tidal Frequencies Plus the 11-year Solar Dynamo Cycle” appeared with a sophisticated answer to all these questions. The abstract reads in part as follows:

A simplified harmonic constituent model based on the above two planetary tidal frequencies and on the exact dates of Jupiter and Saturn planetary tidal phases, plus a theoretically deduced 10.87-year central cycle reveals complex quasi-periodic interference/beat patterns. The major beat periods occur at about 115, 61 and 130 years, plus a quasi-millennial large beat cycle around 983 years. We show that equivalent synchronized cycles are found in cosmogenic records used to reconstruct solar activity and in proxy climate records throughout the Holocene (last 12,000 years) up to now. The quasi-secular beat oscillations hindcast reasonably well the known prolonged periods of low solar activity during the last millennium such as the Oort, Wolf, Sporer, Maunder and Dalton minima, as well as the 17 115-year long oscillations found in a detailed temperature reconstruction of the Northern Hemisphere covering the last 2000 years. The millennial three-frequency beat cycle hindcasts equivalent solar and climate cycles for 12,000 years. Finally, the harmonic model herein proposed reconstructs the prolonged solar minima that occurred during 1900– 1920 and 1960–1980 and the secular solar maxima around 1870–1890, 1940–1950 and 1995–2005 and a secular upward trending during the 20th century: this modulated trending agrees well with some solar proxy model, with the ACRIM TSI satellite composite and with the global surface temperature modulation since 1850…. Finally, the model predicts that during low solar activity periods, the solar cycle length tends to be longer, as some researchers have claimed.

In brief, Earth’s climate can be explained by solar cycles of 983, 115, 61, and 130 years. Scafetta’s hindcast is spectacular. Scafetta’s paper represents the most sophisticated effort that I know of to explain Earth’s climatic changes in terms of observationally-based science. Unlike AGW-based climatology it actually contributes to our understanding of this important topic, and in my view represents the beginning of the Copernican revolution in climate science that I recently advocated.

For the reasons discussed in a journal article I published last spring, it is clear that the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) hypothesis does not satisfy the scientific method and thus does not explain global warming/climate change. So what does? The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that they cannot think of any natural cause, so in their view it must be CAGW, but of course this cannot be correct given the negative findings using the scientific method. But if there is a natural cause, one of the IPCC’s principal but very weak arguments disappears anyway.

This post will sketch one such possible natural hypothesis that has the major advantage that it much better explains the available global temperature data since 1850 on the subject than all of the general circulation models used by the IPCC in their 2007 report.

A Major Natural Cause of Climate Change Needs to Be Much More Carefully Examined

The possible natural cause is that Earth’s climate is primarily but not exclusively determined by variations in the sun, the source of all our heat and light. These variations may in turn be determined by changes in the effects of planetary orbits on the center of mass of the solar system. As the IPCC agrees, there is also an important effect of major volcanic activity, particularly in the mid-latitudes. The IPCC claims, however, that solar variations are too small to explain the observed variations in global termperatures. This appears not to be the case because of indirect effects that the IPCC chose not to examine.

The best known (but not necessarily the only one) of these indirect effects occurs because cosmic rays reaching the Earth’s atmosphere from outer space increase the production of small particles by more than a factor of ten (see Svensmark and Calder and more recently CERN’s Kirkby et al.). This appears to increase the probability of formation of low clouds, which in turn influences the reflection of solar radiation back into space. This, in turn, appears to influence global temperatures since low clouds generally reflect a much higher proportion of solar radiation than the earth or its oceans do. Global climate also appears to be closely related to various oceanic cycles.

There Is an Amazing Relationship between the Various Solar System, Solar, Oceanic, and Climate Cycles

In fact, unlike the poor correlations between CO₂ and global temperatures, all these effects–of solar system mechanics on the sun, of solar variations on cloud formation and oceanic cycles, and of cloud formation and oceanic cycles on global temperatures–appear to have amazingly similar cyclical properties. So although the system is quite complex and very little has been done to understand it, this astronomical explanation of climate change appears to be a much more likely hypothesis than the IPCC’s CAGW hypothesis.

Current research suggests that the major solar/global temperature cycles include 20, 60, and approximately 1,000 years, and possibly a 200 or 210 year cycle, in addition to the 100,000 year astronomical/ice age cycle. So if, as it appears, the 60 year cycle reached its peak in the last decade, the 100,000 year cycle about 6,000 years ago, and the 1,000 year cycle either recently, or at the latest, in the next few decades, the prognosis for Earth’s climate under this hypothesis would appear to be for a colder rather than a warmer climate. The only major cycle that may defy this shift, but only for the next ten years, is the 20 year cycle, which appears to be nearing its low point. Various observations of Earth’s climate over the current Holocene period can be explained by assuming reasonable strengths and phases for the solar cycles that have been examined so far. The ice age 100,000 year cycle has long been attributed to astronomical cycles. Why not the shorter cycles as well? Why are they alone unrelated to astronomical cycles as the IPCC argues?

The Need to Move Climate Research Out of Its Current Pre-Copernican, Medieval Mindset on the Earth Alone

Unfortunately, the US has spent well over $100 billion on CAGW research over the past two decades and almost nothing on astronomical hypotheses. I would argue that at least 50 percent of US-funded research should be on non-CAGW hypotheses in order to have a balanced program that gives equal weight to all the possibilities. Surely a major portion of this 50 percent deserves to be used to explore astronomical hypotheses. Some of the obvious tasks are to better determine the major cycles of the solar system, the sun, the oceans, and global temperatures, what phase each one is in, and the extent to which and the mechanisms by which these cycles influence each other.

It is time for climate researchers to go beyond the confines of Earth to seriously examine astronomical sources of climate change. Astronomers have done so for hundreds of years in seeking to understand Earth’s role in the universe; climate researchers need to follow their lead rather than continuing to pretend that the rest of the universe plays only a minor role in climate. It defies common sense to think that the sun that provides all our light and heat has little impact on Earth’s climate. But this is what the IPCC and other CAGW supporters do to this day.

Unfortunately, the underlying reason that little serious research has been done on the astronomical hypotheses for climate change is the same reason that the results of using the scientific method in determining the validity of the CAGW hypothesis have been ignored–little funding is available for non-CAGW research. Research follows the money and for several decades the funding has been primarily for CAGW. Until this changes we are destined to repeat the mistakes, waste, and bad policy prescriptions that have characterized the last two decades in climate research.

On November 8 I made a presentation on climate change causation and its implications for geoengineering at a conference sponsored by the Russian Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring (Roshydromet) in Moscow and supported by various United Nations organizations including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was attended by the Panel’s Chairman and Deputy and roughly 800 other presenters and attendees.
My presentation, which can be found under Section 3 here, has since been supplemented by a list of sources and notes attached at the end of it. Some of the major points made in my presentation were the following:

Amazingly similar cycles. There is an amazing similarity between solar system, sunspot, oceanic, and global climate cycles. These similarities are so striking that they suggest possible cause and effect relationships, perhaps in the general order shown. In other words it may be that solar system cycles influence solar sunspot and oceanic cycles, which influence global temperature cycles.
Most major cycles appear to be entering their downward phase. Some important common cycles appear to be 20, 60, 200-210, and 1,000 years in length. Although there is some uncertainty with regard to the length of the 200 year cycle and the current phase of the 1,000 year cycle, evidence is presented that all except the 20 and possibly the 1,000 year cycles have passed the peaks of their current cycles. This means that most of the cycles may be starting on their downward phase after recent peaks.
Explains observed climate changes. This provides a natural, non-anthropogenic explanation for most if not all the observations concerning global temperatures over the last two millenia and possibly during the Holocene as a whole, including the upward movement of global temperatures over the last few centuries, the apparent end of the recent upward phase of a 60 year cycle of oceanic and global termperatures, why we now appear to be in a negative PDO, and the current plateau in global temperatures, and suggests that the next major change may be towards lower global temperatures.
Possible mechanism established. As a result of research by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Henrik Svensmark, and others there is now known to be a mechanism by which solar variations can significantly influence Earth’s climate, namely, by changing the intensity of cosmic rays impacting the Earth and thereby cloud cover and thereby the reflection of solar energy back into space and thereby global temperatures. There may be other mechanisms that we do not yet understand.
Implications for Climate Stabilization. This astronomical hypothesis has substantial implications for the optimal approaches to promote climate stabilization. In particular, the proposal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions appears to have even less promise than under the AGW hypothesis; geoengineering approaches that allow control of both adverse global warming and cooling, on the other hand, look even more attractive. Particular attention is devoted to a geoengineering approach called Solar Radiation Management using the insertion of particles into the stratosphere and to the possible use of geoengeering to prevent the next ice age, which also appears to be governed by astronomical cycles.

On August 2, 2011 Professor Murry Salby, Chair of Climate Science at Macquarie University in Australia with visiting professorships at Paris, Stockholm, Jerusalem, and Kyoto, made a presentation entitled Global Emission of Carbon Dioxide: The Contribution from Natural Sources showing that changes in atmospheric CO₂ levels appear to be primarily related to natural temperature changes, not human CO₂ emissions. A summary by Jo Nova can be found here. As she puts it, “It’s not just that man-made emissions don’t control the climate, they don’t even control global CO₂ levels.” Salby analyzed the annual variations in atmospheric CO₂ levels as measured at Mauna Loa with temperatures and found a strong correlation. The largest increases year-to-year occurred when the world warmed fastest due to El Nino conditions. The smallest increases correlated with volcanoes which pump dust up into the atmosphere and keep the world cooler for a while. In other words, temperature controls CO₂ levels on a yearly time-scale, and according to Salby, man-made emissions have little effect. These findings appear to further support the conclusions reached in Section 2.2 of my recent paper summarizing climate change science and economics and the idea that natural global temperature changes such as those due to ENSO and volcanoes are the main drivers of global atmospheric CO₂ levels, not human emissions.

On June 30 I made a presentation at the Sixth International Conference on Climate Change sponsored by the Heartland Institute in Washington, DC, entitled “Obama’s Multifaceted Global Warming Doctrine Agenda and What Might Be Done to Slow It Down.” The slides from the presentation can be downloaded here in PDF format. They provide an overview of many aspects of the Obama Administration’s comprehensive but ill-advised efforts to reduce US carbon dioxide emissions and what might be done to slow down/stop these efforts. Heartland may soon post the video from the presentation on their conference website.

Today my new paper on climate change science and economics was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, a peer-reviewed journal. The paper is unusual from a number of different perspectives.

Some Unusual Features

· The economic benefits of reducing CO2 emissions may be about two orders of magnitude less than those estimated by most economists because the climate sensitivity factor is much lower than assumed by the United Nations because feedback is negative rather than positive and the effects of CO2 emissions reductions on atmospheric CO2 appear to be short rather than long lasting.
· The costs of CO2 emissions reductions are perhaps an order of magnitude higher than usually estimated because of technological and implementation problems recently identified.
· CO2 emissions reductions are economically unattractive since the few benefits remaining after the corrections for the above effects are quite unlikely to economically justify the much higher costs unless much lower cost geoengineering is used.
· The risk of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming appears to be so low that it is not currently worth doing anything to try to control it, including geoengineering.

From a historical perspective, the paper builds on my Comments on Draft Technical Support Document for Endangerment Analysis for Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act, prepared for the US Environmental Protection Agency in early 2009, by presenting an expanded version of a few portions of that material in journal article format, incorporating many new or updated references, and explaining the implications of the science for the economic benefits and costs of climate change control. It is also particularly noteworthy for appearing in a peer-reviewed journal rather than the “gray literature,” such as a report to EPA, where many skeptic analyses end up–something that warmists never fail to point out. Although this article was not written for EPA, it has major implications for the scientific validity (or lack thereof) of the December 2009 EPA Endangerment Finding and the economics that EPA and many economists have used to justify current efforts to regulate the emission of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, cap-and-trade schemes, and other approaches to controlling climate change.

From a scientific perspective, the paper starts with a detailed examination of the scientific validity of two of the central tenets of the AGW hypothesis. By applying the scientific method the paper shows why these two tenets are not scientifically valid since predictions made using these hypotheses fail to correspond with observational data. (See primarily Section 2.)

From an economic perspective the paper then develops correction factors to be used to adjust previous economic estimates of the economic benefits of global warming control for these scientifically invalid aspects of the AGW hypothesis. (See primarily Section 2.) It also briefly summarizes many of the previous analyses of the economic benefits and costs of climate control, analyzes why previous analyses reached the conclusions they did, and contrasts them with the policy conclusions reached in this paper. (See primarily Section 5.) It also critically examines the economic costs of control. (See primarily Section 3.)

From a methodological perspective, the article argues that economic analyses of interdisciplinary issues such as climate change would be much more useful if they critically examine what other disciplines have to say, insist on using the most relevant observational data and the scientific method, and examine lower cost alternatives that would accomplish the same objectives. (See primarily Section 1.) These general principles are illustrated by applying them to the case of climate change mitigation, one of the most interdisciplinary of public policy issues. The analysis shows how use of these principles leads to quite different conclusions than those of most previous such economic analyses.