To Virgin's Richard Branson - A Challenge to Debate Natural Climate Change

 Richard Branson, founder of Virgin this-and-that, wrote on the Virgin.com website: " And climate deniers need to be called out, debated and rallied against; the science is clear enough now." 

So I put the following into his comments section: 

Hi Richard. I have had a standing public offer to debate in the affirmative that "present climate change is natural" for over five years, and no one has accepted my offer. I have exposed all of my arguments to potential opponents - that this is the coolest warm period of the five warming periods since the end of the Ice Age a bit over 10,000 years ago, and Greenland ice cores that show that 90% of the past 10,000 years were warmer than any of the past 100. At the current warming rate we have a long way to go just to get back up to the average temperature since the end of the Ice Age. That would still leave us much cooler than the Eemian interglacial (warmest period) 125,000 years ago, which was followed by a 100,000-year glacial period (our last Ice Age). All of these are proven facts, none are controversial or conjectural, and all are (apparently) not known by you and others, who I label "natural climate change deniers." Will you debate me?

Dilbert Berated for Using Facts (by Natural Climate Change Deniers)

The following is my weekly letter to our local weekly newspaper:

A recent cartoon featured Dilbert attacked verbally by co-worker “Alice”: “I got your stupid email with your stupid link to that stupid scientific study. I don’t care about your so-called ‘facts.’ I know I’m right!”

Like “Alice,” local writers' emotional venting instead of facts doesn’t advance the natural climate change denier argument. Natural disasters cause great suffering, but would cause even more if the frequency of strong hurricanes, tornados, floods, droughts, and wildfires was as great now as pre-1960. Unfortunately, the past half-century of unusually benign weather tricked people into exercising bad judgment and building their homes in precarious places.

Luckily, I’m not thin skinned. Al Gore at theSocial Good Summit in New York last week likened skeptics like me to homophobes, racists, and violent alcoholics. White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer affiliated my kind with arsonists, hostage-takers and suicide bombers. Aren’t my remarks tame in comparison, Mr. Walker?

Mr. Walker exhibits Liberal thin skin. When Tom Elias uses easily detected false “facts” and is believed, don’t his believers qualify along with him as the opposite of smart? I posed the question “stupid” to facilitate their self-identification.

It’s only because facts support us that we’re so effective. Natural climate change deniers outspend skeptics by at least $1,000 to $1; ExxonMobil hasn’t supported skeptic groups for years, and Big Oil money has gone to extreme green groups.

Chesapeake Energy alone gave $25 million to the Sierra Club for the radical organization’s anti-coal campaign. That one grant is ten times more money than the Heartland Institute received from all fossil fuel energy companies in its entire 29-year history, yet skeptics have the alarmists on the ropes.

Alarmist ad hominem attacks fail while skeptical science prevails. Warming isn’t scary when there’s none for over fifteen years.

Chicken Little is a Dumb Cluck

The upcoming release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5) has unleashed Chicken Littles that would have overfilled Petaluma when it was the “Chicken Capital of the World”. Editorial cartoons in both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat featured a “climate change denier” being engulfed by waves of global warming catastrophes. However, much of IPCC AR5 has already been leaked, and it is stealthily scaling back its prognostications from six years ago of the sensitivity of temperature increases to the doubling of atmospheric CO2. It now contains hints that previous certainties are now not quite so certain, inspired no doubt by the lack of significant warming for the past 17 years.

I had already analyzed in my last letter the evidence of slowing sea level rise that can be determined by looking at the 159-year San Francisco tide gauge record. At its current rate of 3.22 inches of sea level rise per century, it will take almost 11,000 years to hit the 36-inch increase that “experts” expect by 2100 (and that some expect by 2050). That would require an immediate increase from just over three inches per century to over three inches per decade. Temperature would have to increase immediately to above the highest IPCC AR5 projections not expected until after 2100.

Rolly Coombs, electrical power generation expert, noted a recent Thomas Elias ICO article where Elias mistakenly wrote that two Southern California solar installations would generate one-third of the power of a nuclear plant. Rolly observed that they would only produce 9% of Diablo Canyon’s 18,566 GwH/year, and I verified that by comparing their 642MW maximum capacity and 28% capacity factor to Diablo Canyon’s 2150MW capacity, which came out only 8%.

Is Elias stupid, or are his readers?

Both?

Winds of Change?

I found this little poem I had written on a scrap of the February 2, 2007, San Francisco Chronicle.

An Ode to Gavin Newsom’s San Francisco Values

San Francisco values

Permeate your life

You claim exemplary virtue

While screwing your best friend’s wife.

After doing the obligatory alcohol rehab routine, he’s now Lieutenant Governor and Democrat leaders feel he’s bound for bigger and better leadership positions.

They’re probably right, although Wiener and Spitzer found less forgiveness than the typical Democrat candidate has come to expect.

So too Jesse Jackson, Jr.

Are winds of change blowing in Democrat politics?

Chicken Little Lives!

Chicken Little is the alarmist spokesperson for climate change, so it’s no wonder that every aspect of natural climate change and weather is cast in Apocalyptic terms.

How about those hurricanes? Over the last five hurricane seasons, the US has had a total of three hurricane strikes – Irene, Issac and Sandy (Actually only two, since Sandy didn’t have hurricane force winds when it made its US landfall). This few hurricanes has happened only twice before – in 1984 and 1866. (tinyurl.com/nq6kedz)

Rising sea levels? Recent San Francisco Chronicle articles featured a full “Chicken Little”, predicting sea level rise of over three feet by 2100. However, if an intrepid reporter strolled near the Golden Gate Bridge, they could read the longest tide record in the Western Hemisphere (or go to tinyurl.com/pa957yv). There they would find that from June 30, 1854 to the present, the annual mean sea level has risen from 6950mm to 7080mm, or five inches (3.22”/century), and that the rate of rise has slowed since 1990. At the average rate, it will take over 1,100 years to increase three feet.  

In similar fashion, global temperature hasn’t increased in 17 years, tornadoes are at a low both in frequency and strength, and forest fires have diminished.

Chicken Little had more proof of calamity than today’s climate alarmists.

Unprecedented? No Way!

In an Ed. Note to my August 30 letter “Unprecedented?”, the ICO Editor erroneously stated that Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New Jersey, but by then Sandy had diminished to “post-tropical cyclone” strength. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that Sandy wasn’t a hurricane when it hit the US.

Hurricane insurance policies have deductibles that would have been triggered if Sandy had still been a named hurricane at the time of landfall, and if hurricane warnings were in effect. However, neither of those conditions were met.

The ICO compared “apples to oranges” to call Sandy the second costliest “hurricane” in US history. When adjusted not only for inflation, but for population and city growth and higher living standards, Sandy is actually only sixth in terms of dollar losses (Katrina is second). In terms of deaths Sandy doesn’t even make the US top ten, or the top 100 for Atlantic tropical cyclones since 1492.

Losses from man-made natural disasters like Katrina – human errors led to the New Orleans levee failures - can easily exceed natural disaster costs. For example, 9/11 costs are estimated conservatively at over a trillion dollars, or over 20 Sandys.  Sandy was also a man-made natural disaster due to building in a known storm-vulnerable area.

The bad news for natural climate change deniers is that, for the first time (since 2002), there have been no Atlantic hurricanes through August, and that accumulated cyclone energy in the Atlantic is about 30 percent of normal.

For “hiatus” deniers, the absence of increased global warming is now 17 years. Central England records show the 2013 temperature is about the same as 1850, at the end of the Little Ice Age. 

It’s hard to blame warming when it isn’t warming.

Hot?

Not.