The Simon-Ehrlich Wager at Seven Billion

Back in 1980, the great libertarian economist, Julian Simon, and the prepetually wrong Malthusian biologist, Paul Ehrlich, entered into a little wager regarding population growth and resource scarcity.  They decided on using the inflation-adjusted prices of five metals to decide the bet.  Simon allowed Ehrlich to pick the five metals.  If the 1990 prices were higher, Ehrlich would win.  If they were lower, Simon would win.  With the help of a fellow perpetually wrong Malthusian, John P. Holdren, Erlich selected chromium (Cr), copper (Cu), Nickel (Ni), tin (Sn) and tungsten (W).  Julian Simon won the bet.  However, a couple of years ago, economist Paul Kedroski suggested that had the time period of the bet extended to 2010, Ehrlich would have been the winner every year since 1991…

Given its 30th anniversary, and with commodities in the news – especially oil – I thought it was an apropos time (and TED an appropriate venue) to revisit the bet’s context, outcome, controversies and implications.

Without getting into it too deeply, here are some things worth knowing. Given the above graph of the five commodities’ prices in inflation-adjusted terms, it will surprise no-one that the bet’s payoff was highly dependent on its start date. Simon famously offered to bet comers on any timeline longer than a year, and on any commodity, but the bet itself was over a decade, from 1980-1990. If you started the bet any year during the 1980s Simon won eight of the ten decadal start years. During the 1990s things changed, however, with Simon the decadal winners in four start years and Ehrlich winning six – 60% of the time. And if we extend the bet into the current decade, taking Simon at his word that he was happy to bet on any period from a year on up (we don’t have enough data to do a full 21st century decade), then Ehrlich won every start-year bet in the 2000s. He looks like he’ll be a perfect Simon/Ehrlich ten-for-ten.

In light of the fact that the world population clock recently crossed the 7 billion mark, I thought I’d see if there was a more accurate measure of the increasing scarcity (or lack thereof) of these metals over time.

President Obama’s Dishonest Clean Energy Campaign Ad

19 January 2012

Obama clean energy ad airing in Va.

A new ad from President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign that touts his energy and ethics record began airing in Virginia this week even as Republican blasted him over a decision to reject a permit for a proposed oil pipeline from Canada.

The 30-second spot (see below) makes a case that Obama’s policies have promoted clean energy jobs and reduced the nation’s dependence on foreign oil while enduring unfounded attacks funded by wealthy energy industry officials.

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This campaign ad is nothing but a pack of lies.

Lie #1

Lie #1: “Secretive oil billionaires attacking President Obama”… The Koch brothers have been anything but secretive in their attacks on President Obama.

Lie #2

Lie #2: The ad implies that President Obama has created 2.7 million “clean energy industry” jobs.

The 2.7 million figure is purportedly cited from a Brookings report. The report said that there currently are 2.7 million jobs in America that “produce goods and services with an environmental benefit.”

The clean economy, which employs some 2.7 million workers, encompasses a signifi cant number of jobs in establishments spread across a diverse group of industries. (Page 4)

The report says that the “clean economy establishments added half a million jobs between 2003 and 2010.” So… Obama didn’t even “create” half a million “clean energy jobs.” He didn’t even create half a million clean economy jobs.    The Brookings report refers to “clean economy” not “clean energy” jobs. The vast majority of the “clean economy” jobs are not in energy… And almost all of those jobs were created before Obama took office.

More than 82% of the “clean economy” jobs listed in the report have nothing to do with energy production…

Waste Management & Treatment … 386,116 … 14%
Public Mass Transit … 350,547 … 13%
Conservation … 314,983 … 12%
Energy Saving Building Materials … 161,896 … 6%
Regulation & Compliance … 141,890 … 5%
Professional Environmental Services … 141,046 … 5%
Organic Food & Farming … 129,956 … 5%
Recycling & Reuse … 129,252 … 5%
Green Consumer Products … 77,264 … 3%
Green Building Materials … 76,577 … 3%
HVAC … 73,600 … 3%
Sustainable Forestry Products … 61,054 … 2%
Recycled Content Products … 59,712 … 2%
Green Architecture … 56,190 … 2%
Air & Water Purification … 24,930 … 1%
Green Chemical Products … 22,622 … 1%
Total … 2,207,635 … 82%

 

Lie #3

Lie #3: The ad implies that President Obama somehow played a role in the increase in US domestic oil production over the last few years… That is beyond ridiculous!  The plays and prospects from which the production growth was derived were worked up, leased, drilled and plumbed-up for production over the last decade or more. The effects of Obama’s disastrous anti-drilling policies won’t show up in production data for quite some time.

Obama’s anti-drilling policies began in 2009 and were ramped up in 2010. This is either the most amazingly arrogant lie to ever come out of this jackass’ mouth or an example of incredible ignorance of the oil & gas industry and energy in general.

The increase in US oil production has come from two main sources:

1) Shale plays like the Bakken.

The Bakken shale play has mostly been developed on private property. Very little of the shale plays have been developed on Federal lands – And the Obama administration has actively sought to further restrict development on Federal lands. Apart from the EPA, regulation and obstruction of these sorts of plays are mostly in the hands of State gov’ts.

2) Deepwater Gulf of Mexico discoveries.

The deepwater discoveries that have been brought on line over the last three years were discovered long before Obama took office… Many were discovered while Clinton was still in office. Construction and installation of the production facilities began long before Obama took office. On top of that, much of the increase in production was the result of the ongoing recovery from hurricanes Rita (2005), Katrina (2005) and Ike (2008).

Over the last two years, the Obama administration has almost paralyzed operations in the Gulf of Mexico with an unlawful permitorium and has aggressively tried to hamper the shale plays with fraudulent EPA attacks on fracking and unlawful efforts to make BLM lands unavailable…

This is all anyone ever needs to know about President Obama’s energy policy…

Addendum

The Institute for Energy Research has a good post on this subject… LINK

Dallas earthquake not caused by fracking… And neither was the Ohio quake.

Wow! I woke up this morning to news that a 2.0 Md earthquake struck about a mile and a half from my office.  I was sleeping at home, about 7 miles from the epicenter, and it didn’t even wake me up.   Thirty years as an exploration geophysicist, and I sleep right through my first earthquake!

This morning, I arrived at work and found my office in total disarray – So the quake didn’t do any damage…

Figure 1. Dallas earthquake location and details (USGS)

It’s Worse Than We Thought… Again… “Warming may be irreversible by 2017″

 

 

IEA: Warming may be irreversible by 2017

Published: Nov. 11, 2011

LONDON, Nov. 11 (UPI) — Rising energy demands could result in irreversible global warming by 2017 without strict new standards, an energy watchdog group said this week in London.

The International Energy Agency said in its latest World Energy Outlook, released Wednesday, that a “remarkable” 5 percent jump in global primary energy demand last year pushed greenhouse gas emissions to a new high due to the rebound of the world’s economies following the 2008 financial crisis.

And that, it said, bodes ill for efforts to reach a long-term target of limiting the global average temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — especially with moves by governments to shift resources away from developing clean energy technologies as more economic problems arise.

“Without further action by 2017, the energy-related infrastructure then in place would generate all the CO2 emissions allowed” to keep the temperature rise at 2 degrees or lower, the report said

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What warming?

HadCRUT3 variance adjusted global mean temperature anomaly, 12-month average. Source: Wood for Trees.

Start of “Anthropocene” pushed back to Late Pleistocene

The Million Dollar Bureaucrat

NASA’s Hansen made up to $750,000 on the side in 2010
October 12, 2011 by Don Surber

Government bureaucrat James Hansen pulled down up to $750,000 last year in speeches and prize money. The American Tradition Institute reported: “As it waits for the resolution of its Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which seeks the outside employment permission records of global warming activist Dr. James Hansen, American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center has received the belatedly filed 2010 public financial disclosure of the renowned director of the NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.”

More than half the extra income came from the $550,600 (£372,000) or 50 million yen Blue Planet award from the Asahi Glass Foundation at the University of Tokyo on October 26, 2010.

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$750k in outside income in 2010.

As the Director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hansen’s gubmint salary could be anywhere from $120k to $200k.

Hansen is also an “Adjunct Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.” Columbia’s Earth Institute is a non-scientific, greentard, interdisciplinary program run by an Enviromarxist economist, Jeffrey Sachs. Columbia’s actual school of earth and atmospheric sciences is the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Adjunct professors at Columbia University earn anywhere from $25k to $186k per year.

So, three-time arrestee and premiere junk scientist James Hansen is almost certainly a million dollar bureaucrat.

Hansen’s major “accomplishments”…

He freely admits to modifying data to obtain desired results…

He directs an agency (NASA GISS) that manipulates temperature data in order to produce more apparent warming than even the Climategate CRU (HadCRUT3) do…

Back in 1988, he published a climate model that, when compared to his own temperature data, substantially disproves AGW…

Hansen’s results are far more deserving of this…

Than they are of this…

Canadian Arctic Reconstruction

Using the same basic methods as my Greenland Sea reconstruction, I put together a reconstruction for the Canadian Arctic…

Fig. 1) Canadian Arctic station location map.

 

From Baffin Bay, west to the Yukon Territory, I found 12 GISS/GHCN stations with long, relatively continuous, record lengths with data through 2011…

Fig. 2) Canadian Arctic temperature reconstruction.

The most significant features are:

1. A strong warming trend from 1992-2010.
2. A general lack of data from 1910-1945, resulting in a very noisy early 20th century signal.
3. No data at all from 1911-1921.

 

Warming Island / Greenland Sea Regional Climate and Arctic Sea Ice Reconstruction

The recent return of the Warming Island AGW myth inspired me to build a climate reconstruction for the Greenland Sea region.

Temperature Reconstruction

I performed a GISS station search centered on 71.4 N latitude, 23.5 W longitude and downloaded the 12 GISS/GHCN instrumental records with at least 60 years of continuous data up to 2011.  

Fig. 1) Station Location Map

Next I calculated a temperature anomaly relative to 1961-1990 for each of the 12 stations and then averaged them together to create a temperature reconstruction.  The climate in the Warming Island area is statistically indistinguishable from that of the 1930′s.

Fig. 2) Warming Island Area: Instrumental temperature reconstruction.

Then I took that reconstruction back to 1000 AD with the GISP2 ice core d18O data (Kobashi et al., 2010)…

Fig. 3) Warming Island Area: Instrumental reconstruction combined with GISP2 ice core reconstruction.

The Modern Warming is also statistically indistinguishable from the Medieval Warm Period in the Warming Island region.

Arctic Sea Ice Reconstruction

It occurred to me that there might just be a relationship between the temperature anomaly and the Arctic sea ice extent.  So I went to Wood for Trees and downloaded the historical  NSIDC Arctic Sea Ice Index.  Then I cross plotted an annual 13-month running average of the sea ice index against the average of the station anomalies and the GISP2 reconstruction (Kobashi et al., 2010) and found a pretty good correlation (R-squared = 0.67)…

Fig. 4) Warming Island Temperature Anomaly vs. NSIDC Arctic Sea Ice Index.

Using the equation “Sea Ice Index = (-0.5976 * Temp. Anom.)+12.374″ I calculated a Model Sea Ice Index.

The “Model Sea Ice Index” (white curve) is very similar to the measured sea ice index (cyan curve)…

Fig. 5) Arctic Sea Ice Extent Model: 1880 AD to present.

Using the same equation, I extrapolated the Model Sea Ice Index back to 1000 AD using the GISP2 temperature data from Kobashi et al., 2010…

Fig. 6) Arctic Sea Ice Extent Model: 1000 AD to present.

The model suggests that Arctic sea ice had been steadily expanding from ca. 1150 AD up until ca. 1800 AD and has been declining since ca. 1800 AD.

Next, I carried the model back to the Early Holocene using the Alley, 2000 GISP2 reconstruction…

Fig. 7) Arctic Sea Ice Extent Model: Holocene

This suggests that the sea ice contraction during the instrumental era (1979-2011) is not particularly remarkable.

Calibrating the Model

Realizing that my model has been extrapolated about 8,000 years away from real data, I decided to compare it to some real data. McKay et al., 2008 demonstrated that the modern Arctic sea ice cover is anomalously high and the Arctic summer sea surface temperature is anomalously low relative to the rest of the Holocene…

Modern sea-ice cover in the study area, expressed here as the number of months/year with >50% coverage, averages 10.6 ±1.2 months/year… Present day SST and SSS in August are 1.1 ± 2.4 8C and 28.5 ±1.3, respectively… In the Holocene record of core HLY0501-05, sea-ice cover has ranged between 5.5 and 9 months/year, summer SSS has varied between 22 and 30, and summer SST has ranged from 3 to 7.5 8C (Fig. 7).

McKay et al., 2008

Fig. 8) Chukchi Sea Ice Extent: Holocene.

My GISP2 (Alley, 2000) sea ice model is generally consistent with McKay et al., 2008…

Fig. 9) Comparison of Arctic sea ice extent model to Chukchi Sea ice cover.

 

 Conclusion

“Move along, there’s nothing to see here.”  The Arctic sea ice has “been there and done that” many times over the last 10,000 years without any anthropogenic assistance.

 

References 

Alley, R.B. 2000.  The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 19:213-226.

Kobashi, T., J.P. Severinghaus, J.-M. Barnola, K. Kawamura, T. Carter, and T. Nakaegawa.  2010. Persistent multi-decadal Greenland temperature fluctuation  through the last millennium. Climatic Change, Vol. 100, pp. 733-756. 

McKay, J.L., A. de Vernal, C. Hillaire-Marcel, C. Not, L. Polyak, and D. Darby.  2008. Holocene fluctuations in Arctic sea-ice cover: dinocyst-based reconstructions for the eastern Chukchi Sea. Can. J. Earth Sci. 45: 1377–1397

Michaels, P.  2008. “Warming Island”—Another Global Warming Myth Exposed. World Climate Report.

 

The Incredible Voyage of Neodenticula Seminae

This article from a publication called DW-World was recently brought to my attention as iron-clad proof of unprecedented Arctic melting due to AGW…

Seems pretty cut and dried… But, I had never heard of DW-World, so I looked for some sort of confirmation of this startling discovery. My first stop was Nature…

Warming Island: Just another Warmista myth

New atlas shows extent of climate change

The world’s newest island makes it on to the map as the Arctic Uunartoq Qeqertaq, or Warming Island, is officially recognised

• John Vidal, environment editor
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 15 September 2011

In Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, Greenland has lost around 15% of its ice cover between 10th edition (1999) (left) and 13th edition (2011) (right). Photograph: Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World

If you have never heard of Uunartoq Qeqertaq, it’s possibly because it’s one of the world’s newest islands, appearing in 2006 off the east coast of Greenland, 340 miles north of the Arctic circle when the ice retreated because of global warming. This Thursday the new land – translated from Inuit as Warming Island – was deemed permanent enough by map-makers to be included in a new edition of the most comprehensive atlas in the world…

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