Why The Frackers' Language "Overhaul" Is Doomed To Fail

Top: Fracking well despoiling water and emitting volatile organic chemicals in a Colo. town. Bottom: Students get ready for global climate strike

Today, as the global  climate strike revs up, it is well to consider the not insignificant role of fracking.  True, fracked shale oil is still a minor part of fossil fuel consumption but it has an outsized impact on the environment and public health. We've known this since the excellent two-part documentary ("Gasland")  by Josh Fox.  See e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/07/gasland-ii-fracking-is-worse-than-you.html

Less well known is that fracking - apart from wasting precious ground water reserves and contaminating the environment with fine particulates e.g.

• A New Pollutant Category Appears ( PM_2,5) And L...

has been a bottomless money pit for investors.  This is  given it takes more energy to generate a quantity of fracked shale oil than the extracted amount delivers.  Thus, the June article in The Wall Street Journal's Business and Finance Section (' Frackers Scrounge For Cash As Wall Street Shuts Spigot'', p. B1, June 7) didn't really astonish or surprise me.. Especially on reading:

"The companies behind the U.S. fracking boom are turning to asset sales, drilling partnerships and other alternative financing to supplement their cash flow. These forms of funding often come with higher interest rates or other downsides  - such as giving outside investors a hefty share of future oil and gas profits."

And further (p. B2):

"Producers have been forced to get creative about financing because Wall Street began shutting off the cash spigot  last year after frackers routinely failed to turn a profit over the last decade."

Worse, only a tenth of large shale companies saw a positive cash flow in the first quarter of 2019.   This according to a Rystad  Energy analysis of 40  drillers.  To sustain  or increase their production these companies had to keep drilling new wells, as opposed to seeing greater production from each existing well .

The piece also noted some companies had become so desperate for cash to jump start new wells that they turned to junk bonds.  The central question emerged:  Why have the frackers - who seemed to be all over the place -- failed to turn a profit over a decade? 

I explained this in earlier posts in terms of the lower energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) say compared with the light  crude oil of the past, non-shale based. I also pointed out the difference in EROEI translated into some bad economics given the lower energy content of shale oil (kerogen) meant the frackers would always be in "catch up" mode so struggling in an energy (and hence economic)  hole.  A less efficient energy source means you have to extract more of it, and at ever higher costs given the innate diminishing returns. (According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in a report issued as recently as May 31::"The average breakeven price of oil has fallen 4 percent (or $2 per barrel) over the past year, to $50 per barrel, according to the latest Dallas Fed Energy Survey." )

The entire issue of sinking oil shale fortunes pivots on the breakeven price: that amount which the recovered oil needs to earn to have made its extraction worthwhile  If that per barrel amount tends to be below what the market offers, a loss occurs and over years the losses pile up. In many cases, as seen in recent years there is the added factor of an oil glut from over production.  In this case one has an excess supply and so oil prices tend to plummet creating a bigger financial hole for an already marginal operation.

The issue first surfaced some six years ago in Richard Heinberg's book, Snake Oil: How Fracking's False Promise Imperils Our Future', ( p.115).   Therein we learned from a report by a London -based brokerage firm,  Tullett Prebon:

 "Our calculated EROEIs both for 1990 (40:1) and for 2010 (17:1) are reasonably close to the numbers cited for those years by Andrew Lees. For 2020, our projected EROEI of 11.5 to 1 is not as catastrophic as 5: 1 but would nevertheless mean that the share of GDP absorbed by energy costs would have escalated to 9.6% from about 6.7% today. Our projections further suggest energy costs would absorb as much as 15% of GDP (at an EROEI of 7.7 to 1)  by 2030."

Now we flash forward to a WSJ Business & Finance piece from Sept. 10  (p. B1):  'Fracking Lingo Gets An Overhaul' where we learn that:   "Frackers are changing how they talk and how they drill to show they can live within their means."   The problem is that  changing the language doesn't really address the core problem: The low EROEI of shale oil which makes it a fundamentally inefficient mode of oil extraction and use.  But what language overhauls are we talking about?  Some examples from the piece:

1) "Where once top shale executives promised to 'ramp up/ production, these days they are more likely to assure investors they can deliver 'free cash flow'."


According to the article this is "the trendiest term in the industry right now".  It has become synonymous with the promise "not to spend beyond their income and to then generate profits which can be returned to investors."

So, in other words, the execs are promising to lowball the costs of their fracking operations because they can't deliver the fracked oil at the price needed for investors to make a buck.. So the interpretation seems to be forget "production growth" and instead look to "discipline" - meaning the frackers will cut more corners to try to ensure costs of extracting the stuff are within bounds.  But this is impossible if the shale oil itself is of such low grade in terms of EROEI.  After all (ibid.)

"Many of  the companies have yet to show they can deliver consistent returns or live within their means as oil prices hover below $60 a barrel"

Again, WHY is this? Well, it's because it costs MORE to extract a barrel of shale oil than $60 a barrel. So  at that price it's a breakeven world and  below that price it's a LOSS.  If companies have YET to show they can live within their means then they never will unless oil prices spike much much higher.  The EROEI of shale is simply too low compared to light sweet crude to support its consistent profitable production.  Hence, no surprise that "shale stocks have hit historic lows with many companies all but cut off from capital markets and many filing for bankruptcy protection."

In other words, the classic losing operation, or "batting on a losing wicket" in Bajan parlance

2) The frackers promised investors they would "downspace" the wells , i.e. move them more closely. In this case, the frackers claimed "they could boost production by placing wells in closer proximity".  

However, .they  found "doing so meant the wells produced less as they draw down the same resources".  

 Quick to parse the lingo, the industry called it the "Parent-child well problem"   but I call it the "not enough shale energy to go around" problem."  Obviously if two wells are placed closer together and the extracted oil from the combo is less than expected it means there wasn't enough there to supply 2 wells to begin with.   Or to put it another way: the energy returned from the two wells is still too low to make a profit because the oil extraction process itself is too inefficient to support the cost. Because the shale itself (kerogen) is too unprofitable.

Supporting this thesis is the revelation (ibid.) that:  "as financing dries up many companies are retreating to the sweetest spots in the best basins and shutting down drilling elsewhere."  Again, why is that being done?  It's because the frackers - with so little capital to work with on account of the oil price being too low, e..g.  to make it profitable -  have to go to the most productive basins to even break even.  Hell, and "even stalwart fields where the shale boom began, including North Dakota's Bakken, are declining in popularity with drillers."  Why?   Because it takes more energy and effort to snag the few barrels left than the barrels are worth!  The amount of energy processing for kerogen, given its cost, is simply too much for the quality of energy resulting.

  As  Richard Heinberg explains (op. cit.,  p. 110):

"Kerogen is not oil. It is better thought of as an oil precursor that was insufficiently cooked by geologic processes. If we want to turn it into oil, we have to finish the process nature started: that involves heating the kerogen to a high temperature for a long time. And that in turn takes energy- lots of it, whether supplied by hydroelectricity, nuclear power plants, natural gas, or the kerogen itself. "

Oil shale fracking is a symptom of diminishing quality supplies of oil, that of high EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) not oil abundance. Anyone with half a brain would know that, which is why Heinberg  refers to it as "snake oil". It simply can't deliver the energy solution promised and in fact its continued use will result in ever lower quotas of useful energy- at ever higher cost.

While we're on the topic of fossil fuel production and global climate issues, let's bear in mind the Dems are not all pure as driven snow in regard to fossil fuel impacts, campaign cash flows etc.. (At least they seem to be better  in comparison to the climate change denying Reeps.)  On Wednesday, the 103-member New Democrat Coalition saw its Pac BP, ExxonMobil and the Edison Electric Institute all max out on donations to this year –then  outline a series of incremental and “pro-market” steps to curb carbon emissions.

 A suite of legislation unveiled on Wednesday would do many great things, like investing in clean energy research and development via ARPA-E and limiting emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. It is not, however, a plan for fulfilling the challenge laid out by the IPCC, leaving the door open to define coal as a potential source of “clean energy” in pursuit of a “technology-neutral, market-oriented standard for electric energy generation” and providing a financial incentive for fossil fuel companies to capture carbon dioxide and funnel it back into pumping out more fossil fuels.

Sadly. Greta Thunberg’s right. And establishment Democrats pushing doomed strategies and policies are denying climate reality nearly as much as Republicans.

Those who want to access all 340 pages of the 'Climate Deception Dossiers' can go here:

www.ucsusa.org/decadesofdeception

See also:

Environmental Policy | Social Justice and Activism

It’s Time to Strike for the Climate

And:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGlDSFrLX4A


And:

Energy Policy | Environmental Policy

The Climate Crisis Means the Wrong People Are Running the World

And:

Energy Policy | Environmental Policy

We Have a Decision to Make. Change the System or Face Climate Catastrophe.

Intensifying Climate Disruption & Ocean Anomalies - Will Big Business Soon Come To The Table?

Even as the "Green New Deal" continues to be hotly debated - with conservatives (at CPAC) yelping the "Greens" plan to take their burgers away - ominous new falling temperature records signal we may be even closer to the runaway greenhouse.  To fix ideas, this would mean an unstoppable climate forcing dynamic from which neither Earth - nor its human inhabitants - would ever return. We are talking about a process leading to another Venus.  The question that often comes up - especially in the financial media - is whether big business is planning to do much of anything about it. So far the only businesses  we know that are taking climate change totally serious - think of actions not just words - are the re-insurance companies like Munich Re.

The graphic above - from The Wall Street Journal- basically tells the whole tale, at least in terms of the temperature anomalies now recorded,  especially relative to the 1951-1980 average. To the right we can also see the annual and smoothed global surface temperature anomalies compared.   As the article reports:

"The past five years have been the hottest in modern records, federal scientists said....Last year was the fourth warmest year since 1890, according to the report by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which track annual climate trends."

Even more ominous (ibid.):

"The report comes after a year of extreme storms, floods and fires across the country, NASA scientists link such extreme weather to rising temperatures, saying that the warming extends fire seasons and fuels bigger storms".

And in terms of the global reach of these effects:

"During 2018 the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.42 (0.79 C) above the 20th century average, according to NOAA's report. It noted record high temperatures across much of Europe and the Mediterranean, the Middle East and New Zealand and surrounding oceans - and across Asia, the Atlantic Ocean and the western Pacific Ocean."

In  terms of the latter perilous thresholds are also being reached, again from warmer temperatures. According to  Laure Resplandy , a geoscientist at Princeton University who led the startling study published  in the journal Nature:

"If you look at the IPCC 1.5C, there are big challenges ahead to keep those targets, and our study suggests it's even harder because we close the window for those lower pathways. A warmer ocean will hold less oxygen, and that has implications for marine ecosystems.  There is also sea level, if you warm the ocean more you will have more thermal expansion and therefore more sea level rise."

The critical element is the fact that as waters get warmer they release more carbon dioxide and oxygen into the air.  As Dr. Resplandy made clear:

"When the ocean warms, the amount of these gases that the ocean is able to hold goes down,"  

Adding:

"So what we measured was the amount lost by the oceans, and then we can calculate how much warming we need to explain that change in gases."

The additional IPCC findings help resolve a long-running puzzle about the rate of ocean warming before 2007. when more reliable measurements from devices called “Argo floats” were put to use worldwide. Before that, differing types of temperature records — and an overall lack of them — contributed to uncertainty  about how quickly the oceans were heating up.

The higher-than-expected amount of heat in the oceans means more heat is being retained within Earth’s climate system each year, rather than escaping into space. In essence, more heat in the oceans signals that global warming is more advanced than scientists thought.

As Dr. Resplandy explains:

"We thought that we got away with not a lot of warming in both the ocean and the atmosphere for the amount of CO2 that we emitted.  But we were wrong. The planet warmed more than we thought. It was hidden from us just because we didn’t sample it right. But it was there. It was in the ocean already".

Given ocean temperatures are rising more rapidly than previously calculated, that  leaves nations even less time to dramatically cut the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide. That is, assuming there is any hope in limiting global warming to the ambitious goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century.  Many newer results show this is overly optimistic and neglecting other factors in play, e.g.

Climate report understates threat

Excerpt:

"So far, average temperatures have risen by one degree Celsius. Adding 50 percent more warming to reach 1.5 degrees won’t simply increase impacts by the same percentage—bad as that would be. Instead, it risks setting up feedbacks that could fall like dangerous dominos, fundamentally destabilizing the planet. This is analyzed in a recent study showing that the window to prevent runaway climate change and a “hot house” super-heated planet is closing much faster than previously understood."

In the midst of all these more recent climate developments it shouldn't be surprising that we learned some of the nation's top oil executives have issued a clarion call that companies "need to actively address climate change and technology concerns that are scaring investors away."  Denver Post, Business,  'Oil Chiefs Issue Climate Call', March 12, p. B3). Still, raising a call or having a conference, is not the same as actual action, given (ibid.):

"Shell is the only giant Western oil and gas company that has agreed to set goals to reduce emissions from the end use of its products."

True, we seem to be a long way from the Climate Deception Dossiers, e.g. 

www.ucsusa.org/decadesofdeception

But alas, we have a long long way to go and there may not be sufficient time to stop the climate change tide even with a Green New Deal.   For example, WSJ columnist Greg Ip has exposed the dichotomy of many businesses which profess concern about climate change, but then "fight solutions that hit their bottom line". ('Climate Change Alarms Business, To An Extent', January 17, p A2).  

The negative takeaways? Many businesses still have to be dragged kicking and screaming to become changelings. Also, "the limited efforts by the federal government under previous administrations are being dismantled by Trump's administration".  Which tells me more businesses - like coal, already on its way out - need to stand up to the Dotard.


 The positive takeaway?  "Many other businesses have concluded some sort of tax or cap and trade system is necessary".  The question remaining is whether global business finally coming to the table now will make an appreciable difference to the fate of our world - the only planet we know is habitable.  At least for humans.

Stay tuned!

See also:

We Have 12 Years to Save—or Lose—Our Only Home

New IPCC Report Confirms Humans Have Very Little Time Before Catastrophe Sets In

Google maps projection of  a +4C greenhouse world -on the verge of being unlivable. 

I have ten great nieces and nephews who will reach a youngish middle age by 2040. But I am pondering now what kind of world awaits them. Will they, indeed, be able to find shelter and prosper in the world now projected in an ominous United Nations report — prepared by The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change.    These dire manifestations are certain if humans collectively fail to change their fossil fuel gobbling ways. Surely, this latest report  ought to have every sentient member of homo sapiens quaking with forebodings.

This is given that it is the embodiment of the United Nations issuing its most urgent call to arms yet  and painting a far grimmer picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought.  Basically, thick-headed humanity is warned  that avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has “no documented historic precedent.”

As if to insert an exclamation point for emphasis, we also learned (WSJ, p. A3, yesterday)  that on Monday, Yale University economist William D. Nordhaus shared the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work arguing for the implementation of global carbon taxes to reduce long term greenhouse emissions.    Quoted in the piece, Dr. Nordhaus said:

"There are billions of individuals, millions of firms, thousands of governments, hundreds of nations, and for them to take action, they're going to have to have incentives.  We can raise the prices of goods and services that are carbon intensive and lower the ones that are less carbon intensive."

This is very sound advice, but now that the IPCC report has come out, one wonders if the window available is simply too small to achieve what's needed. The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.5 degrees Celsius, above preindustrial levels by 2040.  Meanwhile, in the same WSJ issue (p. A17)  one finds a propagandist attempting to impugn Nordhaus' model by referencing the potential costs to limit the temperature increase to 2.7 F by 2100.. Uh sorry, guy, but that train already left the station.  

That would be bad enough but the fake news pusher (a "research fellow at the Hoover Institution") also claimed in that context that the cost of implementing Nordhaus' policy would have been vastly larger than doing nada ($37 trillion vs. $16.4 trillion). Which, of course, is BS. The cost of doing nothing until 2040 and allowing the now forecast 4C rise (more likely 6C) by 2100 will be well over $100 trillion in worldwide costs - from the mega-disasters including massive flooding, fires, to loss of jobs, homes, infrastructure - including power stations. Hence, the propagandist Henderson's take that "Mr. Nordhaus' work doesn't support the recent announcement by the IPCC" is total bollocks.  

Oh, another clown that needs slapping upside the head is Holman Jenkins Jr. (WSJ today, p. A15) who babbles deliriously about "the standard climate sensitivity envelope" and its being applied to "future forecast emissions".  Reading his ignorant spiel it's clear this overpaid hack lacks clue one about what data go into global temperature projections.  Still, even a broken clock is right twice each day so give little Holman credit for having at least the thermal physics guesstimate capacity to realize the IPCC authors' solution of injecting reflecting particles into the atmosphere is a non- starter. It would take an albedo coverage equivalent roughly equal to the lunar surface area to get the job done.

Prof. Nordhaus' work does support the IPCC report,  but look, we have to hit the ground running - and that means immediately (in the next year) retiring 500 million autos worldwide from spewing CO2,. Oh, and shutting down all coal-fired plants.

But after also reading the article in the WSJ Business and Investing section, i.e.:

Traders Bet on Return of $100 Oil

I am not sanguine that consumption of fossil fuel, especially oil, will drop one bit. Nope, we will keep guzzling the damned stuff even as the rising seas drown us or raging fire tornadoes cremate us as the runaway greenhouse kicks in.  Don't believe it? Just stick around - at least until 2040, or better 2100.

Where does the 4C increase come from?  Look at the Guardian UK article from May 17, 2015  which bluntly points out:

"A paper used for guiding future business planning at the Anglo-Dutch multinational assumes that carbon dioxide emissions will fail to limit temperature increases to 2C, the internationally agreed threshold to prevent widespread flooding, famine and desertification. Instead, the New Lens Scenarios document refers to a forecast by the independent International Energy Agency (IEA) that points to a temperature rise of up to 4C in the short term, rising later to 6C."

THIS is the unvarnished truth but you'd never know it by reading most corporate media  releases.   So, in fact, the new IPCC report is basically merely bringing most humans who don't follow climate science closely up to speed.  I guess the reason for the lack of clarion calls is to avoid "frightening" the somnolent public or appearing to always be in emergency mode. Well, newsflash, that's what we have! 

As for the newly released report, it describes a world of worsening food shortages and poverty; more wildfires; and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.  Certainly, alas, in the lifetimes of my great 6 great nephews and 4 great nieces.   Given I likely won't be around by then, I just can't imagine how they will fare - especially as half already live either on an island (Barbados) or a locale prone to wildfires.

Meanwhile, Traitor Trump, who has mocked the science of human-caused climate change, cut the American contribution to a global fund that supports climate mitigation and assistance efforts in developing countries by two-thirds, to $1 billion. He has also  tried to cut government funding of climate-related research — an effort that Congress has so far resisted.

Predictably, the  Dotard White House issued no public response to the United Nations report, which was issued Monday in South Korea at a meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders.  In the immortal words
 of one Bill Shine, the White House communications director:

“Not today.  It’s a Kavanaugh night.”

Right. So Donnie Dotard would rather rest on the laurels of an almost certain Pyrrhic victory than address the number one emergency facing the whole planet. Why am I not surprised?  I guess, like my great nieces and nephews, his doting supporters can go suck salt (sea salt).

So the reptilian spawn Kavanaugh - arguably the most disreputable SC justice yet - gets precedence and props over the five alarm report issued by the UN.    Am I making too big a deal of the IPCC report? Hardly!   According to  Bill Hare, the author of previous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and a physicist with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit organization:

"The report is quite a shock, and quite concerning.  We were not aware of this just a few years ago.”

Well, I was, since the Guardian UK article came out 3 years ago. All the signs and data in fact had been pointing to lowballed temperature increases - leaving most citizens living in a fool's paradise So there have been numerous warning blips that the rate of global warming may be much larger than previously thought.

The bottom line?

Without aggressive action NOW, many effects that climate scientists once expected to happen further in the future will arrive by 2040, and at the lower temperature, the report shows.

Myles Allen, an Oxford University climate scientist and an author of the report. quoted in one NY  Times piece said:

“It’s telling us we need to reverse emissions trends and turn the world economy on a dime,”

To prevent 2.7 degrees of warming, the report said, greenhouse emissions must be reduced by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and by 100 percent by 2050. It also found that use of coal as an electricity source would have to drop from nearly 40 percent today to 1 to 7 percent by 2050. 

Seriously?  Are we really going to be able to remove 500 million autos worldwide? I doubt it. But... when a species like ours is faced with the proverbial hangman's noose maybe it will finally focus attention. Maybe.  As Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University and an author of the report put it:

“It makes me feel angry when I think about the U.S. government.  My kids feel like it’s their future being destroyed.”

Join the club, Mr. Shindell, because my great nieces and nephews feel pretty much the same way!

See also:
Climate report understates threat

Excerpt:

So far, average temperatures have risen by one degree Celsius. Adding 50 percent more warming to reach 1.5 degrees won’t simply increase impacts by the same percentage—bad as that would be. Instead, it risks setting up feedbacks that could fall like dangerous dominos, fundamentally destabilizing the planet. This is analyzed in a recent study showing that the window to prevent runaway climate change and a “hot house” super-heated planet is closing much faster than previously understood.

And:

What Does Science Demand? A Global Energy Transformation With Focus on Inequality of Consumption

Weather Channel's Kait Parker Paddles Breitbart Hack Into Submission Over Climate Bollocks

"Yes, James, you're gonna get fifty of my best for those climate lies!"

It was quite remarkable seeing Weather Channel presenter Kait Parker pummel climate troll denier James Delingpole into submission, after he misrepresented a weather channel segment she did. He integrated it into his pseudo-scientific claptrap about "record cooling"  on Breitbart - the venue for all who believe in fake news.  If anyone deserved a paddling at the hands of Ms. Parker, Delingpole certainly did.  As one UK Guardian columnist put it: "He puts a wrecking ball through any claims the denial lobby might have to being civilized, intelligent or serious, His followers act as an echo chamber, magnifying his nastiness. Between them they alienate anyone who might want an informed debate".   Hmmm.....sounds a lot like Google groups in forums where the JFK assassination is under discussion. Too many trolls and 100:1 noise to signal ratio.

I also had cited this kook before in reference to why so many clueless libertarians in Intertel buy into the climate denial motif. I specifically cited a WSJ article (Nov. 28, 2011) 'Climategate 2.0", p. A13, Delingpole wrote at the time. He claimed that a new release of emails showed that "top scientists in the field fudging data, conspiring to bully, and silence opponents and displaying far less certainty about the reliability of anthropogenic global warming theory than they ever admit in public"

Delingpole  named  Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, and Michael Mann of Penn State University. This, despite the fact that three separate independent investigations found the researchers to be guilty of nothing more aberrant than academic hubris, some mild snark and poor decision making. The last investigation conducted for 6 months under the severe scrutiny of Sir Muir Russell, e..g.












who found that the "rigor and honesty of the climate scientists at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of East Anglia were not in doubt."  The Muir report panel did say the scientists'  responses for reasonable requests for information were "unhelpful and defensive". Those interested can read more of the details here for the  Muir Russell report .

The takeaway point was that NONE of the climate researchers were guilty of the "data manipulation" accusations that Delingpole hurled .

As to why Delingpole is now getting the metaphorical business end of Kait's "paddle", one must refer to the recent Delingpole codswallop (via fake news emporium Breitbart.com) that embedded one of her videos into an article that claimed that Earth was actually cooling, not warming. Ms. Parker wasn't about to have that.

Sickeningly, even the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology tweeted the specious Breitbart article.  Produced by Weather.com, Parker used the actual scientific evidence to completely shut down Breitbart's story. The video came with this caption on YouTube: "Note to Breitbart: Earth is not cooling, climate change Is real and please stop using our video to mislead Americans."

Parker's video, along with an extensive article on Weather.com, systematically picks apart all of Breitbart's arguments. For example, she talks about how you have to factor in both land temperatures and water temperatures to get an accurate measure of Earth's climate. When you do that, instead of just looking at land temperatures, you get record highs, not lows. And then she showed satellite footage of massive ice glaciers melting to prove her point.

The Weather Channel rarely, if ever, gets political, but Parker said she had to speak out when Breitbart actually used her work to promote their  dubious agenda.  She said: "Here's the thing: Science doesn't care about your opinion. Cherry-picking and twisting the facts will not change the future, nor the fact—note, fact, not opinion—that the earth is warming."   Fantastic, now please deliver fifty more swats to his behind that they may ultimately reach his brain.

Delingpole and Breitbart didn't take long to respond, but the puerile nature of the response was itself laughable. Something one would expect from a juvenile who never had cracked open a thermal physics book in his life.  Indeed, as early as January of this year, Skeptical science (the venue for true skeptics) challenged Delinpole's cherry picking tendencies in terms of temperatures, observing:

Delingpole goes on to speak of "the alarmists’ preference for the land- and sea-based temperature datasets which do show a warming trend – especially after the raw data has been adjusted in the right direction".  What he carefully glosses over is that the combined land-ocean temperature adjustments reduce the trend relative to the raw data, and have minimal effect on the 1979 to current trend.


Skeptical science goes on:

"He then accuses the video of taking the line that "...the satellite records too have been subject to dishonest adjustments and that the satellites have given a misleading impression of global temperature because of the way their orbital position changes over time."  That is odd given that the final, and longest say in the video is given to satellite temperature specialist Carl Mears, author of the RSS satellite temperature series, whose concluding point is that we should not ignore the satellite data, nor the surface data, but rather look at all the evidence (Not just at satellite data from 1998 onwards).  With regard to Spencer and Christy, Andrew Dessler says (4:00):

"I don't want to bash them because everybody makes mistakes, and I presume everybody is being honest..."

Yet Delingpole finds contrary to this direct statement that the attempt is to portray the adjutments as dishonest.   Delingpole's claim is a bit like saying silent movies depict the keystone cops as being corrupt."

Adding:

"The real confirmation bias brought up by these folks to smear us is held by them. They are the ones ignoring information to suit their world view. Do they ever say that, unlike the surface data, the satellite datasets can be checked by a completely independent system – balloons? Do they ever say that one of the main corrections for time-of-day (east-west) drift is to remove spurious WARMING after 2000? Do they ever say that the important adjustment to address the variations caused by solar-shadowing effects on the spacecraft is to remove a spurious WARMING? Do they ever say that the adjustments were within the margin of error?"

Well no,  they don't. The universal thread linking all species of climate deniers is that they neglect the fact climate science is stochastic not deterministic (like celestial mechanics), which means they hold data accuracy to the wrong standards. They also tend to focus only on skewed data that appear to make their case. In order to achieve a measurement disclosing that Earth's average global temperature is increasing, there's a lot of "sausage making".  First, scientists must combine thousands of measurements from Earth's surface, taken by land instruments, ships. buoys and orbital satellites.

Second, each of these has its own random errors, all of which must be identified. Not only must researchers comb through the data to eliminate these errors, they must also correct for any differences in how each type of instrument measures temperature. Always margins of error are given, but in most cases the deniers blithely ignore these.

In the case of the noted Thomas Karl paper I'd previously cited in accord with highest temperatures up to that point (in 2015) e.g.

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2015/noaa-analysis-journal-science-no-slowdown-in-global-warming-in-recent-years.html


Thus Karl et al had to dig into NOAA's global surface temperature analysis data to examine how sea surface temperatures (SSTs) were being measured. We know SSTs are measured in various ways:

- collecting ocean water in a bucket and measuring its temperature directly

- measuring the temperature of water taken in by a ship engine as a coolant

- using floating buoys moored in the various oceans

Each technique records slightly different temperatures in the same region so scientists have to adjust the data. In the past couple decades the number of buoys has increased - adding 15% more coverage to the ocean. But because buoys tend to read colder temperatures than ships at the same locations, a measurement bias is introduced which must be corrected for. This was recognized by the researchers and so the primary task set out by Karl et al was to correct for the bias by adding 0.12C to each buoy temperature.

By then combining the ocean data with improved calculations of air temperatures over land around the world, Karl and colleagues found that overall global surface warming over 2000-14 was 0.116C per decade or more than twice the estimated 0.039C starting in 1998 that the IPCC had reported.

Do the denier trolls process any of this? Hell no! Which is exactly why they deserved the business end of Ms. Parker's "paddle".

See Kait's video here:

https://weather.com/news/news/breitbart-misleads-americans-climate-change


See also:

https://www.skepticalscience.com/fake-news-global-warming-el-nino.html

Intertel's Kort Patterson Conjures Wacko Conspiracy Theory On Global Warming 'Alarmists'

"Many people continue to believe the lies and demand that Western Industrial Civilization commit cultural suicide by adopting the crippling constraints sought by the global warming conspirators."

- Kort Patterson, 'Editor's Reply', Port of Call, June/July 2016, p. 6


Okay, look, it's known that one of my pet peeves is entitled members of high IQ societies (e.g. Mensa, Intertel) who feel they can spout off about anything they want - whether on global warming, economic inequality, socialism or whatever ....merely because they are members. There is something about these upper-mid-level IQ societies (I never detect any of it from those in the Triple Nine Society) that brings this flawed trait out in the open.

As I wrote in my post on public misperceptions of Mensa:

"there is such a phenomenon as mistaken expertise or inflated expertise which is very typical of Mensa, as well as Intertel members. Thus, because a person merely belongs to Mensa or Intertel he or she may believe they are qualified to expound on any subject, whether global warming, the financial crash of 2008, or the JFK assassination - without doing the heavy lifting (in research) before opinionating."

The yap before you research syndrome certainly applied to  Kort Patterson - a computer techie and Editor of Intertel's Region 7 NL 'Port Of Call'  in his recent "Editor's Reply" lambasting the entire climate science (real) research community. One is forced to hypothesize that those like Patterson, when they opinionate on topics for which they're unqualified to render a burp,  are themselves failed astrophysicists or even failed climate scientists. Unable to make the cut in those disciplines they content themselves with shooting down the letters, replies, articles of expert members (who actually do have physics or climate science degrees) and act like tinhorn tyrants because they have control of the content of their media.

Such was the case recently after I corrected Kort on one of his ridiculous "Editor's notes"  (May, Port of Call)- but rather than allow its publication, he punked out. He allowed the first three paragraphs then abruptly terminated it and  wrote: "1800 more characters plus propaganda" - before unleashing his own two page "Editor's Reply". This was basically a long-winded, half baked conspiracy theory based on a farrago of already exposed  climate canards combined with his own woeful scientific ignorance. In his screed, which is really all it was, he conjectured that the IPCC along with "disreputable pseudo-scientists" ("the Alarmists") have sought to impede the work of the "real scientists' (mainly the deniers).

Some aspects of Kort's conspiracy theory hatched in his (June/July) Editor's Reply:

1- The Journal Nature "has degenerated into a corrupt promoter of alarmist propaganda".

Interesting, given it was exactly the Nature article by Noel Keenlyside et al that the deniers originally latched on to try to prove global warming had "paused" the past 16 (now 17) years!  For over 8 years they invoked it to attempt to prove global warming was a "hoax". It was only AFTER the deniers' misinterpretations were exposed, see e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/06/george-will-no-warming-for-last-16.html

that they began to castigate the same journal as an organ of "propaganda".


2- The head of IPCC (Richard Tol) "reluctantly admitted" there'd been no "significant warming" for ten years.

But Tol  (when he made that "admission") wasn't privy to the latest research that had found no pause in warming after all.  Tol's "reluctant admission" thus was based on an erroneous interpretation resulting from a disproportionate use of buoys the past several decades. As is now known, these buoys tend to give cooler readings than measurements taken from ships. This was noted by Thomas Karl, Director of the National Centers for Environmental Information of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (NOAA) and lead author of the groundbreaking paper which appeared in the journal Science back in August, 2015.

As Karl noted, quoted in Eos Transactions - Earth & Space Science (July 1, 2015):

"The biggest takeaway is there is no slowdown in global warming".

Indeed, he added that warming the past fifteen years is the "strongest it's been since the latter half of the 20th century". Putting an exclamation point on that, April this year has been the hottest since records were initiated.

A good summary of the paper may be accessed at:

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2015/noaa-analysis-journal-science-no-slowdown-in-global-warming-in-recent-years.html

3- The Alarmists try to restrict participation to just those who can be trusted to parrot the officially approved story line

Seriously, if I hadn't seen this in an Intertel publication, I'd have been convinced it was written by a high grade moron.  Restrict participation? Uh yeah, Kort, to those who actually have specialized in climate science as opposed to computer techies like you, along with engineers, chemists and economists who fancy themselves climate experts. Jeezus Peace.

In many of my blog posts I've also repeatedly cited the actual results from REAL climate scientists, as opposed to the many pretenders! Specifically, I've referenced the scientific consensus on global warming reported in Eos Transactions, Vol. 90, No. 3, p. 22, by P. T. Doran and M. Kendall-Zimmerman which found that (p. 24) :

“the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely non-existent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.”

In their analytic survey for which 3146 climate and Earth scientists responded, a full 96.2% of specialists concurred temperatures have steadily risen and there is no evidence for cooling. Meanwhile, 97.4% concur there is a definite role of humans in global climate change.

The authors concluded (p. 24) :

“The challenge appears to be how to effectively communicate this fact (non-existent debate among real climate specialists) to policy makers and a public that continues to mistakenly perceive debate exists among scientists”


4- Global warming advocates launched an aggressive preemptive campaign to suppress any questioning of their unfounded appeals to authority.

What "aggressive campaign"? Kort's perceptions appear here to be more amiss than my brother Jerry's, venturing from the implausible to the paranoid. In fact, it has been the fossil fuel corporations and allied think tanks (like The Heritage Foundation) that launched all the aggressive campaigns to undermine the genuine science - and brainwash those without much physics background - like Kort- into thinking there was some kind of nefarious plot.

I refer readers to the Union of Concerned Scientists which exposed the sundry propaganda ploys in their recent journals. Those who want to access all 340 pages of the 'Climate Deception Dossiers' can go here:

www.ucsusa.org/decadesofdeception

Over and over in his two thousand word global warming conspiracy tract, Kort asserts the "Alarmists"  are resorting to the fallacy of "appeal to authority". But I guess he might think that because virtually no denier  papers are published in peer-reviewed professional journals. They are generally dismissed precisely because they lack the basics of scientific authority - including: proper data selection,  analysis, consistent interpretation of data, and appropriate mathematical techniques. Hence, their papers are tagged as the opposite of  authoritative science which is in fact  pseudo-science, such as Kort Patterson is peddling.

Only a totally unscientific fool would write the following claptrap as Patterson does (p. 5):

"Changes in the Earth's celestial mechanics and variations in solar radiation are the primary sources of changes in the Earth's climate"

Which is an assertion I'd expect from a semi-knowledgeable first year computer science student, but not an astrophysicist or astronomer.

His reference to "celestial mechanics" is complete bollocks. It is in fact a reference to the Milankovitch hypothesis that has never found acceptance in standard celestial mechanics texts.

It was developed by a Serbian civil engineer (& later meteorologist) who acquired the avocation of astronomy – as a personal abiding interest. This is admirable, but puts him basically in the same class as Immanuel Velikovsky – who was a Russian psychologist – trying to do astronomy but arriving at bunkum like 'Worlds in Collision'. As I noted concerning that work in my July 20, 2011 post:

 " 'Worlds in Collision’ postulated the dynamical idiocy that Jupiter belched out a "comet" with the mass the size of Venus, which then blasted off toward the Sun, passing so near the Earth en route that it caused it’s rotation to halt (coinciding with Joshua’s famous trumpet blare) and in the process triggered the precipitation of carbohydrates (from hydrocarbons?!) – manifesting in the manna for the Israelites. "

Baloney like non-astronomer  Velikovsky's is also perhaps why Milankovitch's "cycles"  appear in no standard astrometric or celestial mechanics monographs. It is the bastard offspring of a non-astronomer and doesn’t follow at all from any standard celestial mechanics principles, equations or theories. (I explained this for Kort's benefit in my original PoC piece that he published, but it seemingly went over his head.)

This marginalization can also be rationally justified (within the astronomically- affected community) on the basis that the Milankovitch hypothesis hasn’t yet been adequately tested (e.g. beyond finding geological correlations - which of course is not causation) to prove itself worthy to compare to rigorous astronomical theories – say like the one for the lunar libration.

For example, when conditions are favorable for an ice age in the northern hemisphere, they’re not favorable for one in the southern hemisphere. How could the Milankovitch Cycles cause a global change in climate then? Also, Milankovitch cycles can only account for a temperature difference of 1° to 2°. How is it possible then that sediment records show temperature differences of 7° to 10°? The 100,000 yr. Milankovitch cycle is dominant in the record, yet it has the weakest astronomical effect  

Moreover, in the record, it doesn’t always occur at 100,000 years – rather it ranges from 80,000 to 125,000 yrs.. How can these variances be explained? Until they are – most astronomers won’t embrace the hypothesis, especially if is bound up with geological correlations as opposed to a consistent model for the changing orbital elements of the planet. .

But it's Kort's invocation of solar variations that truly exposes his profound ignorance. I went through all the reasons in a post from just over a year ago.  As I noted, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/06/new-evidence-sun-is-cooling-salvation.html

"On average, with violent inputs (from solar flares)  smoothed out, the Earth's temperature changes by about +0.07 K (kelvin) over a solar cycle. Compare this to the 1.6 K change (current est. increase) arising from global warming over the past 100 years mostly traced to human use of fossil fuels. Thus, the greenhouse component is nearly 23 times greater.

Even if the solar forcing on climate is enhanced by positive feedbacks the amplification is usually no more than a factor 2. So that 0.07 K increases become  0.14 K increases. The human component is still more important by a factor 11.4, a point made by T. Woods when he emphasized( in his paper 'Solar Irradiance: Recent Results and Future Research Plans')  that the recent results support the hypothesis that "anthropogenic greenhouse gases are the primary contributor to global warming."

Another ludicrous canard compliments of Kort:

"Water vapor is far more effective as a greenhouse gas than CO2"

Actually, no. Kort is a bit behind the times in his physics research! We now know that water vapor is not a factor in the initial positive feedback phase and it certainly doesn’t trump CO2. This was pointed out by Spencer Weart in his excellent article: 'The Discovery of the Risk of Global Warming’, in Physics Today, Jan. 1997, p. 34). Weart pointed out that even a tiny, minuscule amount of CO2 is vastly more efficient at blocking the re-radiation of energy than any amount of water vapor- at those bands. Part of the misconception arose because early researchers, lacking the current technology of infrared spectroscopy, assumed that water vapor bands already blocked out most of what would (ordinarily) be taken by CO2.  They were wrong, as in WAAAAY wrong.

Another Kortian miscue:

"The global warming currently occurring on Mars casts serious doubts on the Alarmists' claim that global warming is caused by human activity."

No it does not.  But let's not tell Kort that, his mind is already made up and he's on the lookout for anything that reinforces his confirmation bias.

But Skeptic Science’s take is direct and to the point:

“It is hard to understand how anyone could claim global warming is happening on Mars when we can’t even agree what’s happening on the planet we live on. Yet they do, and the alleged reasoning is this; if other planets are warming up, then there is some solar system-wide phenomena at work – and therefore that it isn’t human activity causing climate change here on Earth.

The broadest counter argument depends on a simple premise: we know so little about Mars that it's impossible to say what trends in climate the planet is experiencing, or why changes occur.”

SO how was the conclusion arrived at? Skeptic Science again to the rescue:

“NASA scientist Lori Fenton, who observed that changes in albedo – the property of light surfaces to reflect sunlight e.g. ice and snow – were shown when comparing 1977pictures of the Martian surface taken by the Viking spacecraft, to a 1999 image compiled by the Mars Global Surveyor. The pictures revealed that in 1977 the surface was brighter than in 1999, and from this Fenton used a general circulation model to suggest that between 1977 and 1999 the planet had experienced a warming trend of 0.65 degrees C. Fenton attributed the warming to surface dust causing a change in the planet's albedo.

Unfortunately, Fenton’s conclusions were undermined by the failure to distinguish between climate (trends) and weather (single events). Taking two end points – pictures from 1977 and 1999 – did not reveal any kind of trend, merely the weather on two specific Martian days. Without the intervening data – which was not available – it is impossible to say whether there was a trend in albedo reduction”

Reduction of albedo (surface reflectivity), of course, would have implied a basis for Martian global warming.  The ambiguous results here show Kort is jumping the gun on his Martian global warming claims. But truth be told a lot of Patterson's delusionary thinking may be on account of his own straw man fallacy that "global warming conspirators believe Earth must have some kind of 'normal' temperature". No, not true! Rather climate scientists point to only a narrow band of temperatures for which the biosphere is adaptable. Once a runaway greenhouse sets in and the oceans literally boil away, no life can adapt.  And only a moron would insist 212F is a "normal" temperature.

 In the end, Kort Patterson has revealed himself not only as a global warming conspiracy alarmist  (and irrational hysteric) but a committed agnotologist.  To refresh people's memories -  agnotology, derived from the Greek 'agnosis' i.e.  the study of culturally constructed ignorance- is achieved primarily by sowing the teeniest nugget of doubt in whatever claim is made (and as we know NO scientific theory is free of uncertainty).

Stanford historian of science Robert Proctor has correctly tied it to the trend of skeptic science sown deliberately and for political or economic ends . In other words, the supporters of agnotology - whoever they may be- are all committed to one end: destroying the science to enable economic profit and hence planetary biosphere ruin.  Of course, libertarian drama queen that he is,  Kort doesn't phrase it that way but as "Western Industrial civilization committing cultural suicide".

Kort then - as exemplified by his ridiculous quote (top), and paranoia about some giant scientific  "swindle" -   is a perfect example of what one gets when intelligence runs amuck without guidelines or specialty disciplinary critical thinking to ground it. In effect, his recent "reply" shows that high I.Q. , superior intellect, can't be a standard for dispensing objective scientific facts if left to its own impulses to criticize without also examining the scientific basis (and inherent biases)  of its critiques.

See also:

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/thom-hartmann/67895/lying-about-science-for-politics-is-evil

And:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/04/newsmaxglobal-warming-is-22-billion.html