A NY neighborhood 'begrimed' by bikes

For the Wall Street Journal, though, it is a program designed by “totalitarians,” which has “absolutely begrimed” New York’s “best neighborhoods,” all “so that New Yorkers can feel that they are in Paris and London.” Yes, Mayor Bloomberg is a Euro-socialist dictator! And bikes are so much uglier and dirtier than taxis and parking spots.

Here is WSJ editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz being interviewed by a WSJ staffer who together repeat just about every anti-bike myth imaginable on New York City’s new bike-share program.

It is chilling to believe that any member of that uber-elitest editorial board actually believes “I represent the majority of citizens of the city.”

The myths in that interview have all been debunked by Business Insider (here), most notably that the program has been “sneaked under the radar” — what with “159 public meetings” and “230 private meetings with officials, property owners, and others.”

Let me just add that Washington, DC has had an identical — and very successful — Bike Share program since 2008. But then everyone knows we have been taken over by Euro-socialists.

Or maybe it is Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal that has been taken over — by the pro-pollution crowd:

• Not The Onion: Wall Street Journal Hits “Rock Bottom” With Inane Op-Ed Urging “More Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide”

On going through my old draft posts, I came across this unexpectedly accurate story in the Wall Street Journal from January:

More Droughts, Floods, Extreme Weather Expected With Warming Climate

Rising temperatures in the U.S. already have brought more frequent heat waves, droughts, floods and other extreme weather and scientists expect more of the same as a result of climate change, according to a government study released Friday.

Average U.S. temperatures have risen by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895, with most of the increase occurring in the past 30 years, according to a draft of the National Climate Assessment.

Climate Progress covered the story at the time with this headline “End Climate Silence Now: Draft Climate Assessment Warns Of Devastating 9°-15°F Warming Over Most Of U.S.”

If you are wondering how Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ, home of the worst opinion page on climate in the country, could  get the story right, well, it was a wire story from Dow Jones.

And, purely coincidentally, the author’s name was Cassandra Sweet, which all too well suggests how Journal editors view all such prescient warnings:

• Error-Riddled Matt Ridley Piece Lowballs Climate Change, Discredits Wall Street Journal. World Faces 10°F Warming.
• Bjorn Legacy: Lomborg Urges Climate Inaction With Misleading Stats In Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal
• The Wall Street Journal Does It Again: Another Whopper Of A Lie On Climate Science

Today, the Wall Street Journal editorial board published a gem of an editorial titled “Drill, Barack, Drill.” You might be able to guess what it’s about from the title.

It takes a report from the Congressional Research Service about drilling on public lands, engages in some flagrant cherry picking, shoots out some outright falsehoods, and concludes that the Obama Administration has been standing in the way of fossil fuel development on federal lands.

The truth, while sobering, is very different from the creative accounting performed by the Wall Street Journal ed board. Here’s the reality.

WSJ Says: “All of the increased [oil] production from 2007 from 2012 took place on non-federal lands.”

That’s one cherry to pick. There’s a whole tree though. Looking at the whole CRS report gives you the full story:

When comparing fiscal year 2010 with 2007, growth in the federal share of production was about 82 percent of the total.

That’s a lot of growth in production not on private and state lands. The report also says that crude oil production will continue to be significant, and “could remain consistently higher than previous decades.”

WSJ Says: “Federal share of total U.S. oil production has slid under Mr. Obama to 26% in fiscal year 2012 from 31% in fiscal 2008.”

In fact, oil production from federally owned places was higher in every one of the past four years compared to 2008, when oil hit a record high price of $142.50 per barrel. In fiscal year 2008, total crude oil production was 1,550 thousand barrels per day. The rate of production for the next four years has been: 1,731, 1,989, 1,715, and 1,627 thousand barrels per day. The Wall Street Journal may be trying hard here, but none of those numbers is smaller than 1,550.

The domestic boom is driven by ample tight oil (shale oil) and shale gas resources on private lands. In 2012, Adam Sieminski, the Administrator of the Energy Information Administration testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee that:

Because the shale resource basins are largely outside of the Federal lands, so too is shale production. In this case, the geology is working in favor of non-Federal landowners.

The rapid increase in natural gas production from shale resources, found largely outside the Federal lands, over the last 5 years has significantly reduced natural gas prices and the relative attractiveness of conventional natural gas resources, including those of Federal and Indian lands. (EIA)

Also, most oil and gas shale plays in the contiguous U.S. are on private lands:

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The legacy of the confusion and misinformation spread by Bjorn Lomborg and Ruport Murduch’s Wall Street Journal is delay. In this case, it’s a potentially fatal delay in responding to a purely preventable, but nonetheless existential threat to modern civilization, a betrayal of “our children and future generations,” as Obama put it — JR.

Bill McKibben has a letter responding to an error-riddled Wall Street Journal op-ed — though I guess that’s redundant. This one attacks clean energy and the fossil-fuel divestment effort McKibben supports.

McKibben writes:

Robert Bryce’s Dec. 17 op-ed (“Harvard Needs Remedial Energy Math“) attacking campus efforts to have universities divest themselves of holdings in fossil-fuel companies is interesting for what it omits: even the slightest attempt to rebut the mathematical logic that shows fossil-fuel companies have become outlaws against the laws of physics. Here are the numbers: In order to prevent the two-degree Celsius rise in temperature that even the most conservative governments on earth have committed to avoiding, scientists tell us we can burn enough coal and oil and gas to produce 565 gigatons of CO2. Unfortunately, the planet’s fossil-fuel companies, and the countries that operate like fossil-fuel companies (think Venezuela and Kuwait), have five times that much in their reserves. It’s what their share prices are based on; they obviously plan to burn it; indeed, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars daily looking for more. If their business plan is carried out, the planet tanks.

Mr. Bryce is entirely correct that it will be hard to move away from fossil fuels, an enormous engineering challenge. But the Germans are demonstrating it can be done, and the most recent studies shows that we could rely on renewables for our power upwards of 99% of the time as early as 2030 if we got to work. Which we won’t, if the fossil-fuel industry continues to exert its massive financial muscle to block change. That’s why students in 189 campuses have so far risen up to demand divestment—this is the great moral challenge of our time, and maybe, given the stakes, of all time.

Bryce, of course, is one of the most debunked disinformers on the face of the Earth, who famously wrote (in the WSJ of course), “If serious scientists can question Einstein’s theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth’s atmosphere” (see “Robert Bryce Makes Mockery of Science, Is Mocked in Return“). Hmm, if Bryce can be dead wrong about Einstein, then he’s probably dead wrong about everything else.

Bryce works for the Manhattan Institute, which “has received millions of dollars from donors tied to the fossil fuel industry” and the Kochs to spread pro-fossil-fuel messages.  Media Matters’ post, “Who Is Robert Bryce?” has more detail.  See also

• “Small IS Beautiful”! Robert Bryce Pushes Nuclear Power by Quoting Famous Author Who Called It “an Ethical, Spiritual, and Metaphysical Monstrosity”
• Debunking Robert Bryce’s power hungry gusher of lies

Bryce’s nonsense is not worth debunking in detail — one could waste a lifetime doing that. But given that he claims “Harvard Needs Remedial Energy Math,” it’s worth noting one of his own countless instances of innumeracy, the tired “wind power uses too much land” myth:

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Leading Scientists Debunk Ridley Piece, Even Climatologist Cited By Ridley Says He “Is Just Plain Wrong About Future Warming”

Memo to media, deniers: “Climate sensitivity” is NOT the same as projected future warming!

Projected warming even with (an unlikely) low climate sensitivity of between 1.5°C and 2.0°C from Michael Schlesinger et al 2012. A WSJ op-ed that cites this work absurdly concludes “Evidence points to a further rise of just 1°C by 2100.” Not even close — one of the key math errors in the piece.

Every major projection of future warming makes clear that if we keep listening to the falsehoods of the anti-science crowd and keep taking no serious action to reduce carbon pollution we face catastrophic 9°F to 11°F [5°C to 6°C] warming over most of the U.S. (see literature review here).

The Wall Street Journal, however, has published a piece, “Cooling Down the Fears of Climate Change,” that (falsely) asserts observations suggest global warming will be so low as to “be benificial.” This risible piece by Matt Ridley is so riddled with basic math and science errors it raises the question of how the Journal can possibly maintain its reputation as a credible source of news and financial analysis.

Ridley and the Journal apparently don’t know the difference between water vapor and clouds. They don’t understand the basic concept of climate sensitivity. And they can’t do simple math. Naturally, the climate deniers have embraced this nonsense and spread it across the internet.

UPDATE: Ridley has made an even more self-defaming response at Bishop Hill’s blog and WattsUpWithDisinformation. He doesn’t actually refute any of my points– just repeats his mistakes. His piece proves once and for all that Ridley doesn’t know the first thing about climate science or the IPCC.  As but the most astounding example, in my debunking below I explicitly quote the IPCC’s draft Fifth Assessment (AR5) — “the new IPCC draft report, upon which Ridley makes all his claims” — which summarizes the recent literature on clouds this way: “The net radiative feedback due to all cloud types is likely positive.” Ridley then absurdly asserts “He gives no backing for this dogmatic conclusion.” Seriously. It’s like he never read my piece — or the AR5! And he apparently thinks you can’t read either! I must say it is shocking that Bishop Hill would print such an easily falsifiable claim. It is not shocking Watts would.

I wasn’t going to waste time with the umpteenth debunking of the Wall Street Journal‘s nonsense — especially a piece written by someone whose “family leases land for coal mining”! But one of Ridley’s many basic mistakes is often seen in the media — the confusion of the “climate sensitivity” (to a doubling of CO2 levels to 560 parts per million) with projected warming (from actual greenhouse gas levels projected for this century plus carbon cycle feedbacks). That confusion needs clearing up (again).

First, though, let me start by quoting some of the country’s leading climate experts in an excellent debunking piece by Media Matters, “WSJ’s Climate ‘Dynamite’ Is A Dud“:

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by Dana Nucitelli, via Skeptical Science

Readers may recall a letter published in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in January 2012, signed by 16 climate contrarians, which we dubbed The Latest Denialist Plea for Climate Change Inaction. 

Roger Cohen, William Happer, and Richard Lindzen (hereafter CHL) were 3 of the 16 signatories on that letter, and have published yet another in the WSJ a mere 7 months later.  As we noted at the time, neither Happer nor Cohen has a single climate science publication to his name, while Happer is a member of two fossil fuel-funded climate denialist think tanks (George C. Marshall Institute and Global Warming Policy Foundation) and Cohen is a George C. Marshall Institute ‘expert’ who has previously worked for ExxonMobil.  Richard Lindzen is of course a climate scientist, but quite possibly the most consistently wrong climate scientist on climate issues on the planet.

Suffice it to say that CHL do not have a great deal of credibility on climate science issues, which is perhaps why they continue to publish their opinions in the conservative mainstream media rather than subjecting their arguments to the scientific peer-review process.  As we saw in January, the first WSJ letter was little more than a compilation of many long-debunked climate myths, and the quality of their arguments has not improved much in their second attempt.  In fact the two letters bear some striking resemblances, for example both citing the climate opinions of Ivar Giaever, who we have previously seen has not even done the most basic climate science research.

In this post we will examine the claims made in the latest WSJ letter from CHL, with one in particular standing out above the rest.

WSJ – Home of the Whopper

Just last month we looked at a paper by Lindzen and Choi (2011) (LC11), which claimed to provide evidence for a climate sensitivity of less than 1°C, meaning that if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere doubles, Lindzen argues that the average global surface temperature will only warm a total of <1°C in response.

As we discussed at the time, subsequent research has identified a number of fundamental errors in LC11 which have not been addressed, and in addition, virtually all other research using many different lines of evidence finds that climate sensitivity is very likely between 2 and 4.5°C for doubled CO2.  At the time, we also noted that arguments for climate sensitivity <1°C depend entirely on LC11, because there has simply been little if any other scientific research in recent years finding such extreme low outlier sensitivity values.

“Since the body of research using multiple different approaches and lines of evidence is remarkably consistent in finding an equilibrium climate sensitivity of between 2 and 4.5°C for doubled CO2 (whereas a ‘low’ sensitivity would be well below 1.5°C), climate contrarians…attempt to replace it with this single study by Lindzen and Choi”

As if they were reading our post when they penned their WSJ article, this is precisely what CHL have done, claiming:

“It is increasingly clear that doubling CO2 is unlikely to increase global temperature more than about one degree Celsius, not the much larger values touted by the global warming establishment.”

How is this “increasingly clear”?  The beauty of publishing an article in the mainstream media is that providing supporting evidence is unnecessary – the reader is expected to simply take CHL’s word for it.  We can only assume that this ‘increasing evidence’ refers to the increase from essentially zero studies finding such extremely low climate sensitivity, to one fundamentally flawed study (LC11).  While this can perhaps be construed as “increasing” evidence, it is hardly a strong or convincing case.

Extreme Weather Obfuscation, Again

Denying the link between climate change and extreme weather events is becoming a common exercise amongst climate contrarians, for example John Christy, Roger Pielke Jr., and Steve McIntyre.  CHL join the extreme weather obfuscation party, and in fact refer to John Christy’s myth and misinformation-filled congressional testimony on the subject as “measured and informative” in the process.  Perhaps they meant to say “misinformative.”

Their comments on the issue are in response to a previous WSJ article by Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp, in which Krupp asserted:

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