New paper boosts Svensmark's theory of cosmoclimatology; 'unexpected magic by cosmic rays in cloud formation'

"The result boosts our theory that cosmic rays coming from the Galaxy are directly involved in the Earth's weather and climate," says Henrik Svensmark, lead author of the new report.

Simulating what could happen in the atmosphere, the DTU’s SKY2 experiment shows molecular clusters (red dots) failing to grow enough to provide significant numbers of “cloud condensation nuclei” (CCN) of more than 50 nanometres in diameter. This is what existing theories predict. But when the air in the chamber is exposed to ionizing rays that simulate the effect of cosmic rays, the clusters (blue dots) grow much more vigorously to the sizes suitable for helping water droplets to form and make clouds. (A nanometre is a millionth of a millimetre.) (Credit: DTU)

Unexpected Magic by Cosmic Rays in Cloud Formation

Sep. 4, 2013 — Back in 1996 Danish physicists suggested that cosmic rays, energetic particles from space, are important in the formation of clouds. Since then, experiments in Copenhagen and elsewhere have demonstrated that cosmic rays actually help small clusters of molecules to form. But the cosmic-ray/cloud hypothesis seemed to run into a problem when numerical simulations of the prevailing chemical theory pointed to a failure of growth.

Fortunately the chemical theory could also be tested experimentally, as was done with SKY2, the chamber of which holds 8 cubic metres of air and traces of other gases. One series of experiments confirmed the unfavourable prediction that the new clusters would fail to grow sufficiently to be influential for clouds. But another series of experiments, using ionizing rays, gave a very different result, as can be seen in the accompanying figure.

The reactions going on in the air over our heads mostly involve commonplace molecules. During daylight hours, ultraviolet rays from the Sun encourage sulphur dioxide to react with ozone and water vapour to make sulphuric acid. The clusters of interest for cloud formation consist mainly of sulphuric acid and water molecules clumped together in very large numbers and they grow with the aid of other molecules.

Atmospheric chemists have assumed that when the clusters have gathered up the day's yield, they stop growing, and only a small fraction can become large enough to be meteorologically relevant. Yet in the SKY2 experiment, with natural cosmic rays and gamma-rays keeping the air in the chamber ionized, no such interruption occurs. This result suggests that another chemical process seems to be supplying the extra molecules needed to keep the clusters growing.

"The result boosts our theory that cosmic rays coming from the Galaxy are directly involved in the Earth's weather and climate," says Henrik Svensmark, lead author of the new report. "In experiments over many years, we have shown that ionizing rays help to form small molecular clusters. Critics have argued that the clusters cannot grow large enough to affect cloud formation significantly. But our current research, of which the reported SKY2 experiment forms just one part, contradicts their conventional view. Now we want to close in on the details of the unexpected chemistry occurring in the air, at the end of the long journey that brought the cosmic rays here from exploded stars."

Prof. Svensmark and his team are in the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Institute, DTU Space. His co-authors are Martin B. Enghoff and Jens Olaf Pepke Pedersen. In their paper they acknowledge important theoretical contributions to this line of research, notably from Nicolai Bork of the University of Helsinki.

The above story is based on materials provided by Technical University of Denmark (DTU).

Journal Reference:
Henrik Svensmark, Martin B. Enghoff, Jens Olaf Pepke Pedersen. Response of cloud condensation nuclei () to changes in ion-nucleation. Physics Letters A, 2013; 377 (37): 2343 DOI: 10.1016/j.physleta.2013.07.004

Response of cloud condensation nuclei (>50 nm) to changes in ion-nucleation

• Henrik Svensmark^, , 


• Martin B. Enghoff, 


• Jens Olaf Pepke Pedersen

• National Space Institute, Technical University of Denmark, Elektrovej, Bygning 327, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark

Highlights

•

Measures the effect of ionization on the formation of large clusters (>50 nm).

•

Clusters produced by ionization all grow up to diameters larger than 50 nm.

•

Experimental results contrast previous modeling and theory.

---

Abstract

In experiments where ultraviolet light produces aerosols from trace amounts of ozone, sulfur dioxide, and water vapor, the relative increase in aerosols produced by ionization by gamma sources is constant from nucleation to diameters larger than 50 nm, appropriate for cloud condensation nuclei. This result contradicts both ion-free control experiments and also theoretical models that predict a decline in the response at larger particle sizes. This unpredicted experimental finding points to a process not included in current theoretical models, possibly an ion-induced formation of sulfuric acid in small clusters.

Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of the SKY2 experiment.

Fig. 2. During a typical experimental run, number densities of aerosol particles of increasing diameter were observed as a function of time. Left panel: 3–10 nm (black), 10–20 nm (purple), 20–30 nm (dark blue). Middle panel: 30–40 nm (light blue), 40–50 nm (green), 50–60 nm (yellow). Right panel: 60–68 nm (red). At ≈19.2 days the gamma sources were opened to increase the ionization as described in the text, and an increase in aerosol density began immediately in the 3–10 nm curve (black). Subsequently the increase in number densities slowly propagated down to the larger aerosol sizes, as shown by the slanting arrow. Note that the number of particles in the first bin (3–10 nm) is relatively low because of a lower sensitivity of the instrument to the smallest aerosols. Black curves are an average over 67.5 minutes.

Fig. 3. Steady state response to a change in nucleation as a function of particle diameter, normalized to the particle number before two types of perturbation. (a) Ion-induced increase in nucleation. Blue circles are the experimental results averaged over five runs. The red curve is a typical result of a numerical simulation of the experimental situation using a standard numerical aerosol model. Notice that the expected response from the modeling decreases strongly with particle diameter in contrast with the experimental results. A much better agreement is seen with a numerical simulation in the black curve, where the concentration of sulfuric acid is held constant. (b) Control experiment where the increase in particle concentration is done by injection of H₂SO₄–water ultra-fine aerosols (≈6–8 nm) under constant UV intensity and trace gas concentrations, and no gamma source ionization. Notice that in this case the response (red circles) diminishes as aerosol size increases. Error bars are ±1-σ errors.

Related: The Other Climate Theory

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Stop denying climate science and ACT! (before people realize it’s a scam)

Stop denying climate science and ACT! (before people realize it’s a scam)

By Paul Driessen, September 2, 2013

The full-court press is on. Alarmist scientists, politicians, pressure groups, newspapers, ministers, rabbis and bureaucrats want Americans to “stop stalling” on climate change. They demand that we embrace “revenue-neutral” carbon taxes and carbon dioxide regulations, before it’s “too late” to prevent “catastrophic” global warming, “monster” storms and rising seas that will “inundate our coastal cities.”

Anyone dissenting from this “call to action” is a climate change “denier”—a pejorative devised to vilify and silence anyone who rejects this agenda, by linking our views to Holocaust denial. What nonsense.

All of us “deniers” know climate change is real and has been throughout Earth’s many cycles of warming and cooling, storms and droughts, ice ages and little ice ages. Striations (scratches) on a chunk of Niagara Escarpment limestone that I dug out a mile from my boyhood home memorialize stones dragged by the last glacier that buried Wisconsin under a mile of ice. Countless climate changes have buffeted our Earth.

What we deny are assertions that human carbon dioxide emissions have replaced the myriad of complex, interrelated planetary, solar and cosmic forces that caused previous climate reverberations, and that what we are experiencing now is unprecedented and likely to be catastrophic.

Not one of the alarmist claims is supported by actual observations or scientificevidence. Even worse, the claims are getting more ridiculous with every passing day: “children aren’t going to know what snow is,” crime is rising, oceans won’t smell the same, and storms are getting worse—because of global warming. 

Contrary to the hype and hysteria, our planet stopped warming 16 years ago

Contrary to the hype and hysteria, our planet stopped warming 16 years ago, even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continued to climb. That prompted climate catastrophists to start talking about “climate change” and blame every “extreme weather” event on CO2 emissions.

As I have pointed out before, far from being a “dangerous pollutant” (as President Obama and EPA keep saying), carbon dioxide makes all life on Earth possible. It makes food crops and other plants grow faster and better, loads them with more nutrients, helps them survive droughts, and makes our planet greener.

This trace gas has almost nothing to do with planetary warming or climate change. But it’s worth noting that the United States has slashed its CO2 emissions more than almost any other country—sending them back to where they were 30 years ago, thanks to the environmentalists’ latest target: fracking! And the daily human contribution of CO2 to our atmosphere is equivalent to a penny out of $1 million!

CO2 levels have “soared” to 400 ppm (0.04% of Earth’s atmosphere) not because of the USA or other developed countries—but because China, India and dozens of other countries are working desperately to lift billions of people out of abject poverty. To do that, they need fossil fuels, which provide 80% of the energy that makes modern civilization and living standards possible—and these countries are not going to slash their hydrocarbon use. To suggest otherwise reflects callous contempt for the needs of families that want to take their rightful places among Earth’s healthy and prosperous people.

No one would suggest that the absence of extreme weather events over a particular time period is due to humans. However, recent history certainly contradicts incessant claims that our weather is getting worse. In fact, no category 3 or higher hurricane has struck the United States in eight years, the longest such stretch since the Civil War. With only a couple of exceptions earlier this summer, the US is enjoying its longest respite from major tornadoes in decades. We are also witnessing the highest AugustArctic sea ice extent since 2006, amid the coldest summer on record at the North Pole;record August lows for Alert and Eureka, in Nunavut, BC; and record highs for the extent of August sea ice in Antarctica.

Equally fascinating, most of the record high temperatures that the alarmists are trumpeting beat the previous records, mostly set in the 1930s, by mere hundredths of a degree. Yet, somehow that’s news.

As to oceans inundating coastal communities, Topex Poseidon satellites show virtuallyno rise in sea levels between 1993 and 2001, and the EU’s Envisat satellites show no rise from 2003 through 2011. The steady 2-3 mm per year rise in sea level, it turns out, is because scientists “adjust” the raw data (always upward, never down, for some reason). But even 200-300 mm (8-12 inches) per century, or by the year 2100, is a far cry from the 3-20 feet that President Obama and former VP Al Gore have warned us about. Even Mr. Obama was off a few years when he said June 2008 was “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow.” But it’s one more climate cataclysm that we can erase from our worry list—especially compared to the 400 feet that the world’s oceans have risen since the end of the last ice age.

(Mr. Gore is also famous for misinforming his 2009 “Tonight Show” audience that the Earth’s interior is “really hot, several million degrees”—the core is actually 9,000 degrees F—and for refusing to debate anyone on climate change or even take audience questions that he has not preapproved. Perhaps in his defense, Nobel Laureate Gore managed only a C+ and a D in the only science courses he ever took.)

If it’s “weird weather” you seek, just peruse Richard Keene’s fascinating weather guides, Skywatch East and Skywatch West, for numerous examples of wild and wacky weather in the USA. For more examples, check out the Tri-State Twister and Children’s Blizzard, or consult the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change 2011 interim report, Climate Change Reconsidered. You will be amazed at how different the facts are from the fallacies, fibs and fear mongering you find in the “mainstream media.”

No tax that penalizes people and businesses for using fossil fuels is “revenue neutral.”

One final point. No tax that penalizes people and businesses for using fossil fuels is “revenue neutral.” Any such tax or regulation kills profits and jobs, turns full-time jobs into part-timers, and adversely affects people’s health and well-being. Millions of families cannot heat and cool their homes properly, pay their rent, mortgage or other bills, take vacations, or save for retirement. The increasing stress results in sleep deprivation, poor nutrition, more commuting, higher incidences of depression and alcohol, drug, spousal and child abuse, lower life expectancies and higher suicide rates. Climate taxes and regulations also force us to spend billions subsidizing environment unfriendly biofuels, wind and solar energy.

That’s an intolerably high price to pay, for “protection” from illusory and exaggerated climate dangers.

Climate alarmists are trying to sucker, snooker and stampede us into taking “immediate action” on job and economy-strangling taxes and restrictions, before more people catch on to what’s really happening. This protection racket is one more example of passing a law, so that we can find out what’s in it. We simply cannot afford to let science continue being coopted to serve anti-hydrocarbon political agendas.

Demands that we “stop stalling” on “catastrophic manmade climate change” have nothing to do with preventing warming and cooling, storms and droughts that have been “real” since time immemorial. They have everything to do with regulating and restricting the use of hydrocarbons that provide 80% of the energy that makes modern civilization and living standards possible. They have everything to do with giving politicians, bureaucrats and pressure groups more money and more control over our lives and economy—but with no accountability for the lies, mistakes, job losses, ill health and deaths that are inevitable as US living standards deteriorate, and Third World lives remain destitute and desperate.

Computer models and scary predictions are not evidence

Computer models and scary predictions are not evidence. Basing energy and economic decisions on climate models is akin to betting your life’s savings on a computer model that focuses on middle linebackers and ignores quarterbacks and offensive lines, in predicting the Buffalo Bills will win the 2014 and 2015 Super Bowls—and when the prediction falls flat insisting that the Bills really did win, and reality must be “adjusted” to make it conform with the predictions.

Climate “deniers” and rationalists should support Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) and other politicians and scientists who are under constant attack by climate alarmists, for daring to dissent from approved orthodoxy. Their vigilance and determination are all that stand between energy and economic sanity—and America heading down the same destructive path that Europe has trod for the past two decades.

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If you still believe in 'climate change' read this…

By James Delingpole Environment Last updated: September 3rd, 2013

348 Comments Comment on this article

Put him in the Special Punishment wing. He's earned it

If any business were to submit a prospectus as patently false and deliberately dishonest as the ones used to advance the cause of the global warming industry, its directors would all be in prison by now. (C Jeff Randall)

Does that mean Ed Davey should have followed Chris Huhne into the slammer for his claim to Andrew Neil on BBC Daily Politics the other day that in "a recent analysis of 12,000 climate papers…of the scientists who expressed a view 97 per cent said that climate change was happening and that it was human-made activity."?

Not quite, unfortunately, because nothing Davey has said there is technically untrue. A better candidate for prison, actually, would be whoever tweets under the name @BarackObama. When he Tweeted: "Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous" he was promulgating a demonstrable untruth.

No one has ever doubted that climate changes.

Pretty much everyone – probably more than 97 per cent, even – agrees that there is a degree of anthropogenic input, even it's just the barely measurable contribution of beef cattle farts or the heat produced by cities.

But the dangerous bit? No one has come even close to demonstrating it, there is no reliable evidence for it, and very few scientists – certainly far, far fewer than 97 per cent of them – would ever stake their reputations on such a tendentious claim.

The background to all this – and the "97 per cent of climate scientists say…." meme – is expertly covered in a new paper for the Global Warming Policy Foundation by Andrew Montford.

In a sane world it wouldn't have needed writing. An obscure green political activist called John Cook and a few of his eco-cronies produced a pseudo-scientific paper so riddled with flaws that it ought to have been tossed straight in the bin. Instead, it was bigged up by a compliant mainstream media, a desperate and propaganda-hungry green industry, and by the US President as a vitally significant meta-analysis offering indisputable proof of the scientific "consensus" on "climate change."

Montford concludes:

The consensus as described by the survey is virtually meaningless and tells us nothing about the current state of scientific opinion beyond the trivial observation that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that human activities have warmed the planet to some unspecified extent. The survey methodology therefore fails to address the key points that are in dispute in the global warming debate."

So how do the bastards go on getting away with it? Jamie Whyte provides a fascinating, erudite and original answer in his new paper for the Institute of Economic Affairs – Quack Policy.

(And for a summary of the lefty reaction so far, see here)

In it, he exposes the "rhetorical bluster" used, inter alia, by the climate alarmist establishment to make their case sound stronger and more trustworthily "scientific" than it really is. He is especially sceptical of those who try to advance their cause with the weasel phrase "evidence-based" policy.

"They are partial in their accounting for costs and benefits; they ignore substitution effects; they pretend that mathematical precision is evidence; they confound risk and uncertainty; and they exaggerate the certainty warranted by the available evidence. Having committed such errors, they obscure them with grandiose irrelevancies about peer-reviewed publication, consensus among scientists and the proclamations of official scientific committees."

For Whyte – an economist as well as a philosopher – the fundamental flaw in the warmist argument is its failure to a use a realistic discount rate.

None of the projected disastrous effects of climate change exists in the present but only in an imaginary future (which may never come to pass: these are only unverifiable computer model "projections", remember). So we ought, when considering our expensive prevention/mitigation policies, factor in the key point that "future generations" are going to be richer than we are and therefore better able to pay for any problems that "climate change" may cause them.

But the alarmists cannot afford to admit this, for to do so would be fatally to weaken their case that the time for action is now and that any delay will be fatal. Their emphasis on their imminence of catastrophe is designed to preclude rational analysis, so as to railroad through policies before more temperate heads notice their flaws.

In order to give this catastrophism more credibility, alarmists are wont to appeal to the authority of the "consensus.' (Which is why, of course, the warmist establishment made such a meal of the Cook paper above).

Again, Whyte finds a fatal flaw in this line of argument:

The climate models that predict AGW have not been tested and they are not mere entailments of well-known physics and chemistry. Why, then, do scientists have such high levels of confidence in them? In other words, if a scientific consensus really does exist, this is what needs to be explained. It cannot explain itself, nor justify itself.

Good point. And I'd love to hear a convincing answer to this from the numerous well-known scientists who have used their prestige or their celebrity or their presumed expertise to help push the great climate change scare. I'm thinking here of everyone from Lord Winston and Sir Paul Nurse to science-background celebs such as Ben Goldacre, Simon Singh and Dara O'Briain, all of whom on various occasions have purported to know that "climate change" is a major problem because apparently there is some kind of "consensus" among scientists.

Whyte elucidates further:

We do not have confidence in the predictions of physics because physicists say we should. Rather, our confidence is founded on the extraordinary success of physics. Physical theory does not merely allow us to anticipate the existence and location of previously unobserved planets or the speed at which little trolleys will travel across school science laboratories; it allows us to build televisions, space ships, microwave ovens and so on. Physicists inherit their credibility from physics, not vice versa. That is why their special credibility is restricted to physicists.

Those who build climate models are scientists. But their branch of science has no success with which to impress us, neither in its predictions nor in its applications. In the absence of such success, their assertions of confidence should carry little weight. Especially when such assertions are predictable even in the absence of proper grounds for confidence.

Whyte is right. The idea that the catastrophic climate change industry can derive any authority from real science is an insult to real science.

By way of further confirmation, you might care to read this superb recent essay from Dr Richard Lindzen, which you can reach via Watts Up With That?. He argues that mainstream climate science is currently akin to Lysenkoism and that its adherents have more in common with religious zealots than scrupulous seekers-after-truth.

“Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly. It has also been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions. How can one escape from the Iron Triangle when it produces flawed science that is immensely influential and is forcing catastrophic public policy?”

Right, snivelling, mendacious, corrupt, shrivelled-and-syphilitic-membered, pseudo-scientific, rabid climate trolls. Let's be hearing your pitiful excuses….

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New paper finds cold weather increases heart attacks, no relationship between air pollution & heart attacks

Correlation between weekly incidence of AMI [Acute Myocardial Infarcts] and minimal temperature. (Credit: Image courtesy of European Society of Cardiology)

Cold Weather Produces More Heart Attacks, Researchers Find



Sep. 1, 2013 — Cold weather leads to more heart attacks, according to research presented at ESC Congress 2013 today by Professor Marc Claeys from Belgium. The multifactorial study of nearly 16,000 patients found no relationship between heart attacks and air pollution.



Professor Claeys said: "Air pollution and temperature changes are the most frequently reported environmental triggers for acute myocardial infarction (AMI). Epidemiologic studies have focused mainly on one environmental condition, but most environmental triggers are related to each other and may attenuate or reinforce the triggering effect of a single environmental factor."He added: "Better knowledge of the impact of environment on AMI will help medical care providers and policy makers to optimise prevention strategies for a target risk population." The present study evaluated the independent environmental triggers of AMI in a multifactorial nationwide environmental model. Weekly counts of AMI patients that underwent primary percutaneous coronary intervention (pPCI) during 2006-2009 in 32 Belgian PCI centres were extracted from the national PCI database.



AMI counts were correlated with average weekly meteorological data obtained from daily measurements in 73 meteorological sites, equally distributed in Belgium. The following meteorological measures were investigated: air pollution expressed as particulate matter both less than 10µM (PM10) and less than 2.5µM (PM2.5), black smoke, temperature and relative humidity.



During the study period a total of 15,964 AMI patients (mean age 63 years, 24.8% female) were admitted with a weekly average admission rate of 77 +/- 11 patients. Time series and univariate analysis revealed a significant positive correlation between AMI and air pollution and an inverse correlation between AMI and temperature.



Multivariate analysis showed that only temperature was significantly correlated with AMI, which increased by 7% for each 10°C decrease in minimal temperature (odds ratio [OR]=1.07, 95% confidence interval [CI]=1.04-1.11), and that there was no significant effect of air pollution (OR=1.01, 95%CI=1.00-1.02).



Professor Claeys said: "Additional analysis showed that the triggering effect of low temperature was also present outside the winter period. Apparently, smaller differences in temperature between indoor and outdoor can also precipitate AMI. In addition, below a minimal temperature of 10°C there is no additional effect of temperature decrease on the occurrence of AMIs." (see figure 1)



He added: "A potential mechanism to explain the increased risk of coronary events associated with decreasing temperature is the stimulation of cold receptors in the skin and therefore the sympathetic nervous system, leading to a rise in catecholamine levels. Moreover, increased platelet aggregation and blood viscosity during cold exposure promotes thrombosis and clot formation."



Professor Claeys concluded: "In a global environmental model, low temperature is by far the most important environmental trigger for AMI, whereas air pollution has a negligible effect. People at risk of AMI (for example elderly patients with diabetes and hypertension) can minimise their risk by avoiding big changes in temperature. This means wearing suitable clothes when going from the warm indoors to the colder outdoors, even beyond winter time."

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Why the forthcoming UN IPCC Report is already toast

The IPCC is set to release its latest Assessment Report 5 [AR5] in about 1 month, yet the report will be dead on arrival and hopelessly out-of-date in light of recent inconvenient peer-reviewed papers published after the cut-off date for inclusion, as well as papers published before the cut-off date which the UN continues to ignore. 



Since almost the entire report hinges on the output of climate models, and those models have recently been  falsified at a confidence level of >98% over the past 15 years, and falsified at a confidence level of 90% over the past 20 years, the entire report and its Summary for Policymakers are already invalidated even before publication. Every single one of the 73 IPCC climate models in the upcoming report exaggerate global warming. Even the IPCC admits the models have not been validated and that they don't even know how to validate the models. 



Several recent peer-reviewed papers have lowered climate sensitivity estimates to a third to one-half [or less] than assumed by the IPCC models. 



In addition, US & EU envoys are pressuring the UN to explain why the leaked AR5 report doesn't explain why there has been no global warming for past 15-20 years, which no climate model predicted. 



Furthermore, the leaked report claims an increased confidence of 95% without any basis in statistical analysis or explanation why warming has stopped, removing all doubt that the AR5 is a political document, not scientific. 

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Paul Ehrlich's Real Population Bomb

Book Review: 'The Bet' by Paul Sabin

Paul Ehrlich predicted an imminent population catastrophe—Julian Simon wagered he was wrong.

By 

• JONATHAN V. LAST

WSJ.COM 8/30/13: It is difficult to comprehend the hysteria about overpopulation that once gripped America. In 1965, the New Republic, one of America's foremost journals of public affairs, wrote that "world population has passed food supply. The famine has started." The magazine was so convinced of the coming cataclysm that it proclaimed world hunger to be the "single most important fact in the final third of the 20th century." This period, in which large portions of America's intellectual and political elites took leave of their senses and predicted something like the literal end of civilization, is the subject of Paul Sabin's brief, but valuable, book "The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth's Future."

The Bet

By Paul Sabin
Yale, 304 pages, $28.50

Ken Fallin

Mr. Ehrlich, a biologist specializing in butterflies, became famous in the 1970s after publishing "The Population Bomb" (1968), in which he updated the 19th-century projections of Thomas Malthus—people were overbreeding, the supply of food and resources couldn't possibly keep up—and dialed the calamity to 11. Within a few short years, hundreds of millions of people would starve to death as civilization unraveled. Or so predicted Mr. Ehrlich. "The Population Bomb" was reprinted 22 times in the first three years alone, and its author would appear as Johnny Carson's guest on "The Tonight Show" at least 20 times, becoming a national figure and an influential player in Democratic politics. Mr. Ehrlich's ideas attracted a remarkable number of passionate adherents. They also attracted the scornful criticism of a little-known economist named Julian Simon.

When he began exploring demographics, Simon, too, had been concerned about overpopulation. But the more he studied the subject, the more he became convinced that Mr. Ehrlich's thesis was fundamentally flawed. Mr. Ehrlich believed that the laws of nature that governed insects also applied to humans, that natural constraints created cycles of population booms and busts. Simon believed that man's rational powers—and the economies man constructed—made those laws nearly obsolete.

So in 1980 Simon made Mr. Ehrlich a bet. If Mr. Ehrlich's predictions about overpopulation and the depletion of resources were correct, Simon said, then over the next decade the prices of commodities would rise as they became more scarce. Simon contended that, because markets spur innovation and create efficiencies, commodity prices would fall. He proposed that each party put up $1,000 to purchase a basket of five commodities. If the prices of these went down, Mr. Ehrlich would pay Simon the difference between the 1980 and 1990 prices. If the prices went up, Simon would pay. This meant that Mr. Ehrlich's exposure was limited while Simon's was theoretically infinite.

Simon even allowed Mr. Ehrlich to rig the terms of the bet in his favor: Mr. Ehrlich was allowed to select the five commodities that would be the yardstick. Consulting two colleagues, John Holdren and John Harte, Mr. Ehrlich chose chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten, each of which his team supposed was especially likely to become scarce. As they settled on their terms, Mr. Sabin notes, Messrs. Ehrlich, Holdren and Harte "felt confident that they would prevail."

They didn't. In October 1990, Mr. Ehrlich mailed a check for $576.07 to Simon. Mr. Sabin diplomatically reports that "there was no note." Although world population had increased by 800 million during the term of the wager, the prices for the five metals had decreased by more than 50%. And they did so for precisely the reasons Simon predicted—technological innovation and conservation spurred on by the market.

Mr. Ehrlich was more than a sore loser. In 1995, he told this paper: "If Simon disappeared from the face of the Earth, that would be great for humanity." (Simon would die in 1998.) This comment wasn't out of character. "The Bet" is filled chockablock with Mr. Ehrlich's outbursts—calling those who disagree with him "idiots," "fools," "morons," "clowns" and worse. His righteous zeal is matched by both his viciousness in disagreement and his utter imperviousness to contrary evidence. For example, he has criticized the scientists behind the historic Green Revolution in agriculture—men like Norman Borlaug, who fed poor people the world over through the creation of scientific farming—as "narrow-minded colleagues who are proposing idiotic panaceas to solve the food problem."

Mr. Sabin's portrait of Mr. Ehrlich suggests that he is among the more pernicious figures in the last century of American public life. As Mr. Sabin shows, he pushed an authoritarian vision of America, proposing "luxury taxes" on items such as diapers and bottles and refusing to rule out the use of coercive force in order to prevent Americans from having children. In many ways, Mr. Ehrlich was an early instigator of the worst aspects of America's culture wars. This picture is all the more damning because Mr. Sabin paints it not with malice but with sympathy. A history professor at Yale, Mr. Sabin shares Mr. Ehrlich's devotion to environmentalism. Yet this affinity doesn't prevent Mr. Sabin from being clear-eyed.

At heart, "The Bet" is about not just a conflict of men; it is about a conflict of disciplines, pitting ecologists against economists. Mr. Sabin cautiously posits that neither side has been completely vindicated by the events of the past 40 years. But this may be charity on his part: While not everything Simon predicted has come to pass, in the main he has been vindicated. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow put it, "the world has been exhausting its exhaustible resources since the first cave-man chipped a flint."

Mr. Ehrlich may have been defeated in the wager, but he has continued to flourish in the public realm. The great mystery left unsolved by "The Bet" is why Paul Ehrlich and his confederates have paid so small a price for their mistakes. And perhaps even been rewarded for them. In 1990, just as Mr. Ehrlich was mailing his check to Simon, the MacArthur Foundation awarded him one of its "genius" grants. And 20 years later his partner in the wager, John Holdren, was appointed by President Obama to be director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

—Mr. Last is a senior writer at the Weekly Standard and the author of "What to Expect When No One's Expecting."

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New paper finds another non-hockey-stick in Tibet; temperatures during the Little Ice Age warmer than in 2000

A paper published today in Quaternary Research reconstructs temperatures in Tibet over the past 563 years and finds another non-hockey-stick with temperatures during the Little Ice Age at ~1550 AD warmer than at the end of the record in 2000. The paper adds to the peer-reviewed publications of over 1,200 scientists finding non-hockey-sticks around the globe. The authors find, "The temperature variability in this area may be affected by ENSO, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and solar activity," [What?, not AGW?!]

Bottom graph shows temperature reconstruction over the past 563 years. Note the Medieval Warming Period was ~1000 years ago and is not shown in this reconstruction. Top graph shows reconstructed temperatures compared to actual observed temperatures.

Early-summer temperature variations over the past 563 yr inferred from tree rings in the Shaluli Mountains, southeastern Tibet Plateau

• Yang Deng^a, 


• Xiaohua Gou^a, , , 


• Linlin Gao^a, 


• Tao Yang^a, 


• Meixue Yang^b

• ^a MOE Key Laboratory of Western China’s Environmental Systems, Collaborative Innovation Centre for Arid Environments and Climate Change, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou 73000, China


• ^b State Key Laboratory of Cryospheric Sciences, Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou 730000, China

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Abstract

We developed a tree-ring chronology (AD 1446–2008) based on 75 cores from 37 Abies squamata Mast. trees from the Shaluli Mountains, southeastern Tibet Plateau, China, using signal-free methods, which are ideally suited to remove or reduce the distortion introduced during traditional standardization. This chronology correlates best with regional temperatures in June–July, which allowed us to develop a June–July temperature reconstruction that explained 51.2% of the variance in the instrumental record. The reconstruction showed seven cold periods and five warm periods. Cold periods were identified from AD 1472 to 1524, 1599 to 1653, 1661 to 1715, 1732 to 1828, 1837 to 1847, 1865 to 1876 and 1907 to 1926. Warm intervals occurred from AD 1446 to 1471, 1525 to 1598, 1716 to 1731, 1848 to 1864, 1877 to 1906 and 1927 to present. The reconstruction agrees well with nearby tree-ring-based temperature reconstructions. Spatial correlation analyses suggest that our reconstructions provide information on June–July temperature variability for the southeastern Tibetan Plateau and its vicinity. Spectral analyses revealed significant peaks at 2–6, 10.7, 51.2, 102.2 and 204.8 yr. The temperature variability in this area may be affected by ENSO, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and solar activity.

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