The headline from the University of Arizona News, and many other news outlets said, “Twentieth-Century Warming in Lake Tanganyika is Unprecedented.” The headline from Brown University press release (home of the lead author) said, “Brown Geologists Show Unprecedented Warming in Lake Tanganyika.”

Well, not exactly. The title of the study referred to is “Late-twentieth-century warming in Lake Tanganyika unprecedented since AD 500,” published in Nature Geoscience (16 May 2010). Even that more modest claim doesn’t tell the whole story.

First some background. Lake Tanganyika occurs within the East African Rift, which is a divergent tectonic plate boundary that is gradually separating East African countries from the main continent. The rift contains both active and dormant volcanoes. The lake is 418 miles long and 45 miles wide. Its average depth is 1,870 feet with a maximum depth of 4,820 feet. Portions of the lake are claimed by Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, and Zambia. Fishing the lake provides a major food source for people in the surrounding lands. There is concern that lake warming will disrupt the fish supply.

The abstract of the paper concludes, “Our records indicate that changes in the temperature of Lake Tanganyika in the past few decades exceed previous natural variability. We conclude that these unprecedented temperatures and a corresponding decrease in productivity can be attributed to anthropogenic global warming, with potentially important implications for the Lake Tanganyika fishery.”

The questions I had upon reading this were: 1) Are the temperatures really unprecedented? 2) Do they exceed natural variability? 3) What is the evidence that the warming was caused by anthropogenic global warming? 4) Could there be some other cause of fish decline?

The researchers studied lake sediment cores going back 60,000 years and by using proxies deduced a temperature record for the lake surface temperature. In the current study, the researchers said that during the last 1,500 years, temperature varied between 22.5º C and 25.7º C, and that in the last 50 years the temperature rose by 1.6º C.

However, in 2008, these same researchers published a paper in Science (Vol. 322. no. 5899, pp. 252 – 255) which said the lake surface temperature fluctuated between 27° and 29°C over the last 60,000 years according to their interpretation of lake sediment cores.

I emailed a co-author of the paper, a UofA professor, asking for an explanation of this apparent discrepancy. He replied by referring me to the website of the lead author at Brown University. There, she explained that there was a problem in calibration of the temperature proxies. She presents a graph showing the records after recalibration. It is reproduced below. It should be noted that there are two separate core sample locations. The more recent core was taken closer to shore than the older, longer record. The more recent record initially shows cooler temperatures where the two records overlap. The researchers attribute this discrepancy to upwelling cold water from deeper in the lake. So which record is closer to the real surface temperature?

According to the lead author’s own data as shown on the graph, it is obvious that the current temperatures are not unprecedented, nor do they exceed natural variability. The title of their paper is technically correct only if one accepts cherry-picking start dates.

That leaves the question about the cause of the warming. The UofA scientist replied to my email, “our record only demonstrates a lake surface temperature history, not the cause of that history.” The allegation of an anthropogenic cause, a major conclusion of the paper, was made without any supporting evidence, just speculation.

I am wondering why the paper abstract contains the conclusions it does. Is it time for some scary scenarios to promote more study and more funding?

This whole study purports to be about lake surface temperatures, but it contains very few such measurements from the lake surface. From my reading, the researchers deduce surface temperatures from only two core sample locations. As the NOAA satellite graphic below shows, on any given day, at any given time, the variation in lake surface temperature can be as much as 4º C in different parts of the lake, and that equals or exceeds the entire range of temperatures found in the studies. It would seem, therefore, that any temperature record derived from sediment cores could vary greatly depending on location. Since this study had just two sample locations, it makes one wonder if it gives a true representation of actual conditions.

And about the fish. The current paper says that warming is causing a decline in fish abundance. Yet an earlier study, of which the UofA scientist was a co-author, says the fish decline is caused by land disturbance. “Watershed deforestation, road building, and other anthropogenic activities result in sediment inundation of lacustrine habitats.” “Our faunal analyses suggest that all three taxonomic groups are negatively affected by sediment inundation but may have varying response thresholds to disturbance.” (Citation: Conservation Biology, vol. 13, no. 5, Oct. 1999).

After a year on the job, the Obama administration has learned little about energy. They still claim that “green” jobs will be created in the electrical generation sector if only we switch to more wind and solar energy projects.

Their claim that 5 million new jobs will be created in the energy sector over the next ten years is just not credible. Consider that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the entire electrical generation industry, from mining, manufacturing equipment, power generation, and transmission, currently employs just under one million people. Where is Obama going to put 5 million more people? Will he have platoons of people peddling bicycles hooked to small generators? And in the State of the Union speech, he pushed for job-killing climate legislation in spite of recent events showing that the data have been fudged. During the speech, Obama was laughed at after referring to the “overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change.” First the audience laughed, then Pelosi and Biden, and finally Obama himself smirked at the insanity of his remark. Maybe his speech writers should read the news.

So called “green” energy is more expensive than fossil-fuel generated electricity, so energy costs would necessarily increase. Our economy is very sensitive to energy costs, so rising costs would more likely result in job losses rather than more employment.

According to a Cato Institute study (Policy Analysis 280), wind generation costs are 6-7¢ per KWh vs. 3¢ for natural gas, 2.2¢ for coal, and 1.7¢ for nuclear. Solar power costs 38¢ to 53¢ per KWh. The Cato report also said that the materials required for thermal-solar projects were 1,000 times greater than for a similarly sized fossil-fuel facility, and therefore would create substantial incremental energy consumption and industrial pollution. A major environmental cost of photovoltaic solar energy is toxic chemical pollution (arsenic, gallium, and cadmium) and energy consumption associated with the large-scale manufacture of photovoltaic panels. The installation phase has distinct environmental consequences, given the large land masses required for solar farms–some 5 to 10 acres per MW of installed capacity.”

 The Administration touts “fast-tracking” solar development in the west, but has limited permits to 670,000 acres of more than 30 million suitable acres available.

Wind-generated electricity, especially, is intermittent and unreliable, so that it requires conventional backup generating capacity. Energy companies will have a hard time monitoring and switching between generation sources to meet demand and prevent blackouts or brownouts.

The Interior Department policy does not help wind-power. The Cape Wind Project in Nantucket was to be the first off-shore venture, but Interior will allow the area to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places, thus precluding development.

During the State of the Union speech, Obama gave lip service to off-shore petroleum exploration. During the Bush administration, Congress lifted a moratorium on off-shore exploration, but Obama’s Interior Department has imposed a de facto moratorium while they “study” a leasing program. In 2009, the administration leased less land for energy development than that of any other year on record, according to the American Energy Alliance. And government revenues from leasing in 2009 were just one-tenth that in 2008. Meanwhile China is buying up all the leases it can get, some close to American shores.

The Interior Department has withdrawn most of the offered leases for natural gas in Utah, delayed oil shale research and demonstration projects in Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado, and blocked uranium mining in Arizona. Obama proposed development of nuclear energy. But, last year, in a sop to Senator Harry Reid, the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository was closed, so nuclear waste will continue to be stored in barrels near the generating plants rather than safely underground.

Biofuels such as ethanol require heavy government subsidies. According to the Journal of Environmental Monitoring, ethanol subsidies amount to the equivalent of $1.95 per gallon on top of the gasoline retail price. At present, no automobile manufacturer will extend an engine or parts warranty for vehicles that use more than 10 percent of ethanol content in fuel, except for vehicles specifically designed to run on E- 85 fuel. This means that the majority of cars on the road today in the United States are not under warranty for anything other than gasoline containing 10 percent ethanol or less. Currently, ethanol displaces about 2% of gasoline and saves relatively little in petroleum imports. Ethanol is not as energy efficient as gasoline. A 2006 study by Consumer Reports found that an E-85 vehicle delivered 27% less mileage than a similar gasoline-powered vehicle. A study from Stanford University found that ethanol-powered E-85 vehicles significantly increased ozone, a prime ingredient of smog.

While the Obama administration is all starry-eyed over “green” energy, it is unlikely that solar, wind, and biofuels taken together would ever account for more that 2- to 3% of total energy use. For the next few decades, at least, fossils fuels with continue to provide about 85% of energy.

What the government should do is remove restrictions to exploration and development of our domestic resources. For instance, in 2007, the Department of the Interior inventoried 99 million acres of federal land which it estimated to contain 21 billion barrels of oil and 187 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. DOI found that due to restrictive regulations “just 3 percent of onshore Federal oil and 13 percent of onshore Federal gas are accessible under standard lease terms.”

The Department of Energy estimates that the Green River formation in NW Colorado, SE Utah, and SW Wyoming contains 1.8 trillion barrels of oil in shale that could be economically produced. That is more than three times the total reserves of all Mid-East oil fields.

Off-shore resources are also restricted. The Minerals Management Service (of DOI) estimated that there are about 86 billion barrels of undiscovered, recoverable oil and about 420 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, recoverable natural gas in the Federal Outer Continental Shelf of the United States, but 85% of this resource is off limits due to federal and state restrictions.

The U.S. has vast coal supplies which could be turned into gasoline, diesel, and other fuels. Coal reserves in Illinois alone, for instance, have the energy equivalent of all the oil in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait combined. The process was invented by the Germans in 1920 and perfected more recently by Sasol in South Africa. According to Business Week, Sasol “churns out 160,000 barrels of gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet fuel a day, enough to cover 28% of South Africa’s needs, without using a single drop of crude oil, imported or otherwise.” Cost is equivalent to about $30- to $35 per barrel of oil. This source alone could end our dependence on Mid-East oil.

Investors Business Daily (IBD) points out that China is attempting to lock up oil reserves throughout the world, including “in America’s backyard, Argentina, Venezuela, and Canada, and in a country America presumably dominates, Iraq.” At the same time, American oil companies are being discouraged by government, from exploring and exploiting domestic reserves. IBD opines that “What the world is witnessing is the largest peaceful transfer of power in history. Energy means power, and while the U.S. is consumed by environmental ideologies and climate rhetoric, it is committing economic hara-kiri in the process. China, riding on energy acquisitions with little competition, will propel itself into the economic stratosphere.” Obama’s stated goal of reducing our dependence on foreign oil seems to be based on a green fantasy, blinded by ideology.

The Science and Public Policy Institute has published a paper on Surface Temperature Records, in which the authors document the following points:

1. Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century.

2. All terrestrial surface-temperature databases exhibit very serious problems that render them useless for determining accurate long-term temperature trends.

3. All of the problems have skewed the data so as greatly to overstate observed warming both regionally and globally.

4. Global terrestrial temperature data are gravely compromised because more than three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once existed are no longer reporting.

5. There has been a severe bias towards removing higher-altitude, higher-latitude, and rural stations, leading to a further serious overstatement of warming.

6. Contamination by urbanization, changes in land use, improper siting, and inadequately-calibrated instrument upgrades further overstates warming.

7. Numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years have shown the overstatement of observed longer term warming is 30-50% from heat-island contamination alone.

8. Cherry-picking of observing sites combined with interpolation to vacant data grids may make heat-island bias greater than 50% of 20th-century warming.

9. In the oceans, data are missing and uncertainties are substantial. Comprehensive coverage has only been available since 2003, and shows no warming.

10. Satellite temperature monitoring has provided an alternative to terrestrial stations in compiling the global lower-troposphere temperature record. Their findings are increasingly diverging from the station-based constructions in a manner consistent with evidence of a warm bias in the surface temperature record.

11. NOAA and NASA, along with CRU, were the driving forces behind the systematic hyping of 20th-century “global warming”.

12. Changes have been made to alter the historical record to mask cyclical changes that could be readily explained by natural factors like multidecadal ocean and solar changes.

13. Global terrestrial data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or VALIDATE model forecasts.

14. An inclusive external assessment is essential of the surface temperature record of CRU, GISS and NCDC “chaired and paneled by mutually agreed to climate scientists who do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the evaluations.”

15. Reliance on the global data by both the UNIPCC and the US GCRP/CCSP also requires a full investigation and audit.

A PDF file of this 111-page report is available here:

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/surface_temp.pdf