The Road To Mexico -- February 28, 2018

Two big stories coming out of Mexico:

• Mexico will elect a leftist for president this summer -- think Bernie Sanders on steroids
• Mexico's annual oil output falls below two million bopd

From PennEnergy:

• Mexico's annual crude oil and gas output has fallen below 2 million barrels per day for the first time since comparable records were kept starting in 1990
• state-owned oil company Petroleos Mexicanos reports on its website that average daily output in 2017 was about 52,000 barrels short of the 2 million mark
• production has fallen steadily for the past decade; after peaking at almost 3.4 million barrels per day between 2003 and 2005
• the drop is largely due to the company's inability to find new reserves to replace aging, shallow water fields

Finally, "peak oil" proponents might have a poster child for peak oil.

I can't imagine a leftist president making things better. But I could be wrong. It wouldn't be the first time I've been wrong.

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WSJ Op-Ed: Good Climate News Isn't Told

Another incredibly good op-ed by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. The article attracted a lot of attention: 425 comments: about 420 more comments than most Journal articles get.

Data points:

• the biggest lie in American climate journalist is that reporters cover climate science as science
• Holman quotes an exemplary French report that begins: “But uncertainty about how hot things will get also stems from the inability of scientists to nail down a very simple question: By how much will Earth’s average surface temperature go up if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is doubled?”
• “That ‘known unknown’ is called equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), and for the last 25 years the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the ultimate authority on climate science—has settled on a range of 1.5 C to 4.5 C.”
• the French report describes a new study by climate physicists Peter Cox and Mark Williamson of the University of Exeter and Chris Huntingford of the U.K.’s Center for Ecology and Hydrology. Not only does it narrow the range of expected warming to between 2.2 and 3.4 degrees Celsius, but it rules out the possibility of worrying outcomes higher than 4 degrees.
• more to the point, this 2013 move was a much-needed confession of scientific failure that the Exeter group and others now are trying to remedy. The IPCC’s estimate was no more useful or precise than one developed in 1979 by the U.S. National Research Council, when computers and data sets were far more primitive.
• this 40-year lack of progress is no less embarrassing for being thoroughly unreported in the mainstream press. The journal Nature, where the new study appears, frankly refers to an “intractable problem.” In an accompanying commentary, a climate scientist says the issue remains “stubbornly uncertain.” 
• No better example exists than their gullibility in the face of U.S. government press releases pronouncing the latest year the “warmest on record.” Scroll down and the margin of error cited in the government’s own press release would lead you rightly to suspect that a clear trend is actually hard to find in recent decades despite a prodigious increase in CO2 output.
• Well, guess what? Taking account of the actual temperature record and its tiny variations is exactly what the Exeter group and others have been doing in order to make progress on the 40-year problem of climate sensitivity. And they are finding less risk of a catastrophic outcome than previously thought.

This is the most important data point in the whole op-ed:

This question of climate sensitivity goes not just to how much warming we can expect. It goes to the (almost verboten) question of whether the expected warming will be a net plus or net minus for humanity. And whether the benefit of curbing fossil fuels would be worth the cost.

And, of course, again, as good as the op-ed, it fails to ask the most important question: to what extent is human activity contributing to climate change?

Back to the most important data point in the whole op-ed:

This question of climate sensitivity goes not just to how much warming we can expect. It goes to the (almost verboten) question of whether the expected warming will be a net plus or net minus for humanity. And whether the benefit of curbing fossil fuels would be worth the cost.

Everything I've read suggests that climate warming will actually be a net plus for the northern tier of the United States, and probably great swaths of Canada and Siberia.

Even Tuvala, the poster child for sinking islands due to rising seas, is actually growing in land mass (previously posted).

Now to read some of those 425 comments.