Global Warming Responses

CO2 Not The Demon It Is Made Out To Be (UPDATED)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Bottom Line:

  1. The Mean Global Temperature has been stable since 1997, despite a continuous increase of the CO2 content of the air: how could one say that the increase of the CO2 content of the air is the cause of the increase of the temperature? (discussion: p. 4)
  2. 57% of the cumulative anthropic emissions since the beginning of the Industrial revolution have been emitted since 1997, but the temperature has been stable. How to uphold that anthropic CO2 emissions (or anthropic cumulative emissions) cause an increase of the Mean Global Temperature?

(more)

This is Part IV of a series from Christmas 2014.

Renown physicist Freeman Dyson says CO2 does not worry him… montage

The climate models used by alarmist scientists to predict global warming are getting worse, not better; carbon dioxide does far more good than harm; and President Obama has backed the “wrong side” in the war on “climate change.”

So says one of the world’s greatest theoretical physicists, Dr Freeman Dyson, the British-born, naturalised American citizen who worked at Princeton University as a contemporary of Einstein and has advised the US government on a wide range of scientific and technical issues.

In an interview with Andrew Orlowski of The Register, Dyson expressed his despair at the current scientific obsession with climate change which he says is “not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to the obvious facts.”

This mystery, says Dyson, can only partly be explained in terms of follow the money. Also to blame, he believes, is a kind of collective yearning for apocalyptic doom.

It is true that there’s a large community of people who make their money by scaring the public, so money is certainly involved to some extent, but I don’t think that’s the full explanation.

It’s like a hundred years ago, before World War I, there was this insane craving for doom, which in a way, helped cause World War I. People like the poet Rupert Brooke were glorifying war as an escape from the dullness of modern life. [There was] the feeling we’d gone soft and degenerate, and war would be good for us all. That was in the air leading up to World War I, and in some ways it’s in the air today.

Dyson, himself a longstanding Democrat voter, is especially disappointed by his chosen party’s unscientific stance on the climate change issue.

It’s very sad that in this country, political opinion parted [people’s views on climate change]. I’m 100 per cent Democrat myself, and I like Obama. But he took the wrong side on this issue, and the Republicans took the right side…..

[….]

He concludes:

“I am hoping that the scientists and politicians who have been blindly demonizing carbon dioxide for 37 years will one day open their eyes and look at the evidence.”

(BREITBART)

We need MORE CO2, not less!

Dr. William Happer, currently a professor of Physics at Princeton University, was once fired by Gore at the Department of Energy in 1993 for disagreeing with the vice president on the effects of ozone to humans and plant life, also disagrees with Gore’s claim that manmade carbon dioxide (CO2) increases the temperature of the earth and is a threat to mankind. Happer appeared before the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee on Feb. 25 and explained CO2 is in short-supply in relative terms of the history of the planet.

“Many people don’t realize that over geological time, we’re really in a CO2 famine now. Almost never has CO2levels been as low as it has been in the Holocene [geologic epoch] – 280 [parts per million (ppm)] – that’s unheard of,” Happer said. “Most of the time, it’s at least 1,000 [ppm] and it’s been quite higher than that.”

Happer said that when CO2 levels were higher – much higher than they are now, the laws of nature still managed to function as we understand them today.

“The earth was just fine in those times,” Happer said. “You know, we evolved as a species in those times, when CO2 levels were three or four times what they are now. And, the oceans were fine, plants grew, animals grew fine. So it’s baffling to me that, you know, we’re so frightened of getting nowhere close to where we started.”…

Must See Interview

Here is a quick intro that I combined with a great visual in reagrds to PPM and how it is benefitial to mankind:

To skip this aside, click HERE…

CONSENSUS

He mentioned most of the experts KNOW how CO2 affects climate. He says he does not and doesn’t think they do either. This has nothing to do with the supposed “consensus” of experts — 97% — who “say” it is driven by mankind. This is known as anthropogenic global warming, of AGW. The myth of the 97% started with ONLY 75-out-of-77 climatologists saying they believe man is the primary cause.

Yes, you heard me correctly, seventy-five.

Another study has undergrads and non-specialists (bloggers) search through many articles in peer reviewed journals, and noting that a large majority supported the AGW position. The problem was that they were not specialized in the field of science… AND… they only read the abstracts, not the peer reviewed paper itself. Many of the scientists behind the papers “said” to support AGW rejected that idea. So the specialists THEMSELVES said their papers cannot be read to support the AGW position.

Another study (pictured in the graph above) tries to save an earlier one with tainted information based on abstracts — a very UNSCIENTIFIC way to get to consensus (that is, relying on abstracts). Not only was this study based on abstracts, again, non specialists categorized them. Yet another study was merely based on search parameters/results. Here is more info (mainly links) for the not-faint-of-heart.

In reality, nearly half of specialists in the fields related reject man causing climates change.

And a good portion of those that do reject the claim that it is detrimental to our planet.

Only 13% saw relatively little danger (ratings of 1 to 3 on a 10-point scale); the rest were about evenly split between the 44% who see moderate to high danger (ratings of 4 to 7) and 41% who see very high or grave danger (ratings of 8 to 10). (Forbes)

Here is a list of scientists with varying views on the cause of “Climate Change,” and here is a list of 31,000 who stand against man as the primary cause.

Continuing with the original post

This is meant mainly as a supplement to a Christmas Eve-Eve gathering/discussion I was at. I will make this post  a little different than other posts, as, it will be “minimalist.” This is the fourth installment of the topics covered, which are polar bears, rising sea levels, CO2, Inconvenient Truth (the movie), nuclear power, warmest year, electric vehicles (EVs)/hybrid cars, and bullet trains.

Can you imagine the polluted, destroyed, world we would have if the left had their way with green energy?

Environazis, like all progressives, care about two things: other people’s money and the power entailed in imposing their ideology. Prominent among the many things they do not care about is the environment, as demonstrated by a monstrosity planned for Loch Ness:

A giant 67 turbine wind farm planned for the mountains overlooking Loch Ness will be an environmental disaster thanks to the sheer quantity of stone which will need to be quarried to construct it, according to the John Muir Trust. In addition, the Trust has warned that the turbines spell ecological disaster for the wet blanket peat-land which covers the area and acts as a huge carbon sink, the Sunday Times has reported.

According to global warming dogma, carbon sinks are crucial in preventing human activity from causing climatic doom.

The planet isn’t the only victim of this ideologically driven enterprise:

Around one million people visit the picturesque Loch Ness, nestled in the highlands of Scotland each year, bringing about £25 million in revenue with them. Most are on the lookout for the infamous monster, but if Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) get their way the tourists will have something else to look at: the Stronelairg wind farm – 67 turbines, each 443ft high, peppered across the Monadhlaith mountains overlooking the Loch.

….read it all….

Remember what the two top Google scientist in charge of their renewable energy program just said?

We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

[…..]

“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”

But asking someone who has swallowed this story is like beating a dead horse. They will tell me — to my face — that mankind releasing CO2 into the atmosphere is driving weather changes (MRCTV FILE).

I will point out a graph that shows in the past couple of decades man has produced more CO2 combined from the previous 100-years, overlayed to the temperature staying the same for over 18-years (in fact, falling a bit since 2005), and this MAJOR, FOUNDATIONAL belief being shown false doesn’t sway their “belief” towards rethinking their previously held paradigm.

Study-after-study, notes that CO2 productions lags behind temperature rising… not the other way around (as the above video notes). IN OTHER WORDS, many proponents of anthropogenic global warming that view man’s harmful creation of CO2 as a driving force behind the issue seem to have the “script flipped,” to put it mildly.

Here is just one example of “The Phase Relation Between Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide And Global Temperature,” discussed at THE HOCKEY SCHTICK:

As well as ICE-CORES showing a higher PPM of CO2 in our past than today:

  • A new stomatal proxy-based record of CO2 concentrations ([CO2]), based on Betula nana (dwarf birch) leaves from the Hässeldala Port sedimentary sequence in south-eastern Sweden, is presented. The record is of high chronological resolution and spans most of Greenland Interstadial 1 (GI-1a to 1c, Allerød pollen zone), Greenland Stadial 1 (GS-1, Younger Dryas pollen zone) and the very beginning of the Holocene (Preboreal pollen zone). The record clearly demonstrates that i) [CO2] were significantly higher than usually reported for the Last Termination and ii) the overall pattern of CO2 evolution through the studied time period is fairly dynamic, with significant abrupt fluctuations in [CO2] when the climate moved from interstadial to stadial state and vice versa. A new loss-on-ignition chemical record (used here as a proxy for temperature) lends independent support to the Hässeldala Port [CO2] record. The large-amplitude fluctuations around the climate change transitions may indicate unstable climates and that “tipping-point” situations were involved in Last Termination climate evolution. The scenario presented here is in contrast to [CO2] records reconstructed from air bubbles trapped in ice, which indicate lower concentrations and a gradual, linear increase of [CO2] through time. The prevalent explanation for the main climate forcer during the Last Termination being ocean circulation patterns needs to re-examined, and a larger role for atmospheric [CO2] considered. (HOCKEY SCHTICK | PAPER)

But really, an increased CO2 has been historically beneficial to our planet, as well as theoretically good for us. See Also, “Dr. William Happer Speaking To The Benefits Of CO2.”

This comes by way of Gay Patriot (sadly closed now), and shows how scientific the party of science is:

Bypassing Congress yet again, Obama today announced a unilateral imposition of carbon dioxide emission limits for electrical power plants.

Even the NYTimes admits the regulations will have no discernible impact on Global  CO2 levels. They will, however, cost $50 Billion per year in regulatory costs, raise energy bills an average of $1,200 per family per year, and destroy 224,000 jobs annually through 2030.

The Administration promises none of those outcomes will happen, but then, they also promised “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” and “We will be the most transparent administration in history.”

Obama is justifying his dictatorial imposition of carbon dioxide regulations partly on the basis that carbon causes asthma and heart attacks.

You read that right. Carbon. Causes. Asthma.

Party of science my ass.

…read more…

Climate scientist Dr. Murry Salby, Professor and Climate Chair at Macquarie University, Australia explains in a recent, highly-recommended lecture presented at Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg, Germany, why man-made CO2 is not the driver of atmospheric CO2 or climate change.

(“Part 2“)

Dr. Salby demonstrates:

  • CO2 lags temperature on both short [~1-2 year] and long [~1000 year] time scales
  • The IPCC claim that “All of the increases [in CO2 concentrations since pre-industrial times] are caused by human activity” is impossible
  • “Man-made emissions of CO2 are clearly not the source of atmospheric CO2 levels”
  • Satellite observations show the highest levels of CO2 are present over non-industrialized regions, e.g. the Amazon, not over industrialized regions
  • 96% of CO2 emissions are from natural sources, only 4% is man-made
  • Net global emissions from all sources correlate almost perfectly with short-term temperature changes [R2=.93] rather than man-made emissions
  • Methane levels are also controlled by temperature, not man-made emissions
  • Climate model predictions track only a single independent variable – CO2 – and disregard all the other, much more important independent variables including clouds and water vapor.
  • The 1% of the global energy budget controlled by CO2 cannot wag the other 99%
  • Climate models have been falsified by observations over the past 15+ years
  • Climate models have no predictive value
  • Feynman’s quote “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with the data, it’s wrong” applies to the theory of man-made global warming.

See and Read More HERE

The Left vs. Fiery Baptist Preacher (Eschatology Wars Edited)

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is an importation and addition to some older posts from my old blog. One should see this recent post as well to get an idea of this “religious” aspect of the left.

If the following people are rightfully derided for false prophesies, which eventually caused even Harold Camping to say he was wrong, what about this? In other words, if one derides Bush for “lying his way into war,” or that, “the Bible is false because of failed prophecies or contradictions,” then why doesn’t this same thinking apply to this pet theory?

...False Prophecy

  • “…the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012″

Here is a top-ten list from The Herald Sun (an Australian paper) from 2008:

1. OUR CITIES WILL DIE OF THIRST

TIM Flannery, an expert in bones, has made a fortune from books and lectures warning that we face global warming doom. He scared us so well that we last year made him Australian of the Year. In March, Flannery said: “The water problem is so severe for Adelaide that it may run out of water by early 2009.” In fact, Adelaide’s reservoirs are now 75 per cent full, just weeks from 2009.

In June last year, Flannery warned Brisbane’s “water supplies are so low they need desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18 months”. In fact, 18 months later, its dams are 46 per cent full after Brisbane’s wettest spring in 27 years.

In 2005, Flannery predicted Sydney’s dams could be dry in just two years. In fact, three years later its dams are 63 per cent full, not least because June last year was its wettest since 1951.

In 2004, Flannery said global warming would cause such droughts that “there is a fair chance Perth will be the 21st century’s first ghost metropolis”. In fact, Perth now has the lowest water restrictions of any state capital, thanks to its desalination plant and dams that are 40 per cent full after the city’s wettest November in 17 years.

2. OUR REEF WILL DIE

PROFESSOR Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, of Queensland University, is Australia’s most quoted reef expert. He’s advised business, green and government groups, and won our rich Eureka Prize for scares about the Great Barrier Reef. He’s chaired a $20 million global warming study of the World Bank.

In 1999, Hoegh-Guldberg warned that the Great Barrier Reef was under pressure from global warming, and much of it had turned white. In fact, he later admitted the reef had made a “surprising” recovery.

In 2006, he warned high temperatures meant “between 30 and 40 per cent of coral on Queensland’s great Barrier Reef could die within a month”. In fact, he later admitted this bleaching had “a minimal impact”.

In 2007, he warned that temperature changes of the kind caused by global warming were again bleaching the reef. In fact, the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network last week said there had been no big damage to the reef caused by climate change in the four years since its last report, and veteran diver Ben Cropp said this week that in 50 years he’d seen none at all.

3. GOODBYE, NORTH POLE

IN April this year, the papers were full of warnings the Arctic ice could all melt. “We’re actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time,” claimed Dr David Barber, of Manitoba University, ignoring the many earlier times the Pole has been ice free. “It’s hard to see how the system may bounce back (this year),” fretted Dr Ignatius Rigor, of Washington University’s polar science centre.

Tim Flannery also warned “this may be the Arctic’s first ice-free year”, and the ABC and Age got reporter Marian Wilkinson to go stare at the ice and wail: “Here you can see climate change happening before your eyes.” In fact, the Arctic’s ice cover this year was almost 10 per cent above last year’s great low, and has refrozen rapidly since. Meanwhile, sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere has been increasing. Been told either cool fact? Yet Barber is again in the news this month, predicting an ice-free Arctic now in six years. Did anyone ask him how he got his last prediction wrong?

4. BEWARE HUGE WINDS

AL Gore sold his scary global warming film, An Inconvenient Truth, shown in almost every school in the country, with a poster of a terrible hurricane. Former US president Bill Clinton later gloated: “It is now generally recognised that while Al Gore and I were ridiculed, we were right about global warming. . . It’s going to lead to more hurricanes.” In fact, there is still no proof of a link between any warming and hurricanes. Australia is actually getting fewer cyclones, and last month researchers at Florida State University concluded that the 2007 and 2008 hurricane seasons had the least tropical activity in the Northern Hemisphere in 30 years.

5. GIANT HAILSTONES WILL SMASH THROUGH YOUR ROOF

ROSS Garnaut, a professor of economics, is the guru behind the Rudd Government’s global warming policies. He this year defended the ugly curved steel roof he’d planned at the rear of his city property, telling angry locals he was protecting himself from climate change: “Severe and more frequent hailstones will be a feature of this change,” he said. In fact, even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admits “decreases in hail frequency are simulated for Melbourne. . .”

6. NO MORE SKIING

A BAD ski season three years ago – right after a great one – had The Age and other alarmists blaming global warming. The CSIRO, once our top science body, fanned the fear by claiming resorts such as Mt Hotham and Mt Buller could lose a quarter of their snow by 2020. In fact, this year was another boom one for skiing, with Mt Hotham and Mt Buller covered in snow five weeks before the season started.

What’s more, a study this year in the Hydrological Sciences Journal checked six climate models, including one used by the CSIRO. It found they couldn’t even predict the regional climate we’d had already: “Local model projections cannot be credible . . .” It also confirmed the finding of a study last year in the International Journal of Climatology that the 22 most cited global warming models could not “accurately explain the (global) climate from the recent past”. As for predicting the future. . .

7. PERTH WILL BAKE DRY

THE CSIRO last year claimed Perth was “particularly vulnerable” and had a 90 per cent chance of getting less rain and higher temperatures. “There are not many other parts of the world where the IPCC has made a prediction that a drop in rainfall is highly likely,” it said. In fact, Perth has just had its coldest and wettest November since 1991.

8. ISLANDS WILL DROWN

THE seas will rise up to 100m by 2100, claims ABC Science Show host Robyn Williams. Six metres, suggests Al Gore. So let’s take in “climate refugees” from low-lying Tuvalu, says federal Labor. And ban coastal development, says the Brumby Government. In fact, while the seas have slowly risen since the last ice age, before man got gassy, they’ve stopped rising for the last two, according to data from the Jason-1 satellite. “There is no evidence for accelerated sea-level rises,” the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute declared last month.

9. BRITAIN WILL SWELTER

The British Met Office is home to the Hadley Centre, one of the top centres of the man-made global warming faith. In April it predicted: “The coming summer is expected to be a ‘typical British summer’. . .” In fact, in August it admitted: “(This) summer . . . has been one of the wettest on record across the UK.”

In September it predicted: “The coming winter (is) likely to be milder than average.” In fact, winter has been so cold that London had its first October snow in 74 years—and on the very day Parliament voted to fight “global warming”.

Here is a recent two month list of new information turning over past — false — prophecies about global destruction:

  • Climate Modeling Failure: New Study Finds EPA & IPCC Climate Models Wrong About More Droughts For Southwest USA: The EPA, the IPCC and the USGCRP bureaucrats have erroneously predicted, per their global climate models, that southwest U.S. would become drier with more droughts – the latest research finds that these predictions are result of climate modeling failure
  • Global Sea Level Rise: Melting Glaciers Have Tiny Impact On Sea Levels – Maybe 3.7 Inches By 2100: Alarmists have long predicted that Greenland’s melting glaciers were causing an “accelerating” global sea level rise – new study confirms global warming alarmists wrong
  • Tide Gauge Station Data Analysis: NZ Scientists Confirm Sea Level Rise Is Modest – 7 Inches By 2100: current global sea level rise is barely noticable, which is complete contradiction of IPCC predictions over past 2 decades
  • Runaway Greenhouse Effect Facts: NASA’s “Boiling Oceans” Prediction Not Supported By Data – Is Hansen Crazy? Runaway greenhouse effect facts (or lack thereof) – while James Lovelock recently admits to hyping global warming alarmism, James Hansen still does crazy fearmongering – on video he predicts boiling oceans
  • Impact of Climate Change: Health Research Determines Global Warming Does Not Cause Illnesses: The IPCC climate impact models predicted increases in many illnesses that would lessen the quality of life – new study confirms the IPCC “scientists” beliefs in computer simulations were misplaced
  • Climate Change Effects: Agriculture Research Debunks IPCC Myth That Global Warming & CO2 Harm Crops: The latest agriculture research on climate change effects clearly prove that IPCC climate model predictions of looming crop failures are bogus – wheat study result opposite of IPCC fabricated myth
  • Tide Gauge Station Data Analysis: EU Scientists Confirm Sea Level Rise Not Unusual – IPCC Prediction Wrong: IPCC predicted accelerating sea level rises due to human CO2 emissions – real scientists examine the tide gauge station empirical evidence and find recent sea level increases not unusual
  • Extreme Climate Change Risk: Scientists Find Himalaya Severe Rainfall Evidence ‘Baffling’: Researchers analyzing data for extreme climate change risk continue to discover evidence that the predicted results are not happening – lack of extreme rainfall in the Himalayas is most recent example
  • Climate Modeling Failure: IPCC Models Unable Predict The Major ‘Siberian High’ Climatic Condition: Climate modeling failure remains a major embarrassment for the UN’s IPPC’s “climate science” efforts – this time their models failed at predicting the ‘Siberian Highs’ that dominate Northern Hemisphere weather
  • Climate Modeling: Failure of IPCC’s Newest Climate Models – ‘Still Worthless After All These Years’: Climate modeling failure by the IPCC’s past climate models is huge and well documented – the newest climate models are no better
  • Is Global Warming Happening? IPCC Climate Models Predicted Huge Warming But Reality Happened Instead: For years the public wondered “Is global warming happening?” as the IPCC climate models predicted – instead the HadCRUT temperature dataset clearly shows global temps cooling off
  • The Global Warming Permafrost Tipping Point: Scientists Discover Permafrost Thawing Not Happening: The IPCC scientists and global warming alarmists predicted that increasing CO2 emissions would lead to a catastrophic permafrost tipping point, unleashing gigatons of methane gas – they were wrong.

(See More)

Dennis Prager makes mention that global warming has become more of a religion to the secular left in search for something bigger than them. Vic Boccard concurs when he said, “Now, global warming has not only become the mantra of the left, it has become almost a religion of this ilk — a large, end-of-the-world cult.” One author makes passing mention of this comparing it to the eschatologies found in Judaism and Christianity.

….The term eschatology refers to that sub-field of theology devoted to the discussion (logos) of the last things (eschatos). It was located within the field of theology because of the assumption that the “last things” would represent God’s ultimate intervention in history. Today, we talk of secular eschatologies–Marxism, for example–and scientific eschatologies.

Some would argue that Marxist eschatology is part of what makes Marxism a religion. So, perhaps, the term “secular eschatology” is an oxymoron after all.

But, why the impulse to discuss the last things? Why are we curious as to what will happen at the end of time, or “after” the end of time, as if it is even possible to think of an “after” to the end of time? Why does all of this preoccupy us?….

eschatology has been part of my theological agenda since I began to reflect on theology, some fifty years ago. I recently came upon the essays I wrote for admission to Rabbinical School back in the spring of 1954. To my amazement—I was then a rank undergraduate at McGill University—they were suffused with the issue of messianism. When I arrived at the Jewish Theological Seminary, one of my mentors, Professor Gerson Cohen later to become Chancellor of the Seminary, made an off–hand remark to the effect that every significant Jewish movement had an eschatological impulse at its core….

Equally puzzling to me is why Christian theologians are so preoccupied with eschatology. Why is it everywhere in contemporary Christian theology and so strikingly absent from the writings of 20th century Jewish thinkers? Still more puzzling to me, is why our cosmologists and astronomers are so preoccupied with the question of how it all will end…. (SOURCE)

We all know of “end-time stories in religion… in fact I have a pet theory herein that is based in classic religious eschatology. Famines, weather, wars, pestilence all are found in the Bible. Not only in the Bible though, but also in secular ideology in regards to Global Warming. For instance, some “end-time statements by secularists.

  • What changed in the United States with Hurricane Katrina was a feeling that we have entered a period of consequences. ~ Al Gore
  • All across the world, in every kind of environment and region known to man, increasingly dangerous weather patterns and devastating storms are abruptly putting an end to the long-running debate over whether or not climate change is real. Not only is it real, it’s here, and its effects are giving rise to a frighteningly new global phenomenon: the man-made natural disaster. ~ Barack Obama
  • Global warming is too serious for the world any longer to ignore its danger or split into opposing factions on it. ~ TONY BLAIR
  • People tend to focus on the here and now. The problem is that, once global warming is something that most people can feel in the course of their daily lives, it will be too late to prevent much larger, potentially catastrophic changes. ~ ELIZABETH KOLBERT
  • The issue of climate change is one that we ignore at our own peril. There may still be disputes about exactly how much we’re contributing to the warming of the earth’s atmosphere and how much is naturally occurring, but what we can be scientifically certain of is that our continued use of fossil fuels is pushing us to a point of no return. And unless we free ourselves from a dependence on these fossil fuels and chart a new course on energy in this country, we are condemning future generations to global catastrophe. ~ Barack Obama
  • We are upsetting the atmosphere upon which all life depends. In the late 80s when I began to take climate change seriously, we referred to global warming as a “slowmotion catastrophe” one we expected to kick in perhaps generations later. Instead, the signs of change have accelerated alarmingly. ~ David Suzuki

In fact, David Suzuki wants us in JAIL! (See also my: “Eco-Fascism Leading the Way To Democrat Utopian Ideals“)

[icon name=”bullhorn” class=””]…See more at end AND HERE

Regional Catastrophe moderate-case global warming
Global civilization not eliminated, but regional civilizations effectively destroyed; millions to hundreds of millions dead, but large parts of humankind retain current social and technological conditions. Chance of humankind recovery: excellent. Species local to the catastrophe likely die off, and post-catastrophe effects (refugees, fallout, etc.) may kill more. Chance of biosphere recovery: excellent.

Human Die-Back extreme-case global warming
Global civilization set back to pre- or low-industrial conditions; several billion or more dead, but human species as a whole survives, in pockets of varying technological and social conditions. Chance of humankind recovery: moderate. Most non-human species on brink of extinction die off, but most other plant and animal species remain and, eventually, flourish. Chance of biosphere recovery: excellent.

Civilization Extinction worst-case global warming
Global civilization destroyed; millions (at most) remain alive, in isolated locations, with ongoing death rate likely exceeding birth rate. Chance of humankind recovery: slim. Many non-human species die off, but some remain and, over time, begin to expand and diverge. Chance of biosphere recovery: good.

This theory about anthropogenic global warming is nothing more than humanity reaching out to their own pet theories in a false belief that they are [the pet theories] actually bigger than they are [themselves]. Pascal once said that people try to fill that God shaped vacuum. I agree.

The left has its “end of the world” type of theology, or rightly called, eschatology. I have dealt with this before, it will be added at the end, however, this “Swine Flu” example is fitting. Listen to Joe Biden and his “mania” about something which we are being told today by experts is nothing but a regular flew season (in fact, even less deadly than normal seasons of the flu):

What did Joe do a couple of days after this interview? He hopped on a train to go home after his work day (costing us tax-payers another $250). This seems to be a theme in Washington… and as of late, this has been a problem on both sides of the isle — although still much more prominent on the left. That is, expecting the public to fall in line with mandates, and the mandaters living above what they expect the general public to do. this is elitist. So while Gore goes around the country and world telling people how to live a life which he himself doesn’t. A prime example of this is summed up in the cartoon below:

Do you understand? People are traveling around the world saying New York and Florida are going to be under water and it is now too late to do anything about it! Another figure is saying do not take public or private transportation or even put your kids in school. What Christian with influence like the current Vice President or past Vice President is traveling the world or getting on CNN and calling for drastic measure or preaching that the world will end because of man’s actions?  

Christians do not even thing in the worst portion of Armageddon that the world will end. Postmillennialist, amillenialist, or premillinialist Christians preach a time of a thousand year reign of Christ after He (not us) sets things right. Democrats are saying “let US set things straight” in order for the world not to end. This secular proposition by the left has come to fruition in 166 to 244-million people being murdered by utopians just in the 20th century alone (more than the entire history of all deaths by religions since recorded history). Doesn’t that frighten you a bit, that politicians say in order to stop the world from coming to an end you must vote for their legislation pumped down the tubes by organizations that the co-founder of Green Peace say are:

“I now find that many environmental groups have drifted into self-serving cliques with narrow vision and rigid ideology…. many environmentalists are showing signs of elitism, left-wingism, and downright eco-fascism. The once politically centrist, science-based vision of environmentalism has been largely replaced with extremist rhetoric. Science and logic have been abandoned and the movement is often used to promote other causes such as class struggle and anti-corporatism. The public is left trying to figure out what is reasonable and what is not.” (See More)

I don’t want that pill thank you very much. Yet here we are: Cap n’ Trade, Swine Flu, Global Warming, etc. Pills being pushed down the throats of the common man. This common man may wake up with a Biden in his and her living room one day controlling even your thermostat! The “Right” isn’t telling people of same-sexes not to be a couple. In fact, here in California they have the exact same right in Civil Unions that my wife and I have: hospital visits, tax breaks, health-care options from employers, and the like. But that is not what the whole thing is about. However, they will tell us that they don’t want the government telling them how to live… except about how much water to flush in their toilet, how much water can come out of their shower head, what type of light bulb to use in the privacy of one’s home, or now even how low or high to set a thermostat. That isn’t government intrusion… no… that is liberals trying to save the planet for their utopian dreams — that will never come to fruition, mainly due to the Left’s view of man and his nature (the below is from a larger paper I wrote in a response to friend who was going to San Francisco University of California):

In many cases, “modern liberal” positions are based on the idea of tolerance, the freedom of the individual to do as he or she pleases. This in turn is based on moral relativism, the idea that morality is relative to the individual and the situation (which distinguishes it from “classical liberalism”). Again, what is right or wrong for you may not be right or wrong for others. As a result, you cannot tell others not to have an abortion, not to look at or publish pornography, or not to live by an “alternative lifestyle.” Educational environments must be “value free,” there must be no restrictions on sexual and artistic freedom, and according to some, even activities such as recreational drug use should be decriminalized. Because there are no absolute values, each person must discover his own morality, a process taught in our schools as “values clarification.”

The liberal contradiction lies in the fact that every liberal position claims to be morally correct and objectively true. It is right to allow abortions and wrong to oppose them. Tolerance (in its modern definition) is good, intolerance is bad. Children should be allowed to grow up in a value-free environment; parents should not impose their own values. Modern liberalism takes a moral stance on every issue, but it undermines its own foundation by claiming that there is no moral absolute or guide to adhere to.

To put it into simple terms, yet once more, when a liberal tells you that you cannot tell other people what to do, he or she is contradicting himself by telling you what to do! And there is another side to the liberal contradiction. While many liberal positions are based on tolerance and complete individual freedom, other liberal positions are based on strict authoritarianism.

According to contemporary liberalism, the common good (what Rousseau called “the general will”) necessitates the suppression of individual rights when it comes to “saving” the environment, creating a more “equitable distribution” of wealth, achieving “equality” between races and sexes in all walks of life, and enforcing a strict separation of church and state. Paradoxically, that same “common good” takes a back seat to individual freedoms when it comes to the detrimental effects of: pornography and sexual freedom, reduced police power and criminal punishment, or drug use, or firearm mandates, etc..

Let me hasten to add that I too am for tolerance, equal rights, and ending unjust discrimination. I too am for freedom of speech, artistic freedom, academic freedom, and the separation of church and state. I too am for protecting the environment and helping the underprivileged. But I am for these things because I believe in the tenants of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition, not because I reject these absolutes.

If I were to reject the idea of moral truths, what possible motivation (moral duty) could I have to champion these or any other causes? More important, on what basis could I hope to persuade others of the importance of these causes? It is inconsistent to claim to be concerned about rights while rejecting the moral foundation from which rights are derived.

The rejection of one’s own moral foundation leads one to be not only immoral, but also illogical. It leads to positions that are inconsistent with themselves and each other (self-deleting). It leads to outcomes that directly counter one’s original intention and that threaten one’s own goals. It is unfortunate for the liberal agenda, but the liberal contradiction poses just such a threat. And it is not a threat from “conservatives” or from any outside source – it is a threat from within. Because of the rejection of the moral foundation for liberalism, liberalism is failing to protect the rights it claims to cherish. “What is is?” Please Mr. President!

(Chapter three of Dale Berryhill’s book, The Liberal Contradiction, entitled “Who Decides? The Doctrine of Tolerance,” pp. 43-48.)

All these scares are plenty, and almost all from the left. Dennis Prager reads from a Wall Street Journal article about the religion of Climatism::

[icon name=”bullhorn” class=””] UNLESS, that is, the masses believe more-and-more that climate skepticism is truly evil, as David Suzuki believes, jail will soon await:

Richard Tol, Leslie Woodcock, James Lovelock, and others all feel the sting of the machine they were a part of. A part of because these and other men-and-women specialists have abandoned what they previously supported as being true. But this machine they helped build has a way of growing too large to fail. And it is biting them in the ass!

This comes way of WUWT, and highlights the tendency of the Left towards totalitarian thinking in order to make their vision “work.

Scientists who don’t believe in catastrophic man-made global warming should be put in prison, a US philosophy professor argues on a website funded by the UK government.

Lawrence Torcello – assistant professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, NY, writes in an essay at The Conversation that climate scientists who fail to communicate the correct message about “global warming” should face trial for “criminal negligence”. (H/T Bishop Hill):

What are we to make of those behind the well documented corporate funding of global warming denial? Those who purposefully strive to make sure “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” is given to the public? I believe we understand them correctly when we know them to be not only corrupt and deceitful, but criminally negligent in their willful disregard for human life. It is time for modern societies to interpret and update their legal systems accordingly.

More @BREITBART

What next, numbers tattooed on our arms because we hold an opinion different from Torcello?

REASON.ORG ends with a great commentary on this freedom restricting idea of the above lunatic:

In 2012, in a proceeding straight out of the Inquisition, an Italian court convicted six scientists for providing “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” in the lead-up to the earthquake. Now, a philosophy professor says that case may provide a worthwhile example for the treatment of scientific dissenters—specifically, “climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus.”…

…He ultimately allows that he wouldn’t actually criminalize poor scientific communication—just anybody who might support dissenting scientists, or receive such support.

If those with a financial or political interest in inaction had funded an organised campaign to discredit the consensus findings of seismology, and for that reason no preparations were made, then many of us would agree that the financiers of the denialist campaign were criminally responsible for the consequences of that campaign. I submit that this is just what is happening with the current, well documented funding of global warming denialism….

We have good reason to consider the funding of climate denial to be criminally and morally negligent. The charge of criminal and moral negligence ought to extend to all activities of the climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus.

If you’re trying to figure out how that doesn’t threaten the free exercise of speech, Torcello assures us, “We must make the critical distinction between the protected voicing of one’s unpopular beliefs, and the funding of a strategically organized campaign to undermine the public’s ability to develop and voice informed opinions.”

So…You can voice a dissenting opinion, so long as you don’t benefit from it or help dissenters benefit in any way?

By the way, according to RIT, Torcello researches “the moral implications of global warming denialism, as well as other forms of science denialism.” Presumably, his job is a paid one. But this is OK, because…the majority of scientists agree with his views on the issue?

Let’s allow that they do—and that a majority of scientists agree about man-made climate change and a host of other issues. Just when does the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition meet to decide what is still subject to debate, and what is now holy writ? And is an effort to “undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus” always criminally negligent?…

More @Reason

Its scary how much the left HATES profit.

All fails BTW (SLAY NEWS):

  1. “‘The trouble with almost all environmental problems,’ says Paul R. Ehrlich, the population biologist, ‘is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you’re dead. … We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.’” —The New York Times, 1969.
  2. “No real action has been taken to save the environment, [Ehrlich] maintains. And it does need saving. Ehrlich predicts that the oceans will be as dead as Lake Erie in less than a decade.” —Redlands Daily Facts, 1970.
  3. “Scientist Predicts a New Ice Age by 21st Century: Air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century. … If the current rate of increase in electric power generation continues, the demands for cooling water will boil dry the entire flow of the rivers and streams of continental United States. … By the next century ‘the consumption of oxygen in combustion processes, world-wide, will surpass all of the processes which return oxygen to the atmosphere.’” —The Boston Globe, 1970.
  4. “The world could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts. … ‘In the next 50 years,’ the fine dust man constantly puts into the atmosphere by fossil fuel-burning could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees. If sustained ‘over several years’—‘five to 10,’ he estimated—‘such a temperature decrease could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!’” —Washington Post, Times Herald, 1971.
  5. “Dear Mr. President: … We feel obliged to inform you on the results of the scientific conference held here recently. … The main conclusion of the meeting was that a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilized mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon. The cooling has natural cause and falls within the rank of processes which produced the last ice age. … The present rate of the cooling seems fast enough to bring glacial temperatures in about a century.” —Brown University, Department of Geological Sciences, 1972.
  6. “However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing.” – Time Magazine, 1974.
  7. “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age. Telltale signs are everywhere—from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7 [degrees] F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round.” —Time magazine, 1974.
  8. “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” —Associated Press, 1989.
  9. “Unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return.” —former Vice President Al Gore, 2006.
  10. “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” —Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), 2019.

The 97% Consensus Myth (Links and Videos)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Video Description:

Marc Morano of Climate Depot interviewed on the Jan Mickelson show (WHO radio’s ~ Feb 3rd, 2015).

One of the main topics is the 97% consensus of scientists who agree man is the main prognosticator of global warming. Below are some links to many articles refuting this unscientific [if it were true] consensus:

♛ Global Warming Alarmists Caught Doctoring ’97-Percent Consensus’ Claims (Forbes);
♛ (WSJ) The Myth of the Climate Change ‘97%’; What is the origin of the false belief that almost all scientists agree about global warming? (Hockey Schtick);
♛ 97 Articles Refuting The “97% Consensus” (Popular Technology);
♛ 97% Study Falsely Classifies Scientists’ Papers, according to the scientists that published them (Popular Technology)
♛ Cooking Climate Consensus Data: “97% of Scientists Affirm AGW” Debunked (New American);
♛ Only 65 Scientists of 12,000 Make up Alleged 97% on Climate Change and Global Warming Consensus According to Breakdown of Cook et al study, say Friends of Science (Climate Change Dispatch);
♛ Undersecretary of Energy for Science For Obama Rejects “Scientism” (RPT);
♛ 100% Consensus ~ As If More Were Needed (RPT).
♛ The myth of ‘settled science’ – When the left shuts down debate, it’s time for skepticism (Washington Times)
♛ Peer-Reviewed Survey Finds Majority Of Scientists Skeptical Of Global Warming Crisis (Forbes)
♛ Debunking the 97% ‘consensus’ on global warming (American Spectator)
♛ Richard Tol’s Excellent Summary of the Flaws in Cook et al. (2013) – The Infamous 97% Consensus Paper (WUWT – See Dr. Tol’s blog)
♛ The 97% Cook Consensus – when will Environ Res Letters retract it? (JoNova)
♛ UN IPCC Lead Author Dr. Richard Tol Debunks ‘97% Consensus’ Claim (Breitbart)
♛ The 97 Percent Climate Change Consensus That Wasn’t (Heartland)

No matter what you think of the following long and short lists… the bottom line is this, WAY more than 75-Climatologists think that man is either not the main contributor to global warming at all, or that global warming is not a catastrophe waiting to happen:

He mentioned most of the experts KNOW how CO2 affects climate. He says he does not and doesn’t think they do either. This has nothing to do with the supposed “consensus” of experts — 97% — who “say” it is driven by mankind. This is known as anthropogenic global warming, of AGW. The myth of the 97% started with ONLY 75-out-of-77 climatologists saying they believe man is the primary cause.

Yes, you heard me correctly, seventy-five.

Another study has undergrads and non-specialists (bloggers) search through many articles in peer reviewed journals, and noting that a large majority supported the AGW position. The problem was that they were not specialized in the field of science… AND… they only read the abstracts, not the peer reviewed paper itself. Many of the scientists behind the papers “said” to support AGW rejected that idea. So the specialists THEMSELVES said their papers cannot be read to support the AGW position.

Another study (pictured in the graph above) tries to save an earlier one with tainted information based on abstracts — a very UNSCIENTIFIC way to get to consensus (that is, relying on abstracts). Not only was this study based on abstracts, again, non specialists categorized them. Yet another study was merely based on search parameters/results. Here is more info (mainly links) for the not-faint-of-heart.

In reality, nearly half of specialists in the fields related reject man causing climates change.

And a good portion of those that do reject the claim that it is detrimental to our planet.

Only 13% saw relatively little danger (ratings of 1 to 3 on a 10-point scale); the rest were about evenly split between the 44% who see moderate to high danger (ratings of 4 to 7) and 41% who see very high or grave danger (ratings of 8 to 10). (Forbes)

Here is a list of scientists with varying views on the cause of “Climate Change,” and here is a list of 31,000 who stand against man as the primary cause.

(Click Graph To See Previously Hidden Data)

We’ve all been subjected to the incessant “97% of scientists agree …global warming…blah blah” meme, which is nothing more than another statistical fabrication by John Cook and his collection of “anything for the cause” zealots. As has been previously pointed out on WUWT, when you look at the methodology used to reach that number, the veracity of the result falls apart, badly. You see, it turns out that Cook simply employed his band of “Skeptical Science” (SkS) eco-zealots to rate papers, rather than letting all authors of the papers rate their own work (Note: many authors weren’t even contacted and their papers wrongly rated, see here). The result was that the “97% consensus” was a survey of the SkS raters beliefs and interpretations, rather than a survey of the authors opinions of their own science abstracts. Essentially it was pal-review by an activist group with a strong bias towards a particular outcome as demonstrated by the name “the consensus project”.

[….]

Dr. Judith Curry writes:

Look at the views in column 1, then look at the % in the rightmost column:  52% state the the warming since 1850 is mostly anthropogenic.  One common categorization would categorize the other 48%  as ‘deniers’.

So, the inconvenient truth here is that about half of the world’s largest organization of meteorological and climate professionals don’t think humans are “mostly” the cause of Anthropogenic Global Warming the rest will probably get smeared as “deniers”

(Read More at WUWT)

[….]

I wish to note, that, the truth was not a 97% consensus, but that about half disagreed with man causing it. Which is about the same percentage Dr. Happer says on CNBC:

Even the “Father of Climatology” (so all the programs in universities are because of him) says it’s B.S.

2014: Among the 3 percent Coldest Years in 10,000 years

Published by Papa Giorgio

Here are some typical headlines (I will comment on the last link in these four which is from CNN):

Polar Bears CNN

This is the first photo to greet you at the CNN linked story. But the Polar Bear population is at the highest level since they began recording it… anywhere from 25,000-to-30,000 strong. So this photo is a prime example of a narrative that has failed. A “non-sequitur” to be more exact.

  1. 2014 Was The Hottest Year Since At Least 1880, Government Finds;
  2. 2014 Was The Hottest Year On Record Globally By Far;
  3. 2014 Was Officially the Hottest Year on Record;
  4. NOAA: 2014 is shaping up as hottest year on record.

I have previously shown this to NOT be the case here:

However, this should be the proverbial “nail in the coffin.”

Should be.

Mind you we are answering “scientism” here, not science. But before we get to the final post on this subject… to be clear, according to NASA and other satellite data, 2014 is not the hottest since 1880:

In fact, we are using science [proper] to refute “scientism” [which I guess is the opposite, “improper”]. The above is based on Satellite data… what the above mainstream media reports are based on are on the ground temperature gauges that are based on thermometers that are affected by their surroundings. I note this here:

Satellite data is much more accurate than the plus-minus of these thermometers that caused one scientist note: “The claim is based on just one (from a half dozen or so) thermometer-based products whose measurement quality is fraught with uncertainty and with actual error bars at least ten times larger than those claimed ‘effects’.“

IN FACT, 2014 falls into the record lows considering the further you go back via ice-core data

What’s Up With That has this note about the above graph:

We were told in October, before 2014 was over, that it was heading toward being the warmest year on record (Figure 1). The visual link of Polar Bears underscored the message. In fact, 2014 was among the coldest 3 percent of years of the last 10,000, but that doesn’t suit the political agenda.

[….]

The red line, added to the original diagram, imposes the approximate 20th century temperatures (right side) against those of the last 10,000 years. As CO2Science noted from Dahl-Jensen (1998),

After the termination of the glacial period, temperatures increased steadily to a maximum of 2.5°C warmer than at present during the Climatic Optimum (4,000 to 7,000 years ago).

The key phrase in the 2014 claim is, “in the record”, but that only covers approximately 100 years. In the climatologically meaningful 10,000-year context, it is among the coldest.

The claim that 2014 was the warmest on record was politically important for proponents of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) story that human CO2 was causing global warming. Central to that argument was the need to prove late 20th century temperatures were the “warmest ever”. This is why the 2014 claim conveniently appeared before the Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting in Lima Peru, at which the false IPCC claim was desperately promoted. Political importance of the measure was accentuated by the continued, 18+ years lack of increase in global temperature.

Evidence keeps contradicting the major assumptions of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis. As T.H. Huxley (1825 – 1895) said,

The great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact….

…read it all…

CFACT At UN Climate Change Conference 2014 (Plus New Climategate)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Via Climate Depot:

  • Apollo 7’s Walt Cunningham: ‘My background in space science. My doctoral thesis that I was working on was fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field. I have no political inhibitions at all, I just think we ought to be honest about this and not be trying to use it to our own ends to try to get money from the government.’ Also see: Apollo Astronaut Slams UN for perpetrating the ‘one of the biggest frauds in the field of science’
  • Marc Morano: ‘The UN is first and foremost political and they have bastardized science to achieve a political end…The UN claims that they can alter global temperature and storminess and weather events many decades to 100  years into the future. And the United Nations does not have that power — that is reserved for medieval witchcraft.’

[An example of “political”]

* “The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders…. Dr. Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furor over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.” (David Rose, The Daily Mail, January 24, 2010)

David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (New York, NY: Sentinel Publishing, 2011), [FN] 161.

Investors Business Daily asks the following, “If Climate Change Is Real, Why Do Scientists Fudge Data?” ~ h/t to CFACT!

…And of course the enviro-left is going to cheat. That’s the charge against Richard A. Feely, a senior scientist with the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It seems his chart supposedly showing the rising danger of ocean acidification is this issue’s equivalent of the tortured global warming hockey stick. According to climate blogger Anthony Watts, “Feely’s work is based on computer models that don’t line up with real-world data.”

What’s more, Feely has reportedly threatened a scientific colleague who wanted to see the real-world data points behind the chart, telling him he would “not last long” in his career if he continues to question the “motives or quality of” Feely and his colleague’s science and continues to press for the data.

Mike Wallace, the University of New Mexico hydrologist working on a nanogeosciences doctorate who wants to see the data, told Watts that Feely’s response “eclipses even the so-called climategate event.”…

If you forget what Climate-Gate was [is], here is a refresher.

Failed Eco-Nut Predictions of 2015 (A Short List)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Here’s the long list)

Temp Change ipcc

1) UN overestimated global warming by 2015

Two decades ago, the UN came up with several models that all predicted that by 2015, the Earth would have warmed by at least a degree Fahrenheit. Yet in the last two decades, there has instead been virtually no warming according to satellite temperature measurements….

RPT’s addition: NASA has said that the “Abyss” has not gotten warmer since 2005, and do not know why [if taking into account global warming realities] why the earth has stalled in temperature… even getting slightly colder globally since 2005 (see chart of CO2 output and temperature, below). It is called a “mystery” by NASA.

[…..]

2) All Rainforest Species Will Be Extinct

Dr. Paul Ehrlich, the President of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University, got famous for his 1968 book “the Population Bomb” which predicted that increasing human populations would spell doom.

One part of that doom, he warned in his 1981 book “Extinction,” was that all rainforest species would likely soon go extinct due to environmental destruction.

“Half of the populations and species in tropical moist forests would be extinct early in the next century [the 2000s] and none would be left by 2025,” he warns on page 291. He added that that his model indicated that, on the upper bound, complete extinction would occur as soon as 2010….

RPT’s addition: The New York Times makes point that “…for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.” This doesn’t sound too alarmist to me. Speaking of alarmists, William Shatner, Captain Kirk of Star Trek fame, mentioned in a National Geographic video that, “rainforests [are] being cleared at the rate of 20 football fields per minute.”  If this were truly the case, the forests would have been completely wiped out years ago.  In fact, the co-founder and long-time director of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, said:

“All these save-the-forests arguments are based on bad science….  They are quite simply wrong… [Phillip Stott and I] found that the Amazon rainforests is more than 90% intact. We flew over it and met all the environmental authorities. We studied satellite pictures of the entire area.”

Phillip Stott, who has 30 years of studying tropical forests under his belt as well as being professor of biogeography at London University mentioned that, “there are now still – despite what humans have done – more rainforests today than there were 12,000 years ago.”

3) Oil will run out by 2015

A Pennsylvania state government “Student and Teacher Guide” reads: “Some estimates of the oil reserves suggest that by the year 2015 we will have used all of our accessible oil supply.”

Yet the Earth still has oil: at least 1.6 trillion gallons of proven reserves, according to the Energy Information Administration, a US government agency. In fact, proven reserves have more than doubled over the last couple decades, as technological innovation made more oil accessible….

RPT’s addition: Yes, the U.S. has hit an all-time high in production:

Oil Reserves

More than that though, “According to the Institute for Energy Research’s calculations, the U.S. actually sits on 1.442 trillion barrels of recoverable deposits. That’s over 60 times the amount we usually hear about. Merline writes that this larger number would be enough to meet all U.S. oil needs for about the next 200 years” (Business Insider).

Let me repeat that, 200-years of oil!

4) Arctic sea ice will disappear by 2015.

“Peter Wadhams, who heads the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge… believes that the Arctic is likely to become ice-free before 2020 and possibly as early as 2015,” (Yale Environment 360 reported in 2012). Yet government data shows that arctic sea ice has increased since then….

RPT’s addition: Here I will post information from a previous post about Polar Bear population levels, in which I point the following out:

Recent Population Increase Partly Due To Lots of Sea-Ice

Canada (CBC News via the Canadian Coast Guard, 3/2014) [ARCTIC Sea Ice] The Canadian Coast Guard is pleading with merchant ships to plan their voyages well in advance this year as the organization’s icebreaker fleet confronts some of the worst ice conditions on the Atlantic Ocean in decades.

“Plan your voyage and we’ll all get through this,” said Mike Voight, the Atlantic region’s director of programs. “We’ve got a pretty bad or challenging ice year.”

The Canadian Ice Service, an arm of Environment Canada, said there is 10 per cent more ice this year compared to the 30-year average.

“We probably haven’t seen a winter this bad as far as ice for the past 25 years,” said Voight, referring to both the amount and thickness of the ice….

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) Abstract (12/2014) [ARCTIC sea ice] Despite a well-documented ~40% decline in summer Arctic sea ice extent since the late 1970’s, it has been difficult to estimate trends in sea ice volume because thickness observations have been spatially incomplete and temporally sporadic. While numerical models suggest that the decline in extent has been accompanied by a reduction in volume, there is considerable disagreement over the rate at which this has occurred. We present the first complete assessment of trends in northern hemisphere sea ice thickness and volume using 4 years of measurements from CryoSat-2. Between autumn 2010 and spring 2013, there was a 14% and 5% reduction in autumn and spring Arctic sea ice volume, respectively, in keeping with the long-term decline in extent. However, since then there has been a marked 41% and 9% recovery in autumn and spring sea ice volume, respectively, more than offsetting losses of the previous three years. The recovery was driven by the retention of thick ice around north Greenland and Canada during summer 2013 which, in turn, was associated with a 6% drop in the number of days on which melting occurred – climatic conditions more typical of the early 1990’s. Such a sharp increase in volume after just one cool summer indicates that the Arctic sea ice pack may be more resilient than has been previously considered.

Talking About Weather (7/2014) [ANTARCTIC sea ice] Antarctic sea ice has hit its second all-time record maximum this week. The new record is 2.112 million square kilometers above normal. Until the weekend just past, the previous record had been 1.840 million square kilometers above normal, a mark hit on December 20, 2007, as I reported here, and also covered in my book.

Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, responded to e-mail questions and also spoke by telephone about the new record sea ice growth in the Southern Hemisphere, indicating that, somewhat counter-intuitively, the sea ice growth was specifically due to global warming.

Sea Ice 2014

Let us compare this to Al Gore saying the northern ice-caps will be gone

 NewsBusters makes the point another way, in that the “media” is derelict in their duty:

The same year that former Vice President Al Gore predicted that the Arctic sea ice could be completely gone, Arctic ice reached its highest level in two years, according to a report by the Danish Meteorological Institute. 

According to that report, which was cited by the Daily Mail (UK) on Aug. 30, “[t]he Arctic ice cap has expanded for the second year in a row.” The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) confirmed this trend, but didn’t go into as much detail as the Danish Meteorological Institute.

But an examination of ABC, CBS and NBC news programs since the Daily Mail story was published found that all three networks ignored news that Arctic sea ice was at a two-year high….

Remember, you can lead a horse to water but cannot make it drink.

…read it all at Fox News.

Is 2014 The Hottest Year? No (Part 2 of a Series)

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is meant mainly as a supplement to a Christmas Eve-Eve gathering/discussion I was at. I will make this post  a little different than other posts, as, it will be “minimalist.” This is the second installment of the topics covered, which are polar bears, rising sea levels, CO2, Inconvenient Truth (the movie), nuclear power, warmest year, electric vehicles (EVs)/hybrid cars, and bullet trains.

Tarzan couldn’t take this kind of hot!

The question becomes this:

  • WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT WAYS TO MEASURE TEMPERATURE,
  • WHICH ONE ARE MANY MEDIA SOURCES USING,
  • AND WHICH ARE THE MOST RELIABLE.

 

These are the questions any serious person who tells people 2014 is the hottest year as if they are the final arbiter of truth. I have dealt with this in the past, but will again deal with it here.

The two main research groups tracking global lower-tropospheric temperatures (our UAH group, and the Remote Sensing Systems [RSS] group) show 2014 lagging significantly behind 2010 and especially 1998:

Viewed another way:

UAH Reading

Another instance highlighting the NOAA’s overestimating temperature is when it said October was the hottest month ever, but RSS data showed October to be ninth warmest on record. And I wonder what family members on the East-Coast would say to there being more than 400 record lows and record cool highs set, via The Weather Channel (11/2014):

A third surge of cold air pushed into the Northern Plains, Upper Midwest and East Coast. This third surge reinforced the cold temperatures for millions of Americans who have already endured at least a week of January-like chill.

There have been more than 400 record lows and record cool highs set, covering 43 states, since Sunday. That leaves only five states in the contiguous U.S., all in New England, that have not experienced record cold temperatures this week. 

On Wednesday morning record lows were broken or tied from New York to Houston. Thursday morning brought more record cold to parts of the Southeast.

[….]

– First arctic surge: Spread into the East last week (November 11-15).

– Second arctic surge: Blasted through the East, Midwest, and South through early Thursday (November 16-20). For parts of the mid-Mississippi Valley, Ohio Valley, Tennessee Valley and the Middle Atlantic States, this was the coldest of the surges, with numerous daily record lows broken.

– Third arctic surge: Reached the Northern Plains and Upper Midwest Thursday, then slid east across the Great Lakes and parts of the Northeast on Friday. It did not press nearly as far south as the first and second surges did.

– Cold relief: Relief began in the Rockies, then expanded into the southern Plains and Southeast Wednesday and Thursday. Midwest and Northeast relief arrives this weekend.…

Okay, what we have already seen is that the satellite temperatures say 2014 will NOT BE the hottest year. One should ask what the hottest year was: 1934:

2CorrectedTemps_lg

(L.A. Times) A slight adjustment to U.S. temperature records has bumped 1998 as the hottest year in the country’s history and made the Dust Bowl year of 1934 the new record holder, according to NASA.

[….]

That meant that 1998, which had been 0.02 degrees warmer than 1934, was now 0.04 degrees cooler.

This is where I transition to the NOAA temperature, but I wanted to take this transition with help from Dr. Willie Soon (NM), who is an Astrophysicist and Geoscientist at the Solar and Stellar Physics (SSP) Division, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. (I will embolden the point made below.) More and more scientists have been coming out of the closet and Dr. Soon is one of them. He says in fact that if his community continues “to keep silent and do not express outrage like the one I now feel, the notion of science as a philosophy and way of life will soon be reduced to computer games and animation for the mind-controllers and beauty-contest institutions….” Dr. Soon continues:

2014 hottest year a manipulation

Is this a joke or simply my BAD dream? Prostituting science like this is now consider a virtue. It is no wonder that science writer Lord Ridley said that he has lost his faith on science as an institution.

Why would anyone even bother with claims and insistence of the globe in 2014 being the hottest to a relative colder years all within a few hundredths of a degree Celsius? Poor Anders Celsius should be dancing in his grave.

The claim is based on just one (from a half dozen or so) thermometer-based products whose measurement quality is fraught with uncertainty and with actual error bars at least ten times larger than those claimed “effects”. WMO and others simply pick and choose the “data” that produces the press news they want in time for the Lima, Peru political pow-wow.

In truth the datasets taken as a whole clearly show that the global temperature has been flat-trending for nearly two decades now and that the theory of rising CO2 leading to global warming is sorrowfully exaggerated.

This kind of manipulative science, exemplified by IPCC, WMO, NOAA and what have you, is serving its master in the realm of politics and policy, and is indeed very sickening.

All of them are essentially behaving in ways we would never want any of our school children to behave: cheating and manipulating that are accompanied by careful wording and clever rhetoric….

This sets us up for HOW the NOAA gets their temperatures, and why they are inaccurate. The below is posted elsewhere on my blog and is semi-technical for the layman. But the key is PLACEMENT, and you can see that in the photo’s below Dr. Mueller’s presentation on how the numbers are skewed/manipulated.

(Dr. Mueller is part of the Department of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley, and Faculty Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, where he is also associated with the Institute for Nuclear and Particle Astrophysics.)

ESPIONAGE

There seems to be a misunderstanding by the general public of the NOAA and other organizations and how they misuse data points (or average them wrongly).

So, for instance, professor Mueller at Berkeley mentions how climate “scientists” were hiding the decline in the past:

They were skewing the numbers in other words. This is an example of fraud. But numbers can be skewed by faulty or outdated methods/equipment. For instance,

EQUIPMENT FAIL

Here is a recent mention of the below in COMMENTARY MAGAZINE (added here 9-4-19):

…A STUDY by meteorologist Anthony Watts found that almost 90 percent of the 1221 weather stations in the U.S. did not meet the National Weather Service’s setting standards, which requires that they be at least 100 feet from any artificial heat source or radiating surface. You can see some of the most egregious violators here. To deal with this defective information, climate scientists, have “adjusted” the data to solve this problem. Invariably, these adjustments have made earlier data show lower temperatures, and recent data show higher ones.

To develop reliable data, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) placed 114 state-of-the-art weather stations relatively evenly spaced about the lower 48 states. They were carefully sited to be away from urban areas, which are heat islands, airports, which can be affected by jet exhaust, etc.

The system became operative in 2005. Now, realclearenergy.com is reporting that there has been no increase in average temperatures in the continental United States over the last 14 years, as measured by these new stations. If anything, overall temperatures are slightly cooler than they were….

Here are some examples of fudged data because of sub-standard equipment:

You’d think the answer would be obvious, but here we have a NOAA operated USHCN climate station of record providing a live experiment. It always helps to illustrate with photos. Today I surveyed a sewage treatment plant, one of 4 stations surveyed today (though I tried for 5) and found that for convenience, they had made a nice concrete walkway to allow servicing the Fisher-Porter rain gauge, which needs a paper punch tape replaced one a month.

Here is what you see in visible light:

Here is what the infrared camera sees:

Note that the concrete surface is around 22-24°C, while the grassy areas are between 12-19°C

This station will be rated a CRN5 by this definition from the NOAA Climate Reference Network handbook, section 2.2.1:

Class 5 (error >~= 5C) – Temperature sensor located next to/above an artificial heating source, such a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface.”

More than half of the stations the NOAA use are tainted or wrongly placed equipment.

CHANGING DATA-SETS

Another example of changing averages was noted by Steve Goddard and others — even the NOAA have acknowledge it — have been discussing recently is exemplified in Dr. Judith Carry’s post on the matter (from a larger post of mine):

Even the Wall Street Journal chose the higher temperature reading to say that July of 2012 was July was the “hottest month in the contiguous U.S. since records began in 1895.” WUWT found this on accident and it has led to quite a few other revelations as we will see. Here is description in part of what we looking at:

Glaring inconsistencies found between State of the Climate (SOTC) reports sent to the press and public and the “official” climate database record for the United States. Using NCDC’s own data, July 2012 can no longer be claimed to be the “hottest month on record”.

[….]

I initially thought this was just some simple arithmetic error or reporting error, a one-off event, but then I began to find it in other months when I compared the output from the NCDC climate database plotter. Here is a table of the differences I found for the last two years between claims made in the SOTC report and the NCDC database output.

[….]

In almost every instance dating back to the inception of the CONUS Tavg value being reported in the SOTC report, there’s a difference. Some are quite significant. In most cases, the database value is cooler than the claim made in the SOTC report. Clearly, it is a systemic issue that spans over two years of reporting to the press and to the public.

It suggests that claims made by NCDC when they send out these SOTC reports aren’t credible because there are such differences between the data. Clearly, NCDC means for the plotter output they link to, to be an official representation to the public, so there cannot be a claim of me using some “not fit for purpose” method to get that data….

The WALL STREET JOURNAL made a graph showing this record setting month (below-left). The more accurate temperature for July likewise is shown in the same graph (below-right):

This looking at the data sets chosen and what is used and isn’t used to support an idea that fails in every way. Combine this obvious cherry-picking with the bias, collusion, and charges against the report that the President used to route Congress, all show we have a problem Houston! But this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. It seems the NOAA has been skewing these temps for some time. Why? Because the left uses this as a way to promote an ever growing government and the scientists get more-and-more funding. This data fudging story is newer, and it is evolving quickley, including this newest post via Real Science where Steve Goddard notes that More Than 40% Of USHCN Station Data Is Fabricated. Here is Dr. Judith carry’s synopsis (excerpted), in which she critiques a bit Goddard’s post… but then bows to the evidence:

OK, acknowledging that Goddard made some analysis errors, I am still left with some uneasiness about the actual data, and why it keeps changing. For example, Jennifer Marohasy has been writing about Corrupting Australian’s temperature record.

In the midst of preparing this blog post, I received an email from Anthony Watts, suggesting that I hold off on my post since there is some breaking news. Watts pointed me to a post by Paul Homewood entitled Massive Temperature Adjustments At Luling, Texas. Excerpt:

So, I thought it might be worth looking in more detail at a few stations, to see what is going on. In Steve’s post, mentioned above, he links to the USHCN Final dataset for monthly temperatures, making the point that approx 40% of these monthly readings are “estimated”, as there is no raw data.

From this dataset, I picked the one at the top of the list, (which appears to be totally random), Station number 415429, which is Luling, Texas.

Taking last year as an example, we can see that ten of the twelve months are tagged as “E”, i.e estimated. It is understandable that a station might be a month, or even two, late in reporting, but it is not conceivable that readings from last year are late. (The other two months, Jan/Feb are marked “a”, indicating missing days).

But, the mystery thickens. Each state produces a monthly and annual State Climatological Report, which among other things includes a list of monthly mean temperatures by station. If we look at the 2013 annual report for Texas, we can see these monthly temperatures for Luling.

Where an “M” appears after the temperature, this indicates some days are missing, i.e Jan, Feb, Oct and Nov. (Detailed daily data shows just one missing day’s minimum temperature for each of these months).

Yet, according to the USHCN dataset, all ten months from March to December are “Estimated”. Why, when there is full data available?

But it gets worse. The table below compares the actual station data with what USHCN describe as “the bias-adjusted temperature”. The results are shocking.

In other words, the adjustments have added an astonishing 1.35C to the annual temperature for 2013. Note also that I have included the same figures for 1934, which show that the adjustment has reduced temperatures that year by 0.91C. So, the net effect of the adjustments between 1934 and 2013 has been to add 2.26C of warming.

Note as well, that the largest adjustments are for the estimated months of March – December. This is something that Steve Goddard has been emphasising.

It is plain that these adjustments made are not justifiable in any way. It is also clear that the number of “Estimated” measurements made are not justified either, as the real data is there, present and correct.

Watts appears in the comments, stating that he has contacted John Nielsen-Gammon (Texas State Climatologist) about this issue. Nick Stokes also appears in the comments, and one commenter finds a similar problem for another Texas station.

Homewood’s post sheds light on Goddard’s original claim regarding the data drop out (not just stations that are no longer reporting, but reporting stations that are ‘estimated’). I infer from this that there seems to be a real problem with the USHCN data set, or at least with some of the stations. Maybe it is a tempest in a teacup, but it looks like something that requires NOAA’s attention. As far as I can tell, NOAA has not responded to Goddard’s allegations. Now, with Homewood’s explanation/clarification, NOAA really needs to respond….

(H/T to Climate Realist ~ See WUWT and Hockey Schtick for more)

So we see in the above, that temperatures can be changed years later as the totality of the data is included. What was considered the hottest falls to just an average month in the heat index.

And this has — within the past few months — turned into a very large debate.

EQUIPMENT FAIL II

Here is another example of older/faulty equipment:

A Quick Note about the Difference between RSS and UAH TLT data

There is a noticeable difference between the RSS and UAH lower troposphere temperature anomaly data. Dr. Roy Spencer discussed this in his July 2011 blog post On the Divergence Between the UAH and RSS Global Temperature Records.  In summary, John Christy and Roy Spencer believe the divergence is caused by the use of data from different satellites.  UAH has used the NASA Aqua AMSU satellite in recent years, while as Dr. Spencer writes:

…RSS is still using the old NOAA-15 satellite which has a decaying orbit, to which they are then applying a diurnal cycle drift correction based upon a climate model, which does not quite match reality.

I updated the graphs in Roy Spencer’s post in On the Differences and Similarities between Global Surface Temperature and Lower Troposphere Temperature Anomaly Datasets.

While the two lower troposphere temperature datasets are different in recent years, UAH believes their data are correct, and, likewise, RSS believes their TLT data are correct.  Does the UAH data have a warming bias in recent years or does the RSS data have cooling bias?  Until the two suppliers can account for and agree on the differences, both are available for presentation.

 

ROSE COLORED GLASSES

Another example of competing ideas is this example from two major UK papers, the first being from the Guardian:

This next one from the Daily Mail:

(DAILY MAIL) ….The most widely used measurements of Arctic ice extent are the daily satellite readings issued by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, which is co-funded by Nasa. These reveal that – while the long-term trend still shows a decline – last Monday, August 25, the area of the Arctic Ocean with at least 15 per cent ice cover was 5.62 million square kilometres.

This was the highest level recorded on that date since 2006 (see graph, right), and represents an increase of 1.71 million square kilometres over the past two years – an impressive 43 per cent.

Other figures from the Danish Meteorological Institute suggest that the growth has been even more dramatic. Using a different measure, the area with at least 30 per cent ice cover, these reveal a 63 per cent rise – from 2.7 million to 4.4 million square kilometres.

[….]

Crucially, the ice is also thicker, and therefore more resilient to future melting. Professor Andrew Shepherd, of Leeds University, an expert in climate satellite monitoring, said yesterday: ‘It is clear from the measurements we have collected that the Arctic sea ice has experienced a significant recovery in thickness over the past year.

‘It seems that an unusually cool summer in 2013 allowed more ice to survive through to last winter. This means that the Arctic sea ice pack is thicker and stronger than usual, and this should be taken into account when making predictions of its future extent.’

Same data used, one says BEWARE, the END IS NEAR, the other says making gains, as the graph shows below:

(So are Polar Bears, BTW) And the Antarctic has made BIG GAINS. But if the left — yes, the left — says we should renter the little ice-age to be at a normal point of “climate disruption,” then they are living a pipe-dream. As the earth gets warmer life flourishes, as warmer periods in history have exemplified:

June was ranked one of the coldest months in a while. According to the NOAA, July 2014 ranked 29th coldest out of 120 using the Maximum temperature. And so we enter the discussion about if the pause is real… which is now being acknowledged by almost all (except the IPCC).

PAUSE

Here is Dr. Judith Curry posting ion the subject before getting into two papers that talk about it from two points of view:

With 39 explanations and counting, and some climate scientists now arguing that it might last yet another decade, the IPCC has sidelined itself in irrelevance until it has something serious to say about the pause and has reflected on whether its alarmism is justified, given its reliance on computer models that predicted temperature rises that have not occurred. – Rupert Darwall 

The statement by Rupert Darwall concisely states what is at stake with regards to the ‘pause.’   This seriously needs to be sorted out….

For a running — updated — list of these excuses mentioned above, see here. What HAS been clearly shown is that while some wish to make CO2 illegal, CO2 is in fact not driving the climate:

GROUP-THINK

What is being shown as of late is that more-and-more scientists are becoming concerned with the group-think in the climate-sciences. Again, Dr. Judith Curry was the biggest pro-AGW proponent, but has — like many others leaders in their respective field — changed or softened her/their positions on what the science is actually showing:

The implications of dogmatic groupthink and intimidation for the pursuit of sound science — and sound policy — are chilling. – Christopher Snowden

A collection of articles from the health science community on the fate of papers and scientists that challenge the consensus.

SUN & OCEAN

  • Gross Scientific Negligence – IPCC Ignored Huge Body Of Peer-Reviewed Literature Showing Sun’s Clear Impact – See more at: http://tinyurl.com/kw47zcf (NASA is changing on this as well)
  • NASA is saying the sun — thanks to the Goddard Institute studying this, is the driver of warming and cooling: http://tinyurl.com/m29yo99 (Via Hockey Shtick)

And yet another study is showing the sun as the major player… NOT greenhouse gases.

So what’s the bottom line? NOAA temps change over time. Many in this respective field are seeing group-think. Ideology is driving this group-think, not science.

Why should you be interested? Sea surface temperature records indicate El Niño and La Niña events are responsible for the warming of global sea surface temperature anomalies over the past 30 years, not man-made greenhouse gases. I’ve searched sea surface temperature records for more than 4 years and ocean heat content records for more than 3 years, and I can find no evidence of an anthropogenic greenhouse gas signal in either dataset. That is, the warming of the global oceans has been caused by naturally occurring, sunlight-fueled, coupled ocean-atmosphere processes, not anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

(From the newest global temp data-set at WUWT)

No matter what evidences one puts forward, until people remove their rose-colored glasses, they will continue to explain away the pause showing CO2 has nothing to do with global temperatures.

Google Joins the Common Sense Crew On Renewable Energies ~ Finally!

Published by Papa Giorgio

Google Dirt

“At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope… Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.” (Spectrum, via What’s Up With That)

Via Breitbart, useless venture.

Some people call it “renewable energy” but I prefer to call it “alternative energy” because that’s what it really is: an alternativeto energy that actually works (eg nuclear and anything made from wonderful, energy-rich fossil fuel.)

Now a pair of top boffins from uber-green Google’s research department have reached the same conclusion.

Ross Konigstein and David Fork, both Stanford PhDs (aerospace engineering; applied physics) were employed on a Google research project which sought to enhance renewable technology to the point where it could produce energy more cheaply than coal. But after four years, the project was closed down. In this post at IEEE Spectrum they tell us why.

We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

Why is renewable energy such a total fail? Because, as Lewis Page explains here, it’s so ludicrously inefficient and impossibly expensive that if ever we were so foolish as to try rolling it out on a scale beyond its current boutique levels, it would necessitate bankrupting the global economy….

…read more…

Lets apply to this issue the three magic questions that are never asked by the left:

1) compared to what?
2) at what cost?
3) what hard-evidence do you have?

Now, let’s apply this to the newer power plant in the Mojave desert and see if these questions were asked beforehand?

….A solar power plant in the Mojave Desert that’s attracted negative attention for its injuries to birds is producing a whole lot less power than it’s supposed to, according to Energy Department figures.ivanpah-solar-10-30-14-thumb-600x400-83195

According to stats from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a number-crunching branch of the U.S. Department of Energy, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in San Bernardino County has produced only about a quarter of the power it’s supposed to, with both less than optimal weather and apparent mechanical issues contributing to the shortfall.

[….]

As Danko points out, Ivanpah’s owners have recently sought extensions on the repayment schedule for the $1.6 billion in government-backed loans that paid for Ivanpah’s construction, hoping to delay writing checks until the firms can secure a government grant they hope to use to pay down the loan….

(KCET)

Solar

So it seems that these more left leaning environmentalists think it is okay to spend billions of tax-payer money and regulate businesses on ideas that do not work anywhere but in Utopian dreams. Let’s end with WUWT quoting these Google Ph.D.s and then segway out with commentary:

“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”

I must say I’m personally surprised at the conclusion of this study. I genuinely thought that we were maybe a few solar innovations and battery technology breakthroughs away from truly viable solar power. But if this study is to be believed, solar and other renewables will never in the foreseeable future deliver meaningful amounts of energy.

Apple as well is struggling with it’s Utopian — only works on paper — dreams.Solar Apple

Powerline notes that “yesterday’s Wall Street Journal story about the production difficulties of the Arizona supplier that Apple selected to make sapphire screens for the iPhone 6 was fascinating in its own right, but there was one little detail in the story that zipped by too quickly.” Continuing they quote the WSJ:

Mr. Squiller, the GT operations chief, told the bankruptcy court that GT lost three months of production to power outages and delays building the facility.

Whoa, show down there a moment: what’s this about power outages? I’d sure like to know more of the full story here. Was this simply bad engineering on site, or was there a problem with the local grid or the energy sources supplying the grid in that area? Grid stability is going to be a more serious issue going forward as we compel more and more “renewable” (meaning “less stable”) energy as part of the EPA’s mania to restructure the electricity sector through the Clean Air Act.

 

Why Clouds Matter! CERN’s C.L.O.U.D. Program Drives Real Climate Science

Published by Papa Giorgio

(The above graph is an example of how cosmic rays affect the cloud cover of earth… of which will be explained somewhat in what follows.) This post is partly to explain what CERN (CLOUD) is and to point out that global warming and cooling is based on something other than man. (For a semi-technical philosophical/theological walk through CERN’s discovery of the “God Particle,” see Dr. William Lane Craig’s review.) In other words, driven mainly by nature… not man. First, let us get a primer on why clouds play an important role in climate sensitivity in an interview of Dr. Roy Spencer:

Clouds the Key to Global Warming from Papa Giorgio on Vimeo.

Dennis Prager Interviews Climatologist, Roy W. Spencer:

Roy W. Spencer is a climatologist and a Principal Research Scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville, as well as the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He has served as senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

He is known for his satellite-based temperature monitoring work, for which he was awarded the American Meteorological Society’s Special Award. Spencer’s research suggests that global warming is mostly natural, and that the climate system is quite insensitive to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and aerosol pollution and suggests that natural, chaotic variations in low cloud cover may account for most observed warming.

(WIKI)

For more clear thinking like this from Dennis Prager… I invite you to join Pragertopia.

Here is CERN’s recent discoveries discussed on a Canadian Broadcast to better introduce the video by CERN that follows:

Here is a short blurb by What’s Up With That to help introduce the topic:

This refers to the CLOUD experiment at CERN.

I’ll have more on this as it develops (updated twice since the original report now), but for the short term, it appears that a non-visible light irradiance effect on Earth’s cloud seeds has been confirmed. The way it is posited to work is that the  effect of cosmic rays (modulated by the sun’s magnetic variations which either allow more or deflect more cosmic rays) creates cloud condensation nuclei in the Earth’s atmosphere. With more condensation nuclei, more clouds form and vice-versa. Clouds have significant effects on TSI at the surface.

“Cloud feedbacks are the primary source of inter-model differences in equilibrium climate sensitivity, with low cloud being the largest contributor”.Even the IPCC has admitted this in their latest (2007) report:

Update: From the Nature article, Kirkby is a bit more muted in his assessment than the GWPF:

Early results seem to indicate that cosmic rays do cause a change. The high-energy protons seemed to enhance the production of nanometre-sized particles from the gaseous atmosphere by more than a factor of ten. But, Kirkby adds, those particles are far too small to serve as seeds for clouds. “At the moment, it actually says nothing about a possible cosmic-ray effect on clouds and climate, but it’s a very important first step,” he says.

Here is the video:

Here is the founder and principle scientist talking more about CLOUD:

Dr. William Happer Speaks To The Benefits Of CO2 (UPDATED)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Here is an updated article in regards to the newer wave of those “skeptics” coming in from the “cold”

…William Happer, professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, is similarly optimistic. “I think we’re making progress,” Happer said. “I see reassuring signs.”

Despite harsh criticism of their contrarian views, a few scientists like Happer and Curry have pointed to evidence that global warming is less pronounced than predicted. They have also argued that this slighter warming would bring positive developments along with problems. For the first time in years, skeptics believe they can find a path out of the wilderness into which they’ve been cast by the “scientific consensus.” As much as they desire a more open-minded reception by their colleagues, they are hoping even more that the spigot of government research funding – which dwarfs all other sources – will trickle their way.

[….]

They cite an adage: You only get answers to the questions you ask.

“In reality, it’s the government, not the scientists, that asks the questions,” said David Wojick, a longtime government consultant who has closely tracked climate research spending since 1992. If a federal agency wants models that focus on potential sea-level rise, for example, it can order them up. But it can also shift the focus to how warming might boost crop yields or improve drought resistance.

While it could take months for such expanded fields of research to emerge, a wider look at the possibilities excites some scientists. Happer, for one, feels emboldened in ways he rarely has throughout his career because, for many years, he knew his iconoclastic climate conclusions would hurt his professional prospects….

See also, “Breathing Causes Asthma.” (Drop down to the Acid Rain Myth if you wish.)

This from the Examiner.com, about the above exchange:

CNBC invited Dr. William Happer to speak on benefits of CO2. Examiner covered Dr. Happer and former astronaut Harrison Schmitt’s enlightened article in the Wall St. Journal.

The video, seen here, divulges the mythology that surrounds the much maligned molecule. And, if CNBC viewers thought that Dr. Happer was invited to answer questions, he received little time to do that.

Joe Kernan, co-anchor of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” did his best to bring out the benefits of CO2 to his audience. As if his own questions to Happer wouldn’t be enough, he added four other broadcast reporters to the panel.

Repeated interruptions along with explanations of current misconceptions of the panel members limited Happer’s response time to a minimum. Of the 9-minute session, Happer spoke for a mere 2 minutes.

Still, in those mere minutes, the erudite scientist got his points across, albeit without being allowed elaboration.

  • On 97% of scientists agreeing on global warming, Happer responded that the number is “phony.”
  • On rising CO2 as the cause of warming, Happer rather cited increasing CO2 as a result of historical temperature rise rather than the cause.
  • On current warming, Happer reiterated the temperature record of no warming since 1998.
  • On stronger storms, Happer cited no such evidence is found in the data.
  • On the climate models, Happer declared that they need revisiting and represent a “secular religion.”
  • On the impact of increased CO2 on humans, Happer said that much higher levels are safe as sailors in submarines breathe 800 ppm for months at a time. Also, the human race developed in ancient atmospheres of 4,000 ppm of CO2.

The CNBC newscasters might have been well intentioned and seeking the truth from a science perspective. The panel members knew more than most on the complex subject, but they exposed their biases right off the bat, challenging Happer about what a physicist would know about climate science, then loaded the panel with talkative newscasters seeking their own air time instead of answers.

The session concluded with unintelligible arguing among the panelists, as if truth would somehow arise from whomever argued loudest. All this, while the benefits of CO2 from studies of undoctored evidence was stifled to silence despite Happer’s good efforts to deliver one-liners based on science rather than politics.

Here are two plants, one at higher PPM of CO2 and the other at what some scientist say is the best PPM for humanity. As you can see, during warming times in our past (for instance, the Romans grew grapes for wine on the Salisbury Plain)

Some points taken from another blogpost to show how some things in the past are different (warmer) than modern CO2 burnin’ man:

(1) Mars (New Scientist) has had a bout of global warming… last I checked Exxon doesn’t drill there;

(2) In the 8th century AD, the Roman Empire grew grapes used for wine on the slopes of Salisbury Plain (about 80 miles southwest of London) in the United Kingdom;

(3) The Vikings raiding and traveling the seas was made possible by the now frozen “Greenland”actually living up to its name;

(4) NASA‘s “fact” that 1998 was the warmest year (used by Al Gore) was disproved by an amateur mathematician;

(5) In 1970′s, at the first Earth Day rally, scientists, meteorologists and politicians all pushed a theory that there was Global Cooling (Time magazine for instance). While this theory wasn’t as embedded in popular thinking and scientific literature as is global warming, it was still the dominant theory of that time;

(6) There is more ice now that 29-years ago; Antarctic sea ice more than in 1979;

(7) In the 1500′s till the late 1800′s passages that are now iced over allowed for what is termed as the Northwest Passage… Exxon or cars weren’t around then?

❖ “If you are like me and bit foggy on the Northwest Passage, here is a five cent refresher. The British coined the term Northwest Passage for the potential northern oceanic pass that would allow vessels to move between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The earliest explorations for the fabled passage were by Cortes in 1539. The late 1500′s were marked by British explorers, Martin Frobisher, Humphrey Gilbert, and John Davis. Several expeditions followed, all with little success of finding the passage but tempered by the acquisition of new lands. Some attempts lead to deaths of entire crews. Notable of these is the Sir John Franklin expedition in which all of the crew members were lost to starvation, scurvy, cannibalism, and lead poisoning from food sealed in tins. The first to transverse the Northwest Passage was Sir Robert McClure using a combination of both sledge and ship. Ironically this was done during the search for Franklin’s team in which McClure’s own ship became trapped in the ice for three winters. The passage was finally conquered entirely by sea by the Norwegian Amundsen in 1906.”

(8) Acid rain scares of the 1980′s were mostly unfounded and not man-caused (see below);

(9) On the northern side of Mammoth (in California), there are tree-lines that were preserved by a volcanic eruption in A.D. 1350. In this preserved tree-line there were seven species of tree that grew well above the current tree-line in this mountainous range. The Earth would have to be 3.2 degrees warmer (Celsius) in order for these particular trees to grow in this higher altitude.

ACID RAIN MYTH:

The first section below is a good overview of what the second section shows in-depth.

Myth: Acid rain has caused a large portion of U.S. lakes to become acidic.

Fact: In a recent study of 7,000 Northeastern lakes, only 3.4% were found to be acidic. Most of these lakes are just as acidic as they were before the Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, most of the acidic lakes in the United States are in Florida, where there is the least acid rain.

Myth: Data taken by proponents of the acid rain theory is accurate and conclusive.

Fact: Proponents of the acid rain theory have rested their claims on a deeply flawed series of articles by G.E. Likens and his co-workers in the 1970s. A careful evaluation of Likens’ research conducted by a group of scientists at Environmental Research and Technology, Inc., reveals that his data collection and selection was deliberately biased to support the desired conclusions.

Myth: Acid rain destroys vegetation.

Fact: Acid rain actually has a positive impact on vegetation. The nitrogen and sulfur characteristic of acid rain, act as nutrients essential for plant growth. The world’s first acid rain study concluded that, “the principle effect of acid rain is the improvement of crop yields and crop protein content.”

Myth: Acid Rain is unnatural.

Fact: Rainwater is naturally acidic. Because water is such a good solvent, even in the cleanest air, rainwater dissolves some of the naturally present carbon dioxide, forming carbonic acid. According to EPA regulations, Ph levels any lower than 5.0 are environmentally harmful. Yet, an analysis of ice from the Antarctic and the Himalayas, deposited hundreds and thousands of years ago when the environment was presumably pristine, had Ph values ranging from 4.8 to 4.2.

  • Information from Environmental Overkill by Dixy Lee Ray (Regnery Gateway, 1993); Trashing the Planet by Dixy Lee Ray (Regnery Gateway, 1990).

This next section can be read in full online, and comes from Edward Krug’s book, Environment Betrayed: The Abuse of a Just Cause (Kindle Edition), from the chapter on “Acid Rain: Forests and Fish.”

ABSTRACT

Acid rain first came to public attention with claims that it was rapidly killing forests and lakes on a broad basis. To assess the accuracy of these claims, Congress initiated the largest study to date of an environmental problem: the ten-year, $500′-million National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP), which involved over three thousand scientists. NAPAP determined that acid rain may present a threat to one species of tree in 0.1 percent of eastern forests. The percentage of acidic lakes was also found to be much smaller than previously believed and not measurably increasing. Nevertheless, these scientific findings had little apparent impact on legislation passed in 1990, having been judged by some to be “not policy relevant.”

INTRODUCTION

George Will’s column of January 8, 1992, indicates that mainstream journalists are beginning to get the idea that in the hands of environmental advocates, estimates of environmental damage take on lives of their own, with few ties to reality. In the column, Mr. Will mused, “Whose interests are served by a numerical exaggeration? The answer often is: the people whose funding or political importance varies directly with the perceived severity of a particular problem” (Will, 1992).

Just about everyone of public importance had some sort of stake in acid rain being an environmental Armageddon. The scientific reality of the effects of acid rain differ enormously from public perception. And this is important for the setting of environmental policy because, unlike scientific fact, political reality in a democracy is established by vote.

The enormous gulf between fact and perception was brought out in the 60 Minutes story on acid rain (December 30, 1990). Correspondent Steve Kroft asked Dr. James Mahoney (then director of NAPAP) about the media representing acid rain as making a “silent spring” in the forests and lakes of the Northeastern United States. Director Mahoney commented that the media accounts of damage were overblown by quite a bit. When pressed why such fiction, rather than science, is being reported, Dr. Mahoney refused to address this issue and answered that his job is to do the science, not the reporting.

Yet the EPA had no such reservations about commenting, and commenting strongly, on media reporting. The EPA blasted the 60 Minutes acid rain story in a lengthy and detailed response claiming that outrageous statements were made (EPA, 1991). Let us examine the peculiar responses of the EPA, our public servant of environmental policy.

As a scientist, I can see how the EPA would have been upset by some of the comments made on 60 Minutes. The EPA is the lead federal agency of NAPAP. EPA Administrator Reilly is chairman of the President’s Joint Chairs Council, which oversees NAPAP. So I would have thought that the EPA would have been upset by the remark of David Hawkins (an activist for the Natural Resources Defense Council) who in effect told 60 Minutes that NAPAP has been a waste of time and money. And further, he said that in its ten years of existence, NAPAP has only confirmed what was known ten years ago!

Peculiarly, the EPA did not indicate any offense at all with this statement. But as a NAPAP scientist, I certainly was offended. We must remember that the United States almost did not have a NAPAP. In 1980, public opinion was very strong against waiting ten years for NAPAP to complete its study. Environmental activists established the conventional wisdom that by 1990 it would be too late: Rachael Carson’s prophesy of a “silent spring” would come to pass, with acid rain forever killing forests and lakes, by 1990.

Only a recalcitrant President Reagan, allied with Midwest rust-belt legislators, stood in the way of environmentalists’ demands. But the pressure became even too much for President Reagan who, by the end of 1983, was ready to capitulate. In late January/early February 1984, I was one of a committee of scientists who were asked to advise EPA Administrator Ruckelshaus on the choice of continuing research on acid rain or passing a new Clean Air Act. What the government would do hinged on how we answered the following question: will eastern North America survive five more years (will it survive until 1989) under the fierce onslaught of acid rain? The question seems ludicrous now, but back in 1984, it was considered foolish and immoral for anyone to even ask this question. President Reagan stayed with NAPAP.

Now we know that NAPAP’s findings did not confirm what was known ten years ago in 1980, as Mr. Hawkins claimed. And Mr. Hawkins of the Natural Resources Defense Council is in the position to know this firsthand because this is the same Mr. Hawkins who was appointed by President Carter as the EPA assistant administrator responsible for acid rain. President Carter, then Mr. Hawkins’s boss, told the American public in 1980 that acid rain was one of the two most severe atmospheric environmental problems of the century. And Mr. Hawkins’s EPA lent the appearance of scientific credibility to President Carter’s assertion by publishing that the average Northeast lake had been acidified a hundredfold over just the last forty years as the result of acid rain (EPA, 1980)—a statement that has no basis in fact. Yet, by 1990 the EPA’s own research, as part of NAPAP, showed that, even in the Adirondacks, the area whose lakes are supposed to suffer the greatest acidification by acid rain, EPA data show that the average lake is no more acidic now than it was before the industrial era (Krug and Warnick, 1991).

The EPA produced a six-page, single-spaced rebuttal to what it considered outrageous statements made on 60 Minutes (EPA, 1991). Was the EPA response to 60 Minutes concerned about Hawkins’s assertion about wasted research dollars? No. Or about research results substantiating the public perception of 1980? No.

Yet EPA Administrator Reilly wrote in a letter to Science: “In the Senate hearings on my confirmation as EPA Administrator, the first criterion that I mentioned for an effective environmental policy was ‘respect for science'” (Reilly, 1990).

I could understand if Mr. Reilly were concerned about Mr. Hawkins having a less-than-respectful attitude for science on 60 Minutes when he said that NAPAP scientists were unable to see damage because we have very crude scientific tools but that the American public can look out their windows and see the damage being done. Mr. Hawkins then went on to characterize us as backpacking around in the woods.

Yet again, the EPA, which considers itself to be a scientific agency and is the lead agency of NAPAP, an agency whose administrator publically claims to have “respect for science,” did not indicate any offense at all with this statement.

What really offended the EPA? I was asked to comment on Mr. Hawkins’s characterization of us NAPAP scientists as not being able to see anything because we were larking around in the woods with crude scientific tools. I responded, “Actually we do know a lot. We know that the acid rain problem is so small that it’s hard to sec.”

The EPA took great offense to that statement.

The EPA promptly carried out an ad hominem attack on me! This was done even though I have letters from the EPA itself calling me a recognized leader in acid rain—even though I have been used by the EPA itself to review its acid rain programs, and I have even been used to advise Administrators Ruckelshaus and Thomas of the EPA about acid rain.

The EPA also released comments from an alleged peer review of a project report I published for NAPAP two years earlier. I call it an alleged peer review because:

  1. The first time I had heard of it was when a Washington Post reporter called me up on January 11, 1991—twenty-one months after the report was published.
  2. The report was peer-reviewed by NAPAP prior to publication. The EPA’s comments did not come from the NAPAP review of the report.
  3. I have yet to see a copy of this alleged peer review even after making a freedom of information request on January 14, 1991, to EPA Administrator Reilly to see it.

We can now begin to understand why the scientists who conducted the Adirondack lakes study for the EPA—the study that showed no net acidification—refused to publish this result. Similarly, the results of the EPA’s largest acidification research project—where no correlation could be found between acid rain and surface water acidity, and soil chemistry is the principal factor controlling the acidity of surface waters (EPA, 1989)—was not published by EPA scientists in the scientific literature. So, after waiting for up to two years for these data to be published, I finally published them in a letter to Science last fall (Krug and Warnick, 1991).

We see that, as public servants and as holders of the public trust, the EPA is unconcerned about public misinformation that exaggerates acid rain as an environmental problem. The EPA is unconcerned about science bashing in the media. Indeed, the EPA even partakes in it.

In conclusion, George Will’s column of January 8 hit the nail on the head: in the hands of environmental advocates, estimates of environmental damage take on lives of their own, with few ties to reality. As Mr. Will concludes, those who exaggerate are those whose funding or political importance varies directly with the perceived severity of a particular problem.

The reason why the public is so well misinformed on acid rain is that the environmental advocates are not just Greenpeace and the Sierra Club. Just about everybody gains from the acid rain myth—everybody, that is, except you and me. The EPA likes it because, in terms of regulation, the 1990 Clean Air Act is ten times bigger than any previous environmental legislation, including the Clean Air Act of 1970. The government likes it because it gains more popularity, power, and control as government is seen doing something good for little cost; most environmental costs are off budget, being paid directly by the consumer. The media likes it because environmentalism is a just cause depicted in terms of good-versus-evil, David-versus-Goliath battles. Environmentalists hand the media popular and spectacular disaster stories pitting the blue-jeaned defenders of Mother Earth from the three-piece-suit Darth Vaders of big business, in this case, utilities spewing forth acid rain. The utilities like it because they get to pass on higher utility rates, along with increased profits, from the Public Utility Commissions onto you and me because we, the well-misinformed public, are demanding to be protected from the scourge of acid rain.

What a sweet setup!

Small wonder why scientists refuse to publish data showing acid rain has little or no measurable effect. When another acid rain scientist was asked by a magazine reporter why Ed Krug would take it upon himself to publish politically incorrect science, my colleague replied, “He was a bit immature in the area of political science” (Anderson, 1992).

On that note, let us quickly examine what political science has done to the science of acid rain.

POLITICAL SCIENCE: HISTORY

It is a little-known fact that the European and American acid deposition monitoring networks originated in the national agricultural experiment stations; these have been sampling and analyzing atmospheric deposition of N [nitrogen] and S [sulfur] for more than a century, not as contaminants but as beneficial nutrients (Krug, 1991). Among agronomists, such “pollution” was often called the poor man’s fertilizer. In Sweden, the world’s first national acid rain study determined that the principal effect of acid rain was improvement of crop yield and crop protein content (e.g., Johansson, 1959).

However, the insertion of the term “acid rain” into the modern literature and psyche by Likens and associates in 1972 “caught the attention of the scientific community as well as the public at large” (Abdullah, 1989). The deposition. How could anything called “acid rain” be anything but bad? So the results of the Swedish program became lost in history, and any scientist who brought up the point that acid rain might have a good side was ridiculed into oblivion.

Later on, NAPAP would report on the fertilizing effect of acid rain on forests, but would emphasize the negative potential of it. Fertilization of high altitude forest by acid rain, 0.1 percent of our eastern forests, may be increasing cold damage by making forests grow too long into the winter. The potential beneficial effects of fertilization on the remaining 99.9 percent of eastern forests remain safely buried in voluminous technical reports—reports little read by interested specialists, let alone by policy makers and the public.

Around the time that Likens and associates used two little words to permanently change the way that we think about deposition of N and S, the Norwegian national acid rain program came into existence.

The Norwegian national acid rain program of the 1970s, not the Swedish program of the 1940s and ’50s, established the research perspective of the subsequent American, Canadian, and European national acid rain programs. Regrettably, the proposal (Nr. 172/1974) to the Norwegian parliament for financing the program stated that “the aim of the project is to provide material for negotiations in order to limit the emission of SO2 in Europe” (Rosenqvist, 1990). Thus, scientific objectivity was lost from the inception; politicians proclaimed that acid rain is a problem and would pay those scientists who would support the political position.

Thus, political correctness came to acid rain twenty years ago.

A similar situation was manufactured in the United States. As the Norwegian program was ending in 1980, President Carter called acid rain one of the two atmospheric environmental crises of the century and started NAPAP at $10 million per year for ten years.

Thus, the inception of NAPAP was hardly scientifically objective either. And, at $10 million per year, NAPAP was merely window dressing to provide the appearance of scientific credibility for the claims of environmental disaster.

Remember, NAPAP was supposed to be investigating the sources of acid rain, its atmospheric chemistry and transport, as well as its myriad claimed effects, such as visibility, effects on crops, effects on forests, effects on lakes, effects on buildings, effects on human health. Then you take all of these effect and research areas and divide them among all of the participating agencies: the US Park Service, the US Geological Survey, the US Forest Service, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the US Department of Agriculture re, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the national laboratories, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Energy, Department of Commerce, and (last but not least) the Environmental Protection Agency, and you see that $10 million per year will hardly pay the salaries of the administrative paper pushers, let alone support any meaningful research.

NAPAP was originally set up to put a rubber stamp on the false claims of disaster. It was not set up to do science.

This changed after 1984, when the Reagan administration asked for scientific rather than political opinion. We scientists reported to the administration that, contrary to popular belief, the world was nor going to end soon because of acid rain. Please let us do the science.

President Reagan’s response was not to push for a new version of the Clean Air Act. Not only did he continue NAPAP, but he increased NAPAP’s budget tenfold to around $100 million per year so that it could finally get around to doing meaningful scientific research on acid rain.

With the new budget and the emphasis now being on science, NAPAP also got a scientist to be its new director, Lawrence Kulp, a former director of the Lamont Geochemical Laboratory at Columbia University.

This made environmentalists furious. NAPAP became distinct from all other national acid rain programs: it was evolving into a scientific entity rather than remaining a creature of environmental politics. Since NAPAP was no longer likely to rubber stamp the claims of disaster, environmental activists would discredit NAPAP with the help of its powerful allies in the media and government, which most importantly included the EPA. And the EPA was NAPAP’s lead federal agency.

Thus NAPAP was not able to produce perfectly objective science. However, we must commend NAPAP for performing far better than we have any right to expect; NAPAP was overwhelmingly besieged from both within and without.

You can measure the success of NAPAP by environmentalists criticism of it and their vehement objections to the establishment of a “NAPAP” for global warming….

Record Lows in Death Valley ~ Global Warming Fails

Published by Papa Giorgio

THIS WAS ALSO ONLY THE 7TH TIME SINCE 1911 THAT HIGH TEMPERATURES IN AUGUST REMAINED IN THE 80S.

The Washington Post reports:

Death Valley, Calif., which is known for being the world’s hottest location, maxed out at a relatively chilly 89 degrees on Sunday. This temperature – nearly 30 degrees below average – was its coolest high temperature on record for the date by a whopping 15 degrees. The previous record of 104 was set in 1945.

This was only the eighth time that a high in the 80s has occurred in Death Valley in July or August, and there hasn’t been a high less than 90 since 1984. Weather records in Death Valley go back to 1911.

Locations that were hotter than Death Valley yesterday include Spokane Wash. (93), Missoula, Mont. (91),  Casper, Wy. (92), and Boise, Idaho (99).

The average June high in Death Valley is 110 degrees, July is 117 degrees, and August is 115. This makes Sunday’s high temperature a ridiculous 26 degrees below normal.

Death Valley set the world’s record hottest temperature of 134 degrees on July 10, 1913.

…read more…