Jerry Brown Just Destroyed California’s Economy (SB 32) |UPDATED|

California’s annual statewide greenhouse gas (GHG) emission inventory is an important tool for establishing historical emission trends and tracking California’s progress toward the goal set by the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32).The law set a target of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

[….]

Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr. recently established a 2030 greenhouse gas reduction goal of 40 percent below 1990 levels, an interim target toward meeting the 2050 goal of reducing emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels.

(California Air Resourse Board [CARB] — see more in the APPENDIX)

John and Ken discuss how Governor Jerry Brown may have just bankrupted California.

Some main points about the bill:

➤ The new SB 32 requires a massive 40 percent cut from 1990 levels, with a deadline of December 31, 2030. The Bee reports that the new measure gives CARB extended authority to force the extreme reductions upon Californians without setting the parameters of those regulations …. Two related bills, AB 1550 and AB 2722, set out the wealth redistribution piece of the regulatory scheme, taking moneys collected in fines and through extorting businesses and forcing those funds to be spent in districts represented by many legislators voting for SB 32… (BREITBART)

According to author Brad Plumer: “It’s hard to overstate how ambitious this is. Few countries have ever achieved cuts this sharp while enjoying robust economic growth.” The only countries (France and Sweden) that have achieved this, he wrote, did so by increasing their use of nuclear power — something off the table in anti-nuke California. “It will mean reshaping virtually every facet of the state economy, from buildings to transportation to farming and beyond,” he added. “California is essentially offering itself as a guinea pig in the world’s most important policy experiment.”…. What’s really troubling, however, is what these measures will mean for the state’s economy. The additional costs imposed by CARB bureaucrats will make it tougher to keep manufacturing and agricultural jobs from fleeing. Additional land-use edicts mandating fewer suburban developments and an end to major freeway construction will mean higher home costs and more congestion. Radical policies will lead to radical results. This isn’t scare mongering. It’s just the truth. (AMERICAN SPECTATOR)

➤ But it was driven by legislators in poor communities who are critical of the current cap-and-trade system that, according to the Capital & Main blog, “allows big polluters to pollute as long as they pay for credits or offsets purchased in other parts of the state or country. AB 197 requires that the (CARB)… target direct reductions at both stationary and mobile sources in those communities.” Another apparent goal is to force CARB to spend money from the cap-and-trade system more equitably in poorer legislative districts. (IBID.)

Jerry Brown 300 CLEAR

Energy prices, food prices, car costs, etc., will all go up. As California becomes more expensive as a state to do business in, MORE businesses will leave and jobs will be lost. It will leave only the giants in business being able to pay for the extra costs, thus, whittling out competition. California will have a few large corporations left in it as well as a few large unions… all subsidizing the Democrat Party to force competition out of their markets.

The L.A. Times notes this as well:

…“You’re going to be increasing the cost of moving goods through California ports,” said Jock O’Connell, a trade expert at Los Angeles consulting firm Beacon Economics.

Feisty competitors on the South and East coasts have been eating into Los Angeles-area ports’ business, and in June the Panama Canal opened wider channels that may divert more traffic away.

“At some point [importers] reach a tipping point where they say it makes more sense to send goods through Houston, or Charleston,” O’Connell says.

That could be a threat to the hundreds of thousands of Californians who are directly or indirectly employed by port business. “You wind up jeopardizing an awful lot of blue collar workers,” O’Connell said.

Brown dismissed the concerns of business leaders as “very dubious”. This, despite the fact an analysis cited in the article indicates that implementation could cost the state over 300,000 jobs.

(LEGAL INSURRECTION)

This is really a back-door way to implement the previously failed SB 350 and more in order to tax people for California’s unfunded liabilities. JOHN & KEN previously discussed SB 350 noting the harmful effects it would have.

In an excellent article over at the WASHINGTON TIMES, we read this:

Fleeing California: A hostile business climate sends more companies to friendlier states


More than a century ago, Roy Farmer, 20, went door-to-door in Los Angeles with his bags of home-roasted coffee beans. By the 1930s, Farmer Brothers was selling coffee to restaurants throughout the nation. Today the company employs 1,200 men and women and generates $200 million in annual sales to restaurants, convenience stores, hospitals, hotels and universities.

But after surviving depressions, recessions, earthquakes and wars, Farmer Brothers is leaving California, finally driven out by high taxes and oppressive regulations.

The company says it’s fleeing in search of a place where business is appreciated. Relocating its corporate headquarters and distribution facilities from to a friendlier location, Farmer Brothers expects to save $15 million a year. Company executives are looking at Dallas and Oklahoma City. The relocation will bear real consequences for California. Nearly 350 workers will lose their well-paying jobs in Los Angeles alone….

Of course I have been talking about this for years (CARL’S JR. as one example), and posting audio on this issue for years as well…

When California makes it too expensive for alternative energy companies to survive in this state… you know the chickens are coming home to roost!


APPENDIX


The question my wife asked, very astutely, is what are these numbers we are talking about. Here they are:

…Getting to the 2030 and 2050 cuts that California seeks will require steeper cuts than the state has yet experienced over an extended period. Reducing greenhouse gases to the 2020 levels ordered by AB 32 requires a cut of 5.5 percent between 2010 and 2020. Brown’s executive order requires a 40 percent cut below the 2020 target by 2030. That means, in theory, that California would need to reduce emissions about 7 times as quickly between 2020 and 2030 as between 2010 and 2020. 

In practice, however, the acceleration may not be quite so dramatic. That’s because most experts expect California to come in below its 2020 targets. If, for example, California’s emissions come in at around 400 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2020, rather than at 431 (the figure needed to exactly meet its 2020 goal), California would need to cut emissions roughly three times faster between 2020 and 2030 than during the preceding decade.

Between 2030 and 2050, emissions will also need to decline much more quickly than has been the case in recent years.

These calculations come with one slight caveat: the state has specified its long-term goals only in terms of percentage reductions, rather than in terms of exact emissions figures. But the exact numbers, when they are formulated, are expected to be roughly what the percentages suggest (eg, around 260 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent for 2030, and 85 metric tons in 2050).

(CALMATTERS)

Here is page one of a more bullet pointed and graphed path (click it for the PDF) to these reductions that are impossible and is only a way for the state to gain more monetary resources to pay for their B.S.

  • A mere 2% of the carbon emissions credits that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) put up for auction in May were sold. The quarterly auction raised only $10 million of the $500 million that CARB projected. That’s awful news for Democrats in Sacramento who planned to spend the windfall on high-speed rail, housing and electric-car subsidies. (WSJ

According to the Vermont Senator’s website, the Democratic Party draft platform reads:

  • “Democrats believe that climate change is too important to wait for climate deniers and defeatists in Congress to start listening to science, and support using every tool available to reduce emissions now.” (Global Warming Is Too Important To Wait For Democracy)

Too important to wait for Congress? Which is why stuff like the above have to be passed via executive order — like Jerry Brown did. Whether on the state or federal levels, Democrats love growing government and regulating every aspect of the citizens life… by fiat. King George is back. It is merely “King George” forcing policies the public would never approve of:

Brown appears bent on forcing cap-and-trade on Californians, stating last month that “they’re going to plead for a market system called cap-and-trade so they can respond in a way that’s more beneficial to their bottom line.” The Bee reported that Brown also lambasted his opponents in Sacramento, calling them “Trump-inspired acolytes,” but concluded that “they have been vanquished” with the passage of SB 32.

(DONALD TRUMP POLLS)

THERE MAY BE A FAIL-SAFE HOWEVER!

In an excellent post at CLIMATE UNPLUGGED, it is noted that this signing into law by fiat would still need to pass a “California appellate court will soon rule as to whether it violates Proposition 13”

In 2006, the California Legislature enacted AB 32, which mandated that statewide greenhouse gas emissions be reduced to 1990 levels by 2020.  California’s cap & trade auction system followed. Last week the Legislature passed SB 32, which extends and deepens AB 32’s original mandate, requiring the state to further reduce emissions to 40% below the 1990 level by 2030. This is ambitious, to say the least, in a state where all of the “low hanging fruit” (cheap emissions reduction) has presumably been harvested.

None of this is news. Nor is it news that the legality of the entire cap & trade structure is on thin ice. A California appellate court will soon rule as to whether it violates Proposition 13 (yes, that Prop 13, for those of you who remember it) insofar as AB 32 did not pass both houses of the Legislature with the requisite 2/3 vote needed for tax increases. And even if AB 32 survives, few lawyers expect the new, post-2020 authorization to pass the forthcoming Prop 26 challenge. Enacted after AB 32 (and so not applicable to it), Prop 26 was explicitly designed to close the many loopholes the politicians exploited to get around Prop 13’s vote requirements.

The “good” news for California is that if its cap & trade system gets overturned, the Air Resources Board must still hit the 2020 and 2030 targets. The bad news is that it will have to achieve truly massive emissions reductions at a breakneck pace solely via pure command and control regulations….

I hope the court sees the unconstitutionality [California’s constitution] of this and kills it all!

Debunking the Top 5 Climate Change Myths (+CONSENSUS)

Jump to CONSENSUS

“The idea that ‘Climate science is settled’ runs through today’s popular and policy discussions. Unfortunately, that claim is misguided. It has not only distorted our public and policy debates on issues related to energy, greenhouse-gas emissions and the environment. But it also has inhibited the scientific and policy discussions that we need to have about our climate future.” ~ Steven E. Koonin, Undersecretary of Energy for Science under Obama.

My resource on throwing deniers in jail is the best online:

CROWDER’S REFERENCES

MYTH: The world is getting hotter at a significant rate.
TRUTH: The world has gotten 1.7 degrees hotter since 1880.

MYTH: Rise in CO2 is dangerous and can directly be traced to man-made emissions.
TRUTH: CO2 isn’t a pollutant. Most of the rise in CO2 is coming from natural sources. 

MYTH: The Ice Sheets are MELTING AWAY!
TRUTH: Antarctic Ice Sheet is growing by billions of tons. Also FAIL: Scientist That Predicted Ice Caps Would Melt in 2013… Now Claims 2016?

MYTH: Climate change models are reliable.
TRUTH: NOAA has been caught skewing data.1

MYTH: Climate change is the consensus of scientists.
FACT: Not all scientists are in agreement over climate change. Also, manmade climate change is still a theory.

MYTH: Hybrid cars are better for the environment.
TRUTH: Not exactly. Production emissions are much higher, the minerals mined for the battered are typically done with little oversight on “non-green ways” and you’re still hurting the environment FAAAAR more by buying a new hybrid than buying used gas.

MYTH: The polar bears are dying off!
TRUTH: There are more polar bears than ever before. Do not ask a polar bear for a coke. It might kill you.

MOAR Sources


CONSENSUS


A great site bringing together the professional as well as the media’s critique of the 97% consensus can be found HERE: 97 Articles Refuting The “97% Consensus” This really the bottom line:

…The “97 percent” figure in the Zimmerman/Doran survey represents the views of only 79 respondents who listed climate science as an area of expertise and said they published more than half of their recent peer-reviewed papers on climate change. Seventy-nine scientists—of the 3,146 who responded to the survey—does not a consensus make.

In 2010, William R. Love Anderegg, then a student at Stanford University, used Google Scholar to identify the views of the most prolific writers on climate change. His findingswere published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. Mr. Love Anderegg found that 97% to 98% of the 200 most prolific writers on climate change believe “anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been responsible for ‘most’ of the ‘unequivocal’ warming.” There was no mention of how dangerous this climate change might be; and, of course, 200 researchers out of the thousands who have contributed to the climate science debate is not evidence of consensus.

In 2013, John Cook, an Australia-based blogger, and some of his friends reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011. Mr. Cook reported that 97% of those who stated a position explicitly or implicitly suggest that human activity is responsible for some warming. His findings were published in Environmental Research Letters.

Mr. Cook’s work was quickly debunked. In Science and Education in August 2013, for example, David R. Legates (a professor of geography at the University of Delaware and former director of its Center for Climatic Research) and three coauthors reviewed the same papers as did Mr. Cook and found “only 41 papers—0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent—had been found to endorse” the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming. Elsewhere, climate scientists including Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir J. Shavivand Nils- Axel Morner, whose research questions the alleged consensus, protested that Mr. Cook ignored or misrepresented their work.

Rigorous international surveys conducted by German scientists Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch—most recently published in Environmental Science & Policy in 2010—have found that most climate scientists disagree with the consensus on key issues such as the reliability of climate data and computer models. They do not believe that climate processes such as cloud formation and precipitation are sufficiently understood to predict future climate change.

Surveys of meteorologists repeatedly find a majority oppose the alleged consensus. Only 39.5% of 1,854 American Meteorological Society members who responded to a survey in 2012 said man-made global warming is dangerous.

Finally, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—which claims to speak for more than 2,500 scientists—is probably the most frequently cited source for the consensus. Its latest report claims that “human interference with the climate system is occurring, and climate change poses risks for human and natural systems.” Yet relatively few have either written on or reviewed research having to do with the key question: How much of the temperature increase and other climate changes observed in the 20th century was caused by man-made greenhouse-gas emissions? The IPCC lists only 41 authors and editors of the relevant chapter of the Fifth Assessment Report addressing “anthropogenic and natural radiative forcing.”…

(WSJ)

Cook misquoted papers (the one’s he included… not the 8,000 he excluded) as representing consensus… the original post by Popular Technology is HERE, but FORBES did a good job on explaining the discrepancies as stated by the “consensus scientists/specialists.”

…When Popular Technology asked physicist Nicola Scafetta whether Cook and his colleagues accurately classified one of his peer-reviewed papers as supporting the ‘consensus’ position, Scafetta similarly criticized the Skeptical Science classification.

“Cook et al. (2013) is based on a straw man argument because it does not correctly define the IPCC AGW theory, which is NOT that human emissions have contributed 50%+ of the global warming since 1900 but that almost 90-100% of the observed global warming was induced by human emission,” Scafetta responded. “What my papers say is that the IPCC [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] view is erroneous because about 40-70% of the global warming observed from 1900 to 2000 was induced by the sun.”

“What it is observed right now is utter dishonesty by the IPCC advocates. … They are gradually engaging into a metamorphosis process to save face. … And in this way they will get the credit that they do not merit, and continue in defaming critics like me that actually demonstrated such a fact since 2005/2006,” Scafetta added.

Astrophysicist Nir Shaviv similarly objected to Cook and colleagues claiming he explicitly supported the ‘consensus’ position about human-induced global warming. Asked if Cook and colleagues accurately represented his paper, Shaviv responded, “Nope… it is not an accurate representation. The paper shows that if cosmic rays are included in empirical climate sensitivity analyses, then one finds that different time scales consistently give a low climate sensitivity. i.e., it supports the idea that cosmic rays affect the climate and that climate sensitivity is low. This means that part of the 20th century [warming] should be attributed to the increased solar activity and that 21st century warming under a business as usual scenario should be low (about 1°C).”

“I couldn’t write these things more explicitly in the paper because of the refereeing, however, you don’t have to be a genius to reach these conclusions from the paper,” Shaviv added.

To manufacture their misleading asserted consensus, Cook and his colleagues also misclassified various papers as taking “no position” on human-caused global warming. When Cook and his colleagues determined a paper took no position on the issue, they simply pretended, for the purpose of their 97-percent claim, that the paper did not exist.

Morner, a sea level scientist, told Popular Technology that Cook classifying one of his papers as “no position” was “Certainly not correct and certainly misleading. The paper is strongly against AGW [anthropogenic global warming], and documents its absence in the sea level observational facts. Also, it invalidates the mode of sea level handling by the IPCC.”

Soon, an astrophysicist, similarly objected to Cook classifying his paper as “no position.”

“I am sure that this rating of no position on AGW by CO2 is nowhere accurate nor correct,” said Soon.

“I hope my scientific views and conclusions are clear to anyone that will spend time reading our papers. Cook et al. (2013) is not the study to read if you want to find out about what we say and conclude in our own scientific works,” Soon emphasized…

Here are some visuals… and note that if 75 climatologists are a consensus, or 0.5% is a consensus, then how bout this very short list of specialists rejecting the issue in some form… what kind of consensus is that?

I bet many make the point that these specialists do not count. Let me get this straight… they counted when used to promote consensus but do not now that they say their works were misquoted/misused? Forbes and the Wall Street Journal or leading climatologists/physicists (like top-notch persons in their field like Richard Lindzen or Freeman Dyson as examples — or these 1,000 scientists, or these 3,805 scientists trained in specialties directly related to the physical environment of the Earth and the past and current phenomena that affect that environment and 5,812 scientists trained in the fundamental physical and molecular properties of gases, liquids, and solid, which are essential to understanding the physical properties of the atmosphere and Earth.)  aren’t enough… how bout this PEER REVIEWED PAPER delving into the consensus in an in-depth manner. Here is the abstract… followed by some visuals:

Agnotology is the study of how ignorance arises via circulation of misinformation calculated to mislead. Legates et al. (Sci Educ 22:2007–2017, 2013) had questioned the applicability of agnotology to politically-charged debates. In their reply, Bedford and Cook (Sci Educ 22:2019–2030, 2013), seeking to apply agnotology to climate science, asserted that fossil-fuel interests had promoted doubt about a climate consensus. Their definition of climate ‘misinformation’ was contingent upon the post-modernist assumptions that scientific truth is discernible by measuring a consensus among experts, and that a near unanimous consensus exists. However, inspection of a claim by Cook et al. (Environ Res Lett 8:024024, 2013) of 97.1 % consensus, heavily relied upon by Bedford and Cook, shows just 0.3 % endorsement of the standard definition of consensus: that most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic. Agnotology, then, is a two-edged sword since either side in a debate may claim that general ignorance arises from misinformation allegedly circulated by the other. Significant questions about anthropogenic influences on climate remain. Therefore, Legates et al. appropriately asserted that partisan presentations of controversies stifle debate and have no place in education.

Continuing…

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.

AGAIN, to be clear, and to quote the post by STEVEN CROWDER:

…Also, this is kind of inconvenient, but needs to be said. The “97% of Climate Scientists Agree” meme all the climate-change robots harp on and on about is actually a load of pure organic manure, better left to grow your weed than fuel your global warming climate change passions.

In 2013, John Cook, an Australia-based blogger, and some of his friends reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011. Mr. Cook reported that 97% of those who stated a position explicitly or implicitly suggest that human activity is responsible for some warming. His findings were published in Environmental Research Letters.

Mr. Cook’s work was quickly debunked. In Science and Education in August 2013, for example, David R. Legates (a professor of geography at the University of Delaware and former director of its Center for Climatic Research) and three coauthors reviewed the same papers as did Mr. Cook and found “only 41 papers—0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent—had been found to endorse” the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming. Elsewhere, climate scientists including Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir J. Shaviv and Nils- Axel Morner, whose research questions the alleged consensus, protested that Mr. Cook ignored or misrepresented their work.

In other words:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” ~ Joseph Goebbels (Adolf Hitler’s Propagandist)

Put that in your hookah and smoke it. Remember that little tidbit when you insist unborn babies are not humans, especially when you refuse to look at any evidence. Tell me again about how much you respect science.

Also good to remember anytime somebody is pushing anything on you? Follow the money. ‘Cause guess what, kids? There’s a lot of money in saying the Earth is warming and it’s totes our fault…

From The National Review: In truth, the overwhelming majority of climate-research funding comes from the federal government and left-wing foundations. And while the energy industry funds both sides of the climate debate, the government/foundation monies go only toward research that advances the warming regulatory agenda. With a clear public-policy outcome in mind, the government/foundation gravy train is a much greater threat to scientific integrity.

And here are some more points from Obama’s man:

For the latest IPCC report (September 2013), its Working Group I, which focuses on physical science, uses an ensemble of some 55 different models. Although most of these models are tuned to reproduce the gross features of the Earth’s climate, the marked differences in their details and projections reflect all of the limitations that I have described. For example:

  • The models differ in their descriptions of the past century’s global average surface temperature by more than three times the entire warming recorded during that time. Such mismatches are also present in many other basic climate factors, including rainfall, which is fundamental to the atmosphere’s energy balance. As a result, the models give widely varying descriptions of the climate’s inner workings. Since they disagree so markedly, no more than one of them can be right.
  • Although the Earth’s average surface temperature rose sharply by 0.9 degree Fahrenheit during the last quarter of the 20th century, it has increased much more slowly for the past 16 years, even as the human contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen by some 25%. This surprising fact demonstrates directly that natural influences and variability are powerful enough to counteract the present warming influence exerted by human activity.

Yet the models famously fail to capture this slowing in the temperature rise. Several dozen different explanations for this failure have been offered, with ocean variability most likely playing a major role. But the whole episode continues to highlight the limits of our modeling.

  • The models roughly describe the shrinking extent of Arctic sea ice observed over the past two decades, but they fail to describe the comparable growth of Antarctic sea ice, which is now at a record high.
  • The models predict that the lower atmosphere in the tropics will absorb much of the heat of the warming atmosphere. But that “hot spot” has not been confidently observed, casting doubt on our understanding of the crucial feedback of water vapor on temperature.
  • Even though the human influence on climate was much smaller in the past, the models do not account for the fact that the rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today—about one foot per century.
  • A crucial measure of our knowledge of feedbacks is climate sensitivity—that is, the warming induced by a hypothetical doubling of carbon-dioxide concentration. Today’s best estimate of the sensitivity (between 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) is no different, and no more certain, than it was 30 years ago. And this is despite an heroic research effort costing billions of dollars.

BREITBART adds to the idea of the “Cooked” Cook paper with a real survey:

Nearly six in ten climate scientists don’t adhere to the so-called “consensus” on man-made climate change, a new study by the Dutch government has found. The results contradict the oft-cited claim that there is a 97 percent consensus amongst climate scientists that humans are responsible for global warming.

The study, by the PBL Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency, a government body, invited 6550 scientists working in climate related fields, including climate physics, climate impact, and mitigation, to take part in a survey on their views of climate science.

Of the 1868 who responded, just 43 percent agreed with the IPCC that “It is extremely likely {95%+ certainty} that more than half of [global warming] from 1951 to 2010 was caused by [human activity]”. Even with the “don’t knows” removed that figure increases only to 47 percent, still leaving a majority of climate scientists who do not subscribe to the IPCC’s statement.

The findings directly contradict the claim that 97 percent of climate scientists endorse the view that humans are responsible for global warming, as first made by Cook et al in a paper published in Environment Research Letters.

Cook’s paper has since been extremely widely debunked, yet so ingrained has the 97 percent consensus claim become that The Guardian has an entire section named after it, and President Obama has cited it on Twitter.

Commenting on the new study, Australian climate blogger Joanne Nova said: “Finally there is a decent survey on the topic, and it shows that less than half of what we would call “climate scientists” who research the topic and for the most part, publish in the peer reviewed literature, would agree with the IPCC’s main conclusions. Only 43% of climate scientists agree with the IPCC “97%” certainty.”…

…read it all…


Some Resources


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:

Babies are Evil ~ NPR

NPR notes this scare tactic working, when they note:

….”If I had told my boyfriend at the time, ‘I’m not ready to have children because I don’t know what the climate’s gonna be like in 50 years,’ he wouldn’t have understood. There’s no way,” says Hoskins, a 23-year-old whose red hair is twisted in a long braid.

This is one of 16 meetings over the past year and a half organized by Conceivable Future, a nonprofit founded on the notion that “the climate crisis is a reproductive crisis.”

Hoskins says she’s always wanted “little redheaded babies” — as do her parents, the sooner the better.

But she’s a grad student in environmental studies, and the more she learns, the more she questions what kind of life those babies would have.

In a country where even the idea of climate change can be polarizing and political, Hoskins has never shared that fear until now.

Meghan Kallman is a co-founder of Conceivable Future. “I can’t count the number of times people have said, ‘Oh, my God, it’s so nice to know I’m not the only person that worries about this,’ ” she says.

[….]

Ferorelli, 33, and Kallman, 32, are both in committed relationships, and in the throes of this problem. Ferorelli recently helped her widowed mother pack up her house, saving cherished items with the unspoken assumption that they are for a next generation.

And yet, when she imagines raising a child, Ferorelli says she can’t help but envision the nightmare scenarios that have dogged her since she first heard the term “global warming” in elementary school.

“Knowing that I gave that future to somebody is something that just doesn’t sit very well,” she says.

At the New Hampshire meeting, 67-year-old Nancy Nolan tells two younger women that people didn’t know about climate change in the 1980s when she had her kids. Once her children were grown, “I said to them, ‘I hope you never have children,’ which is an awful thing to say,” Nolan says, her voice wavering. “It can bring me to tears easily.”

She adds that of course people are driven to procreate, and you can’t really tell them not to.

One woman looks a little stunned. She’s not a climate activist — just tagged along with a friend — and says she had no idea that deciding not to have kids because of the climate was even a thing.

Previously, and part of the strategy, is that Professor Rieder talks about taxing children (WUWT):

…Climate philosopher Travis Rieder has been touring the country, trying to persuade university students not to have kids – and promoting ideas for restricting childbirth, including tax penalties against people who decide to have a child.

[….]

For the sticks part of the plan, Rieder proposes that richer nations do away with tax breaks for having children and actually penalize new parents. He says the penalty should be progressive, based on income, and could increase with each additional child.

Think of it like a carbon tax, on kids. He knows that sounds crazy.

There is no evidence the world faces a climate apocalypse. All such claims are based onbroken climate models which have never demonstrated predictive skill.

But people who act on Rieder’s well meaning but in my opinion scientifically unsound advice may be opening themselves to a lifetime of misery.

The West is full of unhappy couples who waited too long to have a family, thanks to the financial and social pressures of modern life. An entire industry has arisen to try to help desperate couples have a child, many of whom need medical assistance because they are too old to conceive naturally. Adding to the financial and social pressures prospective parents face will exacerbate this tragedy.

When his prophesied doomsday passes uneventfully, Rieder may have the integrity to do what James Lovelock did, and apologise for being wrong….

Satellite Drift and Global Warming

[For the bottom line people]

“We’ve looked at their new results versus our data, and it does appear that the new warming they’ve ‘found’ is just spurious warming in the old (poorly-calibrated, and orbit time-drifting) NOAA-14 MSU instrument, which they leave in the data analysis,” Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, told TheDCNF.

“We remove that spurious warming since it disagrees with the newer (better calibrated, non-drifting) NOAA-15 AMSU instrument flying at the same time,” Spencer said.

[….]

The new RSS data runs much higher than UAH satellite data, run by Spencer and Dr. John Christy, which only shows a warming trend of 0.072 degrees Celsius per decade. RSS also runs hotter than weather balloon data, which show about the same or less warming than UAH data.

(Daily Caller)

One of the issues that have recently come up in conversation is that the Satellite data has been wrong for essentially 19-years is showing a pause in global warming… even though mankind has produced almost two-thirds of the CO2 since the Industrial revolution in that same time. U.S. News and World Report puts it thus:

Climate change doubters may have lost one of their key talking points: a particular satellite temperature dataset that had seemed to show no warming for the past 18 years.

The Remote Sensing System temperature data, promoted by many who reject mainstream climate science and especially most recently by Sen. Ted Cruz, now shows a slight warming of about 0.18 degrees Fahrenheit since 1998. Ground temperature measurements, which many scientists call more accurate, all show warming in the past 18 years.

“There are people that like to claim there was no warming; they really can’t claim that anymore,” said Carl Mears, the scientist who runs the Remote Sensing System temperature data tracking.

The change resulted from an adjustment Mears made to fix a nagging discrepancy in the data from 15 satellites.

The satellites are in a polar orbit, so they are supposed to go over the same place at about the same time as they circle from north to south pole. Some of the satellites drift a bit, which changes their afternoon and evening measurements ever so slightly. Some satellites had drift that made temperatures warmer, others cooler. Three satellites had thrusters and they stayed in the proper orbit so they provided guidance for adjustments.

Mears said he was “motivated by fixing these differences between the satellites. If the differences hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have done the upgrade.”

NASA chief climate scientist Gavin Schmidt and Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, said experts and studies had shown these problems that Mears adjusted and they both said those adjustments make sense and are well supported in a study in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate….

This “orbital drift” is based on a paper by Carl A. Mears and Frank J. Wentz, which was first submitted to Journal of Geophysical Research, and had the paper rejected. They then “revamped” the paper, and turned it into the Journal of Climate. Keep in mind that there are only two groups working on this stuff… it is a highly specialized field, and Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. John Christy were and are key to understanding this data set and any changes to it (see appendix). Anthony Watts asked about the paper and their review of it:

UPDATE1: Given this sort of work has only two groups doing it, it is a very narrow field of scientific specialty, I asked Dr. Spencer this question:

I assume neither you or Christy were asked to review this paper? There aren’t many satellite temperature data experts in the world.

He replied:

Interesting question…. John reviewed their original paper submission to Journal of Geophysical Research, in detail, asking for additional evidence — but not advocating rejection of the paper.  The JGR editor ended up rejecting it anyway. Mears & Wentz then revised the paper, submitted it to Journal of Climate instead, and likely asked that we be excluded as reviewers.

As it turns out ~ there is something afoot. Three excellent posts…

JUDITH CURRY notes that the revised paper was not peer reviewed by these two juggernauts in the satellite “maintenance” — also noting that really we (myself included) are prematurely discussing this issue:

The climate models project strong warming in the tropical mid troposphere, which have not been borne out by the observations.  The new RSS data set reduces the discrepancies with the climate model simulations.

Roy Spencer’s comments substantially reduce the credibility of the new data set. Their dismissal of the calibration problems with the NOAA-14 MSU is just astonishing.  Presumably Christy’s review of the original submission to JGR included this critique, so they are unlikely to be unaware of this issue.  The AMS journals have one the best review processes out there; I am not sure why Christy/Spencer weren’t asked to review.  I have in the past successfully argued at AMS not to have as reviewers individuals that have made negative public statements about me (not sure if this is the case with Mears/Wentz vs Spencer/Christy).

There is a legitimate debate on how to correct for the diurnal cycle, but based on my assessment, the UAH empirically based approach seems better.

With regards to the ‘pause.’  The ‘pause’ in warming has generally been assessed using the lower tropospheric temperatures, which aren’t yet available from the new dataset.  So it is not yet clear what impact the new data set will have on our interpretation of the pause.

With regards to the Feb 2016 spike, I think Bob Tisdale gets it mostly right.  While a spike from the El Nino is expected, the Feb 2016 seems anomalous and largely associated with a warm spike in the Arctic (of ‘weather’ origin).  I would expect a few more months of anomalously warm temperatures before the El Nino fades.  I’m not sure what to make of the ‘re-emergent blob’ scenario.

We won’t know what the 2016 El Nino spike looks like until the end of the year.  Then we can compare the 1997/1998 temperatures with 2015/2016 temperatures in a (cherry-less) apples to apples comparison, to assess the underlying trend in temperatures from 1998-2016.  The trend will undoubtedly be positive, but most likely it will remain substantially less than the trend predicted by the climate models.

And what of the years following 2016?  Will we see cooling and then a continuation of flat temperatures?  Or continued warming?  I suspect that there will be some cooling and continued flatness.  I’ve stated before that it will be another 5 years before we have the appropriate prospective on the current temperature fluctuations and whether or not the early 21st century pause is over.

We just have to grab some popcorn and watch…better stock up, this is gonna take a while.

But still worth noting, EVEN IF you include the new data… we see modeling waaay overblown:

Without the new — I would say, messaged data from one satellite — we see a great comparison lining up of many tracks of reliable temps:

The models are 100% wrong. 100%


APPENDIX


…For their achievement, the Spencer-Christy team was awarded NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement in 1991 and a Special Award by the American Meteorological Society in 1996 “for developing a global, precise record of earth’s temperature from operational polar-orbiting satellites, fundamentally advancing our ability to monitor climate.” In January 2002 Christy was inducted as a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society.

The data is published monthly, available for all to review. The satellite measurements have been a lightning rod for those who advocate that human emissions of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide (CO2), are causing significant global warming. There have been three relatively minor errors in the calculations that, when determined, were promptly corrected. Which is how science should work. The corrections involved orbital decay, orbital drift, and the cooling of the stratosphere. The measurement of temperatures, from the surface to roughly 50,000 feet (15 km) altitude, includes the layer for the “Hot Spot” and avoids the cooling stratosphere.

Calculations are now made by three separate groups, UAH, Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), and a group with the University of Washington. In addition, Christy uses four separate sets of radiosonde data from weather balloons to verify his work. The correspondence among these datasets is very close.

Also, Christy served as a contributor or lead author (2001) to the first four reports by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

As state climatologist, Christy stated that, according to global climate models, the Paris Agreement to cut CO2 emissions will have an impact on temperatures so small that it cannot be measured. Further, he stated that based on research, if surface temperatures are used to estimate the greenhouse effect, daytime highs better serve the purpose than nighttime temperatures or averages. Daytimes highs are less influenced by changes in land use such as urbanization

[….]

John Christy exemplifies the perseverance, dedication to empirical science, and humanity befitting the Frederick Seitz Memorial Award.

1934 Not The Hottest Year Globally!?

This post will be an extended rebuttal to a portion of a much longer discussion. It is in response to the cartoonists website, SKEPTICAL SCIENCE, which has been responded to in a manner that should undermine it’s validity. But alas, it does not. So first let me post the graphic that caused the person to run to this propaganda site for a rebuttal:

(#4 above is the year 2006)

This graphic is from a larger conversation I had with a friends father about various issues, one being that 2014 was the hottest year ever. The response is here:

(Here is a good response to 2015 being the Hottest year after 2014) Here is an excerpt from the article:

The year 1934 was a very hot year in the United States, ranking fourth behind 2012, 2006, and 1998. However, global warming takes into account temperatures over the entire planet. The U.S.’s land area accounts for only 2% of the earth’s total surface area. Despite the U.S. heat in 1934, the year was not so hot over the rest of the planet, and is barely holding onto a place in the hottest 50 years in the global rankings (today it ranks 49th).

There are some preliminary thoughts on this before we get into the “nitty gritty.” First, in 1933-1936 (the heat wave and wild weather span), how many countries or persons were recording weather and temperature anomalies? Common sense says that of course, not nearly as much as today. We only started measuring with satellites since 1979. Another head-tilter would be have or did the NOAA or NASA previously note other years as warmer — in the past? We will find this out as we go along.

As you read this stuff (follow links to stories, and the like), that some sites just use the basic data without correcting it. I will discuss this later in the post… but first and foremost, are there reports from those years showing temperature and weather anomalies from around the world? Yes. Here is some evidences:

HEATWAVES – 1935

DROUGHTS – 1935

FLOODS – 1935

Mind you, this is a small sampling from THE NO TRICKS ZONE, many more examples can be found at C3 HEADLINES, as well as a site documenting the United Kingdom’s weather for some years. So it seems that we are looking at a few year GLOBAL weather pattern. AGAIN, we did not have satellites then so we can rely on eyewitness accounts such as these.

However, I wanted to comment on some of the wrong data being used or fudged data to make climate look worse now than in the past. I have to thank the person I was discussing the issue with, because he had posted a story linked to the journal, Nature. All it had was an abstract, and while I am a member of the AAAS, the Nature journal subscription was too much. There were also a list of corrections, so I asked him for either a full article and/or some links to the corrections. Lo-and-behold he gave me a link of a corrected graph that worked in my favor:

The red area is what concerns me… but even with it is has been warmer in the past (to note the bottom line). A professor at Berkeley notes that there is a collusion between some to hide the data that counters the narrative from the “warmists.” Mind you, the following video is for 2014, but I will make a point afterwords:

MRCTV BLOG notes the following that will throw a stone into the shoe of the left about 2015 being the hottest year. Remember, the internet never forgets!

…To explain where NOAA messed up, we have to start with 1997.

In a 1997 report discovered by Thomas Nelson, NOAA said the global average temperature for the year was 62.45 degrees Fahrenheit

As Blogger Wattsupwiththat explains:

In that 1997 report, they say clearly that the Global Average Temperature (GAT) was 62.45°F, based on a 30-year average (1961-1990) of the combined land and sea surface temperatures. Since we know the 1997 El Nino caused a record high spike in temperature, that means that for that 30 year period, there was no warmer GAT than 62.45°F up until that time.

Now, back to 2015. The recently released NOAA report, claiming that 2015 was the hottest year ever, says:

During 2015, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaceswas 1.62°F (0.90°C) above the 20th century average. This was the highest among all 136 years in the 1880–2015 record, surpassing the previous record set last year by 0.29°F (0.16°C) and marking the fourth time a global temperature record has been set this century. 

It was blogger Wattsupwiththat  who first noticed and explained the funky math. He explains that the recent report compares 2015 to the 20th century average – but, doesn’t mention what that average temperature was.

However, it does give a 20th Century average in its November 2015  State of the Climate Report: – 13.9 degrees Celsius (57 degrees Fahrenheit):

Now, it’s math time:

  1. According to NOAA, the global average temperature for the 20th century was 57 degrees Fahrenheit.
  2. And the 2015 average was 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit above that average.
  3. In other words, according to this recent NOAA report, 2015 was the hottest year ever at 58.62 degrees Fahrenheit (57+1.62).
  4. And, that 1997 NOAA report states 1997 had an average global temperature of 62.45 degrees.

….According to my calculator:

1997’s 62.45 degrees is 3.83 degrees Fahrenheit higher than 2015’s 58.62 degrees Fahrenheit, meaning that – using NOAA’s own numbers – 2015 cannot be the hottest year on record.  

I will continue with WATT’S UP WITH THAT’S commentary:

As suggested monthly by the mainstream media since April 2015, NOAA and NASA officially declared that 2015 surpassed the 2014 record to become the new hottest year on record and that 2016 could be hotter than 2015! The average global temperatures calculated by NOAA and NASA, however, appear to be inaccurate and unreliable for the following reasons:


In Table 2, we’ve compiled the top five years when the most records were set. When multiple years tie for the high, each individual year gets a fraction of a “record”. So, for example, 1954 and 1933 each get a half of a record for Colorado.


  • According to data on the NOAA website, 1997 was truly the hottest year on record at 62.45 oF. The average global temperature in 2015 was 58.62 oF or 3.83 oF below the 1997 temperature.
  • According to data on the NOAA website, the temperatures such as the 20th century average temperature and annual temperature anomalies, which must be fixed, have different values in the annual global analyses.
  • NOAA and NASA corrected historical temperature data and fabricated temperature data in areas without temperature record systematically, widely, and uni-directionally to “cool” the past in an attempt to prove the soaring temperature trend.
  • NOAA and NASA made efforts to discredit their own satellite data – which is consistent with the balloon data – because it suggests a global warming hiatus since 1998 contradicting with the NOAA and NASA preferred narrative.
  • NOAA and NASA refused to give data and information requested by the US House of Representatives Science, Space and Technology committee. There is no reason for them to withhold the data and information, which are public domain, unless they have something to hide.

The headline “last year was the hottest year on record, this year is hotter than last year, and next year could be hotter than this year” is likely to be repeated years after years until funding for climate change is stopped!

The National Center for Policy Analysis, mentions a change a few years back:

The warmest year on record is no longer 1998 and not because it has been overtaken by a recent heat wave.  National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) scientist James Hansen’s famous claims about 1998 being the warmest year on record in the United States was the result of a serious math error, according to H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA).

According to NASA’s newly published data:

  • The hottest year on record is 1934, not 1998.
  • The third hottest year on record was 1921, not 2006.
  • Three of the five hottest years on record occurred before 1940.
  • Six of the top 10 hottest years occurred before 90 percent of the growth in greenhouse gas emissions during the last century occurred.

Here we see raw data vs. messaged data run through a hopper. In 2007 NASA adjusted it’s U.S. findings to match the real data:

The measured USHCN daily temperature data shows a decline in US temperatures since the 1930s.  But before they release it to the public,  they put it thorough a series of adjustments which change it from a cooling trend to a warming trend.

[….]

The next blink comparator shows changes in the US temperature record from GISS. It alternates between their 1999 graph and the 2012 version of the same graph. The past is cooled and the present is warmed.

(Real Science)

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

Here is another post of mine continuing the data set corruption that has been clearly proven. This post is intimately connected with a previous one:

EQUIPMENT FAIL

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. Here is an example of a well maintained station with data sets:

Here is data sets corresponding to a site where heat corrupts the data:

Here are even more corrupt examples of these stations placed next to air conditioner outlets, next to burners, next to lights that glow at night, asphalt surrounding them and buildings that radiate heat as well as block wind (NOTE this continually growing accumulation of these sites at WUWT):

 photo Weather Station Air 8.jpg
 photo Weather Station Air 4.jpg
 photo Weather Station Air 7.jpg
 photo Weather Station Air 6.jpg
 photo Weather Station Air 5.jpg
 photo Weather Station Air 1.jpg
 photo Weather Station Air 2.jpg

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.

 

The bottom line is that those wishing to expand regulation and laws and taxes on the rest of us fudge the facts. But facts-are-facts. And the ship is sinking for these lefties.

John Kerry, Protecting Our Nation One Iceberg-At-A-Time

Just because you fly in and take photo opportunities doesn’t change the fact that your full of BS!

Even if man-made greenhouse gasses were affecting climate as Kerry thinks it is, why would he want to keep the area unlivable for it’s residents? Here are some great excerpts from a book[s] on the subject that include Icelandic and Greenlandic Vikings:

  • The warm climate during the MWP [Medieval Warming Period] allowed this great migration to flourish. Drift ice posed the greatest hazard to sailors but reports of drift ice in old records do not appear until the thirteenth century (Bryson, 1977.)
  • The Norse peoples traveled to Iceland for a variety of reasons including a search for more land and resources to satisfy a growing population and to escape raiders and harsh rulers. One force behind the movement to Iceland in the ninth century was the ruthlessness of Harald Fairhair, a Norwegian King (Bryson, 1977.)
  • Vikings travelling to Iceland from Norway during the MWP were probably encouraged by the sight of pastures with sedges and grasses and dwarf woodlands of birch and willow resembling those at home.
  • Animal bones and other materials collected from archaeological sites reveal Icelandic Vikings had large farmsteads with dairy cattle (a source of meat), pigs, and sheep and goats (for wool, hair, milk, and meat.) Farmsteads also had ample pastures and fields of barley used for the making of beer and these farms were located near bird cliffs (providing meat, eggs, and eiderdown) and inshore fishing grounds. Fishing was primarily done with hand lines or from small boats that did not venture across the horizon (McGovern and Perdikaris, 2000.)
  • The Greenland Vikings lived mostly on dairy produce and meat, primarily from cows. The vegetable diet of Greenlanders included berries, edible grasses, and seaweed, but these were inadequate even during the best harvests. During the MWP, Greenland’s climate was so cold that cattle breeding and dairy farming could only be carried on in the sheltered fiords. The growing season in Greenland even then was very short. Frost typically occurred in August and the fiords froze in October. Before the year 1300, ships regularly sailed from Norway and other European countries to Greenland bringing with them timber, iron, corn, salt, and other needed items. Trade was by barter. Greenlanders offered butter, cheese, wool, and their frieze cloths, which were greatly sough after in Europe, as well as white and blue fox furs, polar bear skins, walrus and narwhal tusks, and walrus skins. In fact, two Greenland items in particular were prized by Europeans: white bears and the white falcon. These items were given as royal gifts. For instance, the King of Norway-Denmark sent a number of Greenland falcons as a gift to the King of Portugal, and received in return the gift of a cargo of wine (Stefansson, 1966.) Because of the shortage of adequate vegetables and cereal grains, and a shortage of timber to make ships, the trade link to Iceland and Europe was vital (Hermann, 1954.)

Not only that, but the record breaking “heat waves” said to be happening in Greenland have been busted by the data (Climate Depot h/t):

BUSTED: Claim of Greenland Warmest Temperature Record of 75°F Challenged By Data

It is evident that there are two recording stations at Nuuk. No serious meteorologist would declare a record just based on one, when the other was so much different. In any event, 75F (23.9C) is not even a record. According to DMI, the highest temperature recorded at Nuuk was 24.2C, back in July 1908. ..Using the official DMI data, April 2016 was indeed the warmest April on record at Nuuk, at a boiling hot 0.6C. However, this was only 0.2C warmer than the next warmest April, set in 1953. Joe ignores the fact that April 2015 and 2014 were two of the coldest on record, or the fact that Aprils in the 1930s and 40s were just as warm as in recent years.

Do these people think we are idiots?! Oh wait… Kerry is Secretary of State. He is the guy that worked with fake veterans of the Vietnam War to make false claims about our activity there. Even going so far as to throw his “over-awarded” metals over the White House fence. So, yes, I guess we a-r-e stupid.

Here is a myth busting chart about temperature during the past 4,000 years… via WUWT (click chart to enlarge)

Ha it been getting warmer since the little ice-age? Yes. Kerry says this is bad. History says this is good.

Eco-Fascism In Portland Schools

Via Climate Depot:

In a move spearheaded by environmentalists, the Portland Public Schools board unanimously approved A RESOLUTION AIMED AT ELIMINATING DOUBT [not possible] of climate change and its causes in schools.

“It is unacceptable that we have textbooks in our schools that spread doubt about the human causes and urgency of the crisis,” said Lincoln High School student Gaby Lemieux in board testimony. “Climate education is not a niche or a specialization, it is the MINIMUM REQUIREMENT FOR MY GENERATION TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN OUR CHANGING WORLD” [my activism gives me worth]…

(Portland Tribune)

Maybe the Portland schools can have Bill Nye “the Fascist Guy” in to give speeches.

Top MIT Climatologist Slams Consensus (Obama Update)

How many times is this going to be debunked? And yet the LEFT keeps pushing it as if it came straight from the Kremlin!

When 32.6% becomes 97%…

…What the president was referring to was a 2013 paper by the University of Queensland’s John Cook. In his research, Cook studied 11,994 papers published between 1991 and 2011 that mentioned the search words “global warming” and “global climate change.”

Guess what Cook found? Only 32.6% of the papers endorsed the view of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. But of that group, 97% said that “recent warming is mostly man-made.”

And so, by a nice sleight-of-hand obfuscation, the great “97% consensus” was born.

Don’t believe me? Check out the actual paper, or the abstract, or the original article. In fact, let’s just say thank goodness that the originals are still posted online. Typically, when someone pulls off a con of such massive, world-wide proportions, they subsequently burn the evidence to cover their tracks.

Still don’t believe me? Here’s the actual, posted statement:

We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.

Bottom line: In the actual study in question, only one-third of the 11,994 academic papers studied could be construed as arguing for man-made warming. Possibly the other two-thirds were more focused on the unprecedented increase in solar activity seen over the past century.

More below, including Bernie Sanders:

Concesus - 97 percent

Top MIT Climate Scientist HATES the “consensus ‘lie,'” via The Daily Caller:

Dr. Richard Lindzen is sick and tired of the media repeating the so-called “97 percent consensus” statistic to show just how strong the global warming agreement is among climate scientists. It’s purely “propaganda,” argues Lindzen….

…Lindzen if referring to the often cited statistic among environmentalists and liberal politicians that 97 percent of climate scientists agree human activities are causing the planet to warm. This sort of argument has been around for decades, but recent use of the statistic can be traced to a 2013 report by Australian researcher John Cook.

Cook’s paper found of the scientific study “abstracts expressing a position on [manmade global warming], 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” But Cook’s assertion has been heavily criticized by researchers carefully examining his methodology.

A paper by five leading climatologists published in the journal Science and Education found only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate studies examined in Cook’s study explicitly stated mankind has caused most of the warming since 1950 — meaning the actual consensus is 0.3 percent.

“It is astonishing that any journal could have published a paper claiming a 97% climate consensus when on the authors’ own analysis the true consensus was well below 1%,” said Dr. David Legates, a geology professor at the University of Delaware and the study’s lead author….

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.

See more on my main consensus page, HERE.

A Merry Earth-Day = More Fossil Fuels

To make earth cleaner, greener and safer, which energy sources should humanity rely on? Alex Epstein of the Center for Industrial Progress explains how modern societies have cleaned up our water, air and streets using the very energy sources you may not have expected–oil, coal and natural gas.

Global Warming Not a Cause of Coral Reef Degredation

This article comes by way of Sunshine Hours (h/t ~ Climate Depot):

…Then they get to the good stuff.

The results show that coral reefs surrounding remote islands were dramatically healthier than those in populated areas that were subject to a variety of human impacts.

“There are still coral reefs on this planet that are incredibly healthy and probably look the way they did 1,000 years ago,” said Jennifer Smith, lead author of the study and a professor at Scripps’s Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation.

Teeming with sharks, manta rays, jellyfish and sea turtles, these remote locations contrasted starkly with the heavily populated areas, which were encircled by coral reefs covered in murky seaweed and lacking much of the colorful algae that helps to cement a reef.

Duh!!!!!

It isn’t “global warming” damaging reefs. It is humans and their pollution and rich assholes boats scraping over the reefs!

(read it all)

This next excerpt comes from an old post, Coral Reefs are Not Endangered Due to Global Warming. The site has not been posted on since 2010, so I will import their whole post here (I will also reference the quote when I find the book on my shelf[s]):

When the 1998 El Niño raised the temperatures of the waters in the Pacific Ocean, it caused widespread ”bleaching” of coral reefs, which is shown to be a natural response to temperature changes of water in scientific studies. The resulting change in the appearance of corals around the world was enough for many to proclaim that the world’s corals were “dying off en mass” due to global warming, despite the fact that corals have lived through hundreds of relatively recent historical cycles of glacial periods interspersed with warm periods, as well as higher acid concentrations in the water and sea level rise of as much as 400 feet.

Note a 2001 United Nations press release falsely claiming that the 1998 El Nino caused a loss of 90% of the corals in some parts of the Indian Ocean:

”.. It includes new information on the impacts of global warming and coral bleaching, including the El Niño event in 1998 that caused the loss of 90 per cent of the corals in some parts of the Indian Ocean, representing 5% of the world’s reef area. Much of this damage passed almost unnoticed by the world’s policy-makers. Marine scientists point out that had such levels of damage occur in terrestrial environments they would have caused a major public outcry.”

Claims of Coral Dying due to ”Bleaching”

The Book ”Unstoppable Global Warming— Every 1,500 Years” explains numerous scientific studies showing that ”bleaching” coral is an entirely natural occurrence for adapting to temperature changes of the surrounding water— through the coral expelling the current algea associated with it in order to accumulate new strains of algea with are better suited for the newer temperature of water. Studies cited include ”The Acquisition of Exogenous Algal Symbionts by an Octocoral After Bleaching,” by Cynthia L. Lewis and Mary Alice Coffroth. Following is an excerpt from the book:

The claim that higher temperatures will kill off the world’s corals is irresistible to global warming activists. They understand the emotional appeal of the reefs and their bright-colored fishes. Greenpeace, perhaps predictably, has been quick to play this card:

”The Philippine coral reefs, among the most diverse and largest in the world, may not be around for long. … On the last day of the symposium [at Bali] the environmental group Greenpeace released a new coral reef study showing that, because of the global warming, the Pacific Ocean could lose most of its coral reefs by the end of the current century.” (385)

The only problem with the ”disappearing coral” theory is that it is false. Corals date back 450 million years, and most of today’s coral species date back at least 200 million years. Just in the last two million years, coral reefs have been through at least seventeen glacial periods, interspersed with their warm interglacial periods. These glacial-interglacial shifts imposed repeated dramatic temperature changes, along with sea level changes as drastic as four hundred feet.

Temperatures across the Pacific change sharply with the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)-which causes a major Pacific temperature change every four to seven years. The 1998 El Nino boosted sea surface temperatures all over the Pacific, causing massive coral bleaching, especially in the Indian Ocean. That’s when Mark Spalding, supposedly a coral expert, claimed that the vast majority of the corals had died out. (386) Bleaching is a part of corals’ strategy for adapting to their almost-constant temperature changes. (387)

Ross J. Jones of Australia’s Queensland University reported coral bleaching on a portion of the Great Barrier Reef just after average daily sea temperatures rose by 2.5 degrees Celsius in eight days. (388) However, Canada’s D.R. Kobluk and M.A. Lysenko found severe coral bleaching in the Caribbean after the water temperature declined 3 degrees Celsius in eighteen hours. (389)

New studies tell us that bleaching is the coral system’s way of dealing with sudden temperature changes. Cynthia Lewis and Mary Alice Coffroth of the University of Buffalo deliberately triggered bleaching in some coral colonies. In response, the colonies ejected 99 percent of their symbiotic algae friends. The researchers then exposed the bleached coral to a rare variety of algae that wasn’t in the coral colonies at the beginning of the experiment. Sure enough, within a few weeks, the corals had substantially restocked their algae shelves, and about half included the new marker algae. Later, the marker variety was displaced from several of the coral colonies by more effective algae strains-indicating that corals pick the best partners for the new conditions from the wide variety of algae floating in their part of the ocean. (390)

Lewis and Coffroth say this is a healthy demonstration of flexibility in coral colonies. They say coral systems have the flexibility to establish new associations with algae strains from the whole environmental pool and that is ”a mechanism for resilience in the face of environmental change.” (391)

In the same June 2004 issue of Science, Angela Little of Australia’s Cook University and Madeline van Oppen of Australia’s Institute of Marine Science echoed the findings of Lewis and Coffroth. They attached titles to various parts of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and studied the algae recruited by the juvenile corals that grew on them. They found that the young corals were likely to try any algae— ”a potentially adaptive trait.” (392)

Eco-activists and biologists who claim global warming is killing corals are wrong-again. Science has returned its verdict on corals and global warming: No Link.


(385) Report from the 9th International Coral Reef Conference, Bali, 23 June 2003.

(386) Samanta Sen, ”Disappearing Coral Reefs Also a Human Loss,” Interpress News Service, September 13, 2001.

(387) Jeff Hecht, ”Corals Adapt to Cope With Global Warming” NewScientist.com, August 11, 2004.

(388) R. J. Jones et al., ”Changes in Zooxanthellar Densities and Chlorophyll Concentrations in Corals During and After a Bleaching Event,” Marine Ecology Progress Series 158 (1997): 51-59.

(389) D. R. Kobluk and M.A. Lysenko, ”Ring Bleaching in Southern Caribbean Agaricia Agaricites During Rapid Water Cooling,” Bulletin of Marine Science 54 (1994): 142-50.

(390) C. L. Lewis and M.A. Coffroth, ”The Acquisition of Exogenous Algal Symbionts by an Octocoral After Bleaching,” Science 304 (2004): 1490-491.

(391) Ibid.

(392) A. F. Little et al., ”Flexibility in Algal Endosymbioses Shapes Growth in Reef Corals,” Science 305 (2004): 1492-94; Kobluk and Lysenko, ”Ring Bleaching in Southern Caribbean Agaricia Agaricites During Rapid Water Cooling,” 142-50.

Offshore Wind Turbine Farms Killing Whales?

What’s Up With That notes the story from Germany:

Between January 9 and February 4 this year, 29 sperm whales got stranded and died on English, German and Dutch beaches. Environmentalists and the news media offered multiple explanations – except the most obvious and likely one: offshore wind farms.

Indeed, that area has the world’s biggest concentration of offshore wind turbines, and there is ample evidence that their acoustic pollution can interfere with whale communication and navigation.

However, Britain’s Guardian looked for answers everywhere but in the right place. That’s not surprising, as it tends to support wind energy no matter the cost to people or the environment. After consulting with a marine environmental group, the paper concluded: “The North Sea acts as a trap.… It’s virtually impossible for [whales] to find their way out through the narrow English Channel.”

No it’s not. These intelligent animals would naturally have found their way to and through the Channel by simply following the coast of England or continental Europe. But the author seems determined to pursue his “explanation,” even when it becomes increasingly illogical. “The [trapped] whales become dehydrated because they obtain their water from squid,” he argues, before acknowledging that “the dead Dutch and German animals were well-fed,” and that the North Sea’s squid population has increased in recent years.

The article discards Royal Navy sonar and explosives, because “big naval exercises in UK waters are unusual in midwinter.” Finally, the author concludes with this quote from his purported expert: “When there’s a mass stranding, it’s always wise to look at possible human effects. But, at the moment, I don’t see anything pointing in that direction.” He should look a bit harder. Not everyone is so blind.

Indeed, “researchers at the University of St. Andrews have found that the noise made by offshore wind farms can interfere with a whale’s sonar, and can in tragic cases see them driven onto beaches where they often die,” a UK Daily Mail article observed….

[….]

Modern 8-megawatt offshore turbines are 656 feet (200 meters) above the waves; their rotating blades sweep across a 538-foot (164-meter) diameter. Those enormous blades create powerful pulsating infrasound and exact a toll on many species of marine birds, and even on bats that are attracted to the turbines as far as 9 miles (14 km) offshore.

In a February 2005 letter, the Massachusetts Audubon Society estimated that the proposed Cape Cod wind project alone would kill up to 6,600 marine birds each year, including the roseate tern, which is on the endangered list.

Do we really want to add marine mammals to the slaughter of birds and bats, by expanding this intermittent, harmful, enormously expensive and heavily subsidized energy source in marine habitats?…

That was Germany… other stories popped up about Whales beaching themselves in Lincolnshire, England. According to the BBC, a fifth whale washed up on shore. So, I was curious about if there are wind farms nearby that would similarly affect these creature environmentalists seem to care so much about. This story from a 2013 Daily Mail article:

Here is a Getty Image from the farm:

An interesting Power Point slide show of these vibrations can be found HERE.

Professor Tony Ingraffea Admitted to NO PROOF, Under Oath

[fbvideo link=”https://www.facebook.com/FrackNation/videos/vb.288353704562837/1038903379507862/?type=2&theater” width=”695″ height=”400″ onlyvideo=”0″]

After Admitting He Has No Evidence about Dimock, Tony Ingraffea Hides and Runs (Fracknation  on Facebook)

Professor Tony Ingraffea has never been shy about speaking to the press about fracking. He has been in both Gasland documentaries, given hundreds of press interviews, and spoke at rallies with anti-fracking celebrities Mark Ruffalo, Sean Lennon, and Yoko Ono.

But over the past few days, his advocacy has come back to haunt him and left him literally hiding and running away when it comes to answering difficult questions.

It has been a rough few days for Professor Ingraffea, the anti-fracking movement’s favorite scientist. Finally, he was under oath and had to tell the truth. When he didn’t, he had to face his lies being exposed. He was giving evidence in the Dimock Water Trial where the Hubert and Ely families from Pennsylvania are accusing Cabot Oil and Gas of polluting their water during fracking.

Under skillful cross-examination, Professor Ingraffea was forced to admit that he’s an anti-fracking and anti-fossil fuel “advocate.” He denied being an activist, but his face fell when lawyers for Cabot asked to show the jury photographs of him speaking in front of anti-fracking signs and participating in an Artists Against Fracking press conference alongside Ruffalo, Lennon, and Ono.

Even the lawyer for the families, Leslie Lewis, blurted out in open court that she “wasn’t thrilled” that the photos existed.

But the hits to Professor Ingraffea’s credibility kept coming. He admitted that his theory contradicted the plaintiffs’ own timeline. Under Ingraffea’s theory, the “contamination” could only have started in late 2008/early 2009 because that was when the gas drilling started; however, the plaintiffs have stated repeatedly that their water allegedly deteriorated in the summer of 2008 before the drilling Ingraffea has been blaming for the past 8 years…..


Earlier Phelim McAleer Reported


…Tony Ingraffea, Retired Cornell Professor and anti-fracking advocate tells court he has “no proof” Dimock water polluted by oil and gas company.

In an important development Ingraffea – the plaintiffs key witness in the high profile trial has admitted there is no evidence to back up his theory.

Retired professor Tony Ingraffea made the admission during a trial where the Ely and Hubert families of Dimock Pennsylvania are suing Cabot oil and gas for allegedly contaminating their water. The Dimock case is important because activists say it is ground zero for fracking contamination and the area has featured in the Gasland documentaries and hundreds of other activist events and pieces of journalism.

Under cross examination by a lawyer for Cabit Oil and Gas Professor Ingraffea was asked:
“If we follow your theory, the Gesford 3 S well is the leaking well and the well gas migrates out of it over into the other well which is as you said, is speculation – you don’t have any direct proof of that – right?”

To which Professor Ingraffea replied: 

“Yes”.

Ingraffea’s admission of no proof is the latest in a series of setbacks for the plaintiffs in the case.