Al’s Journal : Ice and Snow Disappearing from Mt. Rainier

The effects of the climate crisis are hitting closer and closer to home

The real stories - first read on in the link

Mount Rainier’s ice and snow coverage expanded from the late 1950s to around 1980 during a wetter-than-normal phase of a climate cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. These recent trends indicate that Mount Rainier’s glaciers are very sensitive to warming and could grow again with modest changes in temperature or precipitation, the scientists say. - ScienceNow, the daily online news service of the journal Science

Indeed this year following in the trend of the last several during the reversal back to cold PDO, snow comes deep and stays long.

Deep Snow Delaying Opening of Sunrise Area at Mount Rainier National Park
by Kurt Repanshek on June 21, 2011

Deep Snow Delaying Opening of Sunrise Area at Mount Rainier National Park | National Parks Traveler

[June 21, 2011] Too much snow will keep the Sunrise area in Mount Rainier National Park closed through the Fourth of July weekend and until at least July 8, according to park officials. Also, the White River Campground won’t open until July 1.

As the accompanying photos show, there really is a lot of snow still waiting to melt away at Sunrise.

Since July 1, 2010, a total of 907 inches of snow have fallen at Paradise. The record for the park is 1,122 of snowfall during the 1971-72 winter season. Cool and wet temperatures have persisted into June, delaying snow melt in the upper elevations and slowing snow removal operations that began in March.

President Obama and his out of control EPA tell us our oil reserves are running dry. A simple change of polices and attitudes are all that are required to mulitply U.S. reserves and make us less dependent on foreign oil.

President Obama’s speeches sum up his views on oil, natural gas, and energy prices in just 44 words.

“We have less than 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves. We’re running out of places to drill. We’re running out of oil. We need to end our $4 billion in annual taxpayer subsidies to oil companies. We need to invest in clean, renewable energy.”

As Congressman Joe Wilson would say, “That’s a lie!” Or at least a deliberate distortion of facts.

‘Reserves’ Is a Misleading Term

Oil “reserves” are what can actually be produced at today’s prices, with existing technologies, and under current laws and regulations. America has vast oil, gas, and coal resources - centuries of potential hydrocarbon energy. We have the technology to extract it, especially at $100 a barrel. What we don’t have are laws and regulations that allow us to do so.

If the President were honest, he would say: “We’re running out of oil that Democrats, my administration, and our radical environmentalist allies will let this country produce. We’re running out of places we’ll let companies drill. We have 2 percent of world oil reserves because we’ve made most of our resources off limits.”

If he were honest, he would also say, “We will demonize, penalize, hyper-regulate, tax, and kill hydrocarbons. But we will mandate and subsidize wind, solar, and ethanol, ignore their environmental and human costs, and extol the measly, expensive, unreliable energy they produce.”

Leases Denied

Gulf of Mexico oil production is projected to drop 240,000 barrels a day this year. That’s $9 billion that America will have to pay this year to import replacement oil ... $1.3 billion we won’t collect in federal royalty payments ... thousands of jobs that won’t be “created or saved” ... and billions in corporate, personal income, and sales taxes we won’t collect.

The U.S. Geological Survey says upwards of 90 billion barrels of oil remain to be discovered in the Arctic. ANWR alone could hold 16 billion barrels of recoverable oil, in places totaling 1/20th the surface area of Washington, DC. But it’s all off limits to We the People who own it.

Shell Oil spent $3.5 billion exploring and acquiring leases in the Chukchi Sea - but the Interior Department and EPA refuse to issue drilling permits, arguing diesel emissions from the rig could cause global warming or affect the health of natives 20 to 50 miles away!

Thwarting Other Sources Too

Made in America technology and innovation have unlocked centuries’ worth of new natural gas supplies in U.S. shale formations. This game-changing development has reduced gas prices and devastated the “we’re running out” mantra. So the environmental activists have rallied the troops to produce a bogus “documentary” film (Gasland), a sloppy Cornell University “study,” and reams of new EPA regulations to stymie shale gas.

Coal generates half of all U.S. electricity. So EPA has issued 946 pages of new air quality rules and launched a massive propaganda campaign against power plant mercury emissions, even though those power plants account for barely 0.5 percent of all mercury in the air Americans breathe. President Obama has said he wants to “bankrupt” the industry.

All told, more than a billion acres of U.S. energy prospects are locked up. Yes, there are “no quick fixes” for our energy problems, as President Obama loves to remind us. But if we’d begun drilling in some of these places 10-20 years ago, we wouldn’t be in this fix today.

Subsidizing Losers

As to subsidies, even the alleged billions for oil companies are a pittance compared to subsidies for wind, solar, and ethanol. Subsidies per unit of energy produced are even more shockingly biased. According to the Energy Information Administration, gas-fired electricity generation received 25 cents per megawatt-hour (mWh) in 2007 subsidies; coal got 44 cents. Wind turbines got 23.4 dollars, and photovoltaic solar received 24.3 dollars per mWh.

Solar panel maker Solyndra snagged a $535 million “stimulus” loan in 2009; then, the day after the 2010 elections, it announced it was laying off 190 people. In April 2011 alone, the Energy Department poured $9 billion in loan guarantees into wind and solar projects that will blanket large swaths of crop and wildlife habitat land.

Wind and solar produce electricity just two to eight hours a day, with backup generators making up the monumental shortfall. That means we must duplicate every megawatt of wind and solar with a MW of backup power.

Ethanol receives subsidies of $5.72 per million Btu (190 times what oil and gas companies get) so we can burn food to make fuels the government won’t let us drill for. In 2010, U.S. farmers turned 36 percent of their corn crop into ethanol, which provides 30 percent less energy than gasoline - meaning cars get less mileage per tank for more bucks per gallon. Making one gallon of this substandard fuel also requires some 1,700 gallons of water and large quantities of petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides.

Energy economist Indur Goklany calculates biofuel policies cause up to 200,000 deaths a year in poor countries by raising food prices, increasing malnutrition, and making people more vulnerable to disease.

Overall, since assuming power in Washington, the Obama administration has channeled over $60 billion into the “green jobs” sector.

And the renewable energy subsidy train rolls on.

Update Here Alan Jones interview John McLean on Climate change and the Galileo Movement here.

-----------

The exaggeration and the suborning of scepticism to “the national building work” show exactly why this latest campaign is yet another warmist disgrace:

AUSTRALIA’S scientific community will launch a campaign tonight aimed at redressing what it says is the damage to science which is being caused by climate change denial.

At its annual gathering in Canberra today, the Federation of Australian Science and Technological Societies will tell politicians that the campaign being run against scientific evidence of man-made climate change “is undermining the national building work of all scientists"…

“The valuable and credible work of all scientists is under attack as a result of a noisy misinformation campaign by climate denialists....” the federation’s chief executive officer, Anna-Maria Arabia, said.

So who is this Arabia, so concerned about sceptics undermining the “national building work” and so eager to smear them as “climate denialists”, of all things?

Why, she’s a former infrastructure advisor to Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese and former aide to then Labor leader Kim Beazley.

And what’s her scientific expertise, that she can denounce sceptical scientists as a threat to all scientists everywhere?

Previous to her work in politics, she was an assistant director in the Department for Health and Ageing; a research officer in the Department of Medicine, University of Melbourne; and a Project co-ordinator at the Embassy of Italy. Her academic background is in science, with a focus in pharmacology and neuroscience and was a doctoral candidate at Melbourne and Baker MRI.

Seems a bit thin.

Let’s compare her scientific record to that of one of the sceptics she denounces, Professor Richard Lindzen:

Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences

Professor Lindzen is a dynamical meteorologist with interests in the broad topics of climate, planetary waves, monsoon meteorology, planetary atmospheres, and hydrodynamic instability.... He has developed models for the Earth’s climate with specific concern for the stability of the ice caps, the sensitivity to increases in CO2, the origin of the 100,000 year cycle in glaciation, and the maintenance of regional variations in climate.

Prof. Lindzen is a recipient of the AMS’s Meisinger, and Charney Awards, the AGU’s Macelwane Medal, and the Leo Huss Walin Prize. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. He is a corresponding member of the NAS Committee on Human Rights, and has been a member of the NRC Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate and the Council of the AMS.  He has also been a consultant to the Global Modeling and Simulation Group at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (Ph.D., ‘64, S.M., ‘61, A.B., ‘60, Harvard University)

So, let’s ask again which of the two represents the bigger threat to the reputation of scientists - the lightly credentialled former political operative who denounces sceptical inquiry and demands scientists join some national cause, or the massively credentialled expert who resists demands that he follow the political consensus?

Arabia should pull her head in and apologise. Science is about science, not politics. 

Dr. Nicola Scafetta, author of several peer-reviewed papers explaining the effects of solar activity on Earth’s climate, comments on the paper the warmist media is referencing to attempt to dismiss the significance of the Sun on climate. Dr. Scafetta notes that the computer models of this paper and indeed most of climate science are programmed on the basis of false premises, stating, “there is little hope that the traditional climate models correctly interpret climate change and nothing concerning the real climate can be inferred from them because from a false premise everything can be concluded.”

nicola scafetta | June 16, 2011 at 9:15 am | Reply [From Dr. Judith Curry’s blog]

Dr. Curry has referenced a work by Feulner G., Rahmstorf S. (2010), that uses a traditional climate model to evaluate the effect of the sun on the climate in the eventuality that a new longer solar minimum would occur. The conclusion is that the Sun would do little in any case.

The problem is whether the traditional climate model is correctly interpreting climate change. The only way to do that is to evaluate whether the climate model properly reconstructs the solar signature observed in the climate.

As I have extensively proven in my papers and by proponents of AGW (see for example Crowley, Science 2000), the traditional climate models produce a signature quite similar to the hockey stick graph by Mann which not only simply disagree with history but has also been seriously put in question under several studies.
Moreover, the traditional climate models also fail to properly reconstruct the correct amplitudes of the climate oscillations that have clear solar/astronomical signature.

Given the above, there is little hope that the traditional climate models correctly interpret climate change and nothing concerning the real climate can be inferred from them because from a false premise everything can be concluded.

In fact, the traditional climate models do not model several mechanisms that may contribute to a significant amplification of the solar impact on climate beginning from a cloud modulation from the cosmic rays which is solar induced.

Because of the lack of the current physics of climate change, the only way to correctly interpret climate is by phenomenological modeling the points to the direct simulation of the temperature patterns as I have proposed.
Once this is done, it is found that solar impact on climate is severely underestimated by the traditional models by a large factor while that the anthropogenic component has been overestimated by at least 2-3 times. That is, while the IPCC claims with the traditional models (which do not reconstruct the climate cycles) that more than 90% of the warming since 1850 is anthropogenic, the reality is very likely that no more than 30% of the warming may be anthropogenic and that this anthropogenic warming may not be GHG [greenhouse gas] induced because may also be UHI [urban heat island] induced, at least in part.

Thus, if the Sun will enter in a new prolonged period of minima, it is very unlikely that the global temperature will go up as predicted by the traditional climate models. It will go down as predicted by the models I have proposed in my papers (look at my web-page). For example “N. Scafetta, ”Empirical evidence for a celestial origin of the climate oscillations and its implications”. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 72, 951–970 (2010), and ”Climate Change and Its Causes, A Discussion About Some Key Issues”

Update: see how the boneheads at Real Climate and their toadies in the comments ignore all the solar factors but the brightness changes and they don’t even get those right - claiming it changed just 0.1% since the LIA (Willson estimates 0.4 to 0.5%). But no mention of the other amplifiers like UV (changes 6 to 8 times greater than brightness), solar wind/geomagnetic and cosmic ray ion mediated modulation of low water clouds that make the sun far more important than CO2 which has NEVER been proven to have the effects on warming claimed. When you turn the lights on in many a NYC building, you can see the roaches scurry.

-----

Sun, schmun: Climate hoax promoter Michael Mann suggests that by 2050, human greenhouse warming will be close to 20 times the “maximum impact factor of the sun”

Sunspot Drop Won’t Cause Global Cooling
The cooling impact of the last prolonged solar lull “was probably only a couple tenths of a degree Celsius,” said climatologist Michael Mann of Penn State University. “It’s a tiny blip on the radar screen if you’re looking at the driving factors behind climate change.”
...

“The example I like to use is that greenhouse warming right now is the equivalent of 2 watts of power illuminating every square meter of the Earth’s surface. It’s like a Christmas tree light over every square meter. By mid-century, it will be closer to 4 watts,” said Mann, who was a co-author on that 2001 Science paper. “The maximum impact factor of the sun is 0.2 watts per meter squared.”

At most, a prolonged solar minimum would temporarily offset rising global temperatures for a few years, perhaps a couple decades, said NASA climatologist David Rind, who has also studied Maunder Minimum dynamics. But “when the sunspots return, the additional energy will cause additional warming,” he said.

-----

Svensmark: “In the coming years the sun will show by itself how important it is.”

THE HOCKEY SCHTICK: Dr. Svensmark comments on warmist paper that attempts to dismiss effect of solar activity on climate

[Svensmark] I have had a fast look at the paper, and as far as I can see the authors are only looking at solar irradiance changes, and effects like the one that I have been involved in, like an amplification of the solar signal caused by clouds and cosmic ray modulation, is not taken into account. We known with good confidence that the terrestrial response to the solar signal is 3-7 times larger than from solar irradiance alone (see for example the work of Nir Shaviv, attached-Using the oceans as a calorimeter to quantify the solar radiative forcing-doi:10.1029/2007JA012989). Now if such effects are taken into account the result would be very different (larger solar influence). So I do not think that the present work is the particular helpful in understanding the solar impact in near future. It is only an estimate of the impact of solar irradiance as determined from numerical modeling. In the coming years the sun will show by itself how important it is.

H/T Marc Morano

Icecap Note: from The Black Hole of Global Warming In 2011, your federal government will spend $10.6 million a day on climate change. Annual expenditures will be about $4 billion on global warming research - now called climate change - despite the fact that there has been no global warming since 1998, says the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a British educational think tank.

What is inexplicable and inexcusable is the amount of our nation’s money that has been spent on climate change since that UN Panel, composed mainly of research-money-seeking scientists, invented global warming. Al Gore helped dramatize it with dire warnings that terrorized school children, to his mega-million-dollar benefit. Even more confounding is that added U.S. dollars will be poured into continuing research in 2011.

-----

Global greenhouse gas emissions have risen even faster during the past decade than predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other international agencies. According to alarmist groups, this proves global warming is much worse than previously feared. The increase in emissions “should shock even the most jaded negotiators” at international climate talks currently taking place in Bonn, Germany, the UK Guardian reports. But there’s only one problem with this storyline; global temperatures have not increased at all during the past decade.

The evidence is powerful, straightforward, and damning. NASA satellite instruments precisely measuring global temperatures show absolutely no warming during the past the past 10 years. This is the case for the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, including the United States. This is the case for the Arctic, where the signs of human-caused global warming are supposed to be first and most powerfully felt. This is the case for global sea surface temperatures, which alarmists claim should be sucking up much of the predicted human-induced warming. This is the case for the planet as a whole.

If atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions are the sole or primary driver of global temperatures, then where is all the global warming? We’re talking 10 years of higher-than-expected increases in greenhouse gases, yet 10 years of absolutely no warming. That’s 10 years of nada, nunca, nein, zero, and zilch.

There is a difference between global warming theory and alarmist global warming theory. Global warming theory holds that certain atmospheric gases warm the earth. Unless other factors intervene, adding more of these gases will tend to warm the atmosphere. This is well accepted across the scientific community. Alarmist global warming theory entails the additional assertion that the earth’s sensitivity to even very modest changes in atmospheric gases is extremely high. This is in sharp scientific dispute and has been repeatedly contradicted by real-world climate conditions.

Most powerfully, global temperature trends during the twentieth century sharply defied atmospheric carbon dioxide trends. More than half of the warming during the twentieth century occurred prior to the post-World War II economic boom, yet atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions rose minimally during this time. Between 1945 and 1977, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels jumped rapidly, yet global temperatures declined. Only during the last quarter of the century was there an appreciable correlation between greenhouse gas trends and global temperature trends. But that brief correlation has clearly disappeared this century.

Which brings us back to the sharp scientific disagreement about whether the earth’s climate is extremely sensitive or merely modestly sensitive to minor variances in the composition of its atmospheric gases. Carbon dioxide comprises far less than 1 percent of the earth’s atmosphere. In fact, we could multiply the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere a full 25 times and it would still equal less than 1 percent of the earth’s atmosphere. The alarmists claim that the minor increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations during the past 100 years, from roughly 3 parts per 10,000 to roughly 4 parts per 10,000, is causing climate havoc. Real-world temperature data tell us an entirely different story.

The Scientific Method requires testing a proposed scientific hypothesis before accepting it as the truth. When real-world observations contradict the hypothesis, you go back to the drawing board. For more than a century now, real-world climate conditions have defied the alarmist global warming hypothesis. This is especially so during the past decade, when temperatures should be rising dramatically if the alarmist hypothesis is correct. Temperatures are not rising dramatically. They are not even rising at all.

Oh well, back to the old drawing board…

James M. Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News.

Special to The Examiner

When carbon cap-and-trade legislation officially died in Congress last year, many environmentalists lamented defeat while coal and oil proponents celebrated victory. As a scientist who has been working in the environmental industry for decades, I found both reactions misguided. Subsequent events have—I am sorry to say—proven me right. Thanks to the most aggressive and radicalized Environmental Protection Agency in history, the Obama administration is strangling America’s energy sector in the name of greenhouse gas reduction.

But then cap and trade was never really about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It was about raising revenue. The United States has long had multiple emission reduction programs in place, and these will continue to grow. Thirty-three states have Renewable Portfolio Standards programs, which force gradual declines in fossil fuel power generation. Some portions of the country have (or will have) regional trading programs in place. Energy conservation mandates abound.

All of these efforts, and many others, have been spectacularly successful. Recently released EPA data shows that America is back down to mid-1990s levels of emissions. On a per capita basis, greenhouse gas emissions in the United States declined by 16 percent over the last decade. That reduction is almost 50 percent better than what the 15 richest nations in Europe (the EU-15) achieved in the same time frame, even though Europe has had a cap-and-trade program in place.

So has the Obama administration or EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson seen fit to celebrate this remarkable achievement? Of course not. Obama and his EPA despise hydrocarbons in any form, be it oil, coal or natural gas. Under Jackson, the EPA has issued a plethora of new rules designed to ensure that: a) no new coal-fired power plants of any substantial size can ever be built again in the United States, and b) existing coal-fired plants will slowly be crushed under the weight of multiple, ludicrously stringent new regulations.

It’s happening under Congress’ nose, simply because the Clean Air Act mechanisms that the EPA is using to achieve these ends are too complex for most everyone on the Hill to understand. What do new clean air standards for nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide have to do with burning coal and greenhouse gas emissions, for example? Well, if you set those standards low enough, there is no way that a big, new coal-fired power plant can meet them, no matter how advanced the technology employed. Similarly, if the EPA develops complex and overly stringent new emissions standards of so-called “air toxics” from coal-fired power plants, new plants become untenable. All of this has happened and continues to happen.

These regulations come on top of EPA efforts to directly regulate emissions of greenhouse gas through the Clean Air Act and its permit processes. Beginning July 1, every new facility over a certain size will have to prove that it is “state of the art” when it comes to reducing emissions. Coal- and oil-fired plants need not apply, although some natural-gas-fired projects might sneak through.

In other words the EPA has effectively banned any substantial further use of the most abundant, cheap energy source available. No, it’s not cap and trade, but the net effect on the nation’s energy sector and energy prices is everything that most ardent cap and trade fan could have ever wished for.

Rich Trzupek is a chemist and principal consultant at Mostardi Platt Environmental. This piece was adapted from his Encounter Broadside “How the EPA’s Green Tyranny is Stifling America.” He wrote the forthcoming book “Regulators Gone Wild: How the EPA is Ruining American Industry” (Encounter Books).

OSLO (Reuters) - A cold snap in Greenland in the 12th century may help explain why Viking settlers vanished from the island, scientists said on Monday.

The report, reconstructing temperatures by examining lake sediment cores in west Greenland dating back 5,600 years, also indicated that earlier, pre-historic settlers also had to contend with vicious swings in climate on icy Greenland.

“Climate played (a) big role in Vikings’ disappearance from Greenland,” Brown University in the United States said in a statement of a finding that average temperatures plunged 4 degrees Celsius (7F) in 80 years from about 1100.

Such a shift is roughly the equivalent of the current average temperatures in Edinburgh, Scotland, tumbling to match those in Reykjavik, Iceland. It would be a huge setback to crop and livestock production.

“There is a definite cooling trend in the region right before the Norse disappear,” said William D’Andrea of Brown University, the lead author of the study in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers have scant written or archaeological records to figure out why Viking settlers abandoned colonies on the western side of the island in the mid-1300s and the eastern side in the early 1400s.

Conflicts with indigenous Inuit, a search for better hunting grounds, economic stresses and natural swings in climate, perhaps caused by shifts in the sun’s output or volcanic eruptions, could all be factors.

LITTLE ICE AGE

Scientists have previously suspected that a cooling toward a “Little Ice Age” from the 1400s gradually shortened growing seasons and added to sea ice that hampered sailing links with Iceland or the Nordic nations.

The study, by scientists in the United States and Britain, added the previously unknown 12th century temperature plunge as a possible trigger for the colonies’ demise. Vikings arrived in Greenland in the 980s, during a warm period like the present.

“You have an interval when the summers are long and balmy and you build up the size of your farm, and then suddenly year after year, you go into this cooling trend, and the summers are getting shorter and colder and you can’t make as much hay,” D’Andrea said.

The study also traced even earlier swings in the climate to the rise and fall of pre-historic peoples on Greenland starting with the Saqqaq culture, which thrived from about 4,500 years ago to 2,800 years ago.

Lamb and other climate researchers had shown using many different proxies and recorded historical accounts, this LIA after the Medieval Warm Period. But Mann and Briffa and other erased both using a tree ring proxy data from a few trees in Arizona and on the Yamal peninsula, producing the famous hockey stick. Meanwhile, CO2 Science has confirmed Lamb’s original finding of a MWP using data published by 981 individual scientists from 565 research institutions in 43 different countries!