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By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM
We are seeing increasing stories the last year in the news about cold and snow and global data bases based on satellite and station and ocean data suggest temperatures have leveled off over the last decade. These facts even have the IPCC head Dr. Rajendra Pachauri questioning whether natural forces are at least temporarily offsetting greenhouse forcing. The media and most alarmists have largely ignored these facts or attributed them to a temporary decrease in sunspot numbers or La Ninas, factors they scoffed at before or in the case of La Nina would admit only to regional importance.
This conflicting data is bringing an uncomfortable feeling among many believers, what is called a cognitive dissonance, but most all are able to shake it off. Some work over five decades ago by Leon Festinger, a social psychologist helps explain how they can do that and why we may not see a widespread rapid return to sanity on global climate change even as evidence mounts the prevailing greenhouse theories are flawed, global warming has ceased and climate change may be largely due to natural variability.
When discomfirmatory (contrary) evidence is presented, Festinger found one condition that often determined whether the belief is discarded or maintained with new fervor by belief with a strongly held belief. That was whether or not the individual believer has social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand strong discomfirming evidence. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, you might expect the belief to be maintained and the believers to attempt to proselytice or persuade non-members that the belief is correct even in the face of data suggesting otherwise.
Today there is a huge ‘social support’ group of grant toting modelers and researchers, agenda driven or ratings driven journalists, environmentalists and corporations that have realized green is their favorite color and see this as a way to keep green paper flowing into their coffers and pockets, farmers who are benefiting from the misplaced focus on alternative fuel from crops which has sent the cost for their crops to record levels, traders and major market firms licking their chops at the prospects of big time money from carbon trading, big oil and alternative energy companies that have realized this is the vector to bigger profits and the politicians and political activists who see it as a way to accomplish ulterior goals about changing society and increasing their powerbase.
It will only be after the public realizes they have been snookered that the situation may turn on them. We can only hope damage done is not great or irreparable when that day finally comes. Read more on ‘cognitive dissonance and Festinger’s work “When Prophecies Fail” here.
This morning’s Washingtom Post article shows how even as temperatures level off, the claims and cries grow stronger and more absurd calling for a complete carbon elimination or else a rise of 15F by 2300. As a fellow scientist buried in record snow in Ohio reminded us this morning the words of George Orwell “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
See this video by CEI on carbon dioxide and its’ importance to life as we know it.
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM
It has been the winter of the big snows, from China, the Middle East, Greece, Canada and in the United States from the Pacific Northwest to Colorado and across the plains and upper Midwest to Great Lakes and northern New England. All time records were broken in places. Some of the places that missed out on many of the storms was hard hit this weekend. In a stripe from Mississippi to Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, a storm deposited up to 20 inches of snow, the most in Ohio near Columbus. There the storm, which rolled in Friday, dumped 20.4 inches of snow, breaking the city’s previous record of 15.3 inches set in February 1910, the weather service said. During the weekend, blizzard conditions raged. See the story By Kathy Lynn Gray, Blizzard of 2008 in the Columbus Dispatch here.
Photo from TV 10, WBNS, Central Ohio’s News Leader
In Indiana, 14 inches of snow fell in Milan, which is about 60 miles southeast of Indianapolis, said the weather service said. It was a continuation of the storm that on Friday piled up snow a foot deep in Arkansas and blacked out thousands of homes and businesses from that state to the Great Lakes. Louisville, Ky., and parts of Tennessee got up to a foot, while northern Mississippi got 5 to 7 inches of snow, the weather service said.
Further east the storm brought flooding rains and strong winds that downed trees and power lines to eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey and flooding rains to New York and New England. More storms can be seen on the computer models that may brings snows further east. Since the coldest water with this La Nina in the tropical Pacific has shifted more towards the central Pacific from the eastern Pacific, storms have tended to track inland and bring more rain to the northeast. Blocking though is developing in the Atlantic and polar regions and this should force future storms to track or redevelop further south and bring some late snows to the east the next few weeks.
By Michael Asher, Daily Tech
New derivation of equations governing the greenhouse effect reveals “runaway warming” impossible. Miklos Zagoni isn’t just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary’s most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was. That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too. The theory was developed by another Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA’s Ames Research Center.
After studying it, Zagoni stopped calling global warming a crisis, and has instead focused on presenting the new theory to other climatologists. The data fit extremely well. “I fell in love,” he stated at the International Climate Change Conference this week. “Runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations,” Miskolczi states. Just as the theory of relativity sets an upper limit on velocity, his theory sets an upper limit on the greenhouse effect, a limit which prevents it from warming the Earth more than a certain amount. How did modern researchers make such a mistake? They relied upon equations derived over 80 years ago, equations which left off one term from the final solution.
Miskolczi’s story reads like a book. Looking at a series of differential equations for the greenhouse effect, he noticed the solution—originally done in 1922 by Arthur Milne, but still used by climate researchers today—ignored boundary conditions by assuming an “infinitely thick” atmosphere. So Miskolczi re-derived the solution, this time using the proper boundary conditions for an atmosphere that is not infinite. His result included a new term, which acts as a negative feedback to counter the positive forcing. At low levels, the new term means a small difference ... but as greenhouse gases rise, the negative feedback predominates, forcing values back down. NASA refused to release the results. Miskolczi believes their motivation is simple. “Money”, he tells DailyTech. Research that contradicts the view of an impending crisis jeopardizes funding, not only for his own atmosphere-monitoring project, but all climate-change research. Currently, funding for climate research tops $5 billion per year. Miskolczi resigned in protest.
His theory was eventually published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal in his home country of Hungary. The conclusions are supported by research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research last year from Steven Schwartz of Brookhaven National Labs, who gave statistical evidence that the Earth’s response to carbon dioxide was grossly overstated. It also helps to explain why current global climate models continually predict more warming than actually measured. Read more here.
Twelve Months of Cooling Doesn’t Make A Climate TrendBy Dr. John R. Christy
I have been flooded this week with calls and e-mail messages concerning a story that has appeared on various Internet sites, in which the claim is made that cooling global temperatures over the past twelve months in some way negate or eliminate any global warming that might have happened over the past 100 years.
“Here is my perspective on this issue: Twelve months of data does not make a trend, especially in a system as complex and slow moving as global climate, and even more so when the cause for that short-term cooling is as reasonably well understood and well documented as a switch from a minor El Nino Pacific Ocean warming in January 2007 to the La Nina cooling event now taking place.
“The 0.59 C drop we have seen in the past 12 months is unusual, but not unprecedented; April 1998 to April 1999 saw a 0.71 C fall. The long-term climate trend from November 1978 through (and including) January 2008 continues to show a modest warming at the rate of about 0.14 C (0.25 degrees F) per decade.
“One cool year does not erase decades of climate data, nor does it more than minimally change the long-term climate trend. Long-term climate change is just that “long term” and 12 months of data are little more than a blip on the screen.”
Dr. John Christy is Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director, Earth System Science Center, The University of Alabama in Huntsville
Icecap Note: Certainly John is absolutely correct that we can’t make too much of one year’s change either up or down. The story he referenced focused on the Hadley CRU land and ocean based data. John Christy, Roy Spencer and Phillip Gentry are using satellite derived lower tropospheric data. Satellite is widely recognized as the most accurate method for the assessment of change. The following plot of the last decade of the satellite derived global temperatures shows how the global climate is strongly influenced by El Nino and La Nina as John notes.
See larger image here
As this La Nina weakens, temperatures will very likely rebound. The important issue is whether the Pacific Decadal Oscillation which has descended into its negative cold mode stays there. That would mean less “warm” El Ninos (which have dominated the satellite data set period, because it was mainly in the warm PDO phase which favors El Ninos) and more “cool” La Ninas. This would logically reduce or reverse the longer term trend in temperatures over the next few decades. Download blog pdf here.
By Denis G. Rancourt, Activist Teacher
Global warming is often presented as the greatest potential threat to humankind and as the greatest environmental and ecological threat on the planet. It is also presented as a problem that could be solved or contained by determined international collaboration - by political will if it were present. I argue: (1) that global warming (climate change, climate chaos, etc.) will not become humankind’s greatest threat until the sun has its next hiccup in a billion years or more (in the very unlikely scenario that we are still around), (2) that global warming is presently nowhere near being the planet’s most deadly environmental scourge, and (3) that government action and political will cannot measurably or significantly ameliorate global climate in the present world.
I also advance that there are strong societal, institutional, and psychological motivations for having constructed and for continuing to maintain the myth of a global warming dominant threat (global warming myth, for short). I describe these motivations in terms of the workings of the scientific profession and of the global corporate and finance network and its government shadows. I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized.
The most often cited reconstructed global average temperature curves (themselves somewhat tenuous, see below) show increases in global mean temperature of approximately 0.5-1 C in the last 100 years. Let us compare this to the extremes of temperature to which humans routinely adapt. Humans have thrived in every possible ecological niche on the planet, from deserts to tropical forests to the North Polar Regions, since well before present technological advances. These environments show mean temperature differences of as much as 50 C or more. Many of these environments also show day to night and seasonal differences of as much as 20-50 C. A sudden 0.5-1 C increase in mean annual temperature (not spread over 100 years) would be imperceptible to any human and indeed could barely be detected using all of the methods of the modern scientific enterprise.
In addition, whereas there is evidence of negative consequences to populations from sustained regional cooling (e.g., Europe’s Little Ice Age, 1300-1850 AD) and whereas global ice ages (occurring every 40-100 thousand years or so) clearly have significantly affected human populations, there is no known case of a sustained warming alone having negatively impacted an entire population. If it where not for the global greenhouse effect, the planet would on average be 33 C colder and inhabitable. As a general rule, all life on Earth does better when it’s hotter: Compare ecological diversity and biotic density (or biomass) at the poles and at the equator. Read more here.
By William F. McClenney, P.G. R.E.A.
When I first heard it, I believed it. It made sense. I could see it easily and clearly. And that was a long, long time ago. It seemed counterintuitive that anyone could or would not believe it. It was that seminal. Homo Sapiens would cause the earth to warm, we now call it the Greenhouse Gas theory, and it is now a law (at least in California). But it was just a few years ago as the real hype got going that I had my first cause to question the legality of what would soon be a law. And it happened in the oddest of ways. That occasioned a journey that took me from realization to epiphany to more realizations until I finally got it. I will take you on that journey, if you think you can handle it. But be well advised that due to the Nine Times Rule there is only an 11.1% chance you will be able to follow me.
In an advanced course in Psychology taken some 30 years ago I learned that the human being is nine times more susceptible to rumor than it is to fact. That simple rule explains a dramatic amount of human behavior. To prove this rule all one needs to do is accurately answer this simple question: Which religion is the correct one? That’s what I thought.
So if you want to take the journey I did, brace yourself well. My religion is geology, and this journey is the ultimate heresy. If you make it all the way to the end, and understand it all, you will be amongst a very rare breed, those that made the cut on the Nine Times Rule. And you will know how this fundamental rule has been revised, may possibly be revised again downwards, and why. Because this journey I took, and that you may take, started out about climate change and ended up somewhere else entirely. It ended up as part of the theory of everything.
Icecap Note: What follows is a five part series submitted for our evaluation by William F. McClenney, Professional Geologist #4430 (CA) who changed sides during his multi-year, painstaking research into all aspects of anthropogenic versus natural causes of climate changes. In his own words “The results of this research are startling. Not only can I safely state that the chances of AGW occurring due to greenhouse gases (GHG) is remote at best, and if it did occur might very well be the first time in the geologic record, but that GHG theorists are simply on the wrong side of the decimal point in this debate.” You may not agree with everything he says. I didn’t. But it is overall very insightful, interesting and provocative. Part 1 is here. Part II is here. Part III is here. Part IV is here. Finally Part V is here.
Mr. McClenney is a California Licensed Professional Geologist and Registered Environmental Assessor. He was also appointed the first Certified Environmental Auditor in Victoria, Australia in 1991, empowered to sign-off on contaminated site cleanups. He has been investigating and cleaning up hazardous waste sites for 22 years.
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM
Evidence is growing this La Nina will be a longer term event. Most similar important La Ninas are often multi year events (1949-1951,1954-1956, 1961-63, 1970-1972, 1973-1976, 1998-2001). Though the easternmost Pacific near South America has warmed at the surface as the seasonal weakening of the tropical easterlies led to weakened upwelling, it is still cold beneath. Below you can see the latest depth-section of ocean temperatures (top) and anomalies (bottom). Temperature are in degree Celsius. Note the large reservoir of subsurface anomalously cold water (up to 4 degrees C) in the eastern tropical Pacific at 50 to 100 meters.
See larger image here
Also see the latest CPC depicted ocean heat content in the tropical Pacific. This shows the heat content remains at near maximum deficit levels.
See larger image here
These suggest as the easterlies increase again, cooling will return to the east Pacific and La Nina will persist at least well into 2008. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has dropped strongly negative (latest value from NCEP is -1.54 STD). This decline may represent another Great Pacific Climate Shift as the PDO warm and cold phases tend last 25 to 30 years and the last change , to a warm Pacific, occurred in 1976. See more in this pdf here. If indeed the PDO shift is the real deal, we might expect more La Ninas and fewer weaker El Ninos over the next few decades with a net tendency for cooling. Add to that a quieter sun and eventually a cooling Atlantic, and you have a recipe for global cooling.
However, this has its own drawbacks, La Ninas bring more drought and summer heat waves, landfalling hurricanes, large tornado outbreaks, spring floods, winter snows and cold outbreaks than their more famous counterpart, El Nino, which has dominated during the warm PDO era. A while back, Stan Changnon did an interesting analysis which I reported on recently here that suggests the era we have gone through since the late 1970s with dominant El Ninos was unusually benign with more benefits than damages and will be looked on as the golden era, a modern climate optimum. Even if all this is correct, you might expect the media and enviro-alarmists ‘evidence’ we are affecting our climate to morph from warming and ice melt to the climate extremes characteristic of La Ninas. See full pdf here.
By Dr. Lance Endersbee
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the climate in Europe was cold and unpredictable. Crops failed. Famine followed famine, bringing epidemics. There was a belief that crop failures must be due to human wickedness. But who were the wicked ones? It was believed that there must be some witches who are in the grip of the devil. Witches were named, Inquisitors tested their faith, and a large number of poor souls were condemned and burnt at the stake. For decade after decade, fires burned in most towns in Europe. It is an example of a public delusion. In 1841, Charles MacKay wrote a book, Extraordinary Public Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. It has been reprinted. MacKay describes several popular delusions such as The South-Sea Bubble, The Tulipmania, The Crusades, and The Witch Mania. We read it today with a detached amusement, but there have been many other popular delusions since MacKay wrote his book. We are not immune to the madness of crowds.
Today, there is global warming. The droughts and warm weather are regarded as punishment for the environmental sins of mankind. The particular cause is claimed to be the use of carbon fuels. Over the past two decades the concepts of man-made global warming and man-made climate change have come to be accepted as reality. It is repeated every day, in the papers, on TV, in schools and universities. Many governments, and the United Nations, have declared their faith that Man is causing global climate change. But is it true, or is it just another extraordinary popular delusion?
Many scientists, engineers, farmers and others around the world have sound reasons to believe that global climate change has natural causes, but there is little learned discussion. The reason is that climate change has now become a political and economic issue, and is no longer a scientific issue. Read more here.
Emeritus Professor Lance Endersbee is former Dean of Engineering and former Pro-Vice Chancellor of Melbourne, Australia’s Monash University.
‘Science’ - Environmentalism’s Fig LeafBy Climate Resistance
On The Nation blog, David Roberts of Gristmill (another blog) writes: Long-time greens are painfully aware that the arguments of global warming skeptics are like zombies in a ‘70s B movie. They get shot, stabbed, and crushed, over and over again, but they just keep lurching to their feet and staggering forward. That’s because—news flash!—climate skepticism is an ideological, not a scientific, position, and as such it bears only a tenuous relationship to scientific rules of evidence and inference.
Let us put him straight. Climate scepticism (or skepticism) is not an ideological position. Climate scepticism is not an ideology. Climate scepticism does not offer a perspective on the world from which follow moral imperatives, and climate scepticism is not a doctrine, around which climate sceptics wish to organise society. There is no “world view” of climate scepticism. Environmentalism,on the other hand, is an ideology. It does create moral imperatives. It does wish to organise society around its principles. It is a world view. Of course, climate orthodoxy and environmentalism can be challenged from political or ideological perspectives. But there is no consistent “climate sceptic” position. There doesn’t need to be; It’s not an argument for a course of action, and its objections to environmentalism are varied. There have been criticisms of climate politics from the left, and from the centre (or center), and from the right. But these perspectives are not unique to climate scepticism.
To make his point, Roberts links back to a March ‘07 post of his on Gristmill, where he makes the claim that, the scientific contest, at least as it relates to the basic facts of global warming, is over. If the science is settled, he reasons, then the idea that “The contest between climate advocates and their critics is primarily a scientific contest, a debate over who has the best science” is false. By elimination, the argument with no science must be political. Of course, both of Roberts’s premises are false. The scientific debate is not over - it’s never over, and can never be over. That is itself an unscientific statement. Read more here.
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM
Why the current cooling is likely just the start!
Although, I believe the sun is likely the primary driver for the changes to global climate, the oceans may provide the mechanisms for the changes on year-to-year to multidecadal time scales. In a prior analysis, we had shown how the sun and oceans correlated better with US temperature changes than carbon dioxide over the last century. The oceans had the strongest correlation. In this analysis, we will present evidence for how and why the oceans affect temperatures.
The oceans warm and cool much slower than land for a number of reasons. (1) The sun is able to warm only the thin upper surface of the land directly while it may penetrate many meters into the ocean; (2) The ocean like the air but unlike land is subject to vertical mixing and convective movements; (3) The thermal capacity of the oceans is much higher because the water has roughly four times the specific heat (the amount of heat required to warm a given volume 1 degree Celsius) as most land surfaces. This is why land warms more and much faster than the ocean in the spring and cools more and faster in the fall.
As John Brignell has noted, one consequence of the ocean’s ability to absorb more heat is that when an area of ocean becomes warmer or cooler than usual, it takes much longer for that area to revert to “normal” than it would for a land area. Also because of the huge discrepancy in volumetric thermal capacities, the influence of water on air is very much greater and more immediate than air on water. A change in atmospheric temperatures might take decades to affect the oceans, but the flip of an anomaly of an ocean pool of water has an almost immediate effect on the air. Although ocean temperature anomalies tend to persist for long periods, there are large-scale oscillations or flip-flops that take place on scales of a few years to multiple decades. These oscillations have profound effect on global temperatures. This can be seen with the El Ninos and La Ninas.
See larger image here
In this post, we will look further into the ENSO effects and also show how the longer term multidecadal PDO affects El Nino and La Nina frequency and through that the global temperature tendencies. And we end with a look ahead with changes underway to the sun and ocean.
See larger image here
See full blog here.
Posted by Paul Biggs on the Jennifer Marohasy Blog
According to Lance Endersbee:
The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are damped by the oceans. The oceans are a huge source and sink for volatile gases. The surface area of the oceans is vast in relation to the depth of the oceans and the atmosphere. Thus we are dealing with a surface phenomenon.
See larger graph here.
The above chart is an actual experience curve relating actual CO2 levels with actual global average sea surface temperatures. It is not a time scale, just the simple relation between two physical parameters. The line is made up of the succession of actual monthly plotted points. If we have regard to the possible errors of measurement of CO2 and SST, it is remarkably consistent. The clear relationship is what would be expected from solubility data. It is only evident in the temperature data from satellite sources. The 21 year moving average covers the double solar cycle, including the change in solar polarity. It also covers El Nino and La Nina events. It also recognizes the longer response time of the oceans. This chart proves that human emissions of CO2 cannot accumulate in the atmosphere. They are scavenged as they occur. We can use the chart to predict the decreased levels of CO2 that will result from cooling.
From Joe D’Aleo:
Below is the monthly Hadley land and ocean and UAH MSU lower tropospheric temperatures over the last decade plotted with the CO2. Note the temperatures have not warmed, something even IPCC’s head Dr. Rajendra Pachauri took note of (paraphrasing him - as for the plateauing of temperatures in recent years, we have to see if there are natural factors offsetting greenhouse gases). Note the correlation with CO2 has vanished the last decade for both data sets.
See larger graph here.
Aside from the brief bounce coming out of the moderate/strong La Nina of 1999, there has been no increase despite the steady climb of CO2. If we were nearing that ‘tipping point’ Hansen and Gore love to talk about, surely, a decade is not too short a period to expect some thermal response to CO2 increases. See Jennifer’s Blog here. For more on the oceans’ role compared to CO2 see this earlier blog (updated).
By Joe D’Aleo, CCM
A big surge of snow in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere in the last half of January resulted in January being the snowiest for the hemisphere since satellite records began in 1966.
See full size image here
After some retreat, a second surge took place this month and again now, the snowcover is well above the normal for the month. Data comes courtesy of Dr. Bob Hart, FSU.
See full size image here
This may result in February again being among the snowiest for the hemisphere for the period of record. It will be a few weeks before that analysis is provided. Extensive snowcover in mid to late winter, something lacking in most recent years often means colder and snowier than normal temperatures for late winter and a delayed spring. Look for more snow events and late potentially damaging cold in the news in the days, weeks and months ahead. This mirrors the happenings in the Southern Hemisphere their last winter and spring. Our South American friends at the METSUL had predicted this outcome for us.
See this story today from North Dakota where long-time cold records were set. Fargo broke a record that had stood for 119 years, with 31 below. The record had been 30 below set in 1889. Madison, Wisconsin where their new record seasonal snowfall has climbed to 86.7 inches (and will climb well above 90 next week on its inexorable trek to 100 inches) set a new record with minus 15F. In Chicago, temperatures are on pace to make it the 4th coldest winter in the last 20 years.
By Anthony Watts, Watts Up With that
The global surface temperature anomaly data from the UK Hadley Climate Research Unit has just been released, and it shows a significant drop in the global temperature anomaly in January 2008, to just 0.034C, just slightly above zero. This caps a full year of temperature drop from HadCRUT’s January 2007 value of 0.632C.
See larger image here.
The change in temperature for the year then is 0.595C which is in line with other respected global temperature metrics that I have reported on in the past two weeks. RSS, UAH, and GISS global temperature sets all show sharp drops in the last year. We are in an extended solar minimum, we have a shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation to a cold state, and we are seeing arctic ice extents setting new records and rebounding from the summer melt. While weather is defined as such variability, the fact that so many things are in agreement on a global scale in such a short time span of one year should give us pause. See Anthony’s blog here.
Icecap Note: You have access to all the data sources in our Climate Library Resource section with this link.
How Not to Measure Temperature, Part 52: Another UFA Sighted in ArizonaBy Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That
My post How not to measure temperature, part 51 was also cross posted over at Climate Audit, and has created quite a stir when Atomz, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona, tried to demonstrate that the temperature spike shown in the GISS data at Lampasas, TX, was not due to the relocation next to a building and asphalt parking lot, but rather some problem with GISS algorithm to do homogeneity adjustment to the data.
Steve McIntyre had doubts and posted a tongue in cheek rebuttal where he blamed the problem on UFA’s (Unidentified Faulty Algorithms). It seems reasonable given the fact that Arizona is already the center of surface measurement weirdness given the parking lot weather station operated by the Atmospheric Science Department of the University of Arizona. Enter serendipity. Warren Meyers son Nicolas, has been actively surveying Arizona stations for his school science project. My inbox had a new station from him today, Miami, AZ. So I decided to take a look at it. As is typical when an MMTS sensor gets installed by NOAA/NWS to replace the traditional Stevenson Screen, it got closer to human habitation, and in this case, a LOT closer. Too close I’d say.
See full size here
So I though I’d take a look at the raw GISS temperature plot for Miami, AZ to see if the move would show a spike, it did. (Anthony overlaid the homogenized NASA GISS data after adjustment over the raw data as he had done with Lampasas, Texas.)
See full size graph here
Notice that after the GISS homogeneity adjustment, the past temperatures go down, thus making the slope of the temperature trend rise. The rise is purely artificial, and appears to be an artifact of data adjustment by NASA GISS on this rural station.
In a comment on the subject, Steve Mosher offers an explanation: “In Hansen 2001 Hansen says he uses nightlights to determine if a station is Rural in the US and population everywhere else. Miles city population is less than 10K which makes it rural, BUT, nightlights (satellite imagery taken in 1995) indicates a brightness factor for Miles of 26! effectively making it urban.”
I concur, there appears to be a flaw in the GISS nightlines methodology and adjustment algorithm. I look forward to seeing GISS investigate, and if this problem is indeed verified, a dataset correction. See full post here.
UPDATE: see yet another example of the GISS adjustment issue for a rural station with a good record and little in the way of station moves, and that had changed little in 100 years, Cedarville, CA here.
Tornadoes Not a Sign of Global WarmingBy Dr. Tim Ball in the Canada Free Press
In his book State of Fear, Michael Crichton wrote about exploitation of fear by environmental extremists. He should write another book about exploitation of lack of knowledge. Climate and environment were previously outside of politics, but once they became potential election issues politicians exploited them better than environmentalists. It fulfills H.L Mencken’s observation that, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
So before anyone attempts to make political gain from the tragic events of the tornados that killed people across the southern US recently, let’s put the science on the record. And while we’re at it let’s explode another false claim that storms and severe weather will increase with global warming.
Storm and accompanying tornadoes that caused the recent deaths were partly created by increased warm moist air off the Gulf of Mexico as a result of La Nina. This influx of warm moist air is needed to meet with the cold air that pushes far south, as it has all this winter. It will continue to do as the Earth continues to cool, as it has generally since 1998. The dilemma then is that storms will most likely increase in frequency and severity, but it will be because of global cooling, not warming.
Proponents of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis have positioned themselves to continue to claim they are right no matter what ultimately happens. They switched from calling it ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change’ as the concern as global temperatures began to decline while carbon dioxide levels increased. This position produces incredible statements that merely demonstrate ignorance such as Greenpeace climate spokesperson Steven Guilbeault’s comment, “Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter, that’s what we’re dealing with.” Unfortunately most of the public are not yet knowledgeable about the issue to know how silly Guilbeault’s comment is, but they’re learning. Read more here.
See larger graph here.
Dr. Timothy Ball is a Victoria, British Columbia-based environmental consultant, former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg, and Chairman of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project .
