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The American Geophysical Union has just published its new Statement on Climate Change, here is the press release. Here is how they describe it:
“AGU has a responsibility to help policy makers and the public understand the impacts our science can have on public health and safety, economic stability and growth, and national security,” said Gerald North, chair of AGU’s Climate Change Position Statement Review Panel. “Because our understanding of climate change and its impacts on the world around us has advanced so significantly in the last few years, it was vitally important that AGU update its position statement. The new statement is more reflective of the current state of scientific knowledge. It also calls greater attention to the specific societal impacts we face and actions that can diminish the threat.”
See the statement and Roger Pielke Sr.’s (note Roger was on the drafting committee) comments on the statement here.
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Comment by Ken Haapala, Executive Vice President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
Lowering Standards: Under its new leadership, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) announced a new statement on climate change drafted by a special committee for that purpose. The title says it all: “Human-induced climate change requires urgent action.” The new leadership has completely politicized that once august scientific organization. Among other questionable statements is: “Human-caused increases in greenhouse gases are responsible for most of the observed global average surface warming of roughly 0.8C (1.5F) over the past 140 years.”
If the statement is correct, we all should be thankful that greenhouse gas emissions, carbon dioxide (CO2) in particular, brought the earth out of the Little Ice Age and its brutal weather. Of course, the AGU ignores the fact that a major component of 20th century warming occurred from about 1910 to 1940, long before significant CO2 emissions. The new leadership did not bother to submit the statement to the membership for a vote.
On her web site, Judith Curry presents the significant objections by Roger Pielke Sr., the only dissenter on the AGU committee. Curry questions why any professional society should issue statements on this topic. In her opinion the AGU statement is one of worst she has seen from a professional society.
In a different post, using criteria discussed at an AAAS workshop, Curry grades the climate statements by the Royal Society, the American Meteorological Society, and the American Geophysical Union. Under its new leadership, the AGU did not do well.
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Christopher Monckton of Brenchley redrafts it to say what it should have said if the AGU’s objective had been the honest scientific truth.
Anthropogenic climate change requires no action
Our influence on the climate is minor but beneficial
Human activities are changing Earth’s climate, but as the AGU must now concede not by much. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 has increased from 0.03% before the Industrial Revolution to 0.04% today. Much of this alteration of 1 part in 10,000 of the atmospheric composition may have been caused by burning fossil fuels.
The world has warmed by 0.8 C over the past 140 years, but a recent survey of the abstracts of 11,944 scientific papers on global climate change showed only 43 abstracts, or 0.3% of the sample, endorsing the notion that humans were responsible for most of that warming. The mean residence time of a CO2 molecule in the atmosphere is 7 years, so the AGU must recognize that its earlier fears that anthropogenic emissions will influence the climate system for millennia have proven unfounded.
Observations show that recent modest increases in air and sea temperatures and in sea level have been well within natural variability. Atmospheric water vapor may or may not have increased: we lack the capacity to measure it accurately. Some (but not all) mountain glaciers have receded, and earlier claims that all ice in the Himalayas would be gone in 25 years have been withdrawn. Most of the world’s 160,000 glaciers are in the Antarctic, nearly all of which has cooled in the past 30 years.
Snow cover extent in the northern hemisphere reached a record high December value in 2012. There is no global measurement of permafrost, but its extent has probably changed little. Arctic sea ice has declined since 1979, but Antarctic sea ice has increased, and the AGU must apologize for having given only half the story before. These changes are within natural variability and need no further explanation, though humans may have had some small influence. The changes are consistent with explanations of climate change that rely on known natural influences but allow for some human contribution.
Climate models predict that global temperatures will continue to rise, with the amount of warming primarily determined by the level of emissions; that higher emissions of greenhouse gases will lead to larger warming and greater risks to society and ecosystems; and that some additional warming is unavoidable owing to past emissions. Yet the models have consistently over-predicted global atmospheric and oceanic warming. According to satellite measurements, for 16 years 8 months, or 200 months, there has been no global warming at all.
And, though some 0.2 C warming should have occurred since January 2005 according to the forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the satellite records show no global warming at all since that date.
Climate change is not expected to be uniform over space or time. Deforestation, urbanization, and particulate pollution can have complex geographical, seasonal, and longer-term effects (both adverse and, as we now acknowledge, beneficial) on temperature, precipitation, and cloud properties. In addition, human-induced climate change may alter atmospheric circulation, but our influence cannot readily be distinguished from historical patterns of natural variability and storminess and is as likely to be beneficial as harmful, particularly in the short to medium term.
In the current climate, weather experienced at a given location or region varies from year to year; in a changing climate, both the nature of that variability and the basic patterns of weather experienced can change, sometimes in counter-intuitive ways, some areas may experience cooling, for instance. Indeed, taking the mean of the monthly surface or lower-troposphere global mean surface temperature anomalies from all five principal datasets, the cooling has been global throughout the 150 months since January 2001, representing one-eighth of the present century.
Impacts harmful to society, including increased extremes of heat, precipitation, and coastal high water, are currently no more frequent or intense than usual, and are unlikely to increase for as long as global temperatures continue to fail to rise as the AGU had formerly but erroneously predicted. Other projected outcomes, such threats to public health, water availability, agricultural productivity (particularly in low-latitude developing countries), coastal infrastructure, and biodiversity, are also unlikely in the circumstances. The AGU must now agree that previous talk of ocean “acidification” was incorrect, since the oceans are and must remain pronouncedly alkaline for as long as they are buffered by the rocks in the basins where they lie. Benefits of a warmer world (if and when warming resumes) will include increased availability of agricultural land formerly under permafrost in northern latitudes; reduced storminess as temperature differentials diminish; and greater crop yields thanks to a general growth in the net primary productivity of the world’s trees and plants owing to CO2 fertilization.
While important scientific uncertainties remain as to which particular impacts will be experienced where, the AGU must now accept that no uncertainties are known that could make the impacts of anthropogenic climate change significantly damaging. Furthermore, surprise outcomes, such as the unexpectedly rapid loss of Arctic summer sea ice, may entail even more dramatic advantages than anticipated. Trans-polar navigation and mineral exploration will be facilitated. However, it is known that much of the loss of Arctic sea ice is attributable to natural influences, and half of that loss since 1979 has been compensated by increases in Antarctic sea ice.
Actions that could diminish the benefits posed by climate change to society and ecosystems include the substantial emissions cuts the AGU once advocated in a futile attempt to reduce the magnitude of anthropogenic global warming, which has proven to be remarkably poorly correlated with increases in CO2 emissions. The community of scientists must learn to recognize that it has no responsibility to promote a particular negative viewpoint on climate change and its impacts. Improvements will come from pursuing the research needed to understand why the predicted climate change is not occurring, working with stakeholders to identify relevant information, and conveying results to decision makers and to the general public clearly, accurately, honestly, and without the previous negative prejudice for which the AGU must now humbly apologize.
Erroneous versions of the above statement were adopted by the American Geophysical Union in December 2003 and were revised and republished in December 2007, February 2012, and August 2013. In the face of the evidence, the AGU must now accept that its previous statements were inadequate.
Joseph D’Aleo, AMS, Fellow of the AMS
We have heard tales of broadcasters who dare express some degree of skepticism in the blogs or twitter or sometimes on air, being scolded at by News Directors or outside advocacy groups like Forecast the Facts (funded by the Center for American Progress, a George Soros advocacy group) claiming to be a grassroots organization, whichs conduct letter writing campaigns to attack them with station management. Their launch coincided with the AMS Annual meeting in 2012 where they disrupted the council meeting to lobby the society to make a stronger statement and exert pressure on broadcasters. On their site Forecast the Facts lists their mission:
Forecast the Facts is dedicated to ensuring that Americans hear the truth about climate change: that temperatures are increasing, human activity is largely responsible, and that our world is already experiencing the effects. We do this by empowering everyday people to speak out in the face of misinformation and hold accountable those who mislead the public.
In other words, they want broadcasters to tie virtually every weather (and other) extreme, to our use of fossil fuel and not attempt to explain these events with natural factors or cycles.
Dr Neil Frank, former Director of NHC and long time Houston, Texas on-air meteorologist and Dr William Gray, CSU hurricane forecast pioneer and I sent a strongly worded statement to the AMS in which we started with our view on the real state of the climate::
The UKMO and Rajendra Pachauri have admitted to no warming for the past 16 or 17 years. James Hansen has agreed it is at least a decade. Any significant warming since 1979 was not global but confined to north of 20N. Even the heat records last year, if you only look at stations with 80+ year history, were but a blip compared to the 1930s. These records, you should know, are not altered like station temperatures used for climate analyses. Moreover, global hurricane frequency is at a 30+year low and strong tornado trends are down. There is no trend long term in droughts and floods. Snow and cold have been increasing in winter not decreasing as the IPCC and NOAA climate reports have forecasted. We have seen deceleration in sea level rises.
Both weather balloon and satellite data clearly indicate that there is no hot spot in the tropics, which invalidates the theory on which CO2’s supposed impact on Global Average Surface Temperature is based. Given that the Climate Models upon which EPA relied are all based on this theory, it is not surprising that comparisons of the model forecasts versus actual temperatures have proven the models to be invalid as well. In fact, to our knowledge, EPA never carried out any published Climate Model forecast reliability test results.
We could go on and on as the “consensus” position is in collapse on all fronts. But what we have mentioned so far should be more than enough to condemn the demands for orthodoxy on the subject of climate science. As the great Physicist Richard Feynman said, “...no matter how smart you are, how beautiful your idea or theory, if the data or experiments don’t support it, it’s wrong.”
We then addressed the Forecast the Facts campaign:
We hope that going forward, the AMS will protect the professional interests and freedom of thought of its members by forcefully and publically repudiating the Forecast the Facts campaign, and by taking aggressive legal action against it if necessary...The AMS should welcome all points of view on all subjects within our field of science. In your own words....we must also embrace legitimate science that seeks to increase our understanding even as it complicates the emerging picture of how the climate system works. We all must continue to work toward ensuring that we are operating with the very highest levels of openness and honesty in the presentation of our science. The fruits of such honest, open debate will surely lead to an improved understanding of the Earth’s complex climate system and better weather and climate forecasts, a goal we know we all share.
Keith Seiter responded with a letter in which he stated:
Personally, I do not feel the Forecast the Facts approach is a productive one, and I have told them so directly on several occasions. I published a column in the July 2012 BAMS that described why I feel the tactics used by Forecast the Facts and a few other organizations are counterproductive to improving communication on climate change. I continue to feel this way, and continue to do my best to open up communication on this issue rather than try to suppress it. As you quoted from one of my columns in your letter, I have enormous faith in the scientific process.
Let me close by quoting another of my recent BAMS columns (May 2013), which I encourage you to review:
“Frequent readers of this column will know that I have long been advocating for open and respectful dialog on the science of climate change, with all parties recognizing that as scientists it is our job to be skeptical and require solid theory and evidence to back up claims. We must always be cognizant of how hard it is to keep our intrinsic values from triggering confirmation bias as we review research results or listen to alternative explanations for observational evidence. Our training as scientists, however, makes it clear that our goal must always be the objective truth whether it supports our belief system or not. We must all strive for that level of integrity.”
In his 2012 BAMS article Keith decried the tactics of groups like Forecast the Facts. You may wish to copy that article if challenged by your station management based on letters from FTF or other environmental groups who have little knowledge of the actual facts but are strong believers in the so called consensus position because of their education or political leanings.
And always remember what Michael Crichton has said about consensus:
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics.
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, Weatherbell Analytics
I have in the past posted a recent flurry of papers showing evidence for the sun’s role in climate change. I have posted in depth on this in the past with my own findings including here. By now, you know we place a lot of emphasis on the role the oceans and volcanism plays in climate extremes and cycles. In another post we will show how the PDO, AMO, solar and volcanism affect the intensity and frequency of extremes and the persistence of weather patterns. Please help us make the case for the truth by donating to our team. We are battling the alarmists in the public media, the EPA in the court as JB posted on. There are other efforts underway with government and alarmist groups. All the work has been pro bono. Every little bit you donate helps the team.
OCEAN CYCLES
We are now back in a cold multidecadal PDO.
This favors La Ninas, a cold Alaska and Eurasia (annualized - more extreme in winters).
Meanwhile we entered the warm AMO in the mid 1990s.
That favors a warm Northern hemisphere and arctic.
The two oceans are out of phase. We were in a similar condition of a cold Pacific and warm Atlantic from the late 1940s to early 1960s.
Since both the warm PDO and warm AMO favor warming, taking the two indices standardizing them and adding them and comparing to US annual temperatures (everything smoothed here) we find a strong correlation.
Far better than that with CO2 which had a coincidental correlation 1979 to 1998.
The same PDO/AMO correlation holds with arctic temperatures.
Enlarged
That is because water from both oceans makes its way into the arctic beneath the floating icecap. When its warm, the water thins the ice in summer.
The International Arctic Research Center at the University of Fairbanks has found the same correlation with Atlantic water temperatures and arctic water temperatures and ice thickness/extent.
VOLCANISM
NASA GISS maintains a database of Aerosol loading (aerosol optical thickness) based on volcanoes since 1850 for modeling purposes. Here is the plot of the values by latitude Note how eruptions in one hemisphere, stay concentrated there, near the equator spread both north and south.
I plotted the data a few years back identifying the major eruptions.
Stratospheric aerosols cut back on incoming solar radiation. Values of 7% reduction or higher have been measured. This is widely accepted as being a factor in causing global cooling for 2 to 3 years after a major eruption. Some eruptions have been estimated to throw aerosols to 80,000 or even 120,000 feet high into our atmosphere. While ash and aerosols (sulfate converted from O2) typically falls out from low level eruptions in days or weeks, those that make it into the stratosphere have a lifetime of a few years. While there, they serve to cool the atmosphere and surface (although with regional variances) and when they fall out to serve as nuclei for ice and water droplet clouds and precipitation (rain and snow). Remember the big Midwest flood of 1993 and the huge snows of March 1993 to the winter of 1993/94 and 1995/96
Dr. Richard Keen, who lives in the beautiful Colorado Rockies and is both a weather observer and astronomical expert has been using eclipses to measure this effect. He found the thickness varied and estimated the effect on temperatures.
I composited years with high and low stratospheric aerosols and found a definite cooling with high content and warming with low, greatest at the poles where the low angle sun must pass through a much greater path length to reach the surface.
I focused on the northern hemisphere in this plot, extending it to the end of 2012. We have dropped to virtual zero since the Alaska and Iceland eruptions of the late 2000 decade were lower stratosphere and are estimated to be gone.
Notice in the chart below, a clean atmosphere coincides with warming certainly relative to the high aerosol periods.
Enlarged
The recent high latitude volcanoes from 2007/08 - 2010/11 may have helped with the snows (and rock bottom solar with cold winters) even though the hemispheric loading was not large.
2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajokull Enlarged
We are back to ground zero again.
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Perhaps the most impactful (more so than Pinatubo and Krakatoa) was Iceland’s Laki in 1783.
Laki, Iceland, 1783 Enlarged
The Laki eruption lasted eight months during which time about 14 cubic km of basaltic lava and some tephra were erupted. Haze from the eruption was reported from Iceland to Syria. In Iceland, the haze lead to the loss of most of the island’s livestock (by eating fluorine contaminated grass), crop failure (by acid rain), and the death of one-quarter of the human residents (by famine). Ben Franklin noted the atmospheric effects of the eruption (Wood, 1992).
It is estimated that 80 Mt of sulfuric acid aerosol was released by the eruption (4 times more than El Chichon and 80 times more than Mount St. Helens).
The climatic effects of the Laki eruption are impressive. In the eastern United States, the winter average temperature was 4.8 degrees C below the 225 year average. The estimate for the temperature decrease of the entire Northern Hemisphere is about 1 degree C. The The top graph shows change in acidity in micro equivalents H+ per kg in the Greenland icecap. The bottom graph represents the winter temperature records in the eastern United States. From Sigurdsson (1982).
In North America, the winter of 1784 was the longest and one of the coldest on record. It was the longest period of below-zero temperatures in New England, the largest accumulation of snow in New Jersey, and the longest freezing over of the Chesapeake Bay. There was ice skating in Charleston Harbor, a huge snowstorm hit the south, the Mississippi River froze at New Orleans, and there was ice in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Laki eruption illustrates that low energy, large volume, long duration basaltic eruptions can have climatic impacts greater than large volume explosive silica-rich eruptions. The sulfur contents of basaltic magmas are 10-100 times higher than silica-rich magmas (Palais and Sigurdsson, 1989). The sulfur dioxide is what forms the sulfate aerosols which reflect radiation.
How does sun play a role? I believe the sun drives the oceanic cycles which drive the weather. See the details of how here. Volcanism is the wildcard amplifier. See how the TSI as compiled by Hoyt/Schatten/Willson matches the ocean cycles and temperatures.
These are the major league players in our climate. CO2 didn’t make the team.
By Dr. Gordon Fulks, The Oregonian
In 1960 when a U2 spy plane disappeared over the Soviet Union, President Eisenhower told the world that it was a “weather research aircraft” flying out of Turkey. That cover story worked for a week until Soviet Premier Khrushchev confirmed that the pilot had been captured deep in Soviet territory. Should an American President have supported an elaborate fabrication? It served no lasting purpose and demeaned a great President.
The cases that followed involving Presidents Nixon and Clinton were far less excusable and far more damaging to the presidency. They stretched the truth to avoid accountability.
Now we have yet a different situation where a President is trying to sell a vast program of carbon controls and renewable energy subsidies, based on arguments that may meet political standards for honesty but fail scientific, engineering, and legal standards. That is far more damaging to this nation than Bill Clinton denying an affair with Monica Lewinsky.
President Obama’s recent ‘Climate Change’ speech reiterated his assertions, that the earth is warming dangerously, that human emissions of CO2 are clearly responsible, and that virtually all scientists agree with him. As 115 scientists from around the world told him several years ago: “With all due respect Mr. President, that is not true.” One was Nobel Laureate in Physics Ivar Giaever, a Democrat. The president now calls those who dispute his hysteria the “Flat Earth Society.”
Because the President knows that Congress and the American people will never support carbon reduction schemes that seriously harm our economy, he is pursuing a strategy involving rhetorical subterfuges while his Environmental Protection Agency quietly moves forward with regulations.
Consequently, eleven of us Note: Icecap played an important role filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court recently asking them to overturn the EPA’s “Endangerment Finding” on CO2. This is the first time that the high court has been asked to consider purely scientific arguments rather than, for instance, the EPA’s failure to follow the recommendations of their Inspector General.
We prove that the EPA’s “Three Lines of Evidence” are fatally flawed, based on multiple robust data sets, not on ‘expert opinion’ from those paid to support the president’s position. Honest data show no unusual warming in the latter half of the 20th century and none at all for the last fifteen years despite a slow increase in CO2. The ‘Hot Spot’ that must exist in the tropical troposphere for their theory to work is completely missing. And the climate models for which the taxpayer has paid so dearly, are epic failures. Without global warming, carbon dioxide is clearly ‘Not Guilty.’ And hence the hysteria about extreme weather caused by CO2 is likewise nonsense.
What about the programs that the president is trying to sell to cure a problem that does not exist? These are substantial hoaxes also. While “efficient use of energy” and “renewable energy: sound good, they are far from the reality. Ethanol, solar, and wind typically produce little net energy beyond what went into their manufacture. They merely launder high quality energy from fossil fuels into less desirable but politically popular kinds.
Remarkably, wind and solar do not even reduce our ‘carbon footprint,’ because they need backup by special natural gas power plants designed for rapid start-up. These are far less efficient than state-of-the-art gas-turbine plants that run continuously. Scrapping wind and solar programs would hugely benefit ratepayers and burn less natural gas overall.
Because President Obama has no scientific education, he can hardly be expected to understand the details of what we are saying. But as an attorney, he should know what constitutes honest argument.
Gordon J. Fulks, PhD lives in Corbett, Oregon, and can be reached at gordonfulks@hotmail.com. He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago, Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research.
Record lows in July.
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM
Remember this story long ago on New York’s Central Park multiple very different data sets to which Steve McIntyre responded here.
Well NCDC has a shiny new very cool tool for plotting data for regions, states and some city locations by month(s), seasons, years. They describe it this way.
Data for the Contiguous U.S., statewide, climate divisions, climate regions, and agricultural belts come from the U.S. Climate Divisional Database, which have data from 1895 to the present.
Information is also available at the city level for the following 60 cities. The 27 cities highlighted in blue below are Automated Surface Observing System (ASOS) stations which are part of the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) (temperature data for the USHCN stations were converted to version 2.5 in October 2012). The other 33 cities use Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) data. These cities have data from varying beginning periods of record to the present.
New York’s Central Park was one of the blue cities (new USHCN v2.5). So I plotted it for July since that was one of the months in the original comparison.
The surprise was how flat it was in the dust bowl heat of the 1930s. I know that on the NWS NYC web site, they have archived raw monthly means back well into the 1800s. So I downloaded that and compared.
It was dramatically cooler in the NCDC v2.5 than the original data.
I maybe we need to coin a new term for NOAA NCDC - ‘dust bowl deniers’. Note the past is colder until recent decades. Yes it appears there is man made warming underway but the men are in Asheville, North Carolina.
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Addendum by Anthony Watts:
Cooling the past increases the trend. We’ve seen this effect happen several times before, yet there seems to be no justification for it. Probably this most dramatic example is what we see in this NOAA GISS plot comparison:
I’ve also written before about this tampering with data from the past. Such tampering with new adjustments like USHCN V2.5 allow claims of “warmest ever” to be made when the past gets cooled:
Dear NOAA and Seth, which 1930’s were you comparing to when you say July 2012 is the record warmest?
Does NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) keep two separate sets of climate books for the USA?
See many more examples here, here, here. Note this could be done for every state. If this was a corporation they would be indicted and jailed.
The Weather Channel’s case for global warming courtesy of the climate clowns at climate central and the ‘comedy’? company formerly known as TWC/WSI/Wunderground now under the tailfeathers of MSNBC. Jack Webb in the old show Dragnet had among his memorable saying “Just the fact ma’am”. Thats what we will do. The alarmists ignore the inconvenient facts and instead call to authority - the bogus 97% consensus.
Seriously, you may have heard that The Weather Channel/WSI/Wunderground/Weather Central all under the NBC Universal umbrella and are teaming with Climate Central (remember Heidi Cullen) will be promoting global warming alarmist and hyping every weather event as if we never had a heat wave, cold wave, snowstorm, hurricane, forest fire, tornado outbreak before the greenhouse theory was adopted by environmentalists and politicians and, who spent $100B to bribe scientists to support their theory and for useful idiots in the media like those at the NBC Universal family to carry the water which they gladly do, never questioning them like good journalists used to do.
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, would fit the bill.” Club of Rome, First Global Revolution
“Urgent and unprecedented environmental and social changes challenge scientists to define a new social contract...a commitment on the part of all scientists to devote their energies and talents to the most pressing problems of the day, in proportion to their importance, in exchange for public funding”. NOAA exiting Administrator for NOAA Dr. Lubchenko when she was president of AAAS in 1999 (explains NOAA’s obsession with ‘finding warming, extremes)
“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” Paul Watson, Co-founder of Greenpeace
Climate Central and Heidi Cullen, formerly with TWC is feeding her tall tales to TV broadcasters on WSI and Weather Central systems for daily graphics that the TV mets can use to indoctrinate the audience, I thought I would once a week provide some other facts they would like to ignore.
You see they are feeling pressure with the stories, largely ignored by the mainstream media that warming has stopped and frustrated by public apathy (rank global warming actions 21st out of 21 in terms of priority for government (down 2% to 28%)
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First temperatures have stopped warming in all the data bases going back as far as 1997. All are showing a cooling since 2002 even as CO2 continues to rise. This is true even though CO2 has continued to rise. This happened before from the 1940s to late 1970s during the post war boom.
This is in sharp contrast to what the climate models have predicted.
One of the strongest signature of greenhouse theory in all the climate model is a hot spot in the tropics peaking at higher levels. That is not seen in either the weather balloons and satellite data.
Tropical oceans are supposed to be warming too. But with excellent buoy data across the Pacific to monitor ENSO, we see no warming back to 1979 down to 300 meters in the tropical ocean (130E to 80W).
An article published today in Nature laments the dismal failure of climate models to predict climate a mere 5 years into the future, much less a century from now:
“The dramatic warming predicted after 2008 has yet to arrive.” “It’s fair to say that the real world warmed even less than our forecast suggested,” [modeller] Smith says. “We don’t really understand at the moment why that is.”
“Although I have nothing against this endeavour as a research opportunity, the papers so far have mostly served as a ‘disproof of concept’,” says Gavin Schmidt. Schmidt says that these efforts are “a little misguided”. He argues that it is difficult to attribute success or failure to any particular parameter because the inherent unpredictability of weather and climate is built into both the Earth system and the models. “It doesn’t suggest any solutions,” he says. “Because the climate does not usually change drastically from one year to the next, the model is bound to start off predicting conditions that are close to reality. But that effect quickly wears off as the real climate evolves. If this is the source of the models’ accuracy, that advantage fades quickly after a few years.”
“Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, says that it could be a decade or more before this research really begins to pay off in terms of predictive power, and even then climate scientists will be limited in what they can say about the future.” Once again, modelers attempt to explain away their failures due to the dubious excuse of Trenberth’s “missing heat” sinking undetected to the bottom of the ocean.
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There was a lot of buzz with the hot summer last year when ocean temperatures reinforced ridging over the drought stricken central producing a heat ridge and very warm weather in March and July.
But as Dr. John Christy showed in Senate testimony last summer, no state all-time records were set and the 1930s still dominates.
As for individual station records, there are many coop and stations with short history, which would add to the number of highest ever. John Christy also showed, if you focus only on stations with 80+ years of record that went back to the hot 1930s and 1950s, last year was just a blip.
The 1930s was suppressed in the altered global data sets by adjustments made in the 2000s. They did not adjust records, just monthly and annual averages. The records show the true trend better than the computed global average surface temperature.
Back in 1934 the US data was as depicted below with an interesting factual comment from James Hansen. Note how 1998 was 0.3C (0.5F) cooler than 1934.
This presented a dilemma for the global warming community because the US lacking of warming was in sharp contrast with the global. The secret was the US had an adjustment for Urban Heat Island in the US that was not done for the global.
Around 2007, NOAA removed the UHI adjustment for US data so that a warming could be shown. Notice how this brought 1998 up to the level of 1998.
Dr. Edward Long had shown the difference between true rural and urban temperatures for the lower 48 states.
Brian Stone of Georgia Tech in 2009 found “Across the U.S. as a whole, approximately 50 percent of the warming that has occurred since 1950 is due to land use changes...rather than to the emission of greenhouse gases.” Most large U.S. cities, including Atlanta, are warming at more than twice the rate of the planet as a whole...”
We will talk about the UHI and bad siting contamination, no trends in extremes (except winter hemispheric snows) and the other theory failures in upcoming posts. We will show how natural factors can explain all the decadal and longer term changes and the changing frequency of the various extremes.
The two events that ‘appear’ to agree with prediction are increased Atlantic Basin hurricanes and decreasing arctic ice. But these are due to natural factors - as Joe Bastardi and I have written over the years, the hurricanes are increasing in line with forecasts in 1995 by Bill Gray when the warm AMO mode returned. When the AMO was positive before from the 1930s to 1960 we had 8 major east coast landfalls. Also the warm AMO and PDO are what drive arctic ice changes and arctic temperatures as IARC UAF has shown and I have published in 2012. We will discuss that too.
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, would fit the bill.” Club of Rome First Global Revolution
Posted By Paul Driessen On July 2, 2013
US politicians and bureaucrats have less compassion and common sense that average Londoner
“You’ve heard of Live Aid? Well, this is Drive Aid,” an ardent young man says, as he approaches London pedestrians. “Greedy people in developing nations are eating huge amounts of food that could easily be turned into biofuel to power our cars. African acreage the size of Belgium is being used for food, and we’re saying it should go to cars here in the UK. Can we have your support?”
Londoners reacted with disbelief and outrage, the ActionAid UK video shows, and refused to sign his mock petition. The amusing stunt drove home a vital point: Biofuel programs are turning food into fuel, converting cropland into fuel production sites, and disrupting food supplies for hungry people worldwide. The misguided programs are having serious environmental consequences, as well.
Why, then, can’t politicians, bureaucrats and environmentalists display the common sense exhibited by London’s citizenry? Why did President Obama tell Africans (many of whom are malnourished) in July 2009 that they should refrain from using “dirty” fossil fuels and use their “bountiful” biofuel and other renewable energy resources, instead? When will Congress pull the plug on Renewable Fuel Standards?
Ethanol and other biofuels might have made some sense when Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and established mandates (or “standards") requiring that refiners and consumer purchase large quantities of ethanol and other biofuels. Back then, despite growing evidence to the contrary, many people thought we were running out of oil and gas, and believed manmade global warming threatened the planet. But this is not 2005. Those rationales are no longer persuasive.
The hydraulic fracturing revolution has obliterated the Club of Rome “peak oil” notion that we are rapidly exhausting the world’s petroleum. Climategate and other IPCC scandals demonstrated that the “science” behind climate cataclysm claims is conjectural, manipulated and even fraudulent. And actual observations of temperatures, storms, droughts, sea levels and Arctic ice have refused to cooperate with computer models and Hansen-Gore-EPA-IPCC disaster scenarios.
In fact, biofuels and Renewable Fuel Standards cannot be justified on any grounds.
The United States is using 40 million acres of cropland (Iowa plus New Jersey) and 45% of its corn crop to produce 14 billion gallons of ethanol annually. This amount of corn could feed some 570 million people, out of the 1.2 billion who still struggle to survive on $1.25 per day.
This corn-centric agriculture is displacing wheat and other crops, dramatically increasing grain and food prices, and keeping land under cultivation that would otherwise be returned to wildlife habitat. It requires millions of pounds of insecticides, billions of pounds of fertilizer, vast amounts of petroleum-based energy, and billions of gallons of water to produce a fuel that gets one-third less mileage per gallon than gasoline and achieves no overall reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Ethanol mandates have caused US corn prices to rocket from $1.96 per average bushel in 2005 to as much as $7.50 in autumn 2012 and $6.68 in June 2013. Corn growers and ethanol makers get rich. However, soaring corn prices mean beef, pork, poultry, egg and fish producers pay more for corn-based feed; grocery manufacturers pay more for corn, meat, fish and corn syrup; families pay more for everything on their dinner table; and starving Africans go hungry because aid agencies cannot buy as much food.
By 2022, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (amending the 2005 law) requires 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol and 21 billion gallons of cellulosic and other non-corn-based biofuels. That will monumentally worsen all these problems.
Equally insane, the Environmental Protection Agency’s draft rule for 2013 required that refiners purchase 14 million gallons of cellulosic biofuels. There’s a teensy problem: the fuel doesn’t exist. A mere 4,900 gallons were produced in March, and zero the other months. So companies are forced to buy fantasy fuel, fined big bucks if they do not, and punished if they get conned into buying fraudulent “renewable fuel credits” from “socially responsible” companies like Clean Green Fuel, Absolute Fuels and Green Diesel.
Ethanol collects water, which can result in engine stalls. It corrodes plastic, rubber and soft metal parts. Pre-2001 car engines, parts and systems may not be able to handle E15 fuel blends (15% ethanol, 85% gasoline), adversely affecting engine, fuel pump and sensor durability. Older cars, motorcycles and boats fueled with E15 could conk out in dangerously inopportune places; at the very least they could require costly engine repairs. Lawn mowers and other gasoline-powered equipment are equally susceptible.
On a global scale, the biofuels frenzy is diverting millions of acres of farmland from food crops, converting millions of acres of rainforest and other wildlife habitat into farmland, and employing billions of gallons of water, to produce corn, jatropha, palm oil and other crops for use in producing politically correct biodiesel and other biofuels.
To top off this seemingly inexhaustible list of policy idiocies, all this ethanol and other biofuel could easily be replaced with newly abundant oil and gas supplies. Amazing new seismic, deepwater, deep drilling, hydraulic fracturing and other technologies have led to discoveries of huge new reserves of oil and natural gas and enabled companies to extract far more petroleum from reservoirs once thought to have been depleted.
That means we can now get vastly more energy from far less land; with far fewer impacts on environmental quality, biodiversity and endangered species; and with none of the nasty effects on food supplies, food prices and world hunger that biofuel lunacy entails.
We could do that if radical greens in the Obama Administration, United Nations and eco pressure groups would end their ideological opposition to leasing, drilling, fracking, Outer Continental Shelf and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge development, Canadian oil sands, the Keystone pipeline and countless other projects. We could do so, if they would stop behaving like environmentalist Bull Connors, arrogantly blocking the doors to human and civil rights progress.
This colossal global biofuels industry exists only because resource depletion and climate Armageddon ideologies do not die easily and because politicians lavish government mandates and billions of dollars in taxpayer and consumer subsidies on firms that have persuasive lobbyists and reliable track records for channeling millions of those dollars back to the politicians who keep the racket going.
The ActionAid UK video has lent some good British gallows humor to a serious issue. As another well-known Brit might say, it is time rein in a global SPECTRE that has wreaked too much human and environmental havoc.
To get that long overdue effort underway, Congress needs to amend the 2005 Energy Policy Act, eliminate the Renewable Fuel Standards and end the taxpayer subsidies.
A few thousand farmers and ethanol makers will undoubtedly feel some pain. A few hundred politicians will have less money in their reelection coffers. However, countless wild creatures will breathe much easier in their newly safe natural habitats and millions of families will enjoy a new birth of freedom, a new wave of economic opportunity, and welcome relief from hunger and malnutrition.
“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.” Instead, climate change policy is about how “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.” UN IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer 2010
“Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.” Sir John Houghton, First chairman of the IPCC
By Joe Bastardi and Joe D’Aleo, Weatherbell.com
Its a sad world today when not only does one have to offer weather explanations for a tragedy, but then have to counter obvious lies that are going to be told about it ( hence the reason I am not optimistic about our nation, because too many people accept, rather than question, what they hear). So the first thing I am going to do is show you the facts about how far below normal we are with Wildfires this year.
W are close to a million acres below the 10 yr running mean over 15,000 fire less than the 10 year running mean, less fires than any of the last 10 years, and next to last in acres burned. And yet the climatic ambulance chasers are already out trying to push a lie on this matter that was born of the tragedy of 19 people losing their lives in the wildfire we have been hearing about.
The most destructive incident of fire I know of, and one that is somewhat infamous in meteorological terms is the Dresden Firestorm. Basically what was done to Japan with the Atom bomb was done to Dresden with mass bombing that created and inferno in the center of the city, and the heat plume that developed allowed air to rush in from cooler outlying areas and created what was a literal firestorm. Historians writing on this question the motives of the allies, since Dresden was not a military city. While not an expert on this it appears the decision to do this was the modern day parallel to Shermans burning of all of Georgia, not just the military part. It may have been to completely demoralize the population by hitting a city that really, was looked at as some place like Switzerland.. not really something that was contributing to the German war effort. In fact the Germans moved what little defense they had of Dresden to other places.
In any case, the diagram below shows what happened
In the case of the wildfire there are two things to consider. The air is hot and dry, and the heating by the fire itself increasing the instability by making it even hotter. This means that winds around the wildfire, which even without a wildfire, are prone to shifting around because of the nature of the pattern and topography, become even more un predictable. This is the second case of experts around an event they are trained for, being overwhelmed by the event, the first being the tornado and its shift and winding up, and now this.
But again listen to the facts. Like the tornado season, this is well below normal, and the fire is sticking out like a sore thumb in the wildfire season, just like the 2 late May tornadoes, its the exception to the rule of the season. In addition the fact that there has NOT BEEN A FIRE IN THE AREA, for 4 years, removing fuel, is contributing to this. Is it dry. Yes. But if it had been a wet spring, then more fuel would have been available as the summers always dry out. In the southwest, its pay me now or pay me later. If its wet, it means that eventually the growth has to die when it dries out. When it dries out, its going to burn eventually. JB
It has ben a dry ‘wet season’ in the west as JB said, Se the percent of normal rain is less than 25% of normal in some areas.
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Hot weather and climate change - a mountain from a molehill?
By Steve Goreham
Originally published in The Washington Times
On Sunday, Death Valley temperatures reached 129F, a new June record high for the United States, according to the National Weather Service. Temperatures at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas reached 117F, tying the previous record set in 1942 and 2005. National Geographic, NBC News, and other media ran stories attributing the Southwest heat wave to human-caused global warming. But history shows that today’s temperatures are nothing extraordinary.
The United States high temperature record was set in 1913, measured in Death Valley on July 13. Twenty-three of the 50 US state high temperature records date back to the decade of the 1930s. Seventy percent of state high records were set prior to 1970.
The alarm about climate change is all about one degree. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), global surface temperatures have increased about 1.3F (0.7C) since 1880. Proponents of the theory of man-made warming claim that this is evidence that man-made greenhouse gases are raising global temperatures.
One degree over more than 130 years isn’t very much. In contrast, Chicago temperatures vary from about -5F to 95F, about 100 degrees, each year. When compared to this 100-degree annual swing, the rise in global temperatures since the 1800s is trivial, captured by a thin line on a graph.
Nevertheless, NOAA repeatedly raises concern about global temperatures. The NOAA website proclaims that “May 2013 global temperatures were the third highest on record.” This sounds alarming unless one understands that “on record” refers to the thermometer record, which only dates back to about 1880.
Climate changes over hundreds and thousands of years. Data from ice cores show several periods during the last 10,000 years that were warmer than today, including the Roman Climate Optimum at the height of the Roman Empire and the Medieval Warm Period, when the Vikings settled southwest Greenland. The warm and cool eras since the last ice age were due to natural climate cycles, not greenhouse gas emissions. The “on record” period that NOAA references is only a tiny part of the climatic picture.
Global average temperature is difficult to measure. The data sets of NOAA are an artificial estimate at best. They start with a patchwork collection of thousands of thermometer stations that inadequately cover the globe. Station coverage of the oceans and of the far northern and southern regions is inconsistent and poor. To cover areas without thermometers, averaging estimates are made from surrounding stations to try to fill in the holes.
In addition to coverage problems, gauge measurements often contain large errors. Man-made structures such as buildings and parking lots absorb sunlight, artificially increasing local temperatures. Cars, air conditioners, and other equipment generate heat when operating, creating what is called an Urban Heat Island effect.
The accuracy of the US temperature record is questionable. Meteorologist Anthony Watts, creator of the science website WattsUpWithThat, led a team of volunteers that audited more than 1,000 US temperature gauge stations from 2007 to 2011. Over 70 percent of the sites were found to be located near artificial heating surfaces such as buildings or parking lots, rated as poor or very poor by the site rating system of the National Climatic Data Center, a NOAA organization. These stations were subject to temperature errors as large as 3.6F (2C).
Simple problems can throw off gauge readings. Temperature stations are louvered enclosures that are painted white to reflect sunlight and minimize solar heating. As the station weathers and the paint ages, gauge stations read artificially high temperatures. A study published last month found that after only five years of aging, temperature stations will record a temperature error of 2.9F (1.6C) too high. This is greater than the one degree rise in the last 130 years that NOAA is alarmed about.
In addition to temperature measurement error, NOAA makes “adjustments” to the raw temperature data. According to a 2008 paper, after raw thermometer data is received, a computer algorithm “homogenizes” the data, adjusting for time-of-observation, station moves, thermometer types, and other factors to arrive at the official temperature data set.
This sounds good until one looks at the adjustment that NOAA has added. For temperature data from 1900 to 1960, very little adjustment is added. But after 1960, NOAA adds an upward adjustment to the thermometer data that rises to 0.5F (0.3C) by the year 2000. This gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “man-made global warming.”
Heat waves are real just as climate change is real. But a heat record in Las Vegas or one degree of temperature rise since the Civil War is not evidence that humans are the cause.
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Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the new book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, Weatherbell Analytics (Weatherbell.com)
Location, location, location is important for a lot of things...where you live, where you locate your business, especially retail and where you locate your instruments.
This is a picture from 1922 proudly shown by the NWS of the instrument shelter at Death Valley where 100 years ago, the world’s record of 134F was set.
They show the same kind of white painted Stevenson Shelter is used today. it is unclear whether is on dirt as it appears to be in 1922 or cement.
The WMO specifies that temperature instruments should be 5 1/2 feet above a grassy surface 100 feet or more from a heat source and away from structures that can affect ventilation.
NOAA established special criteria and a ranking system for evaluating siting for the Climate Reference Network.
Enlarged
When Anthony Watts in the surfacestations.org surveyed 1007 of the 1221 US stations, they found the vast majority did not meet the criteria for placement. Here is what his team using on site photography and google earth satellite views found:
Only 1.2% of the stations met the criteria for CRN 1 and 6.7% CRN2. However 70.6% were poorly sited with CRN 4 or 5. Here is some examples from a working document a few years back I authored with Anthony.
USHCN climate station in Bainbridge, GA, showing the MMTS pole sensor in the foreground near the parking space, building, and air conditioner heat exchanger, with the older Stevenson Screen in the background located in the grassy area.
USHCN weather station at Hopkinsville, KY (Pielke et al., 2006). The station is sited too close to a building, too close to a large area of tarmac, and directly above a barbecue.
Max/Min temperature sensor near John Martin Reservoir, CO (Davey, 2005)
A station at Tucson, AZ, in a parking lot on pavement
Numerous sensors are located at waste treatment plants. An infrared image of the scene shows the output of heat from the waste treatment beds right next to the sensor.
Many sites are on or adjacent to tarmacs at airports some affected by exhaust.(Photo from Bing Maps, located by Paolo Mezzasalma, annotated by Anthony Watts.)
The station at Tahoe City, CA, was changed in the early 1980s, when a tennis court was built adjacent to it. The shelter was surrounded by a chain link fence but unwisely they put a trash burn barrel within 5 feet. See the discontinuity in temperature after the site changes.
The site at Lampasas, TX, moved close to a building (below) and a street from a more appropriate grassy site after 2001. Note even with the GISS “homogeneity” adjustment (red) applied to the NOAA adjusted data, this artificial warming remains although the old data (blue) is cooled to accentuate warming even further.
When Anthony and a team or scientists published on the siting issue, NOAA quickly removed some of the worst offenders but their own Inspector General scolded NOAA for not doing due diligence in siting, after documenting there were over 40% of stations not meeting minimum standards.
In his new draft paper to be published they showed the importance of siting and how the adjustments made by NOAA to supposedly fix the site contamination issue, actually accentuate the warm bias.
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By the way, the surfacestations.org site suggests they have moved the shelter and added a thermistor thermometer which was used for official measurements for 12 years. See here however, how they decomissioned the MMTS instrument and returned to liquid in glass perhaps because the MMTS is cooler, as it shielded better against solar heating. Could it be they thought they could break the world record sooner with the old technology with its established warm bias?
See here how a new paper finds that aging weather stations record much higher daytime temperatures, 1.63C higher than new stations.
To show you how instrumentation can go wacky look at this graphic from the Washington state mesonet.
There the temperature was shown to rise from 57 at 5:37am after 0.33 inches of rain to 139F at 8:37 am (notice the dewpoint of 122). It drops to 117F at 12:37pm but then pops again to 137 at 2:37pm. The Quality Control program column calls the 139 and 137 suspect but says the 133F at 9:37 am with a dewpoint of 113F was OK.
This reminds me of when I was in England in 1996 launching a cable weather network, when the local newspaper had a column story about an elderly woman who was found stabbed 17 times in her flat. The reporter interviewed the constable who said “Foul play could not be ruled out”. Ya think?
By the way, a big 100th anniversary party is scheduled at Death Valley on July 10th, the day in 1913 it set what was named now the world’s highest temperature. Members of WeatherUnderground (so appropriate since Death Valley is below sea level) and TWC will be there). Here’s hoping for thunderstorms and temperatures in the 90s. By the way the summer rainy season has begun in the southwest. Thunderstorms are seen in the Mojave desert in Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. They often produce more bluster than rain although when dewpoints rise, heavy rains and local flooding has occurred near the stronger storms. Lightning may trigger fires when the storms are dry and Haboobs or dust storms can be produced when the outflow winds are strong as in early July 2011 in Phoenix.
Final thought. What is the probability given all these problems and those we chronicled in this working document a few years back with Michael Smith we can pretend we can sense global climate change to a tenth of a degree????
American Geophysical Union (following AMS) Scraps Science, Now Faith BasedSource: American Thinker
By Norman Rogers
I recently attended a 3-day science policy conference sponsored by the American Geophysical Union (AGU). The AGU is an association of 62,000 scientists who study the Earth. Although the conference was allegedly about science policy, it resembled a cross between a Scientology and a workshop for lobbyists from the Mohair Council of America.
The euphemisms for lobbying by people who aren’t supposed to be lobbying are “communication” and “outreach.” The AGU believes, in a secular way, that God is on their side and the reason why they are being ignored, and not being given enough money, is that they haven’t done enough communicating. They think that if only the government understood the importance of their work, things would change for the better. It absolutely never crosses their mind that if the government and the people understood what they are really doing, their money might be cut off.
What they are doing is howling at the moon that the sky is falling. The president of the AGU, Carol Finn, who, incidentally, is employed by the federal government, opened the lobbying/communications workshop on the first day of the conference with this:
AGU’s mission is to promote discovery ...for the benefit of humanity[.] ... I live in Colorado[.] ... [L]ast week’s Black Forest fire ... was the worst wildfire in Colorado’s history[.] ... I live in Boulder County[.] ...[T]he county and the city of Longmont have just outlawed fracking[.] ... [A]ll these communities need to be able to try to figure out how to balance energy development and putting drill rigs next to schools[.]
The subtext here, repeated over and over at the conference, is that global warming causes forest fires and that hydrocarbon development is undesirable, if not dangerous. But perhaps forest fires are started by matches. Maybe hydrocarbon development is preferable to riding around on horses.
How trustworthy is an organization that claims to be organized for the “benefit of humanity,” anyway?
The illogical thinking and ever-changing stories about global warming doom are puzzling. What motivates the global warming proselytizers? Is there a root belief that explains their behavior? My suggestion is that their behavior is religious in nature and can be explained if we postulate that they believe in the following commandment:
Thou shalt not add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
If you realize that the story is not really about global warming, but rather about changing the composition of the atmosphere, it becomes easy to understand why the believers are not disturbed by the fact that global warming, as measured by surface temperature, stopped 16 years ago. They easily find other scientific theories to buttress their faith. They ignore or discredit any science that challenges their faith. They tell us that if we don’t stop adding carbon dioxide to the air, we will have extreme weather and the oceans will become acidified. The polar bears will die. The wine will lose its flavor. We will catch exotic diseases. If one theory of doom is refuted, or becomes boring, there are plenty of others to take its place. Embarrassing information, such as the fact that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere makes plants grow faster, with less water, is dismissed. They say plants grow faster, but they are less nutritious, or they grow faster, but they deplete the soil of its nutrients.
What we have is an obsession with the evil of carbon dioxide, a carbon cult.
The great majority of people who are members of the AGU are interested in science, not in a new religion centered on carbon. They have not woken up to the fact that their organization has been infiltrated by a carbon cult.
The carbon cult formulation does explain a lot. Chesterton’s insight “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything” seems relevant in this discussion. Compared to traditional religion, the carbon cult is naive and emotionally thin.
Missionaries for a well-organized religion are intensely practical and often extremely diligent. Much of the science of linguistics has been created not by professors, but by Christian missionaries who want to learn the languages of illiterate peoples so that they can spread the gospel and translate the Bible. Of course, they also have to devise an alphabet and teach the people to read the newly translated Bible. Thus you have an example of the civilizing influence of Christianity.
What is the civilizing influence of missionaries who want to take practical sources of energy away from poor peoples?
The missionaries of the carbon cult are gradually becoming better-organized. In the United States, religions are financed by their followers. The government is not supposed to support religions financially, at least not if one religion is favored over another. But the carbon cult masquerades as a scientific discipline, enabling it to receive government funding. The carbon cult is financed partly by government support of science, and partly by the contributors to the big-budget environmental organizations. The ability to influence government policy is as good as cash in the bank, and the ways in which influence over government policy can be turned into cash are endless. For example, a few years ago, the natural gas industry gave $25 million to the Sierra Club for their “beyond coal” campaign that is trying to destroy the coal industry. The natural gas people thought that the Sierra Club through its influence over the government would kill the coal industry, thereby helping the alternative fuel, natural gas. The natural gas industry did not understand that you can’t buy off ideological fanatics. The Sierra Club later turned on its benefactor and launched an attack on fracking. The Sierra Club is an important church in the carbon cult.
The AGU has received large contributions from, of all people, oil companies. Global warming orator Bill McKibben, the leader of an organization whose purpose is to lower the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, said that the business plan of the oil companies is to wreck the Earth. Carbon cultists consider fossil fuel companies to be extremely evil, but apparently they are willing to suspend that judgment when cash is available. In this case the dictum attributed to Lenin seems relevant: “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” Oil company executives are casting themselves in the role of the people to be hanged.
The first day of the AGU Science Policy Conference was devoted to an excellent tutorial on how to lobby the government and on how to present the doctrines of the carbon cult in an effective way. The organizational structure of a typical congressional office was explained. The attendees were treated to skits showing an effective and ineffective way to approach a congressional staffer. The attendees were cautioned about the use of scientific jargon. Susan Hassol, a prominent writer for the global warming establishment, made the point that the word aerosol should be banned. To scientists, aerosols are small particles floating in the atmosphere, but to the public, they are aerosol spray cans and always will be.
The attendees were told to explain why the weather would be more extreme by comparing carbon dioxide to steroids. If an athlete takes steroids, he will still play the game, but his performance will be more extreme.
One difference between a cult and a legitimate religion is that the cults usually hide their true nature. The more bizarre the cult, the greater the imperative to hide its doctrines. The general public must not be allowed to realize that the advocates of global warming alarmism are in reality making up the story to propagate a fanatical faith that carbon dioxide is bad.
The science behind global warming is very shoddy. Yes, there is a nugget of real science buried in all the alarmist, made-up stuff. Carbon dioxide does absorb infrared radiation, and increased carbon dioxide probably will warm the Earth by a small amount. The mechanism is quite complicated, involving the atmospheric lapse rate and a slight relocation of the tropopause.
The complicated and jargon-laden science is reduced, by the missionaries of the carbon cult, for public consumption, to “carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas.” The formal predictions of global warming from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are the product of an opinion poll of computer models that disagree with each other and that have been manipulated to make them look better than they really are. The carbon cultists accept those predications as serious and profound scientific truth, because the predictions provide support for their faith.
Norman Rogers is a physicist, a member of the American Geophysical Union, and a senior policy advisor at the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank. He maintains a personal website.
By Tim Ball and Tom Harris
King Canute, attempting to teach his people a lesson regarding his abilities, supposedly went to the sea and commanded the tide to stop. Twelfth-century English historian Henry of Huntington wrote that Canute took his throne to the seashore, but the tide, “continuing to rise as usual dashed over his feet and legs without respect to his royal person.”
President Barack Obama’s naive and error-riddled speech at Georgetown University on Tuesday clearly demonstrated that he is serious about trying to stop global climate change. However, like the tide, climate change is a natural event of such proportions that it is largely unaffected by human activities. Obama ignores that the “official climate science” on which he bases America’s climate and energy policies has been washed away by 17 years without global warming, despite atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) - the gas Obama blames for rising temperatures continuing to increase primarily due to the emissions of China and India.
Unlike America’s hopelessly misguided president, the reasons behind Canute’s action were sensible. He wanted to reduce unrealistically elevated expectations of him. Canute’s goal was to show fawning courtiers that there were things over which he had no control. He knew the facts about tides. Sadly for our American friends, and indeed for the whole free world which depends on a strong America, Obama lacks Canute’s humility and knowledge about nature. The president’s misunderstanding and his apparent disinterest in real climate science is leading the United States into an economic black hole from which it may take generations to recover.
Obama also seems oblivious to real-world economic evidence that the policy path on which he is setting the U.S. has already been tried and has failed in other countries. It is not surprising that when he launched his most recent climate change initiative last week in Berlin, the German public response was less than enthusiastic, they are already suffering the economic and energy consequences of “going green” in a hopeless attempt to stop climate change. Many Germans are also aware of the implications of the Climategate scandal, through which the corrupted science of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was exposed through leaked emails.
In foisting many of the same policies on America that have already failed in Europe, the president appears to be counting on U.S. media to continue to hide the significance of Climategate and the recent halt in planetary warming.
In telling Georgetown students on Tuesday that he doesn’t “have much patience for anyone who denies that this challenge is real,” Obama reveals his ignorance. Nobody is denying that climate change is “real” and that coping with such changes can be challenging. What skeptical scientists do question, however, is the degree to which human activity causes those changes. Saying that “ninety-seven percent of scientists” “acknowledged the planet is warming and human activity is contributing to it,” as Obama did in his speech, is both wrong and meaningless.
As ICSC policy advisor Lord Christopher Monckton just showed, the study that backs this claim is fatally flawed. First, science is never determined by a show of hands. If it were, the Earth would still be considered flat and the center of the universe and space travel impossible. Second, the only statistic that could be interesting would be the fraction of scientists who study the causes of climate change and support the idea that our CO2 emissions are causing serious climate problems. There has never been a reputable survey that asked experts this question.
As we have come to expect from this president on global warming and energy, yesterday’s presentation included many basic science mistakes and inappropriate cherry picking of data. For example, Obama’s assertions about abnormally high temperatures and the extent of Arctic sea ice melt are either meaningless or simply wrong. Last July, new average U.S. temperature records were set by one-fifth of a degree Fahrenheit. This is meaningless since the measurement uncertainty in most of the record is one-half degree Fahrenheit. Similarly, last July’s record temperature was not based on the highs of the day. A record was set merely because the nights were slightly less cool in July 2012 than those experienced in the 1930s. So, when the high and lows of the day were averaged, a record average was established. Nevertheless, the highs of the day in the 1930s still exceeded anything experienced in July 2012.
Obama also neglected to mention that Arctic sea ice coverage records began only three decades ago, when we first started to monitor the Arctic by satellite. Land-based measurements indicate that it was warmer in the Arctic in the 1930s and so ice melt was likely greater then as well, although no one knows for sure.
Obama used the erroneous phrase “carbon pollution” a total of twenty times in his Georgetown speech.
He is, of course, really speaking of CO2, an odorless, invisble gas essential to plant life and in no way a pollutant. Yet the Obama Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) still designates CO2 a “harmful substance” so as to allow greater bureaucratic control of industry under the Clean Air Act. In Tuesday’s address, the president promised to expand the EPA’s CO2 regulations to cover existing power stations, an action sure to cost billions of dollars and millions of jobs for no environmental benefit. EPA’s claim is based on three lines of evidence that a recent amicus brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court shows are invalid. Regardless, calling CO2 “carbon” helps Obama politically since it encourages people to think of CO2 as associated with soot, something that is pure carbon and is clearly dirty and undesirable.
Of course, we can and should reduce the amount of soot going in to the atmosphere, and apart from China, significant advances have occurred. Scrubber technology for coal-fired power plants has been available for a long time. If Obama really wants to help people’s health and the environment, he should encourage all possible use of scrubbers.
The “carbon pollution” mistake is often used by activists to focus negative attention specifically on coal-fired electricity generation, since “carbon” comes from the Latin carbo, meaning coal. Over 40 percent of U.S. energy comes from coal, and so killing this energy source is fundamental to the president’s apparent goals of expanding government control and redistributing wealth. Obama wants to end coal use entirely in the U.S., no matter how clean it can be made. Obama even told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008: “What I have said is that for us to take coal off the table as an ideological matter as opposed to saying if technology allows us to use coal in a clean way, we should pursue it.”
Aside from his support for climate change adaptation measures, actions that make sense if carried out properly, Obama’s Georgetown speech appears to be mostly oriented towards accomplishing political objectives unrelated to environmental protection. This is very much in line with former Colorado Democratic Senator Timothy Wirth, who in 1993 summed up the strategy well: “We’ve got to ride to global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing.”
It is ironic that Obama would equate his unscientific campaign to “fight against climate change” with NASA’s trips to the Moon. Unlike Obama’s dogmatic approach, always focused on reducing greenhouse gases no matter what science demonstrates about the real causes of climate change, NASA learned from their mistakes and made necessary changes.
For example, when Apollo 1 went up in flames, killing all three astronauts in 1967, engineers ended the use of high oxygen atmospheres in manned space vehicles. But, when climate models on which the global warming scare is based fail to forecast what actually happens in the real world, when cyclones and strong tornadoes diminish, when ice cover in Antarctica increases, Obama and his fellow alarmists simply raise the rhetoric.
Trying to scare us away, he labels scientists who want to base policy on real-world observations as members of “the Flat Earth Society.” Such name calling merely strengthens our resolve to expose the most serious climate threat we face the exploitation of public ignorance by alarmists such as Obama.
The president was, however, right to say: “This is not just a job for politicians. So I’m going to need all of you to educate your classmates, your colleagues, your parents, your friends. Tell them what’s at stake. Speak up at town halls, church groups, PTA meetings. Push back on misinformation. Speak up for the facts. Broaden the circle of those who are willing to stand up for our future.”
Yes, that is exactly what we will continue to do. Because you are wrong, Mr. President, dangerously wrong. America is too important for anyone, even those of us who are not U.S. citizens, to let it die because of a lie. And much of what you told Georgetown students on Tuesday was indeed a lie.
President Obama’s Climate Initiative - The Bad News and Good NewsBy Steve Goreham (reprinted with permission of author)
Originally published in The Washington Times
In his speech at Georgetown University on Tuesday, President Obama announced, “So today...I’m directing the Environmental Protection Agency to put an end to the limitless dumping of carbon pollution from our power plants and complete new pollution standards for both new and existing power plants.” This is the first proposal in the President’s new climate initiative. The President also called for expanded efforts to use ‘clean energy’ and for the US to lead the world in bold actions to “combat climate change.”
For the last decade, an obsession with global warming has dominated a wide array of US government policies. Climatism, the belief that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate, skews federal automobile, transportation, energy, and infrastructure policies. Billions are spent in the ongoing effort to fight climate change.
Today, US policies toward the automobile industry are “driven” by Climatism. In his speech, the President praised new Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards that rise to 54.5 miles per gallon by year 2025 and that are designed to achieve reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Plug-in electric vehicles are promoted and subsidized as a solution to global warming.
Transportation is shaped by climate policy. Ethanol mandates result in the consumption of 40 percent of the US corn crop in vehicle fuel. Biodiesel is promoted as a way to reduce emissions. Even high-speed rail is proposed as a solution to move citizens from airplanes to trains to reduce emissions.
US energy policy is dominated by Climatism. Earlier this week, Dr. Daniel Schrag, an advisor to the president on climate, stated that “a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.” Despite the fact that more than 30 percent of US electricity is produced from coal today, regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency will make it impossible to build a new coal-fired plant. At the same time, the Obama administration provides loans and subsidies that promote wind, solar, and other forms of renewable energy.
At Georgetown, the President addressed the proposed Keystone Pipeline, which has been delayed for almost five years, stating, “...the pipeline’s impact on our climate will be absolutely critical to determine whether this project will be allowed to go forward.” When operating, the Keystone Pipeline can replace 45 percent of Persian Gulf oil imports with oil from Canada and the northern United States. But our President considers emissions to be a larger issue than reducing OPEC oil imports.
US infrastructure policies are heavily impacted by global warming fears. Reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is at the core of LEED building standards. Urban planning aims to reduce emissions by replacing private automobile transit with public transit. The current administration proposes tens of billions for a “smart electrical grid” to promote renewable energy and residential “smart meters” to promote energy efficiency, both pushed forward by the ideology of Climatism.
The bad news is that US citizens pay twice for the President’s war on climate. First, taxpayers subsidize green energy. The Production Tax Credit for wind energy will cost over $12 billion this year. Department of Energy loan guarantees to more than 20 bankrupt renewable energy companies, including Abound Solar, Beacon Power, Evergreen Solar, Solar Trust, and Solyndra have cost taxpayers billions. Taxpayers also pay for US military efforts to make biofuel out of algae at exorbitant prices.
Second, citizens pay higher costs for electricity, automobiles, and housing from green policies. The Department of Interior offshore wind program will deliver electricity to homeowners at three times the price of conventional power. Fuel economy mandates will raise the price of automobiles. Consumers must pay for smart meters that can curtail electricity usage.
The good news is that, despite fears, man-made emissions have very little effect on Earth’s climate. Water vapor, not carbon dioxide, is Earth’s dominant greenhouse gas. Emissions from human industry cause only about one percent of Earth’s greenhouse effect. And contrary to predictions by all 73 of the world’s top climate models, global temperatures have failed to rise over the last 15 years.
Someone needs to inform the president.
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the new book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.
Update: See this excellent summary of peer reviewed papers and blog statements about the 16 year temperature stasis and global cooling underway since 2002 here
“The greatest threat to the alleviation of the structural poverty of the Third World is the continuing campaign by western governments, egged on by some climate scientists and green groups, to curb greenhouse gas emissions, primarily the CO2 from burning fossil fuels. To put a limit on the use of fossil fuels without adequate economically viable alternatives is to condemn the Third World to perpetual structural poverty.”
- Deepak Lal, Professor Emeritus of International Development Studies at UCLA and Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at University College London, in his new book, Poverty and Progress: Realities and Myths About Global Poverty.
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By Art Horn
I speak to many groups of people through the year using my powerPoint presentations about weather to educate and entertain. Inevitably, at the end of a program, questions about global warming come up. The first thing I say is that there has been no measured surface temperature warming since 1998. This always comes as a shock to everyone in the room. However, as “The Pause” continues it appears more people are beginning to take note. President Obama is not one of them. In a press conference after his re-election he said “What we do know is the temperature around the globe is increasing faster than was predicted even 10 years ago.’
Having worked as a television meteorologist for 25 years, I am keenly aware of how the news media approaches global warming. In all forms of news media it is critical to craft a series of captivating, dramatic stories that will attract the largest audience. Unlike the hundreds of government agencies that get their money directly from Federal Government, media companies need to make their money directly from the people in society. The best way to do that is to have as many people as possible watch, read or listen to your news stories so that advertisers will want to sell their products on your station, website, newspaper or radio station. Global warming is the perfect captivating story.
The global warming news stories through the last 10 years have been dominated by the dangers of using fossil fuels. These stories constantly drumbeat that increasing carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere will bring catastrophic changes to just about anything you can imagine. No wonder that people have never heard of “The Pause”. For example, back in September of 2004 The National Geographic Magazine’s cover story was “Global Warning: Bulletins From A Warmer World”. On the contents page the magazine states “There is no question that the earth is getting hotter, and fast”. The truth is that since that issue was published in 2004 there has been no warming at all and in fact the earth’s average surface temperature has declined slightly since 2003. John Lyman of The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is quoted as saying “Further work will be necessary to solve this cooling mystery.” But the alarming cover story helped sell the magazine.
The National Geographic story goes on for about 75 pages with scare your pants off images and predictions. On page 27 the magazine lists the hottest years on record as 1998, 2002, 2003, 2001 and 1997. It fails to mention that weather records of earth’s temperature only date back 1850. This means that 92% of all temperature “records” of individual years over the last 2,000 years are unknown. It also means that 98.5% of all temperature “records” of individual years over the last 10,000 years are unknown.
The ice sheet that covers Greenland is about 2 miles thick at the summit. The annual average temperature up there is 31 degrees below zero Celsius or 24 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Ice core data from Greenland indicate that average temperature has been as much as 4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today several times in the last 10,000 years and 2 degrees cooler than today several times. The ice core data also show that the earth was warmer than today 1,000 years ago and 2,000 years ago. The average temperature of the earth today is in no way unusual.
Now that the warming, or more accurately, the lack of it has reached 15 years the talk of a pause in global warming is beginning to gain traction. Rich Lowery, editor of the National Review wrote “Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billions tons of carbon (dioxide) to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2012. That’s about a quarter of all CO2 put there by humans since 1750, yet no more warming”.
Rolf Westgard quoted Stamford Universities Noble physicist Robert Laughlin when he wrote in the Minnesota Daily “Global warming forecasts have the difficulty that one can’t find much actual global warming in present day weather observations”. He went on to write “This continues a 15 year pause in global warming despite a relentless rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide.”
In Great Britain the Daily Mail noted “The figures reveal that since the beginning of 1997 until August of 2012 there was no discernable rise in aggregate global temperatures. This means that the “pause” in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996.”
Alexander Otto of Oxford Universities Environmental Change Institute was quoted as saying that because of the hiatus, warming in the next 50 to 100 years “is likely to lie within the range of current climate models, but not at the high end of this range.” However Dr. Roy Spencer of The University of Alabama Huntsville shows that this statement is not even remotely true in current climate model forecasts vs. real world weather balloon observations in the tropics. His analysis shows that all 73 climate models have shown warmer to much warmer temperature predictions than has actually been measured since around 1980.
Now even Rajendra Pachauri, the Head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has admitted that there is a pause in global warming. This comes as quite a surprise since in 2008 he proclaimed “We’re at a stage where the warming is taking place at a much faster rate.” Apparently the facts have become so obvious that the IPCC had to come clean or risk losing even more ground in their crumbling arguments about man made climate catastrophe.
How long will the pause last? Have we reached some kind of peak in global temperature like the earth did 1,000, 2,000 or 3,300 years ago? That is a very difficult forecast since not all of the players in global climate change are completely understood or even known.
Perhaps “The Pause” will give humanity a chance to literally pause and question the man made global warming theory.
The brilliant physics lecturer Dr. Richard Feynman famously said “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” The current trend in rapidly increasing carbon dioxide in the air and the pause in global warming is having a lot to say about the “beautiful theory” of man made global warming.
This article appeared in Energy Tribune. Please help support our team’s efforts to get the truth exposed to the public by donating to Icecap. Small amounts are appreciated. Remember the alarmists blogs are heavily funded by progressive organizations while true climate realist blogs though accused of being paid for by big oil are paid for by the authors with the help any donations we get from readers. We thank you for your support. One college in Maine received a $10M endowment for doing global warming and sustainability research and education and then another $1 in government funding/bribery. Aren’t there any people who share our views who could help us do more? There is no more important time. A story in Politico this week suggest the Obama administration intends to begin the climate war in July. We need to make it politically risky for politicians to support this. A carbon tax would mean $8 gasoline and heating oil and increasing prices for all other goods through a trickle down domino effect. They are praying for another Sandy and a hot spell in July. We need to be ready to rapidly respond to nonsense from the media, Soros funded Climate Progress, Climate Central and NBC owned and corrupted TWC and tax hungry politicians.
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As an example of the efforts underway, by one of the 11 scientists who signed an Amicus Brief to the Supreme Court, here is a post by Dr. Gordon Fulks.
A Supreme Challenge for Climate Fanatics:
Scientists ask high court to vacate EPA’s ‘Endangerment Finding’ on carbon dioxide.
I last spoke to them about six years ago and debated a UO professor (Bartlein) under their sponsorship sometime later.
As to the content of my talk, that will be quite different from my talk to the Rubicon Society six years ago, because the subject of Anthropogenic Global Warming has changed so much in this short time. In 2007, many of us were still treating this subject as a dispute among scientists as to role of carbon dioxide in climate. But that presumed that science was working the way it is supposed to work with all of us applying our best individual efforts independent of external forces like government funding, organized scientific groups pushing an agenda, or political affiliations.
The release of the Climategate e-mails in 2009 completely shattered those illusions. The most prominent of the scientists supporting the present paradigm were found to be working together to guarantee that their ideas always came out on top. And anyone who stood in their way was targeted. We were aware in 2007 that the global climate was not warming as alarmists maintained but now know that the leveling off of the Global Temperature Anomaly (GTA) has continued long enough that it can no longer be denied. Hence as Portland meteorologist Chuck Wiese said, “The theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming has completely collapsed.”
Eleven scientists very recently filled an amicus brief with the Supreme Court asking them to consider what the EPA calls their “Three Lines of Evidence,” because all underpin EPA attempts to regulate carbon dioxide and all are manifestly false. Not only are they manifestly false, but it is simple to show that they are manifestly false. These are not minor failures of an otherwise sound theory but fatal flaws. The EPA clearly lacks an empirically-validated theory on which to base their proposed regulations.
The advantage of arguing in front of the court is that the discussion will focus on what the EPA has already put forth as their best arguments and not drift into all the peripheral discussions that typically keep this subject going forever without resolution. And a ruling against the EPA’s “science” could open the floodgates for discussions of fraud.
Here is some of what we said to the high court (GAST is Global Average Surface Temperatures):
“Amici believe that no scientists have devised an empirically validated theory proving that higher atmospheric CO2 levels will lead to higher GAST. Moreover, if the causal link between higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations and higher GAST is broken by invalidating each of EPA’s three lines of evidence, then EPA’s assertions that higher CO2 concentrations also cause sea-level increases and more frequent and severe storms, floods, and droughts are also disproved. Such causality assertions require a validated theory that higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations cause increases in GAST. Lacking such a validated theory, EPA’s conclusions cannot stand. In science, credible empirical data always trumps proposed theories, even if those theories are claimed to (or actually do) represent the current consensus.”
For more information including the location of my talk and how to find the venue, please go here.
See you there.
Gordon J. Fulks, PhD (Physics)
Corbett, Oregon USA
June 12, 2013 by Craig Rucker
For the UN climate conference in Bonn the bear to worry about was not Polar, but Russian.
In the final minutes of COP 18, the UN climate talks in Doha, Qatari vice prime minister Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah brought down the gavel ending the COP and snubbing delegates of nations waiting to speak. Among them was the Russian delegation which was frantically waving papers in the air demanding to be recognized.
Russia has neither forgiven, nor forgotten.
When the UN climate talks opened in Bonn last week, Russia, joined by Ukraine and Belarus, blocked adoption of the agenda of the “Subsidiary Body for Implementation” (SBI). The SBI is the key negotiating track towards signing a UN climate treaty in Paris in 2015. The SBI has been unable to conduct any business in Bonn and has announced that it has suspended its business. This has prevented the UN from considering, among other items, advancing the loss and damage mechanism (see CFACT’s report) that was perhaps the most significant outcome agreed to in Doha.
Many developing nations are not happy at seeing “loss and damage” blocked, as it is a key pathway for those seeking a global warming route to wealth redistribution.
Russia has raised a much needed question as to whether there is a fundamental lack of fairness and due process at the UN climate talks. The Doha outcome, for example, was “agreed to,” but was it ever properly voted upon? Is it proper for the UNFCCC to allow major portions of the outcome of the climate talks to be drafted behind closed doors, present them at the 11th hour and then proceed based on a “consensus” rather than a recorded vote? Can the UN lawfully slam the gavel on any nation, such as Russia, and refuse to recognize them? Reuters reports that ‘Christiana Figueres, the U.N.’s climate chief, said a consensus was reached,’ but Oleg Shamanov, Russia’s head of delegation, called it an “absolutely obvious violation of the procedure.”
Reuters further reports that, ‘in 2010, Bolivian chief negotiator Pablo Solon claimed that security had blocked him from attending the talks, while a year later Venezuela’s envoy had to stand on a chair to voice her objections. Jayanthi Natarajan, India’s minister of forests and environment, said she was threatened and told not to object to any text at talks in Durban in 2011. “In the past we have very negative examples where procedures were not followed...and the culmination point was Doha. It’s unacceptable,” Shamanov said.’
If the UNFCCC successfully gets its climate treaty in Paris in 2015, the treaty will govern a tremendous portion of the economic activity of all mankind. Not billions, but trillions of dollars will be at stake. Nations will subordinate major portions of their sovereignty to the United Nations. Aside from whether the climate treaty is wise (it is not), can such a thing be created without due process? Without a vote? This would seem to contravene the principles upon which the UN was founded.
Those who stand for individual freedom and the due process which protects it owe Russia their thanks. Russia’s actions, however, appear to be largely self motivated. When al-Attiyah gaveled Russia down in Doha he wounded Russian pride - something Russia is historically willing to fight for.
A larger Russian motivation, however, appears to be what is being called in Bonn the “hot air” issue. Russia was not at all pleased when the UN COP pulled the plug in Doha on all the emissions credits Russia had acquired under the first Kyoto treaty and told Russia it couldn’t carry them forward. Russia, which has announced that it will not be part of a second commitment period for the Kyoto protocol and has signaled a reluctance to sign on in Paris, wants to keep its credits anyway. Russia would like to sell its old credits to the countries which do sign aboard and would be paid effectively for nothing but hot air.
European carbon markets have recently collapsed with the price of carbon hitting record lows. The UNFCCC believes that allowing Russia, Ukraine, Poland and other former Soviet bloc nations to retain the huge stockpile of carbon credits they picked up under Kyoto would relentlessly flood and depress the carbon market in perpetuity. The irony is that in effect, the former Eastern bloc nations are claiming credit and demanding compensation for Communism, which depressed their economic development. Many of the former Eastern bloc’s carbon credits accrued during their painful transition from Communism which temporarily depressed their economies still further. If any compensation is due for the harms caused by Communism, Russia should be paying, not receiving.
Poland, which will host UN COP 19 in November, has approximately 500m tons of carbon credits which it refuses to part with. Poland generates much of its power from coal and would like to use those credits both to offset the emissions from its use of coal and to continue to sell to other nations. Poland is estimated to have sold 190 million Eurosin credits to nations including Japan, Ireland and Spain.
Poland was a victim of Communism. Should Russia and the other nations of the former Soviet Union truly be compensated for the economic destruction wreaked by Communism? The absurdity of how money changes hands through UN processes apparently knows no bounds.
The good news is that the treaty negotiating track at the UN climate talks in Bonn is temporarily suspended, although Ms. Figueres vows to be back on track by Warsaw. The bad news is that there are very few “good guys” involved. The UN climate talks have become a place where radical ideology trumps science, consensus is gaveled into policy with little regard for due process and the nations of the world are bribed to go along with handouts of other people’s money.
Who do you suppose worked for the money that everyone at the UN is so anxious to redistribute?
See more.
Breitbart News can exclusively report on Tuesday night that the Chinese Academy of Sciences has translated and published a Chinese edition of two massive climate change volumes originally published by The Heartland Institute in 2009 and 2011.
The volumes, Climate Change Reconsidered and Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report, are chock full of 1,200 pages of peer-reviewed data concerning the veracity of anthropogenic climate change. Together, they represent the most comprehensive rebuttal of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change findings, which have been the basis of the climate change legislation movement across the planet.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences is set to present the publication on June 15 at a major ceremony in Beijing. The Academy employs approximately 50,000 people and hosts 350 international conferences each year, and is one of the most prestigious scientific academies in the world, ranked ahead of every Ivy League school save Harvard Jim Lakely, director of communications at the Heartland Institute, told Breitbart News, “Translating and publishing nearly 1,300 pages of peer-reviewed scientific literature from English to Chinese is no small task, and indicative of how important CAS considers Climate Change Reconsidered to the global climate change debate. That CAS has invited the authors and editors of Climate Change Reconsidered to a conference this Saturday in Beijing to introduce the studies is yet another indicator of how important it is to get this information out to a wider audience.”
A December 2012 UN meeting designed to provide climate change regulations ended in failure after China refused to sign a global climate change treaty. China was joined by the United States, as well as Canada, India, Japan, Russia, and Brazil. “Opposition to a new climate treaty is justified based upon the real science presented in Climate Change Reconsidered,” explains Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast.
While some critics have charged that China may be fostering research on climate change that facilitates its political positions, Lakely pointed out, “China doesn’t need an excuse. The country can (and is) doing what it thinks is in its best interests as are many countries in the developed and developing world.”
The New York Times noted this week that global CO2 emissions have “accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace” over the last 15 years, but global temperatures have remained flat. The Times notes “the slowdown is a bit of a mystery to climate scientists,” but Lakely said, “it becomes less mysterious when one reads Climate Change Reconsidered. The timing for CAS publishing its translation could hardly be better for the advancement of climate science understanding.”
Lakely said that this could mark the turning point in the climate change debate, and that a global consensus was beginning to form against regulation of emissions. “The latest observable climate data, new studies from scientific academies around the globe, the peer-reviewed studies one can find in Climate Change Reconsidered, and its translation and publication by the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences is making life difficult for those who declare with certainty that man is causing catastrophic global warming,” he explained. “That’s the way it should be. No scientific discipline is ever ‘settled’ especially a discipline as young, as complicated, and as diffuse as climate science. The Heartland Institute is proud to support and promote the pursuit of the classic scientific method that follows the data and continually asks questions about what is happening to the climate of our planet.”
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Prof. Murry Salby’s Presentation In Hamburg: Climate Model World Diverges Starkly From Real World
By P Gosselin on 10 June 2013 (NoTricksZone)
Die kalte Sonne website here has just posted the video presentation of Murry Salby in Hamburg in April. If anyone ever demolished the dubious CO2 AGW science, it’s Salby!
Most of the presentation is very mathematical and technical. But the last 10 minutes sums everything up very nicely for the laypersons.
Die kalte Sonne writes:
Prof. Murry Salby, climate scientist at Macquarie University of Sydney, made a presentation in Hamburg on April 18th as part of a European tour. Prof. Salby is author of the textbook Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate (Cambridge University Press) and Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics (Academic Press) and is renowned worldwide as an astrophysicist. He recently caused excitement with new findings on the relationship of the 12C and 13C isotopes and the development of CO2-concentration. From the findings he concluded that the anthropogenic emissions only had a slight impact on the global CO2-concentrations. They are are mainly a consequence of temperature changes. This relationship is known up to now only from the warming phases after the last ice ages. Prof. Salby extends this relationship to our current climate development.
The video recording of the presentation, which was organised by the host Helmut Schmidt University, is now available at Youtube (above).
Near the end (1:02:50) Salby on CO2 and temperature:
Their divergence over the last decade and a half is now unequivocal. In the models global temperature tracks CO2 almost perfectly. In the real world it clearly doesn’t.”
Salby then presents two charts for comparison, which I’ve arranged side-by-side: the model world vs real world:
Model world (left) vs real world (right). Graphics from Murry Salby presentation.
1:04:05 mark he sums it up neatly:
CO2 then evolves not like temperature, as it does in the model, but like the integral of temperature. In dotted blue is the integral of observed temperature. It closely tracks observed CO2 even after the 1990s when the observed record of CO2 and temperature clearly diverged. If CO2 tracks the integral of temperature, which it clearly does, it cannot track temperature, which it clearly doesn’t.
In the model, CO2 and temperature are related directly. In the real world they are also related, but differently. The distinctly different relationship between CO2 and global temperature represents a fundamental difference in the global energy balance between its evolution in the model world and the real world. If the global energy balance is wrong, everything else is window dressing.”
The points of Salby’s presentation lead to the following implications:
1. In the Real World global temperature is not controlled exclusively by CO2, as it is in the Model World.
2. In significant part, however, CO2 is controlled by Global Temperature, as it is in the Proxy Record.
At the end of the presentation, Salby implies, quoting Richard Feynman, that CO2 science today can be described as “Cult Science”.
He sums up quoting Feynman: “If it differs from observations, then it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”
Read much more at NoTricksZone on Tamino’s epic fail and that of Skeptical Science.