ICECAP

Thursday, March 03, 2016

Mass gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet greater than losses, NASA study reports

Phys.org by Maria-Jose Vinas

A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.

The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice.

According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.

“A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers. The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice.

“We’re essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica,” said Jay Zwally, a glaciologist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study, which was published on Oct. 30 in the Journal of Glaciology. “Our main disagreement is for East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica - there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas.” Zwally added that his team “measured small height changes over large areas, as well as the large changes observed over smaller areas.”

Scientists calculate how much the ice sheet is growing or shrinking from the changes in surface height that are measured by the satellite altimeters. In locations where the amount of new snowfall accumulating on an ice sheet is not equal to the ice flow downward and outward to the ocean, the surface height changes and the ice-sheet mass grows or shrinks.

But it might only take a few decades for Antarctica’s growth to reverse, according to Zwally. “If the losses of the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica continue to increase at the same rate they’ve been increasing for the last two decades, the losses will catch up with the long-term gain in East Antarctica in 20 or 30 years - I don’t think there will be enough snowfall increase to offset these losses.

Map showing the rates of mass changes from ICESat 2003-2008 over Antarctica. Sums are for all of Antarctica: East Antarctica (EA, 2-17); interior West Antarctica (WA2, 1, 18, 19, and 23); coastal West Antarctica (WA1, 20-21); and the ...more.

The study analyzed changes in the surface height of the Antarctic ice sheet measured by radar altimeters on two European Space Agency European Remote Sensing (ERS) satellites, spanning from 1992 to 2001, and by the laser altimeter on NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) from 2003 to 2008.

Zwally said that while other scientists have assumed that the gains in elevation seen in East Antarctica are due to recent increases in snow accumulation, his team used meteorological data beginning in 1979 to show that the snowfall in East Antarctica actually decreased by 11 billion tons per year during both the ERS and ICESat periods. They also used information on snow accumulation for tens of thousands of years, derived by other scientists from ice cores, to conclude that East Antarctica has been thickening for a very long time.
“
“At the end of the last Ice Age, the air became warmer and carried more moisture across the continent, doubling the amount of snow dropped on the ice sheet,” Zwally said.

The extra snowfall that began 10,000 years ago has been slowly accumulating on the ice sheet and compacting into solid ice over millennia, thickening the ice in East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica by an average of 0.7 inches (1.7 centimeters) per year. This small thickening, sustained over thousands of years and spread over the vast expanse of these sectors of Antarctica, corresponds to a very large gain of ice - enough to outweigh the losses from fast-flowing glaciers in other parts of the continent and reduce global sea level rise.

Zwally’s team calculated that the mass gain from the thickening of East Antarctica remained steady from 1992 to 2008 at 200 billion tons per year, while the ice losses from the coastal regions of West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula increased by 65 billion tons per year.

“The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” Zwally said. “But this is also bad news. If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for.”

“The new study highlights the difficulties of measuring the small changes in ice height happening in East Antarctica,” said Ben Smith, a glaciologist with the University of Washington in Seattle who was not involved in Zwally’s study.

“Doing altimetry accurately for very large areas is extraordinarily difficult, and there are measurements of snow accumulation that need to be done independently to understand what’s happening in these places,” Smith said.
To help accurately measure changes in Antarctica, NASA is developing the successor to the ICESat mission, ICESat-2, which is scheduled to launch in 2018. “ICESat-2 will measure changes in the ice sheet within the thickness of a No. 2 pencil,” said Tom Neumann, a glaciologist at Goddard and deputy project scientist for ICESat-2. “It will contribute to solving the problem of Antarctica’s mass balance by providing a long-term record of elevation changes” essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Thwaites and Pine Island region of West Antarctica,” said Jay Zwally, a glaciologist with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study, which was published on Oct. 30 in the Journal of Glaciology. “Our main disagreement is for East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica - there, we see an ice gain that exceeds the losses in the other areas.” Zwally added that his team “measured small height changes over large areas, as well as the large changes observed over smaller areas.

NASA study: Mass gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet greater than losses

Posted on 03/03 at 09:02 AM
(10) Trackbacks • Permalink

Friday, February 26, 2016

New paper shows there was a global warming hiatus this century

Thomas Richard

Climate researchers have published a new paper this week in the journal Nature Climate Change that acknowledges there has been a global warming slowdown from 2000-2014. Their research shows a hiatus did indeed occur and continued into the 21st century, contradicting another study last June that said the hiatus was just an artifact that “vanishes when biases in temperature data are corrected.” This is not the first time activists have tried to hide the hiatus by using dodgy methods.

This new paper shows a global warming slowdown or hiatus, the authors write, which has been “characterized by a reduced rate of global surface warming, has been overstated, lacks sound scientific basis, or is unsupported by observations.” They add, “The evidence presented [in this paper] contradicts these claims.” Ouch.

In this new paper, the authors show there is a “mismatch between what the climate models are producing and what the observations are showing,” says lead author John Fyfe, a climate modeller at the Canadian Center for Climate Modelling and Analysis in Victoria, British Columbia. “We can’t ignore it.” Fyfe prefers the term slowdown over hiatus and adds the usual caveats lest he be taken away from the global warming cash cow: it in no way undermines “global warming theory.”

Gavin Schmidt, a climate activist and a director at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said it’s a “tired discussion and nothing more than academic bickering.” He adds, “A little bit of turf-protecting and self-promotion I think is the most parsimonious explanation. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

Snarking aside, this new paper says that natural variability (like volcanic eruptions, solar radiance, ocean heat uptake, etc..) are important elements in evaluating our climate. As such, they should be factored in when trying to interpret the temperature record and the millions of variables that affect our climate.

Karl Thomas, the lead author of the so-called “pause busting” study says it’s ‘important to investigate how short-term effects might impact decadal trends, but says that these short term trends do not necessarily elucidate the long-term effects of rising greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere.”

Fyfe and his colleagues argue that “Karl’s approach was biased” because of a flat temperature pause between the 1950s and 1970s. Fryfe says that his research took into account events that affect decadal temperature trends such as volcanic eruptions, which dampen solar radiation. As an example, climate models underestimate volcanic eruptions and how they impact how much solar radiation hits the planet, specifically at the start of the 21st century.

Susan Solomon, a climatologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, says that Fyfe’s research helps put “twenty-first-century trends into perspective, and clearly indicates that the rate of warming slowed down at a time when greenhouse-gas emissions were rising dramatically.” Solomon says, “It’s important to explain that. As scientists, we are curious about every bump and wiggle in that curve.”

The UN’s climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has already noted that there was a hiatus in global temperatures this century in its last assessment report. As we’ve noted on numerous occasions, the most accurate method for measuring temperatures is the satellite dataset. It shows no warming for 18 years 8 months with 2015 being an unusually warm year due to a naturally occurring El Nino event.

Fyfe’s paper concludes by saying their “results support previous findings of a reduced rate of surface warming over the 2001-2014 period - a period” when emissions like carbon dioxide increased at a steady rate of about two parts per million each year. They point out that the climate models did not predict the warming hiatus that occurred during the first 14 years of the 21st century, even while so-called greenhouse gases have risen. This “mismatch” is a problem that deserves more scientific scrutiny, they add.

Posted on 02/26 at 10:50 AM
(1) Trackbacks • Permalink

Thursday, January 21, 2016

Climate Alarmists Invent New Excuse: The Satellites Are Lying

by James Delingpole, Breibart

The climate alarmists have come up with a brilliant new excuse to explain why there has been no “global warming” for nearly 19 years.

Turns out the satellite data is lying.

And to prove it they’ve come up with a glossy new video starring such entirely trustworthy and not at all biased climate experts as Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann , Kevin :Travesty” Trenberth and Ben Santer. (All of these paragons of scientific rectitude feature heavily in the Climategate emails)

The video is well produced and cleverly constructed, designed to look measured and reasonable rather than yet another shoddy hit job in the ongoing climate wars.

Sundry “experts”, adopting a tone of “more in sorrow than anger” gently express their reservations about the reliability of the satellite data which, right up until the release of this video, has generally been accepted as the most accurate gauge of global temperatures.

This accuracy was acknowledged 25 years ago by NASA, which said that “satellite analysis of the upper atmosphere is more accurate, and should be adopted as the standard way to monitor temperature change.”

More recently, though, climate alarmists have grown increasingly resentful of the satellite temperature record because of its pesky refusal to show the warming trend they’d like it to show. Instead of warming, the RSS and UAH satellite data shows that the earth’s temperatures have remained flat for over 18 years - the so-called “Pause.”

Hence the alarmists’ preference for the land and sea-based temperature datasets which do show a warming trend, especially after the raw data has been adjusted in the right direction. Climate realists, however, counter that these records have all the integrity of Enron’s accounting system or of Hillary’s word on what really happened in Benghazi.

Given the embarrassment the satellite data has been causing alarmists in recent years - most recently at the Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) “Data or Dogma” hearing last December - it was almost inevitable that sooner or later they would try to discredit it.

In the video, the line taken by the alarmists is that the satellite records too have been subject to dishonest adjustments and that the satellites have given a misleading impression of global temperature because of the way their orbital position changes over time.

These sound plausible criticisms till you look at this graph provided by one of the scientists criticized in the video, John Christy of the University of Alabama, Huntsville.

GL_MT_Avg_2015

What it shows is how closely the satellite data corresponds with measurements taken using a completely independent system -balloons. If the satellites are lying then so are the balloons.

Christy told Breitbart:

There are too many problems with the video on which to comment, but here are a few. First, the satellite problems mentioned here were dealt with 10 to 20 years ago. Second, the main product we use now for greenhouse model validation is the temperature of the Mid-Troposphere (TMT) which was not erroneously impacted by these problems.

The vertical “fall” and east-west “drift” of the spacecraft are two aspects of the same phenomenon - orbital decay.

The real confirmation bias brought up by these folks to smear us is held by them. They are the ones ignoring information to suit their world view. Do they ever say that, unlike the surface data, the satellite datasets can be checked by a completely independent system, balloons? Do they ever say that one of the main corrections for time-of-day (east-west) drift is to remove spurious WARMING after 2000? Do they ever say that the important adjustment to address the variations caused by solar-shadowing effects on the spacecraft is to remove a spurious WARMING? Do they ever say that the adjustments were within the margin of error?

He adds:

I’m impressed someone went to so much trouble and expense. The “satellite data” must be a real problem for someone. Do we know who financed this video?

Yes, we do. It was made by the Yale Climate Connection and part funded by the Grantham Foundation. The Grantham Foundation is the creation of a UK born US based hedge funder called Jeremy Grantham (and his wife Hannelore) and has since 1997 been at the forefront of promoting climate alarmism.

Among the beneficiaries of Grantham’s green largesse are Lord Stern - author of the heavily discredited Stern Report, now with a cosy sinecure at the Grantham Institute - and Bob Ward, a failed paleopiezometrist and crop-headed pit bull impersonator who is lavishly funded to write angry letters to newspapers and other institutions explaining in boring detail why climate change sceptics are evil and wrong.

As for the motivation behind this well-funded smear video - it’s actually explained at the website which is promoting it.

In coming days, we will hear announcements from NASA, NOAA and others that 2015 was the hottest year in the modern instrumental record.

There will be pushback from the likes of climate denier Ted Cruz, who uses a misreading of satellite temperature data to claim, as he did on Seth Meyer’s show - “no warming in 18 years”

This is the story of how that distortion came to be.

In other words it’s yet another case of the increasingly desperate climate alarmists playing their usual game:

If the facts don’t suit your discredited theory, change the facts.

See also in this Daily Caller story with Dr. Richard Lindzen disputing claims this is the warmest year.

“Frankly, I feel it is proof of dishonesty to argue about things like small fluctuations in temperature or the sign of a trend,” Lindzen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells the science blog Climate Depot. “Why lend credibility to this dishonesty?”

Enlarged

Posted on 01/21 at 07:50 PM
(30) Trackbacks • Permalink

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Science lost a champion and we lost a friend.

By David Rothbard

Science lost a champion and we lost a friend.

Respected climatologist Bob Carter has died at 74 years of age following a sudden heart attack. Services will likely be next Monday in his hometown of Townsville, Australia. We send our deepest sympathies to his family and friends.

Bob Carter worked in paleoclimatology, the study of past climate. His knowledge in this field informed his conclusion that scientific data does not support the UN’s claims of catastrophic man-made global warming.

Bob appears prominently in CFACT’’s film Climate Hustle which is now being prepared for theater showings and home video distribution. Last month CFACT flew Bob to Paris for the film’s premiere and to participate in a science briefing. You can see him celebrating with us front and center in this picture.

Marc Morano posted this at Climate Depot: “Bob was a man of great courage, intellect and wit. I am deeply saddened by his passing. He easily seemed a decade younger than his 74 years with his youthful looks and energy level. the world of science has lost a true champion. I first met Bob when I invited him to speak at the U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee hearing on climate in December 2006. Bob’s full 2006 testimony here. I was in contact with Bob over the years, seeking analysis, quotes and of course he is featured prominently in the upcoming film Climate Hustle. Bob was in Paris decked out in his tux for the Paris premier of the film during the UN climate summit.

Bob was amazing in Paris, good humored and adeptly handling the media and protesters. My thoughts and prayers go out to his wife Anne and his family and friends. He will be sorely missed.”

In 2010, then Czech President Vaclav Klaus wrote a fitting tribute to Bob titled, ”Thank heavens for Bob Carter.”

Vaclav Klaus, Former President of The Czech Republic

We do thank God for Bob.

We will miss him terribly.

----------

ICECAP NOTE: I met Bob at a climate conference 8 years ago and talked to him there and at other meetings. Here is a presentation at ICCC10 last year.

He is one of my heroes in this battle for truth. His courage and dedication was inspiring. We will carry on in his name.

Here are other reflections on Bob’s contributions by Mark Steyn and Joanne Nova.

Here this wonderful tribute to Bob by Lord Monckton here.

Posted on 01/19 at 07:08 PM
(0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Fact Check UCS Press Release - two years later

By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow

Update as winter returned as forecast and a mammoth snowstorm paralyzed the east, the warmists with UCS and the progressive ideologue junk science purveyors at ThinkProgress are still reporting snow declining in the east OR blaming these events on warming. See more here.

---------------

Winter is underway. It started warm in December as is often the case in El Ninos.

Enlarged

This week the cold will advance east and south. As El Nino weakens and shift west, cold and snow will again become a story as it did last winter. The UCS, an environmental advocacy group whose environmentalists have assumed control of programs at most universities, has since at least 2007, promised the demise of winter sports activity as snow declines as warming accelerates. Here in NH, they again gave that message to the state legislature last year just before the Boston area 100 inches in 39 day snowmageddon. In this post we will examine the winter story and link to a fact check on all the alarmists claims they have made.

Reference: UNH reports warn of drastic climate change - April 4, 2014, Fosters Democrat

INTRODUCTION

This report here details the nine most relevant claims in the UNH report and provides factual data to refute the basis for those claims.

The authors of the UNH study, while making unfounded statements about the climate, weather, long-term trends and forecasting, do not provide substantial data beyond the flawed forecasts of climate models that have been shown to have failed over the past 20 years.

The data provided here to refute these groundless claims are from a variety of scientifically recognized sources and can be accessed through the source references directly.

As winter advances into the east and south this week, let’s focus on responses to claims made about winter warming and decreased snowfall.

CLAIM #6: Extreme cold temperatures may occur less frequently, and extreme cold days may be warmer than in the past.

FACTS: In the northeast, winters have cooled at a rate of 1.5F/ decade in the last 20 years.

Enlarged Source: NCDC Climate at a Glance

The winter mean temperatures in Concord, NH shows no trend at all since 1868/69, just the natural cycles associated with ocean cycles (annual temperatures in red with 5 year running mean black dash).

Enlarged Source: NWS Portland, Maine

New England’s coldest temperature -50F was equaled in Maine in 2009. 2013/14 was the 4th coldest winter in New Hampshire since 1970 and 2nd coldest March since 1895.

Enlarged Source: NOAA NCDC Month in Review March State Rankings

January to March 2015 was even more extreme. In the northeast (10 northeast states plus DC, it tied for the coldest January to March since 1895 with 1904.

Enlarged

Enlarged

The Union of Concerned Scientists projected that New Hampshire climate would become like North Carolina. This is VERY FAR from the reality. The changes suggest our winters are becoming more like southern Quebec.

CLAIM #7: Warming winters will reduce opportunities for snow- and ice-related recreation (and related economic activity).

FACTS: The UCS had a special presentation in the late summer of 2007 on Mt. Washington promising a dire future for the winter sports and maple sugar industry due to warming.

That winter all time seasonal snow records were set for snowfall in the northeast from Concord to Caribou (and all through the western US up to Alaska).

Enlarged

Along the east coast we have seen record setting snow years and 16 major impact snowstorms just 5 years into this decade making this the snowiest decade on record back to the 1950s and beating out the memorable 1960s and the 2000s, which had 10. For the decade ending 2014/15, we had 25 major impact winter storms affecting the heavily populated areas of the east.

Enlarged NOAA NESIS High Impact Snowstorms

That did not not stop UNH to continue to travel to the state capitol to warn of warming disaster for the ski industry. They did so early last winter I am told after the winter got off a warm, slow snow start. But then 2014/15 set records for snowfall in Boston (back to 1872) and many other locations in the northeast into southeastern Canada.

Enlarged

In Boston, it helped nudge the 10 year running mean of seasonal snow to the highest in the entire record back to the 1880s.

Enlarged

In Boston, the huge snow piles (some of which lasted to July!) were throwbacks to the historic winter of 1717.

Enlarged

Historian David Ludlum wrote “That year, snows had reached five feet in December with drifts of 25 feet in January before one great last assault in late February into early March of 40 to 60 more inches. The snow was so deep that people could only leave their houses from the second floor, implying actual snow depths of as much as 8 feet or more.”

“Entire houses were covered over, identifiable only by a thin curl of smoke coming out of a hole in the snow,” the New England Historical Society noted. “In Hampton, N.H., search parties went out after the storms hunting for widows and elderly people at risk of freezing to death.” Sometimes snow would pile so high people would burn “their furniture because they couldn’t get to the woodshed.”

“It wasn’t uncommon for them to lose their bearings and not be able to find the houses,” the society wrote in its account of winter 1717. “People maintained tunnels and paths through the snow from house to house.”

In the Northern Hemisphere from 1967, 4 of the top 5 snowiest years have occurred since 2007/08, and 5 of the top 6 since 2002/03.

Enlarged NOAA Winter Snowcover Extent (Rutgers)

If you look at snowstorms in the last decade versus the prior 5 decades, you see an amazing increase in high impact snows. We have had 25 high population center impact snow events in the last decade compared to 5 to 8 in the prior five ten-year periods. Many of events uncharacteristically have had very high snow to liquid water content with very low temperatures; the opposite of what the UCS, NOAA and UN had indicated would be the case in the era of global warming.

Enlarged

Environmentalists, like those at the Union of Concerned Scientists at UNH and elsewhere clearly have no skill at predicting the future.

Posted on 01/19 at 12:56 PM
(1) Trackbacks • Permalink

Wednesday, January 06, 2016

Dr. Gray on the Practice of Personal Attacking Global Warming Skeptics

By Steve Goddard

Last week I had the pleasure of dining with my two favorite Fort Collins octogenarians - Dr. Bill Gray and Sue Brackenbury. Their mothers were best friends, but Bill and Sue hadn’t seen each other for decades. Both have been icons of the community in Fort Collins for many years, where Bill’s late wife was mayor in the 1980s. Today is Sue’s 86th birthday, and Bill has a special gift for us.

The Practice of Personal Attacking Global Warming Skeptics - Rather than Responding to Their Scientific Criticisms
By Bill Gray

While visiting the Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Poona, India in August 1966 I met and interacted with a young (~21) and promising Indian meteorologist named Jagdish Shukla. I have not been surprised to see his later scientific rise and very successful meteorological career in the US.

At an evening social event in Poona (August 1966) a number of us (including Shukla) were discussing the then recent China-India War (1962) over China’s infringement on India’s northern border and the political tensions which had continued up to that time. China was then in its isolated cultural revolution period and was belligerent to most outside nations. China’s strong intervention in Korea (1950-53) was still relatively fresh in people’s minds. The US was in the early stages of the Vietnam War and there was worry about China’s possible intervention on the side of the North Vietnamese as they had done in Korea. China was also rapidly advancing in its effort to develop a nuclear bomb. Some people (at the time) were advocating the bombing of China’s nuclear facility before it had developed the bomb (as Israelis did to the Iraq nuclear development facility a number of years later). We discussed the desirability of the US and its allies taking such action. As best I can remember, I did not advocate taking such action and I’m glad that no such action was ever taken.

Fast forward 35 years later to a NOAA Climate meeting Shukla and I attended in Washington around 2001. I was trying to obtain NOAA funding for my CSU project hurricane research which was partly involved with seasonal prediction. My talk at this meeting was directed to the complicate nature of the earth’s climate system and the lack of confidence we should have in the then current numerical climate prediction models of rising CO2 amounts causing large global warming. I specifically criticized the unrealistic positive water-vapor feedback in the climate models, the inability of the models to resolve individual convective units, the lack of proper inclusion of deep ocean circulation processes in the models, and other factors. This was not what the government officials and most of the meeting attendees wanted to hear (and I didn’t get the funding I was seeking). I now see that I was naive in thinking that the global warming question was not totally dominated by governmental and environmental politics unrelated to the science behind the warming issue.

I expected and was prepared for negative comments about the meteorological problems I had pointed out in my talk. The first response came from Shukla. But he didn’t question anything I had just presented. He went directly after me personally - by announcing I was the type of fellow who had earlier advised the bombing of China’s nuclear development facility. He implied by this that I was the type of person too far out of the mainstream to be trusted on any of the serious questions concerning the AGW topic. Shukla was not at all hesitant about bringing up and twisting what he thought I had said 35 years earlier. I was 36 at the time I was then in Poona and about 70 when I gave my later NOAA talk.

These types of personal attacks on us AGW skeptics (unrelated to the physics or science of the topic) are not so unusual. I have heard a number of similar stories about the aggressive isolation and criticisms of skeptics who do not follow the global warming party-line. Most skeptics, as a result, are not able to obtain federal grant support. They pay a high price for trying to tell the truth.

The attempt of the warming crowd to discredit us skeptics can take many forms other than the merits or demerits of the scientific questions we ask. Warming proponents will typically not discuss or defend the physics behind the AGW hypothesis or how their climate models produce the large global warming results they do. They tend to have a ‘take-it’ or ‘leave-it’ mentality or they typically refuse to discuss the warming mechanisms within their models on the grounds that the scientific questions have already been settled.

The warmers usual response to criticism seems to be to try to dig up whatever negative personal information they can uncover about the skeptic and then from this manufactured degraded outlook to imply that the science behind the skeptics criticisms must be similarly flawed.

Why are the warmers so afraid to have open and honest discussion about the basic nitty-gritty assumptions of their AGW hypothesis? I think it is because they well know (but will not admit) that the science behind the AGW hypothesis is ripe with conceptual errors and, in the long run, be proven to be wrong.

I am but one of many AGW skeptics who have been subjected to the warmer’s attempts to isolate, ignore, and personally marginalize us, in order to deflect attention away from the basic scientific problems confronting the AGW hypothesis and its model output representations. I doubt that the global warming crowd would so act if they were really confident of the reality of their science. The warmers are now on a downward slide (which I believe they know but won’t admit) and cannot or will not face-up to the fact that they have picked the wrong horse to bet their future scientific reputations upon. The older warmers are now too far down the AGW road to be able to gracefully extricate themselves. Other warmers may feel that their prestige-enhancements and the governmental funding rewards they have gotten have been worth it - even if their warming alarms are later proven wrong.

Posted on 01/06 at 12:18 PM
(2) Trackbacks • Permalink

Monday, December 28, 2015

Desperate Climate Alarmists Attack Skeptics

By Dr. Larry Bell

President Obama wasted no crises on the occasion of the U.N.’s climate fear-fest earlier this month. Associating murderers of 129 people there two just weeks previously with agents of man-made global warming Armageddon, he observed that by fostering “dangerous” ideologies, climate change “in some ways is akin to the problem of terrorism and ISIL.”

He even hailed the conference as “a powerful rebuke of terrorists.”

These dangerous culprits presumably include all who challenge the existence of any rational scientific basis for climate hysteria...along with disbelievers of pixie dust premises that planetary salvation demands replacing affordable, abundant, and reliable fossil energy with costly, puny and intermittent windmills and sunbeams.

Even if the climate hadn’t warmed over 19 years prior to the run-up to that conference, feverish rhetoric certainly did. Yale Professor Timothy Snyder’s September New York Times op-ed titled “The Next Genocide” compared those who doubted dangerous man-made climate change with a Nazi commander slaughtering a Jewish baby.

He referred to “these deniers [who] tend to present the empirical findings of scientists as a conspiracy and question the validity of science - an intellectual stance that is uncomfortably close to Hitler’s.”

Last February Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, attempted to launch a congressional witch hunt against climate alarm skeptics.

He requested that universities turn over documents about grants, congressional testimony and other activities involving seven dangerously doubting scientists who have testified at climate hearings.

My good friend Dr. Willie Soon, a distinguished and extensively published scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics was targeted for receiving “more than $1 million from [evil] U.S. energy companies over the past decade.”

Not mentioned was that half of that money received over those ten years was paid to his organization for administration, while the rest covered Dr. Soon’s salary and research expenses.

U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., followed suit by publicly encouraging legal prosecution of those who buck a so-called scientific global warming doom and gloom “consensus.”

Following in his presumably carbon-free footprints, Jagdish Shukla, a professor of climate dynamics at George Mason University, along with 19 other academics, sent a Sept. 1st letter to President Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and White House Office of Science Policy Director John Holdren which called for “a RICO investigation of corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change.” (The “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act” (RICO) was primarily directed at Mafia figures that ordered, but didn’t actually commit crimes such as murder.)

The “RICO-20” letter was originally posted on a website of the Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES), a “nonprofit, tax-exempt research institute” founded by Dr. Shukla. It was later removed.

And where did IGES get its own more than $63 million - 98 percent of its total revenue since 2001? A report in The Washington Free Beacon says that a lot came from taxpayers in the form of grants.

According to IRS Form 990 and other documents, 99.6 percent of its 2014 funding ($3.8 million) was provided by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and NASA.

What’s more, a huge amount of that generous IGES non-profit, tax-exempt largess went into Shukla family pockets. According to tax filings, together with his “business manager” and wife Anastasia and “assistant business manager/assistant to the president” daughter Sonia they drew $5.6 million in compensation since 2001 (not including Sonia’s unreported earnings).

Although his IGES employment was “part time” this was all on top of Jagadish’s $314,000 2014 salary from George Mason University which IGES joined as part of its College of Science in 2013.

As reported by Ian Tuttle in the National Review, the only other member of the IGES staff is longtime Shukla associate James Kinter who runs George Mason’s Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies (COLA).

Kinter (who didn’t sign the RICO-20 letter) added $180,038 from IGES to his $171,320 George Mason University salary in 2014. Shukla also reportedly funneled $100,000 in U.S. IGES grants to his “Institute for Global Education, Equality of Opportunity, and Prosperity,” an “educational charity” located in his hometown in India.

Meanwhile, as satellites show no statistical warming for nearly two decades despite rising CO2 levels while overheated climate models have gone berserk, transparent agendas of glass house residents who attack alarm skeptics warrant reverse scrutiny.

Let’s remember who is paying the bills for a multi-billion fear-dependent climate industry which imposes ever-increasing tax and consumer cost hikes for uneconomical and unreliable “green energy” pipe dreams.

In case there’s any lingering doubt, it’s the rest of us.

Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA) and the graduate program in space architecture. He is the author of ”Scared Witless: Prophets and Profits of Climate Doom”(2015) and ”Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax” (2012).

Posted on 12/28 at 01:23 PM
(2) Trackbacks • Permalink

Thursday, December 17, 2015

U.S. Climate Network Shows a Lower Temperature Trend when high quality stations included

Update: see HERE how weather satellites show no ‘global warming’ for 18 1/2 years. No N. Pole warming for nearly 14 years. No S. Pole warming for 37 years! U.S. has had no warming for 18 years!

--------------

SAN FRANCISO, CA - A new study about the surface temperature record presented at the 2015 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union suggests that the 30-year trend of temperatures for the Continental United States (CONUS) since 1979 are about two thirds as strong as officially NOAA temperature trends.

Figure 1 - Comparisons of 30 year trend for compliant Class 1,2 USHCN stations to non-compliant, Class 3,4,5 USHCN stations to NOAA final adjusted V2.5 USHCN data in the Continental United States

Using NOAA’s U.S. Historical Climatology Network, which comprises 1218 weather stations in the CONUS, the researchers were able to identify a 410 station subset of “unperturbed” stations that have not been moved, had equipment changes, or changes in time of observations, and thus require no “adjustments” to their temperature record to account for these problems. The study focuses on finding trend differences between well sited and poorly sited weather stations, based on a WMO approved metric Leroy (2010)1 for classification and assessment of the quality of the measurements based on proximity to artificial heat sources and heat sinks which affect temperature measurement.

An example is shown in Figure 2 below, showing the NOAA USHCN temperature sensor for Ardmore, OK.

Figure 2 - USHCN Temperature sensor located on street corner in Ardmore, OK in full viewshed of multiple heatsinks.

Following up on a paper published by the authors in 2010, Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends2 which concluded:

Temperature trend estimates vary according to site classification, with poor siting leading to an overestimate of minimum temperature trends and an underestimate of maximum temperature trends, resulting in particular in a substantial difference in estimates of the diurnal temperature range trends....this new study is presented at AGU session A43G-0396 on Thursday Dec. 17th at 13:40PST and is titled Comparison of Temperature Trends Using an Unperturbed Subset of The U.S. Historical Climatology Network

A 410-station subset of U.S. Historical Climatology Network (version 2.5) stations is identified that experienced no changes in time of observation or station moves during the 1979-2008 period. These stations are classified based on proximity to artificial surfaces, buildings, and other such objects with unnatural thermal mass using guidelines established by Leroy (2010)1. The United States temperature trends estimated from the relatively few stations in the classes with minimal artificial impact are found to be
collectively about 2/3 as large as US trends estimated in the classes with greater expected artificial impact. The trend differences are largest for minimum temperatures and are statistically significant even at the regional scale and across different types of instrumentation and degrees of urbanization. The homogeneity adjustments applied by the National Centers for Environmental Information (formerly the National Climatic Data Center) greatly reduce those differences but produce trends that are more consistent with the stations with greater expected artificial impact. Trend differences are not found during the 1999- 2008 subperiod of relatively stable temperatures, suggesting that the observed differences are caused by a physical mechanism that is directly or indirectly caused by changing temperatures.

Key findings:

Google Earth imagery, and curator interviews have yielded a well-distributed 410 station subset of the 1218 station USHCN network that is unperturbed by Time of Observation changes, station moves, or rating changes, and a complete or mostly complete 30-year dataset. It must be emphasized that the perturbed stations dropped from the USHCN set show significantly lower trends than those retained in the sample, both for well and poorly sited station sets.

1. Comprehensive and detailed evaluation of station metadata, on-site station photography, satellite and aerial imaging, street level These differences are significant in Tmean, and most pronounced in the minimum temperature data (Tmin). (Figure 3 and Table 1)

2. Bias at the microsite level (the immediate environment of the sensor) in the unperturbed subset of USHCN stations has a significant effect on the mean temperature (Tmean) trend. Well sited stations show significantly less warming from 1979 - 2008.

3. Equipment bias (CRS v. MMTS stations) in the unperturbed subset of USHCN stations has a significant effect on the mean temperature (Tmean) trend when CRS stations are compared with MMTS stations. MMTS stations show significantly less warming than CRS stations from 1979 2008. (Table 1) These differences are significant in Tmean (even after upward adjustment for MMTS conversion) and most pronounced in the maximum temperature data (Tmax).

4. The 30-year Tmean temperature trend of unperturbed, well sited stations is significantly lower than the Tmean temperature trend of NOAA/NCDC official adjusted homogenized surface temperature record for all 1218 USHCN stations.

5. We believe the NOAA/NCDC homogenization adjustment causes well sited stations to be adjusted upwards to match the trends of poorly sited stations.

6. The data suggests that the divergence between well and poorly sited stations is gradual, not a result of spurious step change due
to poor metadata.

The study is authored by Anthony Watts and Evan Jones of surfacestations.org , John Nielsen-Gammon of Texas A&M , John R. Christy of the University of Alabama, Huntsville and represents years of work in studying the quality of the temperature measurement system of the United States.

Lead author Anthony Watts said of the study: “The majority of weather stations used by NOAA to detect climate change temperature signal have been compromised by encroachment of artificial surfaces like concrete, asphalt, and heat sources like air conditioner exhausts. This study demonstrates conclusively that this issue affects temperature trend and that NOAA’s methods are not correcting for this problem, resulting in an inflated temperature trend. It suggests that the trend for U.S. temperature will need to be corrected.” He added: “We also see evidence of this same sort of siting problem around the world at many other official weather stations, suggesting that the same upward bias on trend also manifests itself in the global temperature record”.

The full AGU presentation can be downloaded here.

Figure 3 - Comparisons of well sited (compliant Class 1&2) USHCN stations to poorly sited USHCN stations (non-compliant, Classes 3,4,&5) by CONUS and region to official NOAA adjusted USHCN data (V2.5) for the entire (compliant and non-compliant) USHCN dataset.

[1] Leroy, M. (2010): Siting Classification for Surface Observing Stations on Land, Climate, and Upper-air Observations JMA/WMO Workshop on Quality Management in Surface, Tokyo, Japan, 27-30 July 2010

[2] Fall et al. (2010) Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends

Posted on 12/17 at 07:30 PM
(0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Sunday, December 13, 2015

The UN is celebrating at COP 21, but what did they really achieve?

Craig Rucker reports “The UN is celebrating at COP 21, but what did they really achieve?”

President Obama called the Paris climate agreement the best chance we’ve had to “save” the planet. Not even close, Mr. President. We’ll put that bit of hyperbole right up there with your election being “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

The good news is that the final agreement is substantially weaker than the drafts that led up to it. French Soclialist Laurent Fabius, who presided over COP 21, must have spent all of Friday night yanking the teeth out of it to come up with a document everyone would sign. China and India will be pleased that this agreement permits them to go on burning coal and expanding their economies all they want.

The President will be pleased that the agreement is weak enough that he can attempt to bypass Senate ratification. Marc Morano asked, “Does this mean we never have to hear about ‘solving’ global warming again!?” Marc’s full commentary was posted to the top of the Drudge Report.

CFACT senior policy advisor Paul Driessen warns that although he believes the final agreement is no more than “mush,” attempting to voluntarily abide by it will cause terrible economic harm and human suffering. You can read his full analysis here.

This agreement will not meaningfully alter the temperature of the Earth, even under the UN’s own computer models. The bad news is that it plants the seeds of a new UN climate regime that left unchecked will swell into a bureaucratic behemoth. The good news is that the agreement’s soft commitments, lack of penalties for noncompliance, and long dates buy time for more scientific data to come in.

The more scientific evidence we examine, the weaker the case for economy-wrecking global warming policies becomes. Science may provide the way out. If we can keep the data honest.

Reprieve! Binding Paris treaty now voluntary mush

But Obama still wants to send US energy use and living standards backward

Paul Driessen and Roger Bezdek

Paris climate talks this week descended into madcap all-night negotiations, as delegates desperately tried to salvage some kind of agreement beyond empty promises to do something sometime about what President Obama insists is the gravest threat to our planet, national security and future generations.

He gets far more energized about slashing energy use than about Islamist terrorism, even after the Paris and San Bernardino butchery. Determined for once to lead from upfront, he took a 500-person greenhouse gas-spewing entourage to the City of Light, to call for preventing increasing droughts, floods, storms, island-swallowing rising acidic ocean levels and other disasters conjured up by alarmist computer models.

Legally binding carbon dioxide emission targets were too contentious to pursue. So was modifying the concept of “differentiated responsibilities.” It holds that countries that historically caused the recent atmospheric carbon dioxide build-up must lead in cutting their emissions, while helping developing countries eventually do likewise, by pouring trillions of dollars in cash and free technology into the Green Climate Fund for supposed climate change adaptation, mitigation and compensation. Developing countries had insisted on that massive wealth redistribution as their price for signing any binding document.

Although China now emits far more CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHG) than the USA or EU, it refused to fast-track reducing those emissions. China and wealthy petro-states also opposed paying into the Climate Fund. Other major bones of contention were likewise never resolved.

Thus, in the end, what we apparently got out of Paris is voluntary emission caps, voluntary progress reviews, no international oversight of any voluntary progress, and voluntary contributions to the Fund.

Of course, the entire climate cataclysm mantra is based on the claim that carbon dioxide has replaced the solar and other powerful natural forces that have driven climate change throughout Earth and human history. Now, merely tweaking CO2 emissions will supposedly stabilize climate and weather systems.

President Obama fervently believes this delusion. He will likely use the voluntary Paris gobbledygook to say America somehow has a “moral obligation” to set an example, by de-carbonizing, de-industrializing and de-developing the United States. Thankfully, Congress and the states will have something to say about that, because they know these anti-fossil fuel programs will destroy jobs and living standards, especially for poor, working class and minority families.

The impacts would be far worse than many news stories and White House press releases suggest. Those sources often say the proposed climate treaty and other actions seek GHG reductions of 80% below predicted 2050 emission levels. The real original Paris treaty target is 80% below actual 1990 levels.

That means the world would have to eliminate 96% of the greenhouse gases that all humanity would likely release if we reach world population levels, economic growth and living standards predicted for 2050. The United States would likely have to slash it CO2 and GHG reductions to zero.

Moreover, current 2050 forecasts already assume and incorporate significant energy efficiency, de-carbonization and de-industrialization over the next 35 years. They are not business-as-usual numbers or extrapolations of past trends. Further CO2 reductions beyond those already incorporated into the forecasts would thus be increasingly difficult, expensive, and indeed impossible to achieve.

As we explain in a MasterResource.org analysis, there is a strong positive relationship between GDP and carbon-based energy consumption. Slashing fossil energy use that far would thus require decimating economic growth, job creation and preservation, and average per-person incomes. In fact, average world per capita GDP would plummet from a projected $30,600 in 2050 to a miserable $1,200 per year.

Average per capita GDP in 2050 would be less than what Americans had in 1830! Many futuristic technologies would still exist, but only wealthy families and ruling elites could afford them.

That would be catastrophic for jobs, health and welfare in developed countries and lethal to millions in poor nations, who would be denied the blessings of electricity and fossil fuels for decades to come. That is indefensible, inhumane and immoral. And for what?

Mr. Obama and the alarmists in Paris insisted that drastic GHG reductions will hold global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius (3.5 F) and prevent climate and weather disasters. Now some even claim that the upper safety limit is actually 1.5 degrees C (2.7 F), which would require even more draconian energy and emission cutbacks. Otherwise, Earth could become uninhabitable, they assert. Nonsense.

EPA’s own analyses suggest that its fully implemented Clean Power Plan would bring an undetectable, irrelevant reduction of perhaps 0.02 degrees Celsius (0.05 F) in average global temperatures 85 years from now assuming carbon dioxide actually does drive climate change.

In the Real World, climate changes regularly, and recent climate and weather trends and events are in line with historic experience. In fact, average global temperatures haven’t risen in nearly two decades; no category 3-5 hurricane has struck the USA in a record ten years; Greenland and Antarctic ice are at record levels; and still firmly alkaline sea levels (8.1 pH) are rising at barely seven inches per century.

Many scientists believe the sun and other powerful natural forces may soon usher in a new era of colder temperatures, regardless of whether atmospheric CO2 rises above 0.40% (400 ppm). That would pose much greater threats to human health, agriculture and prosperity (and wildlife) than global warming.

We must never forget: Fossil fuels facilitated successive industrial revolutions and enabled billions to live better than royalty did a century ago, helped average incomes to increase eleven-fold, and helped average global life expectancy to soar from less than 30 in 1870 to 71 today.

Carbon-based energy still provides 81% of world energy, and supports $70 trillion per year in world GDP. It will supply 75-80% of global energy for decades to come, Energy Information Administration, International Energy Agency and other studies forecast. Carbon-based energy is essential if we are to bring electricity to the 1.3 billion people who still do not have it, and end the rampant poverty and lung, intestinal and other diseases that kill millions of people in poor countries every year.

Furthermore, thousands of coal-fired power plants are built, under construction or in planning around the world. China and India will not consider reducing GHG emissions until 2030, and even then it will be voluntary and dependent on how their economies are doing. That means atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will continue to climb, greening the planet and spurring faster crop, forest and grassland growth.

President Obama and the 40,000 climate alarmists gathered in Paris largely these inconvenient realities, and whitewashed the adverse consequences of anti-hydrocarbon policies. Even binding targets would have had minimal or illusory health, climate and environmental benefits.

Instead, they would have horrendous adverse effects on human health and environmental quality, while doing nothing to prevent climate change or extreme weather events. What alarmists wanted in Paris would have let unelected, unaccountable activists and bureaucrats decide which industries, companies, workers, families, states and countries win the Climate Hustle game, and which ones lose.

And it’s not just President Obama, who wants to slash America’s carbon dioxide emissions by 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025 and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050! Every Democrat presidential candidate demands similar actions: Hillary Clinton wants one-third of all US electricity to come from wind and solar by 2027; Bernie Sanders wants 80% by 2050; Martin O’Malley wants 100% by 2050.

Obligating the United States to slash its fossil fuel use, and send billions of taxpayer dollars annually to dictators, bureaucrats and crony industrialists in poor countries would be disastrous. Thank goodness it did not happen. But we are not out of the woods yet.

Dr. Roger Bezdek is an internationally recognized energy analyst and president of Management Information Services, Inc., in Washington, DC. Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.

-----------

See also this summary of feedback after the Paris COP21 UN Fiasco.

The UN is celebrating at COP 21, but what did they really achieve?

But Obama still wants to send US energy use and living standards backward

Paul Driessen and Roger Bezdek

Average per capita GDP in 2050 would be less than what Americans had in 1830! Many futuristic technologies would still exist, but only wealthy families and ruling elites could afford them.

-----------

See also this summary of feedback after the Paris COP21 UN Fiasco.

Posted on 12/13 at 01:25 PM
(1) Trackbacks • Permalink

Monday, December 07, 2015

There is No Global “Climate Danger”

American scientist denounces COP21 and the Plot against the Developing Countries

NASA Meteorologist and member of the Johnson Space Center Climate Group (Ret.), Tom Wysmuller was interviewed in New York by Celestin Ngoa Balla for the weekly Cameroon newspaper Journal Integration. The interview questions were translated from French into English and the replies translated back into French by the Committee for the Republic of Canada. The interview was published in French in issue No. 209 of Journal Integration on Monday, 23 November, 2015, and appears here in English with permission of Journal Integration (http://www.journalintegration.com).

Mr Wysmuller: When did you start investigating the global climate change phenomenon and what evidence do you have to convince our readers of the seriousness, of the rigour of your work?

Thomas Wysmuller: I’ve always had a love for Meteorology, studied it in school, and forecasted weather at the Royal Dutch Weather Bureau in Amsterdam, before working at NASA before, during, and after the Moon Landings. Mathematics I helped develop while assigned to work at Jet Engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney is being used by most climate scientists all over the world. In the late 1990s I started lecturing on formation of the Ice Ages; ergo the copyright on The Colder Side of Global Warming. I continue doing so to this day, and am part of the NASA. The Right Climate Stuff (TRCS) group centered at the Johnson Space Center in Houston Texas.

At a recent conference in New York, you stated that after the Paris Summit on climate change, the planet will go back to the stone age. Can you demonstrate that to our readers?

Thomas Wysmuller:

The context of that assertion was that we would revert to Stone Age conditions if every proposal, change, and energy destroying wish list item would be enacted as a result of the Paris COP21 conference. It would mean that inexpensive coal generated electricity would be barred in Africa. Third World nations would be limited to non-utility scale wind and solar power generation. Africa, South America, and Central America would never develop continent-wide electrical grids, nor would be permitted to develop their own natural resources. I could go on, but hopefully you are getting the idea!

In the same vein, you are also ringing the alarm bell that behind the Paris summit lies the real agenda of some of the great powers and of some notorious people: reducing Earth’s population. What are your reasons to make such a statement?

Thomas Wysmuller: Once inexpensive electrical power is denied to those most needing it, diseases will continue taking their toll in the Third World, decent drinking water will remain in short supply and delivery systems for it will remain substandard compared to Europe and North America.

Keep in mind that there are some truly misguided but well-meaning people believing they are doing environmental good involved in COP21. But others want to keep the Third World poor and relying on “handouts” from the so-called “developed world.”

Even our own (in my view “poor choice” as) president has declared that: “Ultimately, if you think about all the youth that everybody has mentioned here in Africa, if everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning, and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will boil over—unless we find new ways of producing energy”.

Now this is simply false. The planet will never “...boil over,” unless new laws of physics get invented. But keeping Africa poor will result in more deaths resulting from not “...raising living standards.”

And you should not have to wait for someone else to “...find new ways of producing energy.” What if they don’t? Does that mean that you and your descendants should wallow in poverty?

Do NOT take our president’s statement as what the American people want for your country.

For me, I would like to see every African of driving age able to 1: Have one or two cars, 2: Have a decent road system upon which to drive them, 3: Have Air Conditioning, 4: Have a big house or elegant apartment, 5: Have a job making, selling, or distributing things like Air Conditioners, Cars, Farm Equipment, or teaching others how to do just that, and all those things that make life pleasant and a lifestyle you can be proud of.

Can you explain your statement that “global warming is not an issue that concerns Africa”?

Thomas Wysmuller: To begin: The planet’s atmosphere has not warmed for almost two decades, and that includes Africa.

Enlarged Figure 1. No global warming for 18 years and 9 months.

If we look at the total emissions of CO2 produced by man since 1750, we find that one third of these emissions occurred in only the last 18 years and 9 months. However, the most reliable measurements of the Earth’s surface temperature obtained by satellites show no indication of global warming over this period. There is no evidence to support the claims that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are causing a sudden, dangerous change in the Earth’s climate.

I pose the following question from time to time: Pick any day of the year, any season. Add two degrees. Notice any difference? Enjoy life. Save $Billions that your government wants to spend or divert on this foolishness.

A small fraction of those same “$Billions” could develop a power grid across all of Africa, provide cheap, reliable and clean coal-fired electricity for all. CO2 additions would benefit the planet, allowing more rapid plant and crop growth, while CO, Carbon particles, and real pollutants would be controlled with modern engineering techniques. A competent Physicist or Meteorologist would let you know that equatorial regions of Earth would radiate most of that added heat into space - the colder regions would warm, but not enough to cause major ice depletion. Recent evidence points to Antarctica gaining so much more ice/snow so as to drop world sea levels by 0.23mm each year. Truly, “global warming is not an issue that concerns Africa” Economic impoverishment most certainly is!

Should we fear the return of colonialism particularly in Africa?

Thomas Wysmuller: Under real colonialism, you knew from whom you wanted to be liberated. However, “economic subjugation” is likely even more insidious than that of your past colonial experience.

Keeping Africa from utilizing your own natural resources, keeping you without reliable power, denying you a decent transportation infrastructure to move goods throughout the continent, or even withholding reliable electrical power to make those goods, is true repression.

DON’T LET IT HAPPEN TO YOU!!!

The Paris Summit organizers think that the growth of jihadism and wars in Africa is linked to global warming. What do you think?

Thomas Wysmuller: The recent unrest in the world and attacks in Paris “feed” this kind of thinking. In truth, poverty and lack of food and water are the “fuel” for jihadism. This results in destabilization attempts directed towards governments who are unable to “cure” these societal ills. If reliable electricity would power desalinization plants and provide water for agriculture and industry, the attractiveness for regime destruction relied upon by jihadists would dissipate.

Is there a relationship between the warming of the oceans and the emissions of CO2?

Thomas Wysmuller: Absolutely! As the oceans warm, they release the heavier dissolved CO2 molecules contained within them. In fact they are responsible for almost all of the CO2 emissions added to the atmosphere every year. Humans account for less than 4%, and half of that is re-absorbed by either plants or the oceans each year!!!

What advice would you give to the African heads of state that have already accepted the invitation to go to the Paris Summit? Should they refuse to sign the protocol to impose a worldwide climate policy?

Thomas Wysmuller: Go to the Paris Summit. Do NOT give up your nation’s right to explore for, extract, utilize and develop your natural resources.

Review any technical assistance offered, but have your own scientists that have high integrity, analyze any offers and accept only those that: 1: Give your nation capability that it doesn/t presently have, 2: Contribute to your own energy independence, 3: Grant meaningful employment for your people, 4: Improve your nation’s infrastructure, and 5: Allow you to increase your nation’s competitiveness in all aspects of world trade. There are many more in addition to these 5, but starting with these, your heads of state will earn their right to remain in their positions.

And yes, they should absolutely refuse to sign the protocol as it has been described to me. Signing will guarantee permanent mediocrity for those African nations that are tricked into supporting the protocol.

And what message do you have for the African population who, not long ago, heard Barack Obama tell them that it is dangerous for the planet that every house should have electricity?

Thomas Wysmuller: Tell Barack Obama to cut power to the US White House 20 times per day, sell his jet plane Air Force One, and get rid of the cars that he rides in on the way to golf courses on a weekly basis. When all of those happen, then consider that you might not want every house having electricity, and decide that his house will be the only one in that category.

Nonetheless, the phenomenon of global warming is not a myth. And you are saying that it has some good advantages such as creating jobs?

Thomas Wysmuller: We are in a 2 degree C plus and minus temperature band for the past 10,000 years! 300 years ago we were cooling. 100 years ago we started warming again. We are still in that 2 degree C range, and not anywhere near the top of that range.

Add atmospheric CO2 and plants grow more and need less water to do so. Satellite imagery of the Sahel region of Africa shows greening during the 20 years after the satellites were first put in orbit. If there is any myth, it is that of taking just the past 100 years of temperature change and insisting that it will go on forever. Over 100 climate models have failed to accurately project the Earth’s atmospheric temperature - and all but 3 failed on the high side because of CO2 increase assumptions and feedbacks built into the modeler’s assumptions.

Jobs will follow as a result of NOT following the proposed resource development restrictions that some would impose upon your country and delight in your continued subservience. I’m not one of them!!!

The way things are going right now, some scientists fear an increase of floods, cyclones and other natural catastrophes. Can you comment?

Thomas Wysmuller: Those scientists to whom you refer just are not keeping up with reality. I cannot apologize for their ignorance, but hopefully they can. There is a concept called “Accumulated Cyclonic Energy” (ACE) and it is tracked worldwide. It takes the energy components of storms wind speed, storm duration measured in 6-hour intervals, and area covered. This ACE statistic trend is tracked, and for the past 15 years the trend is down, and decidedly so, even as CO2 has risen.

Figure 2. Accumulated Cyclonic Energy (ACE), a measure of the energy components of storms has tended to decrease for the last 15 years, while CO2 emissions have risen.

Hurricanes, Cyclones, Typhoons, etc., are within their historic ranges though not fewer in number, but this is likely due to better satellite tracking of these systems. In areas where there is high accuracy in storm tracking, such as the United States, numbers of Tornadoes in all categories are either diminished or flat, none increasing!

Please keep in mind that the “catastrophes” referred to are all “Weather” related, not “Climate” related, as “Climate” is the result of very long term changes in the averages of many meteorological factors, and CO2 is not the major one involved.

What can explain that two weeks before the Paris summit, the conclusions of your work and your observations are not well-known around the world? Are there some people that don’t want your voice to be heard?

Thomas Wysmuller: Many highly regarded and recognized scientists with world class reputations share my outlook and have similar opinions. I give lectures, talks and presentations all over the world, and those conclusions that I have arrived at with others are actually quite well known.

I am sure there are some that “...don’t want your (my) voice to be heard,” but those are the actions of fear; fear that they will be exposed as less than competent, and have to defend policies that damage the very people and nations that they pretend to be helping.

Can you tell us why you are not afraid to oppose the powerful nations and powerful people (including even the Pope) who are involved in promoting this climate change agenda? They say that that there is a danger! Are you trying to tell us that the right of all nations to develop, the need to create jobs, and the need for science to be truthful, is more important than fear?

Thomas Wysmuller: Absolutely!!! And there is no “climate danger” to worry about but there is a very real danger that lack of development, poverty, and lack of economic opportunity present to your country and the world!
I have easily developed a lack of fear with respect to my positions, as they are grounded in hard science, accurate data, and a structured approach in problem solving that I learned during my days at NASA. Over the years I have applied my Meteorological, Mathematical, and Earth Sciences background to my presentations, and acquired an understanding of climate, and Ice-Age formation.

I believe my “advice” to the developing world will actually allow them to DEVELOP!!! Rise to the level that brings the best lifestyle, medical health, and prosperity that you can hope for and then benefit all of humanity!!! When your nation’s intelligence and intellect is focused on becoming equal partners in the world, the rest of the world’s nations will welcome your inclusion in mainstream economic progress, and I not only look forward to that day, but will work hard to convince others to help you achieve it.

I thank you for your work in communicating my viewpoints to your country’s leaders and your general readership. Political decisions based upon sound science and correct information are the recipe for national achievement, and I wish you the very best in attaining that success!!!

Posted on 12/07 at 07:11 PM
(1) Trackbacks • Permalink

Tuesday, December 01, 2015

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time—Part IX

By Francis Menton, Manhattan Contrarian

Perhaps you are wondering if the world truly has gone mad, or if it only seems that way. If so, take a look at the climate confab that has just gotten under way in Paris. Yes, the world truly has gone mad.

Time Magazine puts the number of attendees at 40,000. Holy cow! That’s 40,000 people, every one of them on the taxpayer dime of some country or other, and every one of them dedicated to the proposition that you must be forced to use less energy and/or have your price of energy jacked up until you can’t afford it any more. It’s to save the planet! And all of those 40,000 taxpayer-funded people are also dedicated to suppressing any dissent to climate orthodoxy in order to preserve their own salaries and careers. And yet all of them somehow fly to Paris on planes burning massive amounts of fossil fuel, not noticing any contradiction between how they demand you live your life and how they live theirs.

Consider the case of our President. He has called the so-called “climate crisis” “worse than the terrorist threat.” He has also just flown to Paris in Air Force One, and presumably plans to fly back the same way. An Air Force One 747 consumes 5 gallons of fuel per mile. It’s 3855 air miles from Washington to Paris, 7710 round trip. Did I mention that Air Force One is actually two planes? They always keep a spare 747 within about a half-hour, just in case. So make that 15,420 air miles at 5 gallons per mile. A gallon translates to 21.1 pounds of CO2 emissions. So our dear President is emitting some 1,625,000 pounds of CO2 just for his own flight over and back, more than 800 tons. For comparison, the average American’s annual carbon emissions are about 20 tons—for everything you do for an entire year. Just for the President, and just for this one flight over and back, he is emitting 40 years worth of your carbon consumption. Add in the emissions of his massive entourage on this boondoggle, and it’s a multiple of what you will emit in your entire lifetime. Wired here calculates the total emission of all the attendees in attending the conference at 300,000 tons of CO2—several hundred times what you will emit in your entire life. And these people purport to lecture you and restrict you by force on how much energy you can use?

But of course, everybody knows that solving the carbon “crisis” is critically important because “the Earth is warming.” We do know that, don’t we? Acknowledging that you agree that “the Earth is warming” is the main way that you prove to polite society today that you are not a complete fool, an idiot, a “denier,” an anti-science crazy. As summarized by CNN here in August:

According to multiple peer-reviewed scientific journals, scientists who study climate are overwhelmingly in agreement that the Earth is warming...An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change acknowledged by many experts as the scientific authority on climate change—says in a major report [in 2013] that it’s unequivocal that the climate is warming.

Of course, the last thing you’d want to do before agreeing that “the Earth is warming” would be to look at the data. Well, maybe just a peak? Here’s the latest satellite temperature record from UAH, from the time they first put up the satellites in 1979 and going right up to yesterday:

It’s rather obvious here that the warmest year was 1998, and indeed the peak was in early 1998. That’s almost 18 years ago! What does it even mean to say that “the Earth is warming” when the best data show that the warmest time was 18 years ago? The trend since 1998 is down, not up. The trend since 1997 is completely flat.

Candidate Ted Cruz was famously quoted by Time back in August as saying

“If you look at satellite data for the last 18 years, there’s been zero recorded warming...The satellite says it ain’t happening ... I’m saying that data and facts don’t support it.”

For that heresy Cruz drew a response from billionaire and former Mayor Mike Bloomberg in a CNN interview on November 25. Bloomberg referred to “right wing crazies” who reject mainstream climate science, and particularly said he was talking about Cruz:

You’ve got a guy like Ted Cruz...and he says some of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard.

Yes, in the field of climate “science,” pointing out that the data refute the hypothesis is now “crazy” and “the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” Who again is the stupid one here?

But, you ask, what about those seemingly monthly press releases from NOAA and NASA, based on ground thermometers rather than satellites, that keep reporting that each successive month and year are “the hottest ever”? Readers here know that this is what I have referred to as “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.” Read some previous articles in this series here. As reported in those articles, numerous non-government-funded independent researchers have gone to check the raw archived temperature data from many stations against the current NOAA and NASA data bases that generate the reports of “hottest ever,” and uniformly they find the same thing: early year data altered downward, and recent year data altered upward, in order to create a warming trend where otherwise none exists. See, for example, Tony Heller’s Real Science, Paul Homewood’s Not a Lot of People Know That, Joe D’Aleo’s Icecap.

Now for the latest on that. In Germany, a retired geologist and data computation expert named Friederich Karl Ewert recently decided to follow the lead of Heller, Homewood, D’Aleo, et al., and try his hand at comparing archived raw temperature data from many weather stations to currently-reported temperatures from NASA. Here is the result, reported on November 20 at No Tricks Zone:

From the publicly available data, Ewert made an unbelievable discovery: Between the years 2010 and 2012 the data measured since 1881 were altered so that they showed a significant warming, especially after 1950. [...] A comparison of the data from 2010 with the data of 2012 shows that NASA-GISS had altered its own datasets so that especially after WWII a clear warming appears - although it never existed.

Surprise! It’s “unbelievable.” Actually not, if you’ve been following this issue at all. According to my Google search here, the Ewert study has been reported at Breitbart, CNS, No Tricks Zone, Not a Lot of People Know That, Weasel Zippers, Hockey Schtick, Free Republic, The Federalist Papers, and many others—all of them conservative-oriented sources. But somehow no mention at literally any so-called “mainstream” source: New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, Bloomberg, etc., etc., etc. If anybody can find a mention in any mainstream source, I’ll be interested to know. Have the facts really become this partisan?

So 40,000 people, all on government payroll, meet in Paris to seek to put over on the world’s people a spending/control program of multi-trillions of dollars, all based on so-called “facts” that all are required to believe but are contradicted by the best available data. Our primary media sources systematically suppress the data. Yes, the world truly has gone mad.

Posted on 12/01 at 09:05 PM
(10) Trackbacks • Permalink

Friday, November 20, 2015

Prominent Scientists Declare Climate Claims Ahead of UN Summit ‘Irrational’ - ‘Based On Nonsense’

MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen: ‘Demonization of CO2 is irrational at best and even modest warming is mostly beneficial.’ - ‘When someone says this is the warmest temperature on record. What are they talking about? It’s just nonsense. This is a very tiny change period.’

Princeton Physicist Dr. Will Happer: ‘Policies to slow CO2 emissions are really based on nonsense. We are being led down a false path. To call carbon dioxide a pollutant is really Orwellian. You are calling something a pollutant that we all produce. Where does that lead us eventually?’

Greenpeace Co-Founder Dr. Patrick Moore: ‘We are dealing with pure political propaganda that has nothing to do with science.’

By: Marc Morano - Climate Depot

Note: CFACT’s new skeptical documentary, Climate Hustle, is set to rock the UN climate summit with red carpet world premiere in Paris.

From Left to Right: Dr. Will Happer, Dr. Richard Lindzen & Dr. Patrick Moore

AUSTIN, Texas - A team of prominent scientists gathered in Texas today at a climate summit to declare that fears of man-made global warming were “irrational” and “based on nonsense” that “had nothing to do with science.” They warned that “we are being led down a false path” by the upcoming UN climate summit in Paris.

The scientists appeared at a climate summit sponsored by the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The summit in Austin was titled: “At the Crossroads: Energy & Climate Policy Summit.”

Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen, an emeritus Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT, derided what he termed climate “catastrophism.” “Demonization of CO2 is irrational at best and even modest warming is mostly beneficial,” Lindzen said.

Lindzen cautioned: “The most important thing to keep in mind is - when you ask ‘is it warming, is it cooling’, etc. - is that we are talking about something tiny (temperature changes) and that is the crucial point.” Lindzen also challenged the oft-repeated UN IPCC claim that most of warming over past 50 years was due to mankind. “People get excited over this. Is this statement alarming? No,” Lindzen stated.

“We are speaking of small changes 0.25 Celcius would be about 51% of the recent warming and that strongly suggests a low and inconsequential climate sensitivity - meaning no problem at all,” Lindzen explained. “I urge you when looking at a graph, check the scales! The uncertainty here is tenths of a degree,” he noted. “When someone points to this and says this is the warmest temperature on record. What are they talking about? It’s just nonsense. This is a very tiny change period. And they are arguing over hundredths of a degree when it is uncertain in tenths of a degree,” Lindzen said.

“And the proof that the uncertainty is tenths of a degree are the adjustments that are being made. If you can adjust temperatures to 2/10ths of a degree, it means it wasn’t certain to 2/10ths of a degree,” he said. (Also See: Scientists balk at ‘hottest year’ claims: Ignores Satellites showing 18 Year ‘Pause’ - ‘We are arguing over the significance of hundredths of a degree’ - The ‘Pause’ continues)

“The UN IPCC wisely avoided making the claim that 51% of a small change in temperature constitutes a problem. They left this to the politicians and anyone who took the bait,” he said.

Lindzen noted that National Academy of Sciences president Dr. Ralph Cicerone has even admitted that there is no evidence for a catastrophic claims of man-made global warming. See: Backing away from climate alarm? NAS Pres. Ralph Cicerone says ‘we don’t have that kind of evidence’ to claim we are ‘going to fry’ from AGW.

Lindzen also featured 2006 quotes from Scientist Dr. Miike Hulme, Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, and Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, admitting that claims of a climate catastrophe were not the ‘language of science.’

“The discourse of catastrophe is a campaigning device,” Hulme wrote to the BBC in 2006. “The language of catastrophe is not the language of science. To state that climate change will be ‘catastrophic’ hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which do not emerge from empirical or theoretical science,” Hulme wrote. “Is any amount of climate change catastrophic? Catastrophic for whom, for where, and by when? What index is being used to measure the catastrophe?” Hulme continued.

Lindzen singled out Secretary of State John Kerry for his ‘ignorance’ on science. “John Kerry stands alone,” Lindzen said. “Kerry expresses his ignorance of what science is,” he added. Lindzen also criticized EPA Chief Gina McCarthy’s education: “I don’t want to be snobbish, but U Mass Boston is not a very good school,” he said to laughter.

Lindzen concluded his talk by saying: “Learn how to identify claims that have no alarming implications and feel free to say ‘So what?’”

Princeton Physicist Dr. Will Happer, who has authored over 200 peer-reviewed papers, called policies to reduce CO2 “based on nonsense.” “Policies to slow CO2 emissions are really based on nonsense. They are all based on computer models that do not work. We are being led down a false path. “Our breath is not that different from a power plant,” he continued. “To call carbon dioxide a pollutant is really Orwellian. You are calling something a pollutant that we all produce. Where does that lead us eventually?” he asked.

“Coal, formed from ancient CO2, is a benefit to the world. Coal is CO2 from ancient atmospheres. We are simply returning CO2 to the atmosphere from which it came when you burn coal. And it’s a good thing since it is at very low levels in the atmosphere. We are in a CO2 famine. It is very, very low,” Happer explained. Happer continued: “CO2 will be beneficial and crop yields will increase.” “More CO2 will be a very significant benefit to agriculture,” he added. Happer then showed a picture of polluted air in China with the caption: “Real pollution in Shanghai.” “If you can see it, it’s not CO2,” Happer said. “If plants could vote, they would vote for coal,” Happer declared.

Happer also rebutted the alleged 97% consensus. “97% of scientists have often been wrong on many things,” he said.

Ecologist and Greenpeace founding member Dr. Patrick Moore discussed the benefits of rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. “Let’s celebrate CO2!” Moore declared.

“We know for absolute certain that carbon dioxide is the stuff of life, the foundation for life on earth,” Moore said. “We are dealing with pure political propaganda that has nothing to do with science,” he continued. “The deserts are greening from rising CO2,” he added.

“CO2 has provided the basis of life for at least 3.5 billion years,” Moore said.

---------

Se also Nils Axel Morner’s sea Level analysis which will be also distributed at Paris showing the hype about AGW induced sea level rise is unwarranted.

----------

Still the best debunking movie - The Great Global Warming Swindle

UPDATE:

The New ‘Consensus’: 97 Percent Of Americans Aren’t Worried About Global Warming

MICHAEL BASTASCH, Daily Caller

While 97 percent of scientists may agree mankind is driving global warming, 97 percent of Americans don’t seem to care about the issue when stacked up against other concerns such as terrorism or the economy, according to a recent Fox News poll.

A November Fox News poll of more than 1,000 registered voters found that only 3 percent listed “climate change” as the most important issue facing the country today, down from 5 percent in August. Americans were much more worried about terrorism, the economy and immigration than global warming.

Even among Democrats concern for global warming was low. The Fox poll found only 6 percent of Democrats listed global warming as their top concern, compared to 1 percent of Republicans. Men were slightly more likely than women to list global warming as their top concern, and whites were more likely than blacks to worry about warming.

Fox released its poll as President Barack Obama prepares to meet other world leaders in Paris next week for a United Nations climate summit. Obama desperately wants countries to sign onto a global agreement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and make up for his foreign policy failure at Copenhagen in 2009.

But Obama’s climate agenda doesn’t seem to be gaining traction with Americans despite increased efforts to tie global warming to extreme weather, public health concerns and national security.

Democratic mega-donor Tom Steyer spent $73 million during the 2014 election cycle backing liberal candidates and trying to make global warming a top tier issue in campaigns but with little success it would seem.

Steyer, a hedge fund billionaire, has vowed to dump money into getting candidates to talk more about global warming. Steyer held a fundraiser earlier this year for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who later released a plan to build half a billion solar panels by the end of her first term.

Republican donor Jay Faison, a North Carolina businessman, has also pledged to spend big making global warming a top-tier political issue. Faison’s money may have already convinced New Hampshire Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte to support federal regulations limiting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

Faison donated $5,400 to Ayotte’s campaign in June. He also gave $500,000 to a super PAC called Granite State Solutions, according to the Center or Responsive Politics. That PAC could be used to defend Ayotte and other New Hampshire Republican candidates during the 2016 election cycle.

“After carefully reviewing this plan and talking with members of our business community, environmental groups, and other stakeholders, I have decided to support the Clean Power Plan to address climate change through clean energy solutions that will protect our environment,” Ayotte said in a statement last month.

Posted on 11/20 at 12:14 PM
(17) Trackbacks • Permalink

Saturday, November 07, 2015

Is ‘climate change’ really the world’s most pressing problem? (OPINION)

By Gordon Fulks

Famed Nobel laureate in physics Richard Feynman once described science as “the belief in the ignorance of experts.” The very first scientific society, The Royal Society, adopted the motto: “Take nobody’s word for it.” Questioning is the stock-in-trade of scientists; it is the way we discover new things and the way we keep science honest. Without the ability to question conclusions, science degenerates into politics and pseudo-religion.

Yet fanatical proponents of the prevailing climate paradigm, like historian Naomi Oreskes, argue that such questioning is equivalent to the tobacco companies questioning the link between smoking and lung cancer. That is pure political nonsense, because the arbiter in science is always robust data, not opinion. And we scientists relish the opportunity to point out again the very sturdy statistical links between smoking and lung cancer.

The problem with climate science is that the robust data that should backup the alarming conclusions of the establishment are not there. In fact the robust data show no link between man-made CO2 and global temperature. To be sure, propagandists are forever promoting natural climate variations as “proof.” But these are merely proof that our climate continues to cycle in response to natural forces, as it always has. The Minoan, Roman, and Medieval Warm Periods were all warmer than the Modern Warm Period and had nothing to do with our ancestors pulling their chariots with Hummers. This simple logic puts those scientists who earn their living from climate hysteria on the defensive.

Enlarged

Knowing that the robust data is running solidly against them, they are looking elsewhere for a way to win the argument. Climate modelers who have been predicting far more warming than has been observed are particularly on the defensive, because their failures are well documented. To try to salvage something, they have asked President Barack Obama to invoke the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) act to prosecute as mobsters their fellow scientists who dare to disagree with them. When 20 scientists, led by Professor Jagadish Shukla of George Mason University (and GMI Climate Propogandist, Ed Maibach, demanded such action, hurricane expert Peter Webster told atmospheric sciences Professor Judith Curry of Georgia Tech that these scientists had “signed the death warrant for science.” And Lamar Smith, R-Texas, began a congressional inquiry to question such a brazen attack on science and those who practice it. No one imagined how this drama would unfold. It soon became apparent that Shukla had diverted a portion of his $63 million in government contract funds to his family. It seems he was not content with just a lucrative salary.

This scandal is unfolding as the United Nations is about to convene another climate conference in Paris later this month. To make matters worse, well-known French TV meteorologist Philippe Verdier was abruptly removed from French government television for writing a book charging that we “:are hostage to a planetary scandal over climate change - a war machine whose aim is to keep us in fear.”

Will these latest scandals overshadow the Paris conference, as the “Climategate” scandal hung heavily over the Copenhagen conference? My sense is that the participants are now very well-practiced at weathering the perpetual setbacks swirling around them. Total denial has worked for them in the past. Why not now?

What will slow them down is the enormity of what they demand: enormous payments to developing nations and enormous curtailment of industrial activity in the developed world, further shifting it to those developing nations. None of this legitimately addresses any concerns about carbon dioxide, however misguided. It only shifts carbon emissions from one location to another, giving corrupt politicians and bureaucrats a chance to claim success before people realize that they have been duped again by the pervasive propaganda.

One can only hope that Paris will finally mark the unraveling of the vast and greedy climate cartel. The world must move on to far more pressing - and real - problems.

Gordon J. Fulks lives in Corbett and can be reached at gordonfulks@hotmail.com. He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago’s Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research.

Posted on 11/07 at 06:38 PM
(37) Trackbacks • Permalink

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

More lies and chicanery. Buying university and corporate support for leftist ideology

Update:

Global Cooling: Is an Ice Age Coming? The real truth. Politicians, government agencies under their thumb, the greens, corporations and universities all benefiting from the fraud are misleading the public with the help of the all too compliant media. See here how a climate ignorant and incompetent politician continues to make stupid statements that make the news.

See more here.

See first how Corporations are whores for the government like the universities accepting huge funding if they support the warming fraud.

The White House business climate
Firms that take the president’s global warming pledge stand to profit
By Meteorologist Anthony Sadar, Washington Times

The American Business Act on Climate Pledge continues to attract new customers. Last week the White House announced new commitments to its mantra that may become just another solemn affirmation required of businesses before they are handed lucrative federal government contracts at the expense of “we the people.”

The voluntary pledge, accessible at the White House’s press office website, is mercifully short. A company must support the upcoming November-December climate change agreement in Paris for a low-carbon, sustainable future. From there the business must submit to the conclusion that “multiple benefits [will result] with regard to sustainable economic growth, public health, resilience to natural disasters, and the health of the global environment.” Apparently, there is no downside to joining the fight against inexpensive, poverty-alleviating fossil fuels that have yet to be shown to be the true enemy of the global ecosphere.

Predictably, companies formed to usurp fossil fuel’s place in the energy market, have signed on (Abengoa Bioenergy and Pacific Ethanol, for example). In addition, corporate giants like American Express, Apple, AT&T, General Mills, General Motors, IBM, Pepsi, Coca Cola, and McDonald’s have pledged their support.

Each business provides details on their substantial commitments to operate more efficiently and cause less harm to the environment. There is no doubt about the benefits to the biosphere that these common-sense actions will yield, so the question is this: Why not do the right thing for the right reason? Increased recycling, energy efficiency activities, raw material substitutions, reduced water consumption and the like are what all businesses should be doing anyway to be better stewards of the environment and more conscientious business entities. But simply doing the right thing in this case seems to have a more sinister side when politics steps in.

The White House has apparently generated a list of companies and organizations that will eventually be deemed friendly to the environment and worthy of the government’s largesse and praise, while those not so listed will be shamed into signing, or be called enemies of the earth or simply greedy corporations.

It seems that by signing the pledge, American businesses are tacitly supporting the White House’s leftist ideology that relies on a supposed connection between low-cost fuels and catastrophic global warming to impose new burdens on the American people.

The White House puts its faith in climate prophesies that corroborate its own foregone, convenient conclusions and uses its bully pulpit to force others to convert or die - that is, be smeared and shunned.

The failure of computer models to predict climate change accurately over nearly two decades now shows that sufficient knowledge is definitely lacking to require a reworking of the world economy based on wind mills, solar collectors and biomass, rather than oil, natural gas and coal.

Americans seem to know the relative unimportance of man-made climate change as concerns about such change languish at the bottom of lists of issues that really trouble the citizenry - lists with the economy and terrorism at the top.

Yet, the White House will put the full faith and credit of its citizens on the line at the Paris climate confab to promote drastic economic changes that will do little, if anything, to combat the profound dominance of natural climate change. What is more likely to happen is that large global enterprises and governments interested in wealth redistribution will profit immensely, while the poor will be left, once again, to freeze (or swelter) in the dark.

Meanwhile, big businesses will benefit by pledging their allegiance to the White House, but will the republic, for which it should stand, benefit?

Anthony J. Sadar is a certified consulting meteorologist and author of “In Global Warming We Trust” (Telescope Books, 2012).

--------------

By Dr. Charles Battig (MD)

Now I can finally relax, take a deep breath, and breathe easier. The Environmental Protection Agency, an aggressive arm of the nanny government, has just issued new air quality standards that mandate that the new ‘safe” level of ozone in the air we breathe shall be lowered from the current 75 parts per billion to 70 ppb. I feel better already, perhaps.

I also feel better for all the theoretical lives that will be saved, according to EPA sponsored studies such as this one. However, my joy is tempered by the realization that those are not real lives saved, rather, they are “estimated deaths saved,” as in “We applied health impact assessment methodology to estimate numbers of deaths and other adverse health outcomes that would have been avoided during 2005, 2006, and 2007 if the current (or lower) NAAQS ozone standards had been met. Estimated reductions in ozone concentrations were interpolated according to geographic area and year, and concentration response functions were obtained or derived from the epidemiological literature.”

Thus, the fewer ozone deaths will be taking place in a computer-generated fantasy world, where epidemiological data-torturing takes place by bits and bytes, not in the hospital admission records for real-life patients. The referenced paper concludes: “We estimated that annual numbers of avoided ozone-related premature deaths would have ranged from 1,410 to 2,480 at 75 ppb to 2,450 to 4,130 at 70 ppb, and 5,210 to 7,990 at 60 ppb. Acute respiratory symptoms would have been reduced by 3 million cases and school-loss days by 1 million cases annually if the current 75 ppb standard had been attained. Substantially greater health benefits would have resulted if the CASAC - recommended range of standards (70 to 60 ppb) had been met.”

Such papers are used to justify the EPA’s claims that “[s]tudies indicate that exposure to ozone at levels below 75 ppb—the level of the current standard - can pose serious threats to public health, harm the respiratory system, cause or aggravate asthma and other lung diseases, and is linked to premature death from respiratory and cardiovascular causes.” Lowering of atmospheric ozone concentration is presented as a win for health and associated increased energy costs: “EPA estimates that the benefits of meeting the proposed standards will significantly outweigh the costs. If the standards are finalized, every dollar we invest to meet them will return up to three dollars in health benefits. These large health benefits will be gained from avoiding asthma attacks, heart attacks, missed school days and premature deaths, among other health effects valued at $6.4 to $13 billion annually in 2025 for a standard of 70 ppb, and $19 to $38 billion annually in 2025 for a standard of 65 ppb. Annual costs are estimated at $3.9 billion in 2025 for a standard of 70 ppb, and $15 billion for a standard at 65 ppb.”

As a physician, I am intrigued, if not put off, by the EPA concept of “premature deaths.” How am I to know that that unfortunate patient, who has just died, died prematurely? If asked, he would undoubtedly claim that he had died before his time, no matter the actual cause. All deaths are “premature” when viewed subjectively. The answer lies within the all-knowing, EPA-sponsored computers, as in “health assessment methodology” that claim the ability to define who died before their time.

When independent epidemiological researchers examine real-world patients, real-world hospital admissions, and real-world medical records, the EPA health claims are not validated. In smoggy central California, such a study reported: “Average ground-level ozone (O3) and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) measurements were not correlated with 19,327 patient admissions for asthma at the University of California-Davis Medical Center (UCDMC) during 2010-2012.” Another study concluded: “Overwhelming epidemiologic evidence now indicates that there is no relationship in California between PM and total mortality [also known as ‘premature deaths.’]” Yet another study: “[T]he empirical evidence is that current levels of air quality, ozone and PM2.5, are not causally related to acute deaths for California. An empirical and logical case can be made air quality is not causally related to acute deaths for the rest of the United States.”

Surely smoggy air must be unhealthy. It must be, because it looks so bad. The poster child for such smoggy air is Shanghai, China, where newspaper pictures depict a yellow haze obscuring the visibility of buildings. However, the average lifespan there is 82.5 years, bettering the reported lifespan in any major U.S. city.

Surely pristine nature would be the place to avoid smoggy air. Millions visit the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, in spite of the off-putting name. When it is nature, it is smoky; when man-made, it is smog. Yet the basic chemical process is the same. Native conifers emit organic compounds known as terpenes, which interact with sunlight to produce...smog. Few park visitors are reported being victims of “premature death” secondary to breathing polluted air.

One final reason not to expect the EPA’s claims of ozone reduction and resultant saving of premature deaths of asthma victims to materialize is that the root cause of asthma is not completely known. It may be hereditary, and it may be secondary to environmental factors, or some combination thereof. A variety of factors can trigger an asthma attack in a susceptible individual. It maybe exercise, cold air, or indoor antigens. The Wall Street Journal October 1, 2015 article “Asthma Linked to Missing Bacteria” reported an association with the type of intestinal bacterial flora. A puzzling observation is that even as the EPA air quality standards have achieved a 63-percent reduction in major air pollutants between 1980 and 2014, asthma rates have continued to rise in the U.S. Between 1980 and 2010, asthma incidence in the population is reported to have gone from 3.1 percent to 8.4 percent.

The EPA computers have spoken, and theoretical “premature deaths” will be averted. In the real world, energy prices will likely increase and impact the least advantaged the hardest as they struggle to pay for the air-conditioning and heating by which modern technology protects us from the reality of nature’s health impacts.

Charles G. Battig, M.S., M.D., Piedmont Chapter president, VA-Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment (VA-SEEE). His website is http://www.climateis.com. ICECAP was pleased to sponsor Dr Battig’s attendeance at the early ICCC conferences that we co-sponsored. Dr. Battig has presented at recent conferences and writes frequently on the topic.

Posted on 10/13 at 09:30 AM
(53) Trackbacks • Permalink

Sunday, September 20, 2015

“Climate Change Scare is Population Reduction, Not Science”

The Evil, Lethal Underside of Human Population Control

This statement was written by Paul Driessen as a message to EIR’s September 22, 2015 press conference in Manhattan, announcing the release of the special report, “‘Global Warming’ Scare is Population Reduction, Not Science.” The report features a lengthy interview with Driessen.

One of the dark undersides of the extreme environmental movement is its long obsession with population control. Once linked to alleged resource depletion and global famine, human population control is now tied to the assertion that our Earth cannot possibly meet everyone’s aspirations for modern housing, transportation, energy and living standards ... without causing irreversible climate change and sustainability disasters.

It is also driven by claims that human populations must be reduced and then limited to some arbitrary “carrying capacity.” President Obama’s Science Adviser John Holdren and Pope Francis’ senior climate change adviser Hans Joachim Schellnhuber both say our planet’s maximum carrying capacity is a mere one billion people. (See the special report on the unholy alliance that has been advising Pope Francis on the environment and climate change here. )

Naturally, they are carefully and deliberately vague about exactly HOW we are supposed to “progress” from 7.2 billion men, women and children on our planet today - or a projected 9.6 billion people in 2050 - to just one billion some years from now.

They prefer not to discuss how six to 8.5 billion people are to be removed from the human gene pool...which billions must perish...and who gets to decide. It’s all cloaked in pious, ecological, euphemistic language. However, statements by prominent environmentalists offer solid clues.

Mr. Holdren and Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich have written: “We need to de-develop the United States” and other developed countries, “to bring our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation.” We must then address the “ecologically feasible development of the underdeveloped countries.” [emphasis added - from their Human Ecology book]

Ehrlich also said: “Giving society cheap energy is like giving an idiot child a machine gun.” Even more outrageous, he claimed that the “instant death control” provided by DDT was “responsible for the drastic lowering of death rates” in poor countries. Since those people were not practicing birth control, certainly not at the level he deems necessary, they need to have a “death rate solution” imposed on them.

And so radical environmentalists have waged campaigns against using DDT as a powerful insect repellant to prevent malaria. They oppose modern fertilizers and biotech foods that feed more people from less land, using less water, and even during floods or droughts.

They are also viscerally against all forms of carbon-based and nuclear energy, which yield far more reliable and affordable energy, and far more energy per acre than wind, solar and biofuel alternatives.

These statements and policies make several things abundantly clear.

In the view of population control advocates - mostly less educated, darker skinned people in mostly poor, underdeveloped countries are less desirable, and less worth saving, than people in richer, mostly Caucasian countries. People in the political, ruling classes must be exempt from decisions about population control, resource allocation, housing, travel and living standards.

And someone must decide how many people, having which skills, will be needed to feed and clothe - and provide energy, raw materials and technologies for whatever portion of that remaining one billion people are not in those ruling classes.

From my perspective, it is a crime against humanity to impose policies that pretend to protect the world’s most energy-deprived masses from hypothetical, computer-generated climate, resource depletion and other catastrophes decades from now - by perpetuating energy deprivation, poverty, malnutrition and disease that now kill millions of people every year.

These are all fascinating issues. One has to wonder how the vast majority of the world’s people feel about them - and who will ask President Obama, Pope Francis, Ban Ki Moon and UN climate director Christiana Figueres some of these very troubling and inconvenient questions.

Paul Driessen
Senior policy analyst, Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality
pkdriessen@gmail.com

Access the full reoport and get copies to distribute here.
-----------

UPDATE: Top scientist resigns from post, admits Global Warming is a scam

There is no Global Warming

Hal Lewis, Professor Emeritus UCSB

As reported by the Gateway Pundit: Top US scientist Hal Lewis resigned this week from his post at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He admitted global warming climate change was nothing but a scam in his resignation letter.

From the Telegraph (because for some reason the Liberal Media here in the U.S don’t like this stuff getting out).

The following is a letter to the American Physical Society released to the public by Professor Emeritus of physics Hal Lewis of the University of California at Santa Barbara

Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis
From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence - it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’etre of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it…

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club.

--------

Climate Alarmists demand Obama use the RICO act to Silence Critics

Update: Scientist leading effort to prosecute climate skeptics under RICO ‘paid himself & his wife $1.5 million from govt climate grants for part-time work’

Leader of 20 scientist effort to prosecute climate skeptics under RICO revealed as ‘Climate Profiteer’! ‘From 2012-2014, the Leader of RICO 20 climate scientists paid himself and his wife $1.5 million from government climate grants for part-time work.

George Mason University Professor Jagadish Shukla ( jshukla@gmu.edu) a Lead Author with the UN IPCC, reportedly made lavish profits off the global warming industry while accusing climate skeptics of deceiving the public. Shukla is leader of 20 scientists who are demanding RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) charges be used against skeptics for disagreeing with their view on climate change.

Shukla reportedly moved his government grants through a ‘non-profit’. The group “pays Shukla and wife Anne $500,000 per year for part-time work,” Prof. Roger Pielke Jr. revealed.

“The $350,000-$400,000 per year paid leader of the RICO20 from his ‘non-profit’ was presumably on top of his $250,000 per year academic salary,"Pielke wrote. “That totals to $750,000 per year to the leader of the RICO20 from public money for climate work and going after skeptics. Good work if you can get it,” Pielke Jr. added.

RICO!
By Judith Curry, Climate Etc. Sep 17, 2015
[SEPP Comment: The appalling low being reached by those who do not tolerate intellectual questioning and disagreement.]

Climate Scientists give up on science, talk tobacco, want to jail skeptics
By Jo Nova, Her Blog, Sep 18, 2015

Scientists Ask Obama To Prosecute Global Warming Skeptics
By Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller, Sep 17, 2015

Scientists ask Obama for RICO investigation to end climate debate
By Thomas Richard, Examiner, Sep 17, 2015

Suppressing Scientific Inquiry - The Witch Hunt - Push-Back

Failed Climate Scientists Call For RICO Investigation To Stop Criticisms, And Non-Scientist Claims Scientists Will Cause Next Genocide
By William Briggs, His Blog, Sep 18, 2015

RICO: IPCC and comrades may be prosecuted for racketeering
By Lubos Motl, The Reference Frame, Sep 18, 2015

Silencing Dissent Via the Police (No Climate Free Speech, Part 3)
By Donna Laframboise, NFC, Sep 18, 2015

------------

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

h/t JoNova and James Delingpole - A group of climate scientists, including Professor Kevin Trenberth, have demanded President Obama abuse the RICO act, to silence criticism of their theories.

The letter;

Dear President Obama, Attorney General Lynch, and OSTP Director Holdren,

As you know, an overwhelming majority of climate scientists are convinced about the potentially serious adverse effects of human-induced climate change on human health, agriculture, and biodiversity. We applaud your efforts to regulate emissions and the other steps you are taking. Nonetheless, as climate scientists we are exceedingly concerned that America’s response to climate change. Indeed, the worlds response to climate change is insufficient. The risks posed by climate change, including increasing extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and increasing ocean acidity and potential strategies for addressing them are detailed in the Third National Climate Assessment (2014), Climate Change Impacts in the United States. The stability of the Earth’s climate over the past ten thousand years contributed to the growth of agriculture and therefore, a thriving human civilization. We are now at high risk of seriously destabilizing the Earth’s climate and irreparably harming people around the world, especially the world’s poorest people.

We appreciate that you are making aggressive and imaginative use of the limited tools available to you in the face of a recalcitrant Congress. One additional tool recently proposed by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) investigation of corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change. The actions of these organizations have been extensively documented in peer reviewed academic research (Brulle, 2013) and in recent books including: Doubt is their Product (Michaels, 2008), Climate Cover-Up (Hoggan & Littlemore, 2009), Merchants of Doubt (Oreskes & Conway, 2010), The Climate War (Pooley, 2010), and in The Climate Deception Dossiers (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2015). We strongly endorse Senator Whitehouse’s call for a RICO investigation.

The methods of these organizations are quite similar to those used earlier by the tobacco industry. A RICO investigation (1999 to 2006) played an important role in stopping the tobacco industry from continuing to deceive the American people about the dangers of smoking. If corporations in the fossil fuel industry and their supporters are guilty of the misdeeds that have been documented in books and journal articles, it is imperative that these misdeeds be stopped as soon as possible so that America and the world can get on with the critically important business of finding effective ways to restabilize the Earth’s climate, before even more lasting damage is done.

Sincerely,

Jagadish Shukla, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
Edward Maibach, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
Paul Dirmeyer, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
Barry Klinger, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
Paul Schopf, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
David Straus, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
Edward Sarachik, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Michael Wallace, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Alan Robock, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
Eugenia Kalnay, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
William Lau, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
Kevin Trenberth, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO
T.N. Krishnamurti, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
Vasu Misra, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL
Ben Kirtman, University of Miami, Miami, FL
Robert Dickinson, University of Texas, Austin, TX
Michela Biasutti, Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY
Mark Cane, Columbia University, New York, NY
Lisa Goddard, Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY
Alan Betts, Atmospheric Research, Pittsford, VT

From the thread at William M. Briggs’ post on this:

patrick michaels

September 19, 2015 at 12:16 am

The letter was written by Jagadish Shukla, a climate modeler at George Mason University. His GMU CV lists ~16 million in federal funds in five years, If we back those years (2004-08) out and go forward, he’s probably good for about 100m (that’s1/10 of a billion) in 2006 dollars over his career. But wait, there’s more!

The letter did not come from GMU. It came from his consulting company, the Institute of Global Environment and Society [sic]. There, you will see that his wife and (apparently) his daughter are the administrators, no doubt for a princessly sum, because most CV’s don’t list your outside consulting contracts. But wait, you can get eight for one!

That’s because the largest number of people who signed this miscarriage work for him, at the same company, or at GMU, where probably a load of his consulting stuff is funneled through.;

Talk about RICO! I can’t make this up, it’s too good. They had better hope a vindictive Republican never gets elected while they are still kicking. If that person had control of only one house of Congress, the government would probably run amok against them, to the detriment of all of science, as governments don’t know when or where to stop.

Posted on 09/20 at 07:07 AM
(97) Trackbacks • Permalink

Page 13 of 97 pages « First < 11 12 13 14 15 > Last »