Volcano erupts in Iceland, hundreds evacuated

By Gudjonb Helgason and Paisley Dodds, AP

REYKJAVIK, Iceland - A volcano erupted near a glacier in southern Iceland, shooting ash and molten lava into the air and forcing the evacuation Sunday of hundreds of people from a nearby village.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage from the volcano but a state of emergency was declared in communities near the Eyjafjallajokull glacier and scientists feared the eruption could trigger a larger and potentially more dangerous eruption at the nearby Katla volcano.

Saturday’s eruption, which occurred just before midnight (2000 EDT, 8 p.m.), came weeks after a series of small earthquakes. Television footage showed lava flows along the fissure.

“This was a rather small and peaceful eruption but we are concerned that it could trigger an eruption at the nearby Katla volcano, a vicious volcano that could cause both local and global damage,” said Pall Einarsson, a geophysicist at the University of Iceland’s Institute of Earth Science.

Icecap Note: The volcano Katla is subglacial and has a reputation as one of the most dangerous volcanoes of Iceland. Its peak reaches 1493 m in height and the extension of the glacier Mýrdalsjokull which lies over it reaches 595 km². The crater of the volcano has a diameter of 10 km and the volcano normally erupts every 40 - 80 years. The last eruption took place in 1918, meaning scientists monitor the volcano very carefully. Since 930, 16 eruptions have been documented. The Laki craters and the Eldgja are part of the same volcanic system, so it can be regarded as one of the most powerful in the world.

Authorities evacuated 450 people in the area 160 kilometers (100 miles) southeast of the capital, Reykjavik, said Vidir Reynisson of the Icelandic Civil Protection Department. Evacuation centers were set up near the village of Hella.

The most immediate threat was to livestock because of the caustic gases.

“We had to leave all our animals behind,” Elin Ragnarsdottir, a 47-year-old farmer, told RUV, Iceland’s national broadcaster from one of the evacuation centers. “We got a call and a text message ... and we just went.”

Iceland sits on a large volcanic hot spot in the mid-oceanic ridge. Volcanic eruptions are often triggered by seismic activity when the Earth’s plates move and when magma from deep underground pushes its way to the surface.

Scientists have been monitoring recent activity using seismometers and global positioning instruments,

“This event has had a long prelude in earthquake activity,” Einarsson told The Associated Press. “The volcano has been inflating since the beginning of the year, both rising and swelling. One of the possible scenarios we’re looking at is that this small eruption could bring about something bigger.”

Authorities initially feared the eruption occurred below the 100-square-mile (160 square-kilometer) glacier and could have triggered floods if the glacial ice melted. Scientists, however, concluded from an aerial survey Sunday that the eruption occurred near the glacier in an area where there was no ice.

“This is the best possible place for an eruption,” said Tumi Gudumundsson, a geologist at the University of Iceland.

There hasn’t been an eruption near the Eyjafjallajokull glacier since 1821.

The Icelandic Civil Aviation Administration ordered aircraft to stay 120 nautical miles away from the volcano area, essentially closing it off because visibility is low in some areas. Reykjavik appeared to be unaffected with clear visibility.

All domestic flights were canceled until further notice, the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service reported.

Three Icelandair flights from the U.S. - departing from Seattle, Boston and Orlando, Florida - bound for Keflavik airport in Reykjavik were turned back to Boston, leaving about 500 people waiting, the airline said.

Flights to Stockholm, London, Amsterdam and Frankfurt were scheduled to leave Sunday morning but a flight to Oslo was canceled and passengers were being rerouted. The airline expected further delays throughout Sunday.

First settled by Vikings in the 9th century, Iceland is known as the land of fire and ice because of its volcanos and glaciers.

In the mid 1780s, the Laki volcano erupted, prompting scores to die of famine when livestock and crops were destroyed. During the Middle Ages, Icelanders called the Hekla volcano the “Gateway to Hell,” believing that souls were dragged below. Hekla is Iceland’s most active volcano.

See report on how high latitude volcanoes affect climate with a look at Alaska, Iceland and Kamchatka here.

Climategate: The Warmers Strike Back

Walter E. Williams, Washington Times, Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Stephen Dinan’s Washington Times article “Climate Scientist to Fight Back at Skeptics,” (March 5, 2010) tells of a forthcoming campaign that one global warmer said needs to be “an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach” to gut the credibility of skeptics. “Climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences say they are tired of ‘being treated like political pawns’ and need to fight back...” Part of their strategy is to form a nonprofit organization and use donations to run newspaper ads to criticize critics. Stanford professor and environmentalist Paul Ehrlich, in one of the e-mails obtained by the Washington Times said, “Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules.”

Professor Thomas Sowell’s most recent book, “Intellectuals and Society,” has a quote from Eric Hoffer, “One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputation.” Environmentalist Professor Paul Ehrlich, who’s giving advice to the warmers, is an excellent example of Hoffer’s observation. Ehrlich in his widely read 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” predicted, “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer.” Ehrlich also predicted the earth’s then-5 billion population would starve back to 2 billion people by 2025. In 1969, Dr. Ehrlich warned Britain’s Institute of Biology, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Despite these asinine predictions, Ehrlich has won no less than 16 awards, including the 1980 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ highest award.

Stanford University professor and environmentalist activist Stephen H. Schneider is another scientist involved in the warmer retaliation. In a 1989 Discover Magazine interview, Professor Schneider said, “We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”

Former Colorado Sen. Tim Wirth, now president of the United Nations Foundation, in 1990 said, “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we’ll be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

Environmental activist predictions have been dead wrong. In National Wildlife (July 1975), Nigel Calder warned, “… the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” In the same issue, C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization warned, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.”

George Woodwell’s, founder of the Woods Hole Research Center, comments suggest that the warmers are gearing up for a big propaganda push. In one of his e-mails, Woodwell said that researchers have been ceding too much ground. He criticized Pennsylvania State University for their academic investigation of Professor Michael Mann, who wrote many of the e-mails leaked from the Britain’s now disgraced Climate Research Unit. Stephen Dinan’s Washington Times article reports, “In his e-mail, Mr. Woodwell acknowledged that he is advocating taking ‘an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach’ but said scientists have had their ‘classical reasonableness’ turned against them,” adding, “‘We are dealing with an opposition that is not going to yield to facts or appeals from people who hold themselves in high regard and think their assertions and data are obvious truths.’”

Fortunately, for the American people, Sen. James M. Inhofe, R- Okla., is considering asking the Justice Department to investigate whether climate scientists who receive taxpayer-funded grants have falsified data. He has identified 17 taxpayer-supported scientists who have been major players in the global warming conspiracy. 

Here is an opinion piece by Judith Curry in Physics Today “Can scientists rebuild the public trust in climate science?.”

Spencer: Direct Evidence that Most U.S. Warming Since 1973 Could Be Spurious

By Dr. Roy Spencer

INTRODUCTION
My last few posts have described a new method for quantifying the average Urban Heat Island (UHI) warming effect as a function of population density, using thousands of pairs of temperature measuring stations within 150 km of each other. The results supported previous work which had shown that UHI warming increases logarithmically with population, with the greatest rate of warming occurring at the lowest population densities as population density increases.

Nightlights enlarged here.

But how does this help us determine whether global warming trends have been spuriously inflated by such effects remaining in the leading surface temperature datasets, like those produced by Phil Jones (CRU) and Jim Hansen (NASA/GISS)?

While my quantifying the UHI effect is an interesting exercise, the existence of such an effect spatially (with distance between stations) does not necessarily prove that there has been a spurious warming in the thermometer measurements at those stations over time. The reason why it doesn’t is that, to the extent that the population density of each thermometer site does not change over time, then various levels of UHI contamination at different thermometer sites would probably have little influence on long-term temperature trends. Urbanized locations would indeed be warmer on average, but “global warming” would affect them in about the same way as the more rural locations.

This hypothetical situation seems unlikely, though, since population does indeed increase over time. If we had sufficient truly-rural stations to rely on, we could just throw all the other UHI-contaminated data away. Unfortunately, there are very few long-term records from thermometers that have not experienced some sort of change in their exposure...usually the addition of manmade structures and surfaces that lead to spurious warming.

Thus, we are forced to use data from sites with at least some level of UHI contamination. So the question becomes, how does one adjust for such effects?

As the provider of the officially-blessed GHCN temperature dataset that both Hansen and Jones depend upon, NOAA has chosen a rather painstaking approach where the long-term temperature records from individual thermometer sites have undergone homogeneity “corrections” to their data, mainly based upon (presumably spurious) abrupt temperature changes over time. The coming and going of some stations over the years further complicates the construction of temperature records back 100 years or more.

All of these problems (among others) have led to a hodgepodge of complex adjustments.

A SIMPLER TECHNIQUE TO LOOK FOR SPURIOUS WARMING

I like simplicity of analysis - whenever possible, anyway. Complexity in data analysis should only be added when it is required to elucidate something that is not obvious from a simpler analysis. And it turns out that a simple analysis of publicly available raw (not adjusted) temperature data from NOAA/NESDIS NOAA/NCDC, combined with high-resolution population density data for those temperature monitoring sites, shows clear evidence of UHI warming contaminating the GHCN data for the United States.

I will restrict the analysis to 1973 and later since (1) this is the primary period of warming allegedly due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions; (2) the period having the largest number of monitoring sites has been since 1973; and (3) a relatively short 37-year record maximizes the number of continuously operating stations, avoiding the need to handle transitions as older stations stop operating and newer ones are added.

Similar to my previous posts, for each U.S. station I average together four temperature measurements per day (00, 06, 12, and 18 UTC) to get a daily average temperature (GHCN uses daily max/min data). There must be at least 20 days of such data for a monthly average to be computed. I then include only those stations having at least 90% complete monthly data from 1973 through 2009. Annual cycles in temperature and anomalies are computed from each station separately.

I then compute multi-station average anomalies in 5×5 deg. latitude/longitude boxes, and then compare the temperature trends for the represented regions to those in the CRUTem3 (Phil Jones’) dataset for the same regions. But to determine whether the CRUTem3 dataset has any spurious trends, I further divide my averages into 4 population density classes: 0 to 25; 25 to 100; 100 to 400; and greater than 400 persons per sq. km. The population density data is at a nominal 1 km resolution, available for 1990 and 2000…I use the 2000 data.

All of these restrictions then result in thirteen 24 to 26 5-deg grid boxes over the U.S. having all population classes represented over the 37-year period of record. In comparison, the entire U.S. covers about 40 grid boxes in the CRUTem3 dataset. While the following results are therefore for a regional subset (at least 60%) of the U.S., we will see that the CRUTem3 temperature variations for the entire U.S. do not change substantially when all 31 40 grids are included in the CRUTem3 averaging.

EVIDENCE OF A LARGE SPURIOUS WARMING TREND IN THE U.S. GHCN DATA

The following chart shows yearly area-averaged temperature anomalies from 1973 through 2009 for the 24 to 26 5-deg. grid squares over the U.S. having all four population classes represented (as well as a CRUTem3 average temperature measurement). All anomalies have been recomputed relative to the 30-year period, 1973-2002. (below, enlarged here.

The heavy red line is from the CRUTem3 dataset, and so might be considered one of the “official” estimates. The heavy blue curve is the lowest population class. (The other 3 population classes clutter the figure too much to show, but we will soon see those results in a more useful form.)

Significantly, the warming trend in the lowest population class is only 47% of the CRUTem3 trend, a factor of two difference.

Also interesting is that in the CRUTem3 data, 1998 and 2006 would be the two warmest years during this period of record. But in the lowest population class data, the two warmest years are 1987 and 1990. When the CRUTem3 data for the whole U.S. are analyzed (the lighter red line) the two warmest years are swapped, 2006 is 1st and then 1998 2nd.

From looking at the warmest years in the CRUTem3 data, one gets the impression that each new high-temperature year supersedes the previous one in intensity. But the low-population stations show just the opposite: the intensity of the warmest years is actually decreasing over time.

To get a better idea of how the calculated warming trend depends upon population density for all 4 classes, the following graph shows - just like the spatial UHI effect on temperatures I have previously reported on - that the warming trend goes down nonlinearly as population density of the stations decrease. In fact, extrapolation of these results to zero population density might produce little warming at all! (below, enlarged here. )

This is a very significant result. It suggests the possibility that there has been essentially no warming in the U.S. since the 1970s.

Also, note that the highest population class actually exhibits slightly more warming than that seen in the CRUTem3 dataset. This provides additional confidence that the effects demonstrated here are real.

Finally, the next graph shows the difference between the lowest population density class results seen in the first graph above. This provides a better idea of which years contribute to the large difference in warming trends. (below, enlarged here. )

Taken together, I believe these results provide powerful and direct evidence that the GHCN data still has a substantial spurious warming component, at least for the period (since 1973) and region (U.S.) addressed here.

There is a clear need for new, independent analyses of the global temperature data…the raw data, that is. As I have mentioned before, we need independent groups doing new and independent global temperature analyses - not international committees of Nobel laureates passing down opinions on tablets of stone.

But, as always, the analysis presented above is meant more for stimulating thought and discussion, and does not equal a peer-reviewed paper. Caveat emptor. See full post and more here.

The Real Deniers - in Full Cognitive Dissonance Mode

McIntyre accused by University of Queensland Prof of CRU break in
Watts Up With That from Andrew Bolt’s blog at the Herald Sun

Professor John Quiggin complains of smears by sceptics:

In recent years, science and scientific institutions have come under increasingly vociferous attack, with accusations of fraud, incompetence and even aspirations to world domination becoming commonplace. Scientists have been constrained in fighting back by the fact that they are ethically constrained to be honest, whereas their opponents lie without any compunction.

Ethically unconstrained, Professor John Quiggin smears a sceptic:

writing my previous post on the “Climategate” break-in to the University of East Anglia computer system, I remained unclear about who was actually responsible for the break-in theft of the emails, which were then selectively quoted to promote a bogus allegation of scientific fraud. Looking over the evidence that is now available, I think there is enough to point to Steven McIntyre as the person, along with the actual hacker or leaker, who bears primary moral responsibility for the crime.

So, to sum up, McIntyre organised the campaign which led to the creation of the file, obtained information from the CRU file system by means he declined to reveal, received the stolen emails shortly after the theft and made dishonest and defamatory use of the stolen information. Whether or not he was directly involved in the theft, or merely created the opportunity and benefited from the proceeds is impossible to determine, and essentially irrelevant.

OK professor, let’s see your evidence beyond this missive.

Somebody needs to educate Quiggin on the CRU ftp security blunder that was “the mole”. He doesn’t get it, and then proceeds to use that as “evidence” against McIntyre. It’s comical.

Here’s Professor Quiggin’s page at the University of Queensland.

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Climate Realists reports here: Sad news: George Monbiot, the high priest of the AGW cult, is feeling frustrated and depressed. He is oppressed by the realisation that, as the politicians phrase it, he is not getting his message across. And this blog, at least in a small way, bears some part of the responsibility. From his pontifical throne in the Vatican of global warming - The Guardian - he has issued an anathema. Quoting from a recent anti-AGW scam posting by me, he observes: “The attack on climate scientists is now widening to an all-out war on science.” Don’t get carried away, George. It is only an all-out war on bogus science, such as the global warming superstition you champion.

Paul Erlich, the master of exagerration and the epitome of a false prophet was given the platform by Nature and in his op ed he begins “The integrity of climate research has taken a very public battering in recent months. Scientists must now emphasize the science, while acknowledging that they are in a street fight. Climate scientists are on the defensive, knocked off balance by a re-energized community of global-warming deniers who, by dominating the media agenda, are sowing doubts about the fundamental science. Most researchers find themselves completely out of their league in this kind of battle because it’s only superficially about the science. The real goal is to stoke the angry fires of talk radio, cable news, the blogosphere and the like, all of which feed off of contrarian story lines and seldom make the time to assess facts and weigh evidence. Civility, honesty, fact and perspective are irrelevant.

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ABC News in Australia reports an Independent body to review UN climate panel

United Nations chief Ban Ki-Moon has announced a respected international body will conduct an independent review of UN climate science after a global warming report was found to have errors. But Mr Ban says the errors should not affect the conclusion that human activities are changing the climate and that greenhouse gas emissions should be cut urgently. “The threat posed by climate change is real, and nothing that has been alleged or revealed in the media recently alters the fundamental scientific consensus on climate change,” he said. The verdict is in before the jury is even assembled.

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Concerns raised over Institute of Physics climate submission to Parliament

A statement submitted by the Institute of Physics (IOP) to a parliamentary inquiry on climate change continues to draw criticism, with one senior physicist saying that it is “not worthy” of the organization. Others have complained that the statement appears to play into the hands of climate “sceptics”, as it criticizes scientists for withholding climate data when requested using the UK’s Freedom of Information Act. The IOP, which owns the company that publishes physicsworld.com, has responded by making it clear that it believes in man-made climate change and that its submission was criticizing instead the practices of the climate scientists at the centre of the inquiry. See the IOP page and comments here. See Watts Up With That coverage and comments here.

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And in this fairytale story from down under, AUSTRALIA’s two leading scientific agencies released a report today showing Australia has warmed significantly over the past 50 years, and stating categorically that “climate change is real”. The State of the Climate snapshot, drawn together by CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology partly in response to recent attacks on the science underpinning climate change, shows that Australia’s mean temperature has increased 0.7 degrees since 1960. No mention of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, Great Pacific Climate Shift, the historic solar cycle or Warwick Hughes’ analysis of rural stations (with no UHI) all of which remain standing in contradiction of this.

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At a briefing on Capitol Hill yesterday, Stanford University communication professor Jon Krosnick presented his ‘analysis’ estimating the impact of “ClimateGate” on public perceptions of climate change and of climate scientists. The briefing was co-sponsored by the high priests of the church of AGW in the The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Meteorological Society (AMS), and the American Statistical Association (ASA).  You missed nothing if you were not able to attend.

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Ands finally in It’s Gettin’ Hot in Here: The Big Battle Over Climate Science in Discover Magazine, the king of the fraudsters, Michael Mann is grilled.
On Tom Nelson’s Blog

[Q] Who might have done the hacking?
[Michael Mann] It appears to have been extremely well orchestrated, a very professional job. There also appears to have been a well-organized PR campaign that was all ready to go at the time these e-mails were released. And that campaign, involving all sorts of organizations that have lobbied against climate change legislation, has led some people to conclude that this is connected to a larger campaign by special interests to attack the science of climate change, to prevent policy action from being taken to deal with the problem.
...
[Q] Judith Curry has been an outspoken critic of your work and of a lot of climate researchers in general.
[Mann] Did you ask Judith to turn over her e-mails from the past three years? Once she does that, then she’s in a position to judge other scientists. Until she does that, she is not in a position to be talking about other scientists. Glass houses. Look, I’ll just say this. I’ve received e-mails from Judith that she would not want to be made public.
...
[Q] What is the worst-case scenario? Are we talking about the risk of our demise as a species?
[Mann] That’s what scares me, yeah.  yeah and maybe the other shoe to drop

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Cold Mid-Latitude Winter May have Implications on Hurricane Season
By Joseph D’Aleo, March 13, 2010

The blocking high pressure in the Polar Regions that dominated the winter and produced the record low arctic oscillation and a bitter winter in Mid-Latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere had effects further south that could have implications this hurricane season (below, enlarged here).

This pushed the subtropical high south of normal and made it weaker than normal. Winds were less than normal and cloudiness and precipitation were suppressed in the subtropics.

Mean winter pressure (above, enlarged here) - less than normal with center south of normal .

Mean winter surface winds (above, enlarged here) were weaker than normal through lower subtropics leading to less mixing of water and the development of a shallow pool of warm surface water and less upwelling of cold water off Africa from normal stronger northerly winds.

Also with the high pressure suppressed south of normal, cloudiness (above, enlarged here) was suppressed due to subsidence which further allowed more sunshine to warm the water (below, enlarged here).

Also last season tropical activity was suppressed by El Nino. Tropical storms are a heat compensation mechanism, removing excess tropical ocean heat built up through the summer and peaking in the late summer and early fall and transporting that heat north in the form of sensible and latent heat in tropical storms. Less heat was removed last season than in an active season.

The big question is whether El Nino hangs on long enough to affect this season. Seasons after El Nino years tend to see a big rebound in activity (below, enlarged here).

Most ENSO models suggests it dies this summer. However westerly wind bursts continue to maintain a suppressed thermocline in the central Pacific with Kelvin waves that carry warm water east. Looks like at least one more El Nino bounce though with the warmest water more towards the central Pacific. El Ninos as you know and as we saw last summer, tend to reduce Atlantic activity and landfall threat by increasing the shear in the Atlantic basin.

Longer term, a negative PDO mode (temporarily weakened by El Nino), should ensure the next major ENSO event is La Nina perhaps later this year. See post here.

Global Urban Heat Island Effect Study: An Update

By Roy W. Spencer, Ph.D.

My post from yesterday showed a rather unexpected difference between the United States versus the rest of the world for the average urban heat island (UHI) temperature-population relationship. Updated results shown below have now reduced that discrepancy...but not removed it.

I have now included more station temperature and population data by removing my requirement that two neighboring temperature measurement stations must have similar fractions of water coverage (lakes, coastlines, etc.). The results (shown below, second panel) reveal less of a discrepancy between the U.S. and the rest of the world than in my previous post. The US now shows weak warming at the lowest population densities, rather than cooling as was presented yesterday.

Also, I adjusted the population bin boundaries used for averaging to provide more uniform numbers of station pairs per bin. This has reduced the differences between individual years (top panel), suggesting more robust results. It has also increased the overall UHI warming effect, with about 1.0 deg. C average warming at a population density of 100 persons per sq. km.

See enlarged for both here.

This is an update to my previous post describing a new technique for estimating the average amount of urban heat island (UHI) warming accompanying an increase in population density. The analysis is based upon 4x per day temperature observations in the NOAA International Surface Hourly (ISH) dataset, and on 1 km population density data for the year 2000.

John Christy has agreed to co-author a paper on this new technique, since he has some experience publishing in this area of research (UHI & land use change effects on thermometer data) than me. We have not yet decided what journal to submit to.

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On the “march of the thermometers”
By Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That

I’ve been away from WUWT this weekend for recovery from a cold plus family time as we have visitors, so I’m just now getting back to regular posting.  Recently on the web there has been a lot of activity and discussions around the issue of the dropping of climatic weather stations aka “the march of the thermometers” as Joe D’Aleo and I reported in this compendium report on issues with surface temperature records.

Most of the station dropout issue covered in that report is based on the hard work of E. M. Smith, aka “chiefio, who has been aggressively working through the data bias issues that develop when thermometers have been dropped from the Global Historical Climate Network. My contribution to the study of the dropout issue was essentially zero, as I focused on contributing what I’ve been studying for the past three years, the USHCN. USHCN has had a few station dropout issues, mostly due to closure, but nothing compared to the magnitude of what has happened in the GHCN.

That said, the GHCN station dropout Smith has been working on is a significant event, going from an inventory of 7000 stations worldwide to about 1000 now, and with lopsided spatial coverage of the globe. According to Smith, there’s also been an affinity for retaining airport stations over other kinds of stations. His count shows 92% of GHCN stations in the USA are sited at airports, with about 41% worldwide.

The dropout issue has been known for quite some time. In this post there is a video that WUWT contributor John Goetz made in March 2008 that shows the global station dropout issue over time. You might want to hit the pause button at time 1:06 to see what recent global inventory looks like.

The question that is being debated is how that dropout affects the outcome of absolutes, averages, and trends. Some say that while the data bias issues show up in absolutes and averaging, it doesn’t effect trends at all when anomaly methods are applied.

Over at Lucia’s Blackboard blog there have been a couple of posts on the issue that raise some questions on methods.  I’d like to thank both Lucia Liljegren and Zeke Hausfather for exploring the issue in an “open source” way. All the methods and code used have been posted there at Lucia’s blog which enables a number of people to have a look at and replicate the issue independently. That’s good.

E.M Smith at “chiefio” has completed a very detailed response to the issues raised there and elsewhere. You can read his essay here. His essay is lengthy, I recommend giving yourself more than a few minutes to take it all in. Joe D’Aleo and I will have more to say on this issue also. See post here.

Icecap Note: See also this post here.

See the number of missing months increase (enlarged here) with a strong bias towards the colder months.

See also this one on Alert station in Canada and GISS.
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Follow the Money

Enough is enough.

It’s about time that someone once and for all puts the lie to the recurrent charges that the AGW skeptical community is supported by “Big Oil”, or is populated by “flat-earthers”, or by those who in the past have been complicit with “the tobacco lobby”. These transparently pejorative statements are frequent inclusions in postings and commentary by AGW proponents , sometimes by less committed followers of the AGW controversy and even by some posters who are intellectually inclined to side with the skeptics. There are rarely any substantiating statements to support these allegations which in the absence of any formal repudiation by those so categorized, take on a life of their own like so many urban myths that populate the blogosphere.

The facts are that quite the opposite is the case. For example, let’s take “Big Oil”. BP has contributed over $500 Million to UC Berkeley, one of the Bay Area’s centers of AGW support, for its Energy Biosciences Institute. 

Stanford University has received $225 Million from ExxonMobil, Toyota and Schlumberger for its Global Climate and Energy Project.  That money will be combined with a $50 Million donation from alumnus Jay Precourt whose career as an oil engineer included such companies as Hamilton Oil and Tejas Gas Corp. The new entity will be named the Precourt Center for Energy Efficiency. See here.

Compare these numbers with a total of ~$6.4 Million over a 4-year period between 2002-2005 provided to non-academic and presumably more conservative think tanks by ExxonMobile according to data acquired by EDF (hardly an unbiased source). See here.

As for individuals active in the promotion of AGW, Susan Solomon, a Phd from Stanford and a lead author of the 2007 IPC Report was a recipient of the 2004 Blue Planet Prize, a 50 Million Yen (~$460,000) cash award from the Asahi Glass Foundation , see here. Other high profile figures such as James Hansen and Michael Mann have received six-figure amounts from organizations such as the Theresa Heinz Foundation and the Dan David Foundation. It seems as though being a staunch proponent of AGW is a very rewarding position to have.

These are just a fractional example of the money that has flowed from the private sector to individuals and academic institutions friendly to the notion of anthropogenic influences on the environment. Over the past 10 years Government funding to such organizations has been conservatively estimated at well over $50 Billion.

Compare these enormous sums of money with the amounts that are received by prominent and well qualified members of the skeptical community. I know from personal association that external funding for such sites as WUWT and icecap is in the low five figures and comes almost exclusively from individual donations from those who access these sites.  It would seem that the thinly veiled assertions from those expressing an alarmist position that people who adopt a more skeptical attitude are somehow insincere and must be doing it for the money. Since this is patently untrue, I submit that such accusations are more likely to be evidence of projection than of fiscal reality and they are more designed to obfuscate than enlighten the debate. 

See more here. 

2001-2010 was the Snowiest Decade on Record

By Steve Goddard Guest Post on Watts Up With That

Snow blankets New York City. Photo: Del Mundo, New York Daily News

Now that we have reached the end of the meteorological winter (December-February,) Rutgers University Global Snow Lab numbers (1967-2010) show that the just completed decade (2001-2010) had the snowiest Northern Hemisphere winters on record.  The just completed winter was also the second snowiest on record, exceeded only by 1978.  Average winter snow extent during the past decade was greater than 45,500,000 km2, beating out the 1960s by about 70,000 km2, and beating out the 1990s by nearly 1,000,000 km2.  The bar chart below (enlarged here) shows average winter snow extent for each decade going back to the late 1960s.

Here are a few interesting facts.

Average winter snow extent has increased since the 1990s, by nearly the area of Texas and California combined.

Three of the four snowiest winters in the Rutgers record occurred during the last decade - the top four winters are (in order) 1978, 2010, 2008, 2003. The third week of February, 2010 had the second highest weekly extent (52,170,000 m2) out of the 2,229 week record.

The bar graph below (enlarged here) shows winter data for each year in the Rutgers database, color coded by decade.  The yellow line shows the mean winter snow extent through the period.  Note that the past decade only had two winters below 45 million km2.  The 1990s had seven winters below the 45 million km2, the 1980s had five winters below 45 million km2, and the 1970s had four winters below 45 million km2.  This indicates that the past decade not only had the most snowfall, but it also had the most consistently high snowfall, year over year.

It appears that AGW claims of the demise of snowfall have been exaggerated.  And so far things are not looking very good for the climate model predictions of declining snowfall in the 21st century.

Many regions of the Northern Hemisphere have seen record snowfall this winter, including Washington D.C, Moscow, China, and Korea.  Dr. Hansen’s office at Columbia University has seen record snowfall, and Al Gore has ineptly described the record snow: “Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm,”

A decade long record across the entire Northern Hemisphere is not appropriately described as a “snowstorm.” See post and comments here.

‘Snowball Earth’: Glaciers, ice packs once met at Equator

By Lewis Page, The Register

Macdonald says that glaciers on land at the Equator means solid pack ice at sea in the tropics, too.

“Climate modeling has long predicted that if sea ice were ever to develop within 30 degrees latitude of the equator, the whole ocean would rapidly freeze over,” he says. “So our result implies quite strongly that ice would have been found at all latitudes during the Sturtian glaciation.”

Enlarged here.

Even on Snowball Earth, however, it’s thought that there must have been “refugia” where liquid surface water and at least occasional sunlight remained, as proto-animal life above the bacterial level is believed to have arisen and survived at around the time of the first, Sturtian snowballing. Macdonald considers that the big freeze may actually have stimulated early, primitive life to get its act together and begin the long process which has led to the present-day biosphere.

“The fossil record suggests that all of the major eukaryotic [other than microbial] groups, with the possible exception of animals, existed before the Sturtian glaciation,” says the prof. “The questions that arise from this are: If a snowball Earth existed, how did these eukaryotes survive? Did the Sturtian snowball Earth stimulate evolution and the origin of animals?”

“From an evolutionary perspective,” he adds, “it’s not always a bad thing for life on Earth to face severe stress.”

Macdonald and his colleagues aren’t sure what triggered the Sturtian snowball effect, but note that a lot of lava came to the earth’s surface at around that point, suggesting that the big chill could have been kicked off by volcanic dust darkening the skies.

The Harvard team publish their results this week in hefty boffinry mag Science.

Global warming may be normal at this point in glacial cycle
By Lewis Page, The Register

German and Russian scientists say that it is normal for an interglacial period like the one just ending to finish with one or more brief - in geological terms - spells of warming before the glaciers return.

According to boffins based at the Helmholtz-Zentrum für Umweltforschung (UFZ) and at the Russian Academy of Sciences, in the Earth’s history thus far there have been eras where the glaciers covered much of Europe, lasting about 100,000 years. These are separated by warmer interglacial periods lasting around 10,000 years. We are currently at the end of an interglacial era called the Holocene.

The scientists, looking into the last interglacial period - the Eemian - which ended around 115,000 years ago, say they have found that that it ended with “significant climate fluctuations” before the rule of the glaciers returned.

The scientists got their results by examining ancient lake sediments exposed by modern open-cast mining in Russia and Germany. They believe that the end of the Eemian interglacial epoch saw “possibly at least two” warming events, according to a statement issued by the UFZ.

“The observed instability with the proven occurrence of short warming events during the transition from the last interglacial to the last glacial epoch could be, when viewed carefully, a general, naturally occurring characteristic of such transition phases,” concludes UFZ boffin Dr Tatjana Boettger.

Boettger and her fellow researchers say that the Eemian ice-free period wound up with sudden - in these terms - warming spells and serious changes in vegetation. Then the glaciers surged south, at their high tide 21,000 years ago reaching as far as Berlin.

This Weichselian Glacial era ended around 15,000 years ago, leading to the conditions which have been seen for all of human history with the ice caps confined to the polar regions. The UFZ says that this Holocene era reached its “highest point so far around 6000 years ago” and that we might now expect to see sudden warmings and changes as at the end of the Eemian - followed by a slow descent into another freezing glacial era.

“Detailed studies of these phenomena are important for understanding the current controversial discussed climate trend so that we can assess the human contribution to climate change with more certainty,” comments Dr Frank W Junge of the Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Saxon Academy of Sciences, SAW) in Leipzig.

The profs’ paper Instability of climate and vegetation dynamics in Central and Eastern Europe during the final stage of the Last Interglacial (Eemian, Mikulino) and Early Glaciation can be read here (subscriber link).

‘Gore Effect’ Comes to His Home State

Coldest Winter In 30 Years and Coldest February Since 1979
By Meteorologist Bobby Boyd, National Weather Service, Nashville, Tennessee


Photo Credit: Bobby Boyd

It’s been unusually cold this winter across Middle Tennessee (coldest in 30 years) with all three winter months below normal in temperature at Nashville for the first time since the winter of 1977-1978. The temperature this winter (Dec, Jan, Feb) averaged 35.6 degrees making the meteorological winter of 2009-2010 the 11th coldest on record and the coldest since the winter of 1978-1979. The temperature this winter in Nashville averaged 4.0 degrees below normal. The coldest temperature this winter in Nashville was 8 degrees on January 10, 2010.

The months of December, January and February are considered the meteorological winter by most meteorologists and climatologists as opposed to the astronomical winter which begins with the winter solstice and ends with the vernal equinox.

Rainfall totaled 10.89 inches for the winter months which is 1.31 inches below normal. Snowfall for the winter months totaled 7.1 inches. While only a trace of snow fell in December 2009, January totaled 4.8 inches and February 2.3 inches. This has been the snowiest winter in the Nashville area since the winter of 2002-2003 when 15.1 inches fell. Average winter snowfall is 9.1 inches for the Nashville area.

Coldest Winters In Nashville
1.  1977-1978
2.  1962-1963
3.  1976-1977
4.  1917-1918
5.  1935-1936
6.  1904-1905
7.  1901-1902
8.  1885-1886
9.  1978-1979
10.  1963-1964
11.  2009-2010
12.  1894-1895

February 2010 ended 6.9 degrees below normal making it the 12th coldest February on record in Nashville and the coldest since 1979. The temperature reached 50 degrees only on 4 days during the month of February. This is the fewest 50 degree days since February 1978 when 50 degrees was reached only on 1 day during the month, which is the fewest ever in the month of February. The temperature reached 60 degrees only on 2 days in February of 2010. This is the fewest 60 degree days in February since 1978 when Nashville failed to reach the 60 degree mark for the only time in the month of February.

Rainfall during the month of February totaled 2.77 inches which was 0.92 inches below normal. Snowfall totaled 2.3 inches in February. Average snowfall in February is 3.4 inches.

Coldest Februarys on record.
1.  1978
2.  1899
3.  1895
4.  1905
5.  1958
6.  1902
7.  1947
8.  1968
9.  1885
10. 1979
11. 1963
12. 2010

Read more here.

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The coldest winter in three decades in South Florida here.

A colder-than-normal February wrapped up the coldest winter since the early 1980s over south Florida. Almost all main weather reporting sites recorded the coldest December-February average temperature since 1981, except for Miami International Airport which recorded its coldest average winter temperature since 1986. December to February temperatures ended up about 2 to 3 degrees below normal, which is remarkable considering that December was 2 to 3 degrees above normal.

These values resulted in the following all-time recorded rankings: Miami Beach recorded its 2nd coldest winter on record; Naples recorded its 6th coldest winter on record; Moore Haven its 8th coldest and West Palm Beach its 10th coldest winter on record.

The extended periods of cold temperatures in January and February resulted in average temperatures during that two-month period of 4 to 5 degrees below normal. This resulted in all four main climate stations recording among the top 10 coldest January-February temperatures on record. Miami Beach set a record for its all-time coldest January-February on record (previous record set in 1958). In West Palm Beach, it was the 2nd coldest January-February on record; Naples recorded its 3rd coldest January-February, Moore Haven its 3rd coldest, Fort Lauderdale its 8th coldest and Miami its 10th coldest January-February average temperature on record. Only in the winters of 1940, 1958, 1977 and 1981 did January-February average temperatures come close to what was observed in 2010. The coldest period observed this winter was between January 2nd and January 13th when south Florida experienced one of its coldest 12-day periods on record (read more about this exceptional cold episode here).

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First Tornado Free February in at Least 60 Years

See also here where this is the first February without a tornado for the United States in at least 60 years.

February typically has 22 tornadoes on average, based on reports dating back to 1950 from the SPC. “Despite it being an El Nino year, which would normally mean severe weather in the South, the jet stream has been depressing cold air very far south and it has combined with cooler-than-normal Gulf of Mexico water temperatures,” Margusity said. “These have led to the suppression of severe weather in February.”

However, this would not be the first tornado-free month on record. According to the SPC, only five months since 1950 have failed to turn in a tornado report: October 1952, December 1963, November 1976, January 1986 and January 2003. Story thanks to AccuWeather.com’s Jon Auciello.

New Global Warming Data Reveals “Accurate Hockey Stick Graph”

Pajamas Media

The data underlying the famous “hockey stick” global warming graph has finally been found after having earlier been misplaced by leading climate researchers. The newly recovered data confirms the accuracy of the abrupt upward turn in readings characteristic of the “hockey stick” shape found in many global warming projections.

Up until now, however, the data on which the controversial graph had been based was presumed to be lost, so it was not known exactly which aspects of global warming the chart illustrated. Now that the data has been recovered, scientists can state with complete certainty that this updated chart accurately chronicles the past and future trajectory of the global warming crisis.

View the full-size graph by clicking HERE or on the small version shown below:

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Snowicane - Major Storm Clobbers Northeast
By Joseph D’Aleo

A major nor’easter with hurricane force winds, mountainous snowfalls, flooding rains has slammed the northeast leaving at least 700,000 homes and businesses without electricity. Power failures were so bad in New Hampshire that even the state Emergency Operations Center was operating on a generator. Meanwhile in this upside down storm, it was rain and hurricane force winds in eastern New England with a wind gust of 91 mph at Isle of Shoals near Portsmouth, New Hamsphire and 94 mph at Cape Elizabeth, ME, well above hurricane force of 74 mph. Gusts hit 60 mph or more from New York’s Long Island to Massachusetts.

Public Service of New Hampshire, the state’s largest utility, reported power cut to at least 237,000 homes and businesses and said it would take days before everyone’s lights flickered back on. New York had more than 220,000 customers without power, mostly in the Hudson Valley north of New York City. Maine reported 130,000, Massachusetts 100,000, Vermont 25,000 and New Jersey 11,000.

New York City’s Central Park has had 20.9 inches as of 7 pm Friday, the fourth greatest for any storm in New York City since 1869. It is a new record monthly snow FOR ANY MONTH with 36.9 inches breaking the old record of 30.5 in March 1896.

But up in the Catskills, they hit the jackpot with a 5-day total of 84 inches at Hunter Mountain and 60 inches at Windham. Here is this Friday’s newsletter email from Hunter Mountain.

Good morning from Hunter Mountain!!

We wanted to let you know that we’ve received 60” of snow (they added at least 5 during Friday) in the last 3 days… and we wanted to invite you to come up and shoot some photos, film, or just to see this crazy snow for yourself!

We watched the weather report this morning, and they reported a mere 30” total in Greene County—it made us laugh. There’s more than 5 feet of snow in Hunter, with roadside snowbanks 10-12 feet high.

It’s still snowing here, albeit lightly… but we’re expected to get another 4-8” today as the storm winds its way back and hits us again!

If you’d like to come up, or if you’d like more info on the “Snowicane” of 2010, hit me up! We can certainly make arrangements for you. This is epic snow that has not been present in the area since the 30’s and 50’s—come up and take a bit ol’ bite of snowstorm history here, folks! We’ve had hundreds of die-hard skiers and riders here to ski and ride through this storm!

We hope you’ll consider taking a ride up here… the snow has calmed a bit, the roads are in good shape. For up-to-date info on our operations, visit the Hunterblog. Check our Photo Gallery for some photos from the past few days… our webcams are running as well (we’re working on digging out the summit cam...). As we’ve been telling our fans & followers… come get some!!

See the Bloomberg story on the new monthly record here.

From New York to northern New England Mountains, near or more than 4 feet of snow fell. Sunday, River, Sugarloaf in ME, Stove in VT over 50 inches so far. Another foot or more coming tomorrow in a wrap around storm.

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Depth of two-day snowfall remains blanketed in mystery
By By Frank D. Roylance, Baltimore Sun

The blizzard that heaped more than 2 feet of snow on Baltimore on Feb. 5 and 6 was probably the deepest two-day snowfall on record. But we might never be sure how deep it was.

A contractor working for the Federal Aviation Administration at BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport, paid to measure the snow for the aviation industry’s needs, did not follow a separate protocol required by the National Weather Service and the National Climatic Data Center for valid climate data.

So while the contractor measured 28.8 inches of snow during that storm, the National Weather Service has thrown out the reading. Instead, climatologists will rank the storm as “only” 24.8 inches - a number that almost surely understates the “true” total.

Worse, for climatologists, it now appears the weather service’s rules for snow data had been ignored for years at BWI, throwing a cloud over the validity of snow totals as far back as 1998, when the FAA took the job over from the weather service.

Only BWI’s data are known to be affected, but the problem could be more widespread. That possibility has caught the attention of top officials at the FAA.

“We plan to meet with the National Weather Service next week to begin a discussion on making sure that we’re all on the same page in terms of measuring snow accumulations at our airports,” FAA spokesman Jim Peters said. “There will be a national discussion.”

In the meantime, the weather service’s Baltimore- Washington Forecast Office in Sterling, Va., is preparing to convene a committee of climatologists and other experts to review Baltimore’s snowfall records from the 2010 and 2003 storms, and perhaps back to 1998.

“I feel very strongly about historical records and getting the climate data correct,” said James E. Lee, the meteorologist-in-charge at Sterling. “Obviously, with the increased media attention and political attention to climate, it is really up to NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, of which the National Weather Service is an agency] to make sure ... the climate record is a genuine one, and consistent to the best of our ability.”

The problem at BWI came to light Feb. 6, as snow accumulations reported at the airport passed 26 inches. They seemed poised to break the record set in February 2003 - the storm listed on Sterling’s Web site as Baltimore’s biggest.

But when reporters called asking about a new record, Lee said that because of measurement errors by an FAA contractor at BWI, the two-day storm total would be pegged at “only” 24.8 inches. He had discarded a 28.8-inch measurement from BWI because it was the sum of hourly measurements throughout the storm - a method invalid for climatological data.

Even at 24.8 inches, Lee said, the storm total beat the previous two-day record of 24.4 inches, set at BWI during two days of the four-day 2003 event. “I’m convinced that was the most amount of snow Baltimore has seen [from a two-day storm] in recorded history.”

But Lee had to use the most conservative reading from the airport - a “snow depth” measurement of the total on the ground when the storm ended, after hours of compaction.

The FAA requires its observers to take hourly snow measurements and wipe the boards clean after each hour, adding the totals as they go. That provides pilots with better real-time information about changing conditions. But it virtually eliminates compaction and so inflates accumulation. Climatologists require measurements every six hours, striking a balance between the hourly and snow depth readings. Some airports maintain separate snow boards for the different protocols. But not BWI.

Richard Carlson, vice president of Pacific Weather Inc., said his company has experienced weather observers at 20 U.S. airports, including eight at BWI. Pacific has held the contract there since 2008.

“We follow the FAA manual ... and that is the guide book on how these meteorological observations are to be taken,” Carlson said. “We had heard about the six-hour measuring thing, but ... if you have high winds at all, this really is not going to work.”

So when Lee questioned the snow data from BWI on Feb. 6, Carlson said, “we informed them [Lee] that we have different criteria, a different manual we are following.” He says the company’s predecessor at BWI also followed FAA rules.

Lee “kept harping back to the six-hour measurement thing,” Carlson said. “That’s meant for climatological purposes, and what we’re doing is operational,” serving the needs of the airport. “He wasn’t real happy.”

Lee wasn’t happy, but there was little he could do. “It’s interesting to have the responsibility for quality control but not the authority to tell the [FAA] contractor what to do,” Lee said.

“In future inspections, this will be raised ... prior to the start of the winter season, to ensure the six-hour swipe is going to be adhered to,” he said.

Shawn Durkin, weather station manager who has worked for Pacific Weather Inc. for 16 years, stands on the rooftop location at BWI where Pacific Weather takes its snow measurements, using a snow board, mounted on the bench to his left, and an 8-inch rain gauge, at right

Read full story here.

Dr. Richard Lindzen’s Talk at Fermilab

By The Hockey Schtick

VIEWS ON CLIMATE CHANGE & CLIMATEGATE

Enlarged here.

Richard Lindzen PhD, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was recently invited to give a talk entitled “The Peculiar Issue of Global Warming” at Fermilab 2/10/10 which you can watch in its entirety with slides here. Dr. Lindzen calmly eviscerates the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) and the IPCC “consensus”. Highly recommended.

Below are 3 slides from the presentation, the first noting that the theory of intelligent design sounds rigorous by comparison to the theory of anthropogenic global warming, the second noting that 3 pro-CAGW publications have already acknowledged that temperature data has contradicted the man-made attribution assumption (primarily CO2), which is the inherent assumption of the IPCC models, and the third noting that the fundamental assumption of CAGW that there is positive feedback by water vapor due to CO2 is “likely wrong”.

Enlarged here.

Enlarged here.

Enlarged here.

See full blog post here.

A Pending American Temperaturegate

By Edward Long, American Thinker

Our study of data-massaging by the U.S. government agency charged with collecting temperature information raises uncomfortable questions.

We have been repeatedly told (perhaps “lectured” is a better word) the past twenty years that global warming is occurring. With Climategate and subsequent confessions and bailouts by scientists at the CRU, Penn State, Arizona State, IPCC, et al., we are learning that little to none of the factual content in their “peer reviewed” articles is true. The Medieval Warming Period did occur, and it was warmer than currently; the oceans are not going to flood the plains; and the Arctic Ocean may not be turning into a summer water park. Of course, the mainstream media, especially in the United States, has reported little of this news, and President Obama appears not to be well-informed. But now the global warming story grows more interesting because here in America, we may have our own little “gate.” I will call it ATG, for “American Temperaturegate.”

NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) informs us, based on their “Adjusted Data” for the period from the last decade of the 19th century to 2006, that the temperature for the contiguous U.S. has increased at a rate of 0.69C/century. Click here. NCDC arrives at this conclusion by massaging raw data from a set of meteorological stations located in the contiguous U.S. which they selected on the basis of a 2.5-degree latitude- and 3.5-degree-longitude grid. For more on this, click here and here. The most-asked question, most recently by D’Aleo and Watts, is whether the NCDC’s reported increase is correct. Perhaps the value is due to a dominant use (over-selection) of stations in urban locations or because of other issues, such as leaving out stations at higher altitudes for the more recent history and retaining them for the more distant past. 

Here, one aspect is considered—that of the Urban Heat Island Effect, which is tagged as UHIE.

We selected two sets of meteorological stations (48 each, with one station per each of the lower 48 states) from the NCDC master list. The stations in one set were at rural locations—a rural set. The stations in the other set were at urban locations—an urban set. The NCDC latitude and longitude station coordinates were used to “fly over” the locations on a computer, using a GPS map application to confirm the rural and urban characteristics. For each of the 96 stations, the NCDC’s raw and adjusted temperature data were entered into a spreadsheet application and studied. The “raw” data are the annual average temperatures of the measured data. The “adjusted” data are the annual average temperatures the NCDC derived from the raw data by making a set of “corrective” assumptions for time of day, type of instrument, etc. and guessing the temperature at stations for missing data based on temperatures of other stations at the same latitude and/or region. For a more in-depth understanding of the NCDC protocols for converting raw data to adjusted data, click here. A summary of the findings is in the following table.  The values in the table (below, enlarged here)show that the NCDC’s rate of increase of temperature, 0.69C/century, is based on an over-selection of stations with urban locations.

The values in the table highlight four important considerations:

1) The rate of increase for rural locations, based on as-measured (raw) values, is small (if not, in effect, zero) at 0.11 C/century. 

2) There is definitely a UHIE in that the urban raw data has a rate of increase of 0.72C/century. This tells us that man has caused warming in urban locations. This finding should not surprise anyone. On the other hand, because the rural value is 15% of the urban value, the UHIE has not caused warming in the rural locations, and it certainly has not caused a global sense of warming other than the aspect that the urban location values when averaged with the rural values produce an average increase which is larger than that of the rural alone. 

3) The rural + urban value for the adjusted data, 0.65C/century, is still less than the 0.69C/century published by the NCDC. Thus, likely, there are more urban than rural sites used by the NCDC. 

4) And this is the “Temperaturegate” aspect: The NCDC’s massaging—they call it “adjusting”—has resulted in an increase in the rural values, from a raw value of 0.11C/century to an adjusted value of 0.58C/century, and no change in the urban values. That is, the NCDC’s treatment has forced the rural value to look more like that of the urban. This is the exact opposite of any rational consideration, given the growth of the sizes of and activities within urban locations, unless deception is the goal.

The criticism this makes of the NCDC’s treatment of historical data for the contiguous U.S. is the same as a recent Russian paper made of the HadCRUT treatment of historical temperature data for Russia. For a thumbnail of the points made in that paper, click here.

See full Temperaturegate story here.

Edward R. Long holds a Ph.D. in physics. He is a retired NASA scientist who is a consultant on radiation physics for space flight and on energy/climate in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

See full paper on SPPI here and an excellent Watts Up With That blog and discussion with comments here.

The Goracle Speaks: Repower America Reports His View of the “Facts”

By Al Gore

With all the climate deniers spreading lies about the climate crisis in the media, it’s vital we arm ourselves with the facts. Thankfully, Repower America put together a great fact sheet explaining the relationship between the climate crisis and extreme weather:

“Fact: Climate change causes more frequent and severe snowstorms
Record snowstorms need two things: temperatures below freezing, and very high humidity. On a planet warmer by a few degrees on average, the Northeast US will still have plenty of days below freezing; the big difference will be warmer seas producing higher levels of moisture in the air - and therefore more severe cold-season storms.”

“Fact: We can expect more extreme weather
Scientists tell us that climate change has already led to more extreme weather in the United States and we can expect stronger hurricanes, more wildfires, heatwaves and droughts, to name a few.”

“Fact: The world is warming at a quickening pace
Weather in one region over days or months should not be confused with climate or the patterns of weather over decades and centuries. And the science is clear here: the last decade was the hottest on record. And to put this year’s weather in perspective, January was warmer than average for the continental United States”

As usual the Goracle is clueless. He is wrong on all three points. For examples, this winter featured snowmagedden for the Mid-Atlantic states. The longest duration cold ever in Florida and the southeast including snowflakes in Miami and Naples and damage to the citrus. Yes with the January thaw which is strongest and most reliable in the coldest winters, the average for the US for the month was a little above, much of the central and southeast was much below normal. And here is what the winter since December 1 looks like so far.

You say one winter doesn’t count and that I am cherry picking. Remember the fact sheet picked one number one month. December was the 14th coldest of 115 years for the US and February will rank similarly. And we have had 3 cold winters in a row. The northern cold and records snows of the last two years were blamed on La Nina and we were promised global warming would return with a vengeance when El Nino came back. Well guess what? It did this past summer and was El Nino was moderate this winter and yet it was colder and even snowier, even in places like the Dakotas and Iowa where El Ninos are typically warm and snowless. Oh and as for the red in Canada that is the result of the 5 standard deviation negative AO which produces blocking high pressure. Temperatures are much warmer than normal in the blocking areas (0 to 10 below instead of 10 to 20 below F) but still cold. Fill in your own expletives.

BTW, thanks to Craig Woods This is thre breakdown of records to date month-by-month this winter. Even with the Urban Heat Island affect, this winter in the United States has seen many more (3X) record low minimums than record high maximum temperatures. (Hat Tip Boris Konon, WSI). Here are the numbers:

December
Record high maximums 264
Record low minimums 1,086

January
Record high maximums 342
Record low minimums 901

February (through 2/24)
Record high maximums 80
Record low minimums 240

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Bill O’Reilly hosts Bill Nye The Science Guy and AccuWeather’s Joe Bastardi in Fox News Debate
By Anthony Watts, Watts up With That

Heh, this is entertaining.

While Bill Nye argues for “in whose best interest is denial?” and brings up the ridiculous CO2 on Venus argument, Joe Bastardi runs circles around him with technical graphs and explanations on forcing factors and their magnitudes.

Warmists scream “weather is not climate!”. We need to shout back “Venus is not Earth!” since the Venusian atmosphere is entirely different in compositions and forcings, and we understand it far less than Earth’s. Icecap note: as commenters said also 26 million miles closer to the sun and days 150 of our days long and has an atmosphere that is denser and deeper with surface pressures 90 times earth producing compressional warming. In the Venusian atmosphere at the same pressure as earth’s, temperatures are comprable to earth. Of course Nye did not mention Mars, where even though its atmosphere is mainly C02, the air is colder because the atmosphere is thin and pressures lower and of course Mars is farther away. See comments for much more.

Meanwhile, Bill O"Reilly seems more concerned about making his commercial break on time than saving the planet.

Nye needs a better argument, as Fox News viewers can see past the appeal to emotion. Bastardi while far more technically competent than Nye, needs to focus on explaining a bit about natural cycles, since few viewers would know what the “PDO” is.

A caveat for both men, doing live TV debate by the seat of your pants is tough. You can’t see each other, and you are communicating via earpiece audio. Live TV is never easy, live via satellite interlinks is even tougher.

Watch the segment => here.

Icecap Note: Agreed TV interviews are no walk in the park. When on tape you have no control over what they use. When you are live, often, as Anthony said, you are unable to see the other parties or the interviewer (I did one interview for a major cable network at a local station from what was no more than a closet with a camera and lighting and no monitor). Often the host keeps interrupting or allows your opponent to go on a monologue (especially with the college professors) with too little chance for you to reply. Sometimes when they give you a few questions to prepare for, they come in from left field with another often oddball question frustrating you because you had in your mind exactly how you were going to reply). Nye proved hand held graphics usually don’t work. The only one that did was the SPPI temperature plot which showed the cooling for a blend of the station data sets and satellite data sets since 2001. Nye followed that with an unintelligible statement to the effect if you leave out 1998, you get a warming. Well I thought 1998 was before 2001. How foolish of me.

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A worldwide fervor over climate change orthodoxy
By Christopher Essex, Toronto Sun

Can you hear me? You’ve been incognizant, but it’s over and you’re going to be OK. Take deep breaths and relax until your vision clears. The world is not going to end because of climate change, at least not in the near future. You are a most fortunate individual. You have been a participant in the biggest inter-dimensional cross rip since the Tunguska blast of 1909! No wait, that’s Ghostbusters.

Let me put it differently: There has never been anything quite like this - ever. The entire world has been embroiled in a persistent, free-floating global fervor (and a really nasty one, too) allegedly based on fervor-less, dispassionate science.

Recently, there was a huge explosion in the climate change orthodoxy factory that was set off by objective evidence we have been deceived and manipulated. The evidence was the leaked e-mails of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), which are now subject to several official investigations, forcing the head of the CRU to step aside. The e-mails tell a lurid tale of unbecoming, unwarranted, organized and fierce hostility to skeptical climatic researchers, as well as data tampering, anti-scientific secrecy, manipulations of scientific journals, and distortions of peer review that make George Orwell look like a prophet.

This could be dismissed as an isolated case if the CRU were some marginal backwater. But what was produced there was central to the scientific case, such as it was, mounted by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The CRU was global warming central! That makes the recent admission by its deposed head to the BBC stunning. He said there was actually no statistically significant global warming for 15 years. That’s contrary to more than a decade of overheated, hysterical rhetoric and news stories, ultimately based in large part on the CRU’s now-discredited positions.

Of course the counter spin was desperate and pathetic: The e-mails were illegally obtained; it was a plot by skeptics/deniers funded by corporations, facilitated by foreign governments; OK, it’s bad, but even putting CRU data aside there’s still “overwhelming” evidence.

This was blown away in the subsequent explosion of pent-up complaints about faulty science that have been hushed up for years by silencing skeptics and likening them to criminals. With new eyes paying attention to the complaints, what was old seemed new.

For example, one IPCC myth was even debunked before it was adopted. In the first, 2002, edition of my book, Taken By Storm, with Ross McKitrick we showed the Himalayan glaciers were not at risk due to global warming. Yet this invention, attributed to the World Wildlife Federation, still appeared, five years afterward, in the 2007 IPCC report. The IPCC author responsible subsequently admitted he put it in to scare people. Finally in 2009, seven years afterward, the head of the IPCC had to answer embarrassing questions about it.

Rule number one: Don’t believe anything you read or hear in the news about ice. Count on it to be a tart up of a pre-tarted position.

So many of these seemingly “new” one-sided “errors” have burst out that unanticipated developments ensued: India threatened to pull out of the IPCC, Greenpeace called for the head of the IPCC’s head, while IPCC stalwarts rushed to distance themselves from the IPCC.

It’s been like watching the conclusion of a classic Bond movie where an enormous explosion consumes Dr. No’s fortress. The serious damage of the great fervor was not from these noisy secondary cultural explosions. It was from the sustained, immoral attacks on scientific skepticism and skeptical scientists. The attacks began the moment science became subordinate to policy.

That is corruption of science, and we will all eventually suffer if it is not consciously stopped. Read more here.

Dr. Christopher Essex is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Western Ontario and co-author of Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming

Climate Debate in San Diego Union Tribune

Pro: Climate change is real; there is no debate
By Walter C. Oechel

Sunday, February 21, 2010 at 12:01 a.m.

The message from five decades of scientific research, the public-at-large and even most politicians is clear: Climate change is real and we must act now. Our future health, economic well-being and national security are at risk if we don’t.

“But what about the debate?” There really isn’t one. The following are facts:

• Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that acts to warm the planet.

• Carbon dioxide is being emitted from fossil fuels by human activity.

• The amount of carbon dioxide emitted from fossil fuel use is increasing.

• The climate is getting warmer, more unstable, and the climate extremes are greater.

• This can only be adequately explained by including human carbon dioxide emissions.

More than 90 percent of the U.S. and international scientific communities agree that while there has always been climate variation, the recent historic warming is due to human activities, particularly from fossil fuel overuse.

I have been working in the area of global warming, climate change and the impacts of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide for more than three decades. The critical scientific issues were quite well understood 30 years ago but public dissemination of relevant information and appropriate new policy have been thwarted by media laziness, the loss of the Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting and a disinformation campaign funded in part by elements of the fossil fuel industry.

As a false debate raged, we lost valuable time that could have been used to develop technologies and approaches to lower carbon dioxide emissions and increase energy efficiency. Instead, the United States has increased its reliance on foreign-supplied fossil fuel. As we now move slowly toward energy efficiency, we are behind the curve in comparison to other countries but still have the potential to become a leader in renewable technologies. We need to act quickly and effectively to help slow the effects of climate change, gain market-share in renewables, reduce foreign debt and reduce our reliance on insecure foreign fossil fuel markets.

A rarely discussed factor affecting our global health and climate stability is population growth. The world population is increasing by more than a billion people every 15 years, and on average each person is emitting more carbon dioxide. Between 1990 and 2007, as obfuscation and debate regarding climate continued, world population increased by 9.8 percent and per-person carbon dioxide emissions increased by 25 percent. These two factors resulted in an increase of total fossil fuel emissions by 38 percent.

Americans have often faced challenges that have brought about innovation and success. The opportunity to create a long-term and forward-thinking economy based on green technologies is within our reach and includes solar homes and electric cars using renewable energy. We should work with other nations in promoting education and health, which will help slow population growth. With the data collected by scientists, the tools developed by a growing green energy sector and the workforce trained in math, science and engineering to implement these new technologies, we have an opportunity to boost our national and global economy and mitigate the effects of climate change. We have no other choice but to work together globally to avert long-term global climate disaster.

Oechel is professor of biology and director of the Global Change Research Group at San Diego State University.

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Con: Denialists say it’s all about the water vapor
By Jack Henderson

Sunday, February 21, 2010 at 12:01 a.m.

First, to set the record straight, examination of ice core samples from the arctic shows that cyclical global warming and cooling has been going on for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. It is the sun’s emissions that provide the heat, and greenhouse gasses trap that heat, warming the Earth. As the sun goes through cycles of more or less emission, the Earth goes through cycles of warming and cooling.

Water vapor is Earth’s most significant greenhouse gas. About 95 percent of the greenhouse effect is from naturally occurring water vapor, and about 5 percent of it from other gasses. Of the other gasses, carbon dioxide is about 3 percent. Of that portion, about half is man-made.

Former Vice President Al Gore touched off the man-made global warming hysteria. His error-filled movie persuaded many that people are responsible for global warming. The subsequent award of the Nobel Prize led to many scientists and nonscientists becoming disciples of the prophet Gore.

In order to get funding and notoriety, these acolytes deliberately excluded water vapor as a greenhouse gas in their analyses. And, in fact, leaked e-mails show that there was collusion by climate scientists to skew scientific information in favor of man-made global warming.

In a December letter to The San Diego Union-Tribune, two distinguished scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography wrote “the denialists are never held to the same standards but are allowed to present their charges as if they carried the same weight as published research.”

To the contrary, a multitude of publications from prestigious institutions, and dating from the 1950s to current time, present data including water vapor. One notable quote is from S. Fred Singer, atmospheric physicist professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia: “I can only see one element of the climate system capable of generating these fast, global changes, that is, changes in the tropical atmosphere leading to changes in the inventory of the earth’s most powerful greenhouse gas - water vapor.”

And from Wallace Broecker, a leading world authority on climate at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University: “The ability of humans to influence greenhouse water vapor is negligible. As such, individuals and groups whose agenda it is to require that human beings are the cause of global warming must discount or ignore the effects of water vapor to preserve their arguments.”

The question for the Scripps professors and the Gore disciples is simply, how do you account for water vapor?

Carbon dioxide is relegated further down on the list by recent reports that tell of the presence of previously unknown sources of methane. Methane is a greenhouse gas some 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat. It is bubbling up from the Arctic Ocean floor. Over the past couple of decades, researchers have documented about 90 oceanic locations of methane hydrate, estimated to contain as much as 63,000 gigatons or more of carbon. As the ocean warms, more and more methane will be released from the ocean floor and eclipse the effects of carbon dioxide.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are pledging to provide billions of dollars for other countries to cut down their carbon emissions. Wouldn’t it be better to spend those billions by helping those put in need because of global warming? Icecap Note: or because of misguided government policies.

See the debate story here.

CO2 has been a boon to vegetation and enabled us to feed many millions more people

or seen in experiments here.

Greenhouses know this and actually many pump 3 times the ambient air CO2 into the greenhouses to produce a more vigorous plant growth, CO2 reaches levels up to 5 or 10 times higher in crowded auditoriums and malls, 30 times higher in submarines with no ill effect. CO2 is not a pollutant but an essential plant fertilizer. It has little or no effect on global temperatures. As both Singer and Broeker say, its all about water vapor and satellites and balloons say it is not increasing. The governments and environmentalists don’t talk about water vapor because there is no way to make money off of it. They can’t tax the hydrological cycle or prevent you or the soil and oceans from evaporating water vapor or trees transpiring it. They can and have tweaked their climate models to show water vapor increasing as CO2 increases, but as noted that is not the case. This is why their climate models despite their best efforts to manipulate temperatures to appear otherwise are failing miserably.

A Short History of the Polluted Peer Review Process

Patrick J. Michaels, George Mason University

Michael Mann’s Dec. 31 Letter to the Editor, “Science Journals Must be Unpolluted by Politics,” states that I falsely claimed that work by me and “other fossil-fuel-funded climate change contrarians” has been “unfairly blocked . . . from appearing in mainstream science journals.”

In fact, this started nearly 20 years ago, when Stephen Schneider, the editor of Climatic Change, rejected a manuscript of mine reconstructing upper-air data, saying that its “counter-paradigm” nature required that it be subject to more vigorous peer review than other submissions.

Prof. Mann claims that other “skeptics” (whatever that means), such as University of Alabama’s John Christy, have “no problem” with the mainstream journals. Prof. Christy recently documented a remarkable series of publication irregularities directed against him and other scientists, revealed in the climategate emails.

Recently, Roger Pielke Jr., director of the University of Colorado’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, noted a series of “effort[s] by activist climate scientists to stage-manage the peer review process much like how one might manage a partisan blog for public consumption.” One of his sources is again climategate, which is rife with threats to boycott a journal that dared to publish papers that Prof. Mann and his friends disagreed with.

In passing, I would note that the University of Virginia, where I worked for nearly 30 years, has rather rigorous standards for promoting scientists like myself through the academic ranks. Instead, Prof. Mann cites President Barack Obama’s science adviser John Holdren as an authority on my work, all the while arguing for keeping science “unpolluted by politics”!

Read more here.

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Global Warming Meltdown
By KUSI’s John Coleman

Global Warming: Meltdown digs deeply into the strong differences of positions about global warming; It answers the negative responses by several key institutions to our first global warming telecast in January.  See the special in 9 parts here.

The “Climategate” revelations that began in mid December have crescendoed into a series of almost daily embarrassments for the UN IPCC.  This telecast covers as many of them as we can cram into an hour.  The program can be viewed in segments.  With the intro to each segment you will find links you may use to find more information on the topics covered.  If this is the first time you are hearing about my efforts to debunk the bad science behind the global warming frenzy, you will find a wealth of information, videos and links to sites on the colemanscorner page here.

*The first program “Global Warming: The Other Side” can be viewed here. See the SPPI paper featured in it here.

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The sound of alarm
By Dr. Richard Lindzen, MIT letter to Boston Globe

February 19, 2010

Kerry Emanuel’s February 15 Boston Globe op-ed ”Climate changes are proven fact” is more advocacy than assessment. Vague terms such as “consistent with,” “probably,” and “potentially” hardly change this. Certainly climate change is real; it occurs all the time. To claim that the little we’ve seen is larger than any change we “have been able to discern” for a thousand years is disingenuous. Panels of the National Academy of Sciences and Congress have concluded that the methods used to claim this cannot be used for more than 400 years, if at all. Even the head of the deservedly maligned Climatic Research Unit acknowledges that the medieval period may well have been warmer than the present.

The claim that everything other than models represents “mere opinion and speculation” is also peculiar. Despite their faults, models show that projections of significant warming depend critically on clouds and water vapor, and the physics of these processes can be observationally tested (the normal scientific approach); at this point, the models seem to be failing.

Finally, given a generation of environmental propaganda, a presidential science adviser (John Holdren) who has promoted alarm since the 1970s, and a government that proposes funding levels for climate research about 20 times the levels in 1991, courage seems hardly the appropriate description - at least for scientists supporting such alarm. See letter here.

Richard S. Lindzen
Cambridge
The writer is Alfred P. Sloan professor of atmospheric sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
See his video interview for Copenhagen and John Coleman here.

Scientists: World May Not Be Warming

By Dan Weil

New research from multiple scientists indicates the case for global warming isn’t as strong as some would have it.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently declared that “unequivocal” evidence shows human pollution is driving temperatures up.

It says the global temperature already has risen by 0.7 degree centigrade thanks to greenhouse gases. And it predicts another five to six degrees of extra heat by 2100, wreaking havoc on living things worldwide.

But many are now challenging that claim.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, a former lead author for the IPCC, told The Sunday Times of London.

He and others say weather stations that have been used to amass temperature data over the past 150 years may not be accurate. The stations have been affected by urbanization, changes in land use and in many instances moves to different locations.

Christy’s research examines the impact of those factors on three different regions: east Africa, California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, agrees.

“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialization and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he told The Sunday Times.

A new report by Joseph D’Aleo, a meteorologist who co-founded the Weather Channel, and veteran meteorologist Anthony Watts makes much the same points.

“Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systemically and uni-directionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant global warming in the 20th century,” they write.

“All terrestrial surface-temperature data bases exhibit very serious problems that render them useless for determining accurate long-term temperature trends.” Read more here.

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IPCC Corruption Included Ignoring Facts and Science
By Dr. Tim Ball, Canada Free Press

Phil Jones, disgraced and dismissed Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), granted BBC reporter Roger Harrabin an interview. Why Harrabin? His reporting has shown bias on all the IPCC and CRU activities. Leaked emails showed the CRU gang used friends in the BBC and that apparently continues. Prevarication, evasion, half-truths continue in Phil Jones’answers. Despite this there are stunning admissions from Jones. “There is a tendency in the IPCC reports to leave out inconvenient findings, especially in the part(s) most likely to be read by policy makers.”

It’s a deliberate strategy not just a tendency and not only in the Summary for Policymakers (SPM). Many major factors that create weather and can trigger change are ignored in the Scientific Report and computer models. Icecap Note: Tim then goes on in some detail to discuss one, the sun. He then concludes:

Watch the Richter Scale as Politicians Jump Off the IPCC Wagon

Jones only concedes some points but they are enough from the high priest of the CRU and IPCC to completely destroy its credibility. What will the sycophants and exploiters like Gore and the Mainstream Media do now? What about politicians who based positions and policy on environment and energy on the IPCC? What about the massive scams of Cap And Trade? What about the extreme environmental groups who have bullied and preached from the moral high ground? What about the scientists who took vehement positions without understanding? It is a very sad day for science, the people and the world.  Read full post here.

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Dalton Minimum Repeat goes mainstream
By David Archibald

The AGU Fall meeting has a session entitled “Aspects and consequences of an unusually deep and long solar minimum”.  Two hours of video of this session can be accessed here.

Two of the papers presented had interesting observations with implications for climate.  First of all Solanki came to the conclusion that the Sun is leaving its fifty to sixty year long grand maximum of the second half of the 20th century.  He had said previously that the Sun was more active in the second half of the 20th century than in the previous 8,000 years.  This is his last slide:

Enlarged here.

To get his papers published, Solanki has had genuflect to global warming.  Perhaps he won’t have to do that from now on.

McCracken gave a paper with its title as per this slide:

Enlarged here.

While he states that it is his opinion alone and not necessarily held by his co-authors, he comes to the conclusion that a repeat of the Dalton Minimum is the most likely thing to happen next:

Dalton Minimum Repeat goes mainstream.  Enlarged here.

Solar Cycle 24 is now just over a year old and the next event on the solar calendar is the year of maximum, which the green corona brightness tells us will be in 2015. 

A repeat of the Dalton Minimum will have consequences for the Earth’s climate.  Just how cold will it have to get for the Thames to freeze over, as it last did in 1815?  See PDF here.

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Stimulating Green Jobs For China
Investor’s Business Daily

When even Chuck Schumer is upset with the White House, you know something’s amiss. In this case, it’s news that efforts to boost wind power with taxpayer stimulus dollars are filling foreign coffers and creating foreign jobs.

According to the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, nearly $2 billion in money from the American Recovery and Investment Act has been spent on wind power. The goal was to further energy independence while creating American jobs. It has done neither.

Of the money spent, according to the report, nearly 80% has gone to foreign manufacturers of wind turbines.

“In all due respect, I remind (Energy Secretary Steven Chu) there is a four-letter word associated with the stimulus - J-O-B-S,” Sen. Schumer, D-N.Y., told ABC News, which interviewed him for a report done in coordination with the workshop’s investigation. “Very few jobs here, lots of jobs in China.”

The only good thing one can say is that at least China is a real place, as opposed to the phantom ZIP codes and congressional districts in which the administration has claimed to have created jobs.

But how does buying wind turbines made in China create energy independence or create jobs?

Last October, on the day the workshop first reported on this story, a consortium of U.S. and Chinese companies announced a deal to build a $1.5 billion wind farm in Texas, using imported Chinese turbines.

The project is expected to create some temporary construction jobs in America. Some 2,000 manufacturing jobs will be created in China. In a message posted on his Facebook page, Secretary Chu wrote that the point of the grant program was “ensuring America leads the world in creating jobs in manufacturing the parts that go into wind farms” and even export components to foreign wind farms. It hasn’t worked out that way.

Of the 1,807 turbines erected on 28 wind farms receiving grants, foreign-owned manufacturers built 1,219, according to the workshop report. The installation of these turbines may have created as many as 6,838 manufacturing jobs overseas.

When the American Wind Energy Association released its 2009 year-end report on Jan. 26, CEO Denise Bode acknowledged that despite billions in stimulus spending, there had actually been a net loss in manufacturing jobs. Bode told USA Today she estimates the manufacturing job loss at 1,500.

Last March, a cargo of steel towers was unloaded at the port of Vancouver, Wash. They were made in Vietnam for a Danish wind company and destined for a Portuguese wind farm in Indiana that got a stimulus grant. Posted 02/11/2010 05:50 PM ET

The towers arrived in Washington state after traveling 7,400 miles from Vietnam’s Barra VANUATU province, where they were constructed by CS Wind - Vietnam’s leading steel tower manufacturer.

We’re all for free trade, but stimulus money was supposed to create jobs in America. As for helping us achieve energy independence, wind has failed miserably.

After decades of subsidies, wind provides only 1% of our electricity compared with 49% for coal, 22% for natural gas, 19% for nuclear power and 7% for hydroelectric. Wind turbines generally operate at only 20% efficiency vs. 85% for coal, gas and nuclear plants.

The irony is we leave vast reserves of job-creating domestic oil, coal and natural gas locked up as we sacrifice our economy to the Gaia, the goddess of climate change, something China has wisely refused to do. Read story here.

Speaking of China:
Frozen Cattle Crisis In Harsh Mongolia Winter
Sky News

Up to 20 million farm animals may die in Mongolia before spring as the fiercest winter in living memory grips the country, International Aid Agencies are being warned. Half the entire country’s livestock could be wiped out, local experts told the Red Cross.

A Sky News team that travelled through remote regions in Central Mongolia found cattle, goats and sheep frozen to death across the plains, with some herds almost completely wiped out. Outside her traditional home in Central Mongolia, grandmother Hotont Suon weeps as she looks at the carcasses of her herd lying on their backs.

Their legs in the air, they are frozen to death. In the pens, sheep huddle together from the bitter cold. Two died while we watched. Dogs and goats gnaw from the carcasses of the dead animals strewn outside the traditional “gurs”, the herders’ circular tented homesteads.

“Our hay is all gone now. As our goats die we sell the hides and buy more fodder, but it only lasts a few days,” she said. It’s called the “Dzud” - a multiple disaster with a summer drought followed by one of the coldest winters on record. It has left millions of livestock dying from a combination of exhaustion and starvation - some herders report that their cattle perish at the rate of 50 a night.

Some families have even been reduced to sharing their small tented home with the surviving animals. Inside a gur, a three-month-old baby played with a black wet-faced calf. The baby’s mother, Otgon Jargal, broke down in tears. “We have no skills. Our lives depend on our livestock. How can I look after my child when all the animals have died?” she cried.

The Mongolian government has appealed for food, medicine and animal food to combat one of the country’s worst natural disasters. The poorer herding families are left with insufficient food supplies to last out the winter. Many have taken out high interest loans to pay for animal fodder which they can’t meet.

Fears are also growing for thousands of herders who live in remote mountain regions in soutwestern Mongolia. There has been no word from thousands of people cut off in their villages by the heaviest snow fall in decades, prompting Mongolian air force helicopters to launch search and rescue operations.

Read more here. See this shocking video here.

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