Inside Sources (10/21/19) column: “The cost of the Green New Deal may hit consumers too hard to make it through the U.S. Congress, even if Democrats sweep the 2020 elections. But get ready for federal litigation racking up legal bills for taxpayers. On Wednesday, a U.S. House Oversight subcommittee will host a hearing, “Examining the Oil Industry’s Efforts to Suppress the Truth about Climate Change.” A hearing like this featuring “Squad” members U.S. Reps. Ayana Pressley and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez - fresh off the latter’s endorsement of Democratic Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders - should make for quite a show....But this week’s hearing will also advance another strategy being pursued by green extremists, one already responsible for costly legal bills to taxpayers across the country. Based on the hearing’s witnesses, it appears that if Democrats win the White House, they will push forward with partisan climate litigation targeting energy companies, prosecuted by the federal government and paid for by taxpayers.”
--------------
The Climate Strikers Are Completely Unhinged
If you’ve ever spent much time in New York, you know that it can be weather-challenged: very hot in the summer, and very cold in the winter. But September is almost always a month of near-perfect temperatures, and this year has been no exception. Nevertheless, the so-called “Climate Strike” movement chose last Friday, September 20, as the date for their big day of demonstrations.
The high temperature was an ideal 77 deg F (25 deg C). Estimates of the number of protesters that turned out range (according to the New York Times) from 60,000 (NY Police Dept.) to 250,000 (organizers). The message of the speakers was, of course, that we are in the midst of a climate crisis that must be addressed immediately by drastic and coercive government action. It seems that the organizers and leaders of the demonstrations, let alone a goodly number of the participants, have turned themselves purple with anger over unverifiable predictions of barely-perceptible future temperature increases. From the Times:
Rarely, if ever, has the modern world witnessed a youth movement so large and wide, spanning across societies rich and poor, tied together by a common if inchoate sense of rage.
Let me assemble some of the words that were used by these people. I suppose that they somehow think that this kind of rhetoric might be convincing to the normal people who were just trying to enjoy a beautiful late summer day. Is any of it persuasive to you?
From the ubiquitous teen-ager Greta Thunberg, quoted in Time:
“This is an emergency. Our house is on fire… We will do everything in our power to stop this crisis from getting worse.... Why should we study for a future that is being taken away from us. That is being sold for profit. Everywhere I have been the situation is more or less same. The people in power, their beautiful words are the same.... The number of politicians and celebrities who want to take selfies with us are the same. The empty promises are the same. The lies are the same, and the inaction is the same.”
If that is not crazy enough for you, try these lines, also attributed to Thunberg (although I seriously doubt that she wrote them), appearing in a “Climate Resistance Handbook” put out in advance of the event by 350.org:
I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. Around the year 2030, we will be in a position where we set an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilization as we know it. That is unless in that time, permanent and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society have taken place, including a reduction of CO2 emissions by at least 50%.
And let’s not focus all of our attention on the wild-eyed Ms. Thunberg. How about something from another speaker at the New York event, Vic Barrett? That’s the Vic Barrett previously best known as one of the plaintiffs in the litigation dubbed by the Manhattan Contrarian as the “Stupidest Litigation in the Country,” namely the case from Oregon seeking to have the federal courts declare a “constitutional right” to a “stable climate,” and then use that declaration to enjoin all production and use of fossil fuels. Here are some of the words of Ms. Barrett (video at the link):
We are being pushed from the lands that we settled, the lands that my family has inhabited for generations. That land will be under water in a few decades if we continue on the path we are on. . . . My future is being stolen from me. . . . Everything that I am is slipping into the sea. . . . My people face extinction. Indigenous lands all over our planet are being flooded, poisoned and destroyed.
Yes, we are to feel “panic""over our impending “extinction.” Supposedly, this is the conclusion of “science.” Really? Meanwhile, here’s a new source of relevant data that I have not previously highlighted at this site. NOAA has a special and relatively new U.S.-only surface temperature series, called USCRN (US Climate Reference Network) based on only 114 of its very best ground thermometers, with state-of-the-art equipment and pristine siting, relatively evenly spaced around the country. By contrast to the other series from NOAA and NASA, this one has no “homogenization” adjustment thrown in by the climate activists in the bowels of the agencies. The series only goes back to 2005. Here’s what it shows:
No warming at all. By the way, did you notice those very warm months in 2006 and 2012, with temperatures some 4 degrees above normal for the entire U.S.? Neither did anybody else. So why again is a projected 2 or 3 degree temperature increase something to panic about? And, if you believe the business about greenhouse gas emissions controlling the climate, shouldn’t we be seeing a nice steady year-by-year increase in temperatures as CO2 concentration in the atmosphere increases? You do find that in the NOAA and NASA adjusted series - but all of the increase is in the adjustments. Here, in a series that consists only of raw data from pristine stations, there is no increase.
Finally, for today’s entertainment, check out this report from Climate Change Dispatch on the climate strike demonstrations that took place in Washington, DC. Those demonstrations featured massive blocking of traffic at multiple locations, plus dumpster fires, in addition to gratuitous travel by car and plane by thousands of people. In other words, it couldn’t be more obvious that these people don’t care at all about the amount of carbon emissions they cause. From Climate Change Dispatch:
Thanks to these brave warriors fighting for their precious Mother Earth, thousands of cars are spewing tons of exhaust into the air that wouldn’t have if these enviro-crybabies had real jobs. Here’s an official rundown of all the traffic that’s been blocked.
Somebody here has become completely detached from reality, and I don’t think it’s me.
---------------
See 120 years of failed climate catastrophe forecasts here. and an updated Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions here.
Remember all the scary headlines after a warm week in July in Alaska (after storms removed ice early from Bering Sea (which had a record high ice cover in 2012)… don’t expect to see this in the enviro media.
Cordova, AK - Lowest September Temperature on record
September 22, 2019 by Robert Felix
Coldest September temp in at least 110 years, maybe more. Not just for the day, but for the entire month.
Intense Arctic cold descended into southern Alaska last week, setting a new all-time monthly Lowest Minimum Temperature.
According NOAA, the mercury plunged to -11.7 C (11 F) at Cordova Airport on Thursday, Sept 12, annihilating the previous record low of -6.7 C (20 F) set back in 1972.
This is the coldest temperature for the month of September ever recorded at the station since it began operating in 1909. Cordova Airport sits at an elevation of 9.4 m (31 ft)
-----------
The AP headlined after July: Alaska’s average temperature in July was 58.1 degrees (14.5 Celsius). That’s 5.4 degrees F (3 Celsius) above average and 0.8 degrees (0.4 Celsius) higher than the previous warmest month of July 2004, NOAA said. They opined the worse is yet to come.
Here is a plot of Anchorage July temperatures. Note the spike and warming starting in 2013.
What was never really covered except on places like Weatherbell and WUWT was the incredible cold in January 2012, when it was warm in the lower 48. Note how Anchorage was more the 14F below normal in January 2012!
Anchorage set an all-time snow record of 134.5 inches;, topping the old record of 132.6 inches set in 1954-1955. In nearby Valdez, an amazing 437.9 inches fell, 114 inches (35%) above normal.
With the cold came deep sea ice - a record for the Bering Sea.
Note this past winter saw a dip below normal as strong north Pacific storms drove the ice out to sea. The lack of sea ice helped sea temperatures warm and favor the warmth on land - reaching 90F in July in Anchorage.
The environmental or funding chasing scientists and media play ambulance chasers - with every extreme a sign of a demise of life as we know it maybe even in a dozen years. When inconvenient weather occurs like record cold and snow or record low areal coverage of drought they either ignore it or blame it on man-made climate change. They have made it an non-falsifiable hypothesis - whether it is hot or cold, wet or dry, stormy or not - we are to blame. And as MIT’s Jonathan Gruber told the media, the public is ‘stupid’ and will believe what we say with the help of the all too compliant media. That is the philosophy of the elitists and globalists. They have indoctrinated our young people to poison the well for the future.
Jack Webb in Dragnet long ago explained how indoctrination and even technology may have corrupted thinking of many of our younger generation.
Celebrities, politicians, and leaders across the globe are divided on the dangers of climate change and the best ways to address the problems arising from it.
In light of the vast differences, it would be wise for any observer to understand the finer details of the climate debate, the origins of claims, and the history of it, before they begin to trust these voices.
Given man’s high proclivity to bias, it is necessary to inspect the climate issue through the lenses of currently prevalent biases. Sackett in his 1979 paper defined bias as “any process at any stage of inference which tends to produce results or conclusions that differ systematically from the truth.”
The climate change issue, like any other issue of public interest, has been subject to numerous biases. Here are just a few and why they have misled us in a big way.
Confirmation Bias: The act of referencing only an opinion or evidence that fuels one’s pre-existing view, while dismissing any contrary evidence or opinion - no matter how valid.
This bias became very evident during the past two decades, when the computer climate models used by climate scientists failed dramatically in their climate forecasts. Biased scientists and politicians completely ignore the failure.
Almost all of the current policy discourse in climate change is entirely dependent on these faulty models. Instead of admitting a grand failure in their predictions, the scientists and political leaders continue to use these faulty forecasts for policy decisions.
There are people with confirmation bias in the other end of spectrum as well. Also known as climate deniers, they deny climate change entirely. They don’t believe in the gradual yet safe warming that has been scientifically proven to be prevalent since the 18th century.
Groupthink Bias or Bandwagon Effect: For the sake of avoiding conflict, people may agree upon a given perspective without critical evaluation. The society as a whole may agree upon theories that deviate from the truth.
This is the biggest of all biases to haunt the climate change issue and has proved to be the biggest hurdle for the progress of climate sciences.
Just as in the days of Galileo, we have swathes of academic and political institutions that suppress critical assessment of their dominant doomsday perspective. Groupthink bias has provided the fodder for their attitude to suppress dissenting voices.
A classic fallout of this bias is the recent school strike by children across the globe. None of the children have graduate level education in climate sciences, and they merely chose to adopt the groupthink mentality without critically evaluating the issue at hand - a task for which they lack the adequate factual knowledge and theoretical understanding anyway. Some children did try to question the whole school strike movement, but they were quickly reprimanded and put to silence.
The Bias of Clustering Illusion: This bias occurs when we look innately for patterns in random data, eventually making conclusions based on a small sample set or pattern, rather than assessing them in context with the entire data.
A denier is likely to pick short-term cooling patterns and use them as reasons to say that the world is not warming. Likewise, a climate alarmist is prone to exaggerate short-term warming patterns and incorrectly use them as evidence for dangerous warming.
Unfortunately, clustering bias has become very common in the climate debate.
The short-term warming in 2016 - caused by the El Nino weather pattern - was considered an indicator of extreme long-term warming by the alarmists, and the mainstream media eventually promoted it as a sign of climate doomsday.
However, in reality, the 2016 warming occurred in the midst of a 20-year period (1999-2019) when the rate of warming slowed down globally and was even acknowledged by top climate scientists.
The alarmists are guilty of the clustering bias not just during the El Nino of 2016, but throughout the past few years when they cherry picked many such short-term weather patterns and deliberately termed them signs of climate apocalypse.
For example, the alarmist misinterpretation about the dangers of Arctic sea ice melting falls under the clustering bias. Yes, the Arctic has been melting ever since the end of Little Ice Age in the 17th century, but the historical climate data - for the past 10,000 years, the Holocene climate period -indicate that Arctic ice is at one of its highest levels.
Also falling in the clustering bias is the alarmist interpretation of the role of carbon dioxide in the modern warming period. During 1979-1999, the correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration levels and rising global temperature led alarmists to conclude that CO2 emission from human activity was causing the warming.
However, a look at historical data suggests that CO2 concentrations are not the primary drivers of global temperature and that there are a host of other natural factors that affect the temperature. Besides, the current warming trend began well before the industrial era, when emissions from human activity were insignificant.
Satellite temperature data (December 1978 to June 2019) show that global temperature levels have failed to rise to the levels that they had during the super El Nino of 2016.
In fact, 2016 recorded the highest departure from the satellite temperature averages since 1998. The global temperatures recorded a warming anomaly of 1.33F in April 1998 and never showed such a high degree of departure until February of 2016, when the El Nino caused a warming anomaly of 1.55.
The highest temperature departures during 2017 and 2018 were lower than 2016, despite the total atmospheric CO2 concentration increasing by every year.
It categorically proves that CO2 is not the primary driver of temperature, a fact that can be identified and confirmed by assessing the historical climate records as well.
The bias list continues, but let me just stop here and conclude that without critical evaluation of claims made about our climate, we are likely to be victims of these biases (both deliberate and unintentional ones).
Yes, the world is warming, but not at an unprecedented rate, and there is no scientific evidence to conclude that climate change in the coming years will be dangerous for our society or the environment.
The real climate crisis is the one where billions across the world have been misled about the current and past state of our world’s climate.
Vijay Jayaraj (M.Sc., Environmental Science, University of East Anglia, England), Research Associate for Developing Countries for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, lives in Bangalore, India.
UPDATES: See Larry Bell’s post ‘Hottest Temps Ever’ Alarms Reveal Ignorance of History’ here.
According to the banner headline in an Aug. 2 article in The Hill, “July was Earth’s hottest month ever recorded.” That’s certainly newsworthy, considering that “ever” unquestionably dates back a very long time.
The claim was based on provisional data provided by the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Services (C3S), highlighting that their then-predicted July temperatures were “on a par with, and possibly marginally higher” than the previous high of 2016 - purported by them to be 2.16 degrees Fahrenheit more than pre-industrial levels.
AccuWeather founder and CEO Joel Myers posted an August 7 blog article challenging those claims titled “Throwing cold water on extreme heat hype.”
Myers reports that “there is no evidence so far that extreme heat waves are becoming more common because of climate change, especially when you consider how many heat waves occurred historically compared to recent history.”
New York City, for example, has not had a daily high temperature day above 100 degrees Fahrenheit since 2012, and only five such days since 2002. By comparison, in a previous 18-year span from 1984 through 2001, New York City had nine days at 100 degrees or higher.
Meyers adds, “When the power went out in New York City earlier [last] month, the temperature didn’t even get to 100 degrees - it was 95, which is not extreme. For comparison, there were 12 days at 99 degrees or higher in 1999 alone.”
Or take Kansas City, Missouri - another example - which experienced an average of 18.7 days a year at 100 degrees or higher during the 1930s, compared to just 5.5 a year over the last 10 years.
As AccuWeather further clarified, “over the last 30 years, Kansas City has averaged only 4.8 days a year at 100 degrees or higher, which is only one-quarter of the frequency of days at 100 degrees or higher in the 1930s."”
As a matter of fact - here in America - 26 of the 50 states set high temperature records during the 1930s which either still stand or have since been tied. An additional 11 state all-time-high temperature records were set before 1930, and only two (South Dakota and South Carolina) that were set in the 21st century.
AccuWeather concludes, “So 37 of the 50 states have an all-time high temperature record not exceeded for more than 75 years. Given these numbers and the decreased frequency of days of 100 degrees or higher, it cannot be said that either the frequency or magnitude of heat waves is more common today.”
And as Ross McKitrick points out in a July 23 Vancouver Sun article, “Reality check - there is no ‘climate emergency’ in Vancouver” either. Amid the ordinary variability of nature, today’s weather is about the same as it’s been for as far back as the records go (since 1896).
McKitrick reports, “Looking at the 100 years from 1918 to 2018, February and September average daytime highs rose slightly at about 1.5 degrees per century, while the other 10 months did not exhibit a statistically significant trend.”
Since 1938, no month exhibits a significant upward trend in average daytime highs, while four months slightly declined. From 1958 to present, only four months slightly warmed, while annual average daytime high temperatures evidenced no significant trend.
The decade with the most daily average temperatures over 86 degrees Fahrenheit (seven) occurred in the 1960s, followed by six in the 2000s. So far, the present decade has known only one. The most in a single year (four) was 2009, followed by 1960 and 1942 which both had three.
As reported on July 28 by Joe D’Aleo of WeatherBell Analytics, “in the last 7 and 30 days, there were more U.S. record lows than highs.”
D’Aleo, who previously served as the first Weather Channel director, added, “The heat wave in what has been a cool and wet spring and summer was intense but brief and mainly notable for the elevated nighttime temperatures.”
Regarding a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) preliminary announcement that 2019 may have been the hottest month globally, University of Alabama climatologist Roy Spencer asks us to treat that claim with great skepticism.
Spencer’s website notes, for example, that unusual warmth in western Europe (France) was offset by unusual cool of eastern Europe and western Russia.
Even these recording comparisons are skewed by notorious and well-documented recording errors resulting from badly compromised urban temperature measurement locations, inconsistent calibration methods, and long-standing patterns of warm-biased surface and ocean temperature data “tuning adjustments” by NOAA.
Nevertheless, London’s The Telegraph ran an article headlined, “Give heat waves names so people take them more seriously, say experts, as Britain braces for hottest day” (as is done for winter storms).
So okay, I’ll volunteer to give this latest one a name.
How about calling it “summer?”
-------
See also Dr Roy Spencer post - July 2019 was not the warmest on record here.
-------------
Inconvenient facts about the heat this summer
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM
In the last 7 and 30 days, there were more US record lows than highs. The heat wave in what has been a cool and wet spring and summer was intense but brief and mainly notable for the elevated nighttime temperatures. That nighttime warmth is consistent with the very wet first 6 months of 2019. Water vapor is by volume by far the most significant and potent greenhouse gas. Note the large number under HIGH MIN the last 30 days. There were also more DAILY and MONTHLY record lows than highs year to date.
As for Europe’s heat, it was a surge of Sahara air ahead of a eastern Atlantic trough in a pattern that was very amplified for this time of year (characteristic of cooler regimes earlier this century).
Europe’s all-time heat record was in 1977 (also very hot in the summer in the US but surrounded by two brutal winters that had the media talking ice age). The heat wave of 2003 had a similar jet stream scenario. Though proclaimed to be the new climate norm, they had to wait 16 years to see it repeat.
Climatologist Dr. John Christy shows heat here in the U.S. has been declining since the 1930s.
The politically driven NCA boondoggle produced a chart that finessed the issue by doing a ratio of heat records to cold records. Both are declining but nighttime lows are elevated by the urban heat island as most stations are now city or airport and so the record lows have declined faster.
Undoubtedly you read at least some organs of the mainstream media. Perhaps your go-to source is the New York Times, or maybe the Washington Post, or Bloomberg News, or The Economist, or maybe Reuters. And therefore you have the strong impression that the world is well on its way to a huge energy transition, away from the dirty fossil fuels of the past, and toward the low carbon and renewable energy of the future. Or maybe you steer clear of all of those propagandists, but you still have the same impression. Perhaps you are getting this impression from the politicians running places like New York, or California, or Germany, or Denmark, or South Australia, or Spain, or any of many other holier-than-thou jurisdictions that have announced the imminent end of their fossil fuel use. Anyway, with so many people so loudly proclaiming the approaching end of fossil fuels, surely by now fossil fuel use must have begun its rapid drop toward oblivion.
But where can you get actual information on world energy consumption of each type, and of how it is changing over time? One quite comprehensive source is the Statistical Review of World Energy, put out each year by the BP oil company. The 2019 version, covering statistics through 2018, just came out on June 11. It was covered at Watts Up With That by Larry Hamlin on July 23.
The following chart, covering 2018 world energy consumption by fuel type, really tells you all you need to know:
In simple terms, world consumption of all the fossil fuel types continues to increase, and at fairly rapid rates. There was a notable pick-up in the rates of increase from 2017 to 2018. The “renewables,” like wind and solar - represented by that tiny red-orange band in the middle - have increased somewhat from a tiny base, but remain a barely-perceptible portion of the overall total.
Much of the interesting information in the Review appears in spreadsheets rather than graphs, so to get the most out of the report you need to spend some time with pages full of numbers. Hamlin has done some of that work for us, and comes up with some interesting statistics derived from BP’s spreadsheets. Examples:
The results for the last decade show that global energy use grew by 18.5% during the last decade with 98.5% of that energy growth accounted for by the developing nations.
The developing nations represented about 51% of global energy use in 2008 and ended the decade accounting for over 59% of global energy use.
Energy use growth by the developing nations during the last decade occurred at a rate 5.5 times greater than the flat growth rate that occurred in the developed nations.
Almost all of those energy consumption increases come from fossil fuels, of course.
In the graph category, this next one nicely illustrates the total futility of the U.S. and Europe trying to “save the planet” by reducing coal consumption:
The “Asia Pacific” category in that chart includes not just China and India, but also places like Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Vietnam. Clearly, the increases in their coal consumption are swamping - and will continue to swamp - any modest reductions that Western nations can achieve by hobbling their economies.
A spreadsheet of carbon dioxide emissions by country and region appears at page 55 of the BP Review. Overall, world emissions were up 2% in 2018 over 2017, and up close to 12% since 2008. But those aggregate numbers hide interesting differences by country. U.S. and European emissions were both down since 2008, but in 2018 U.S. emissions increased 2.6% (with the booming economy) while European emissions continued their slow decline. China’s CO2 emissions were up 2.2% in 2018 (and up over 25% since 2008). The 2.2% increase for 2018 may not sound like all that much, but it represented an increase of about 200 million tons of CO2, an amount far exceeding the reduction of about 69 million tons of CO2 emissions achieved by Europe in that year. Meanwhile, places like India (7.0%), Indonesia (5.2%), Bangladesh (9.3%) and Vietnam (14.8%) saw their emissions soar in 2018. India’s 7% increase also represented a multiple of Europe’s decrease (about double) in terms of tons of CO2. Only one country achieved a double-digit CO2 emissions reduction for 2018. Yes, it is Venezuela, at -13.2%. Green New Deal anyone?
In short, the few rich guys who are knocking themselves out over CO2 guilt are achieving totally insignificant reductions in emissions, while those reductions are getting totally swamped by rapidly increasing emissions from the developing world.
The BP guys who put out the report are overcome with angst over what their statistics are showing. There’s this from a guy named Spencer Dale, the “group chief economist” and apparently the man in charge of compiling the Review:
[W]hen our successors look back at Statistical Reviews from around this period, they will observe a world in which there was growing societal awareness and demands for urgent action on climate change, but where the actual energy data continued to move stubbornly in the wrong direction. A growing mismatch between hopes and reality. In that context, I fear - or perhaps hope - that 2018 will represent the year in which this mismatch peaked.
Don’t they realize that they are in the oil and gas business? Anyway, I have some news for Mr. Dale: There is zero chance that any of those third world countries will stop their emissions increases until they have achieved the same levels of per capita energy consumption that we have here in the U.S. and in Europe. I say, get over your angst, relax and enjoy it.
_thumb.png)
_thumb.gif)
.gif){kind=link}
