Bombarded by the incessant fear-mongering of the global warming industry, many people now see carbon dioxide (CO2) as evil incarnate - the bane of civilization and source of an ever-growing list of planetary problems - from erupting volcanoes and tectonic earthquakes to shrinking sheep and reduced circumcision rates.

The climate experts, joined by their lazy and interminably gullible allies in the mainstream media, have managed through guile and deception to orchestrate a successful fear campaign against a trace atmospheric gas that is essential to all life on earth. Around the clock, these self-anointed saviors of Mother Earth hector mankind, admonishing the thoughtless masses for increasing CO2 to “climate tipping” levels that will eventually bake our planet unless we cork our gaseous emissions, shut down industry and hand over more of our paychecks to the Gods of Cap and Trade.

Hypnotized by their “science is settled” theory, the self-professed climate experts have abandon the practice of science and morphed into political-scientist advocates, manipulating and fine-tuning their research so it matches their pre-ordained conclusions. (A brief look at the Climategate e-mails, made public last November, illustrates the abysmal level to which climate science has descended.)

The snakeoil scientists have worked indefatigably to give CO2 - a molecular friend of mankind - a dirty name. They have hidden the facts of CO2 from the people, lest they awake to the grand AGW deception. And they have studiously engaged in a premeditated attempt to deceive the innocent (they have already deceived themselves), always with a finger to the wind and an eye on the next juicy research grant. Here are a few truths about the benefits of CO2, routinely suppressed or glossed over in the hysterics-laden propaganda about catastrophic global warming (a term renamed “climate change” as global temperatures leveled off and began to decline) disseminated by agenda-driven scientists and politicians and their chief ally, the negligent and slothful reporter.

CO2 not a pollutant - Atmospheric CO2 is essential to life on earth and is directly responsible for the food we eat and the oxygen we breathe. Plants feed on CO2 and emit oxygen as a waste gas, and humans and animals breathe oxygen and exhale CO2. When plant-growers want to stimulate plant growth, they introduce more CO2.

Current CO2 deficiency - With a current CO2 concentration of 388 ppm, Earth’s atmosphere is CO2 deficient. (During the last 600 million years, only the Carboniferous Period and our current age, the Quaternary Period, have experienced CO2 levels less than 400 ppm.) Millions of year ago, when CO2 concentrations were 10 times higher than today, plant life flourished. Falling, not rising, CO2 levels, would seriously impact life as we know it, reducing agricultural production for a growing population and increasing the likelihood of food shortages and famine.

CO2 non-threatening at 10,000 ppm - CO2 is not a threat to humans unless it reaches 50,000 ppm (exhaled breath is about 45,000 ppm). Sailors in U.S. submarines experience no harmful effects while routinely working in spaces where CO2 concentrations reach 8,000 ppm. Concert-goers in a packed auditorium are steeped in 10,000 ppm. The recommended level in workspaces for an eight-hour day is 5,000 ppm, and the typical officer worker inhales air containing up to 2,500 ppm. So why the fuss about the potential doubling of life-enriching CO2? (Contrary to the AGW theory, runaway temperatures are not a catastrophic side-effect of CO2 increases.)

Higher CO2 equals more food - Rising concentrations of atmospheric CO2 stimulate plant grown, resulting in higher agricultural yields. As Dr Craig Idso and Dr. Keith Idso have shown, a 300 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 will increase the yield of nearly all food crops by 30 to 50 percent. According to both researchers, the expected rise in CO2 concentrations by 2050 will increase world agricultural production, but to levels that barely will be enough to prevent widespread famine. Efforts to limit CO2 would retard both industrial and agricultural production.

A 300 ppm increase in CO2 results in a 30- to 50-percent increase in the yield of most food crops
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has determined that a one percent increase in CO2 boosts crop yields by eight percent, translating into a 33-pound-per-acre yield per 1-ppm rise in CO2. The USDA also found that a field of corn in full sunlight consumes all of the CO2 within three feet of the ground. The corn will stop growing unless the surrounding air is stirred constantly by wind currents. In fact, the plants are harmed at CO2 concentrations of 240 ppm, and they die at 160 ppm.

In short, more CO2 puts more food on the table. Human life, in terms of length and quality, has improved dramatically since the massive burning of fossil fuels. In their zeal to curb CO2 emissions, the Green movement seeks to deprive humanity of life-sustaining nutrition.

Rising CO2 is natural - Atmospheric CO2 has risen steadily for the past 18,000 years - long before fossil-fuel-burning factories and power plants dotted the landscape. Most of the greenhouse effect is natural – resulting from water vapor and other trace gases. Human-generated greenhouse gases account for roughly 0.28 percent of the greenhouse effect.

Man-made CO2 comprises about 0.117 percent of this total, and human contributions of other gases - for example, methane and nitrous oxide - add another 0.163 percent. Compared to water vapor, which makes up 95 percent of greenhouse gases, CO2, at roughly 3.6 percent, is a piddling amount. Capping CO2 emissions in a vain attempt to “stop global warming” would hobble industrial output and lower our standard of living, while having almost no impact on the Earth’s climate, which, according to recent reports, has entered a “cold mode” that could last 20 to 30 years.

Short atmospheric lifetime - The residence time of bulk atmospheric CO2 is roughly five years, a fact previously acknowledged by former IPCC Chairman Dr. Bert Bolin. This figure is steadfastly ignored or disputed by scientists who base their findings on carbon-cycle computer models that project theoretically longer lifetimes - 50 to 200 years, or longer - than those actually measured in the real world. Their model-manipulated conclusions are contradicted by observational data and geo-chemistry.

As Tom V. Segalstad, associate professor of resource and environmental geology at the University of Oslo, notes: “The non-realistic carbon-cycle modeling and misconception of the way the geochemistry of CO2 works simply defy reality, and would make it impossible for breweries to make the carbonated beer or soda ‘pop’ that many of us enjoy (Segalstad, 1998).”

With such short CO2 residence times (about one fifth of the CO2 pool is exchanged every year between different sources and sinks), it is impossible for human activity to be the cause of rising CO2 levels. As Segalstad observes: “Concerning the Earth’s carbon cycle, the anthropogenic CO2 contribution and its influence are so small and negligible that our resources would be much better spent on other real challenges that are facing mankind.”

Contemptuous of any scientific data that would derail their globalist schemes, the international banking establishment and their political cronies are moving ahead at flank speed to fleece American citizens through a cap-and trade system that will drive their energy bills through the roof - all in the name of fighting a conjured-up bogeyman called “global warming.”

Initially, the cap-and-trade swindle will drive up energy costs by as much as $1,700 per year for many families. By 2035, those costs could escalate to more than $6,000 annually. And what about the economic losses caused by soaring energy costs and declining industrial output? Some independent analysts are projecting the loss of millions of jobs as the nation’s GDP reverses direction, throwing already hard-hit Americans out of their homes and onto the street.

As Lord Christopher Monckton, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, observes: “To prevent that half a Fahrenheit degree of [predicted] warming imagined by the UN, we’d have to shut down—and shut down completely—the entire world economy for a decade. Right back to the Stone Age, and without even the right to light a carbon-emitting fire in our caves . . . “The economic cost of trying to mitigate imagined ‘global warming’ by reducing our CO2 emissions must in all circumstances extravagantly, monstrously, absurdly outweigh any conceivable climatic benefit. It is this central economic truth . . . that the media and the politicians can no longer ignore.” See Kirk’s post here. See how it is supported by this presentation by Chemist Dr. Martin Hertsberg.

Here’s a story about how one missing letter, an M, can wreck a whole month’s worth of climate data. It is one of the longest posts ever made on WUWT, I spent almost my entire Saturday on it. I think it might also be one of the most important because it demonstrates a serious weakness in surface data reporting.

In my last post, we talked about the odd temperature anomaly that Jean S. found in the March GISS data and posted at Climate Audit:

The anomaly over Finland has an interesting signature to it, and the correction that GISS posted on their website confirms something I’ve been looking at for a few months.

The data shown between 4/13 and 4/15 were based on data downloaded on 4/12 and included some station reports from Finland in which the minus sign may have been dropped.

With some work I started back in late December and through January, and with GISS putting stamp of approval on “missing minus signs” I can now demonstrate that missing minus signs aren’t just an odd event, they happen with regularity, and the effect is quite pronounced when it does happen. This goes to the very heart of data gathering integrity and is rooted in simple human error. The fault lies not with GISS (though now they need a new quality control feature) but mostly with NOAA/NCDC who manages the GHCN and also needs proper quality control. The error originates at the airport, likely with a guy sitting in the control tower. Readers who are pilots will understand this when they see what I’m talking about.

I’ve seen this error happen all over the world. Please read on and be patient, there is a lot of minutiae that must be discussed to properly frame the issue. I have to start at the very bottom of the climate data food-chain and work upwards.

First, a discussion about the root of error and the differences between the surface and satellite dataset. I should mention that in the satellite image from NASA’s Earth Observations (NEO), we don’t see the same error as we see in the GISTEMP map above.

NASA NEO March 1-31 2010 day satellite measured temp anomaly.

Why? Better sensors, maybe, but mostly it has to do with a different data gathering methodology. In the surface data sets, including land and ocean data, most every datapoint is touched by a human hand, even airport data that gets done by automated airport sensors sometimes gets transcribed manually (often in third world and technologically stunted countries). In the surface data, thousands of sensors are spread across the globe, many different designs, many different exposures, many different people with different standards of measurement and reporting. The precision, accuracy, and calibration of the vast surface network varies, especially when we have broad mix of instrumentation types.For example in the US Historical Climatological Network the equipment varies significantly.

See larger image here.

In satellite data, the data is measured at a single point with one sensor type, the Microwave Sounder Unit on the satellite, calibrated to a precision source on-board. On-board redundant precision platinum resistance thermometers (PRTs) carried on the satellite radiometers. The PRT’s are individually calibrated in a laboratory before being installed in the instruments. The satellite data is automatically measured and transmitted. In contrast to the surface temperature record, no human hands touch the data gathering or data reporting process. Satellite data generation is far more homogeneous than the mish-mash of surface data.

I think it would be safe to say that the chances of human error in raw surface data are at least an order of magnitude greater (if not several) than error in raw satellite data. Post measurement processing is another issue, but for the purposes of this essay, I’m focusing only on raw data gathering and transmittal.

As mentioned in the recently updated compendium of issues with the surface temperature data by Joe D’Aleo and myself, there has been a move in the Global Historical Climatological Network (GHCN) to rely more and more on airports for climate data. This, in my opinion, is a huge mistake because in addition to those issues

E.M. Smith aka “Chiefio” reports that in GISS (which uses GHCN) worldwide, there has been a wholesale migration towards airport weather data as a climatic data source.

See in the full post how miscoding of the METAR station observation code by neglecting to insert an “m” indicator in front of any temperatures reported in degrees Celsius can lead to a very large error in the daily average and significant warm bias in the monthly. He shows how that accounted for the error in Finland and shows many other examples of such errors, far more common than assumed. It is in the colder higher latitudes where the problem occurs and where the alleged greatest warming are found. See much more detail here.

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Dial “M” for mangled - Wikipedia and Environment Canada caught with temperature data errors

By Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That

Ecotretas find more cases of missing “M"s and mangled data in METAR reports making it into climatic temperature data.  I’ve reposted his findings below and added some of my own notes [in brackets] to strengthen his findings. This time it’s Eureka, Nunavut, Canada. From “Up Here” magazine: The first High Arctic Weather Station in history, Eureka was established in April 1947 at 80-degrees north latitude in the vicinity of two rivers, which provided fresh water to the six-man United States Army Air Force team that parachuted in. They erected Jamesway huts to shelter themselves and their equipment until August, when an icebreaker reached Eureka - as it has every year since - and brought permanent buildings and supplies. For decades after that, small, all-male crews would hunker down for entire winters, going a little stir-crazy from the isolation.

Photo by Eric Charlton from Flicker used under creative commons license

As I pointed out last Saturday there’s a common reporting flaw in world meteorological stations that use the METAR weather data format to report their hourly temperatures. Just one bad report in a cold location in the Arctic or Antarctic is enough to throw off the whole month’s worth of data when averaged. And it is monthly data that is used for climate. The all time high temperature error identified below has found it’s way into Wikipedia as “factual” when it is clearly wrong.

Some METAR and other kinds of unidentified errors also seem to be finding their way into official Environment Canada data. I’ve made screencaps. Given the importance of this weather station as the last surviving GHCN station that far north, also used in GISS, you’d think better quality control would be done, particularly when EC has a statement about data quality on each data page. What has been found seems to point to a corrupted dataset there.

- Anthony

Eureka

[Images above from GISS]

Eureka, in Nunavut Canada, is a very special meteorological station. As can be seen in the first image above, it is responsible for the very big stripe on the very top of Canada. As can be seen on the second image, the data from only one station is responsible for a very big percentage of global temperatures. Both graphs can be obtained here.

So, one would imagine that data for this station is quality proof. We found two sources for temperature data: at Weather Underground and at the National Climate Data and Information Archive.

The first interesting data about this station is it’s record high temperature, which according to Wikipedia was reached on July 14, 2009, with 20C. [image here]

Here is where it really gets strange, I’ve added two screencaps from Environment Canada, one for the monthly data, another for the daily data from July 14th, 2009. They don’t match! The 20.9C value never appears in the July 14th hourly data. Perhaps EC corrected the error in the daily/hourly data, but missed the monthly?  - Anthony]

But that seems not to be the case in other examples. Take January 1st, 2007, for instance. Both Weather Underground and Environment Canada agree: there was a mighty spike at noon. Seems like the “M” problem affects both:
See hourly listing here and graphically depicted here..

These are just excerpts from the post. Read much more here.

Recently we posted Roger Pielke Sr. exchange with Kevin Trenberth on UCAR’s press release on the “missing heat in the climate system” (forecast by the climate models) here. We agree with the following comments from Bill Dipuccio about the importance of the issue with links to the follow-up discussions on Climate Science weblog with Trenberth and Josh Willis of NOAA.

This press release from UCAR has major implications and I don’t think its getting as much attention as it deserves. 

They admit that the alleged build-up of heat in the climate system cannot be documented by actual measurements and some of the energy may even be illusory.  Of course they are confident that most of the energy is hidden somewhere, so they are calling for more thorough measurements, especially of ocean heat and TOA from satellites.  See the graph below.


See enlarged image here.

Pielke has had extensive exchanges with Trenberth on this (updated again today) and a disagreement is opening up between Josh Willis and Trenberth regarding the quality of ocean data.  Willis generally disagrees with Trenberth’s assertion that there is hidden heat in the deep layers. 

See also Doug Hoffman’s summary here.

To paraphrase the old Wendy’s commercial, “Where’s the Heat!?”

Bill DiPuccio

Astronomer Snaevarr Gudmundsson from Iceland was able to travel to within just a few kilometers from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano, and shared his incredible close-up images with Universe Today. “I stayed near the volcano from about 16:00 hours to 22:00 hours on Saturday and watched its impressive eruption,” Gudmundsson said in an email to me. “Amazing event, awesome explosions of 1200 C hot magma reaching ice and water. I shot more than 550 images during these hours of continuous enjoyment. Sounds ridiculous but its ever changing appearance was never boring.”

The massive plume put on an impressive display - from lightning forming within the plume to an incredible amount of spewing ash. On one of following pictures you can see helicopter for size comparison of the plume

The massive plume of Eyjafjallajokull volcano dwarfs a helicopter flying nearby (upper left). Image courtesy of and copyright Snaevarr Gudmundsson.

Gudmundsson said he and other photographers were a safe distance from the eruption, but were a few kilometers away. “Nearby was a small river and its prominent sound prevented us from hearing much in the eruption itself except a loud roar from thunders from time to time,” he said. “During daylight we even glimpsed some lightning but at dusk (the photo is taken at about 22:00 in the evening) they were easily spotted especially during active periods of explosions.”

The plume of Eyjafjallajokull volcano on April 17, 2010. Image courtesy of and copyright Snaevarr Gudmundsson.

I asked if there was any smell associated with the volcano and Gudmundsson said there was a bit of sulphuric smell in the air even though they were in a location where the wind was blowing towards the volcano. “The ash went to the other side of the volcano, as you can suggest, making life miserable for farmers and households below, but the rest of it climbed to higher altitude and from there to Europe.”

“From the foot of the volcano to the prominent top, seen in front of the tephra cloud (seen on some of the photos) the overall height is about 1300 -1400 m,” Gudmundsson said. “When the eruption began a huge flood went down beneath the obvious glacier to the left from the crater. And if you look closely on the photo showing the foot hills under the mountain a lot of icebergs can be seen on the flood plain. Under that same glacier was a rather deep lagoon (can’t been seen but sat between the two high moraines on either side of it, in front of the glacier) but sediment from the eruption filled it up in only two days at most! That is unbelievable. I have climbed this glacier many times but to approach it one usually must traverse the moraine, around the lagoon to reach the ice. But suddenly it is gone.”

Another view of Eyjafjallajokull volcano on April 17, 2010. Image courtesy of and copyright Snaevarr Gudmundsson.

Gudmundsson said the flood paths can be seen below the glacier as a narrow gorges carved into rather soft volcanic sediment.

Some of the latest reports from Iceland say that in some areas the volcanic fallout has been significant, clogging car engines, turning grass grey and reducing visibility to just a few meters.

The police say driving conditions can be very difficult in these places, but the area affected is remote with only a few hundred people, most of them living in isolated homes and many of them farmers. They have been advised to stay inside with the windows and doors shut and if they do venture out to wear goggles and a mask.

The staff of Landhelgisgaeslan (Icelandic Coastal Patrol) captured this radar image of the craters in Eyjafjallajokull on Friday. There are three main openings and each one is 200-500m in diameter.

Radar image of the volcano, taken by the Icelandic Coastal Patrol.

Our very special thanks to Snaevarr Gudmundsson for sharing his images and experiences of seeing the volcano “up close and personal.” Also thanks Col Maybury of radio station 2NUR in Newcastle, Australia for connecting me with Snaevarr (yes my connection to Iceland came through Australia!) and also thanks to erlinger on Twitter for help with Icelandic translations of news reports. See post here. More on this volcano this week. See earlier post from last spring on high latitude volcanoes in this prior story. Will be updated this week. 

BRACE yourself for more winters like the last one, northern Europe. Freezing conditions could become more likely: winter temperatures may even plummet to depths last seen at the end of the 17th century, a time known as the Little Ice Age. That’s the message from a new study that identifies a compelling link between solar activity and winter temperatures in northern Europe.

The research finds that low solar activity promotes the formation of giant kinks in the jet stream. These kinks can block warm westerly winds from reaching Europe, while allowing in winds from Arctic Siberia. When this happens in winter, northern Europe freezes, even though other, comparable regions of the globe may be experiencing unusually mild conditions.

Mike Lockwood at the University of Reading in the UK began his investigation because these past two relatively cold British winters coincided with a lapse in the sun’s activity more profound than anything seen for a century. For most of 2008-9, sunspots virtually disappeared from the sun’s surface and the buffeting of Earth by the solar magnetic field dropped to record lows since measurements began, about 150 years ago.

Lockwood and his colleagues took average winter temperatures from the Central England Temperature dataset, which extends back to 1659, and compared it with records of highs and lows in solar activity. They found that during years of low solar activity, winters in the UK were far more likely to be colder than average. “There is less than a 1 per cent probability that the result was obtained by chance,” says Lockwood, in a paper to appear in Environmental Research Letters (DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/5/2/024001).

Judith Lean, a solar-terrestrial physicist at the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC, says the analysis is statistically robust, and reckons it forms a piece in the larger puzzle of how solar activity influences weather. Often cited by climate-change sceptics as a cause of global warming (see “What are you up to, sunshine?"), the effects of solar cycles have largely evaded the grasp of climate modellers. Lockwood found that when he removed 20th-century warming due to industrial emissions from his models, the statistical link between solar lows and extreme winters was stronger, suggesting the phenomenon is unrelated to global warming. But the sun undeniably has a big influence on weather systems: it is, after all, the energy source that powers them.

“All the little pieces are adding up into something much bigger,” says Lean. “People are beginning to realise that European weather is particularly susceptible to solar activity.” A study she published in 2008 found that warmer-than-average temperatures were more likely in northern Europe when solar activity is high (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2008GL034864).

Lean says research like hers and Lockwood’s is helping to overcome a long-standing reticence among climate scientists to tackle the influence of solar cycles on the climate and weather. A big clue to the nature of this influence may lie in work published in 2008 by David Barriopedro at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, and colleagues. They investigated so-called “blocking events” in the mid-latitude jet stream during the winters of 1955-99.

The jet stream brings winds from the west, over the Atlantic, and into northern Europe. Blocking occurs when the meanders in the jet stream become so large that they double back on themselves, halting the prevailing westerly winds and allowing cold north-easterlies to take control (see diagram). Barriopedro found that when solar activity is low, the blocking events move eastwards across the Atlantic towards Europe, effectively opening an atmospheric corridor to the frigid Siberian Arctic.

But how can solar variability influence the jet stream? One finger of suspicion is pointing at the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere that lies 20 to 50 kilometres above our heads. There, patterns of winds and temperature are known to be influenced by solar activity, says Lockwood. This is because peaks in ultraviolet radiation emitted by the sun boost ozone formation in the stratosphere, which in turn absorbs more ultraviolet and heats up. The heating is greatest in the region of the stratosphere nearest to the sun and so a temperature gradient appears across the stratosphere and winds are born.

How this affects the weather below is still debated. Very little is known about the physics that governs the stratosphere, but one pattern that is emerging is that stratospheric “weather” is linked to the troposphere below it - where our everyday weather and currents like the jet stream reside. Edwin Gerber of New York University studies these interactions. He and colleagues showed in 2009 that upward movements of air in the troposphere can change the patterns of stratospheric winds. These changes, in turn, can be reflected back down to the troposphere and influence weather at the surface of the Earth (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2009GL040913). “Changes in the stratospheric winds influence the path of winter storms across Europe,” Gerber says.

If researchers can prove that the sun can similarly induce changes in the troposphere via the stratosphere, which Gerber thinks they will, this could solve one of the biggest puzzles of the Little Ice Age - namely, that it appeared to have been a peculiarly European phenomenon, with other parts of the globe largely spared. The effects of the sun on the stratosphere are not global, says Lockwood. “They change the way the atmospheric energy is distributed around the world rather than change the total amount of energy being put into it.”

Future studies may show that the effects of changes in solar activity can be felt further afield, but for now it seems that Europe is particularly susceptible because it happens to sit under the northern jet stream at a longitude where its meanders can grow into kinks.

Although sunspot activity is gradually returning, astronomers are not expecting it to reach its previously high levels. So if Lockwood is correct, while the general temperature trend in the northern hemisphere will increase in line with global warming over the coming decades, northern Europe can look forward to some more harsh winters. It may be time to buy some decent gloves.

How much influence solar activity wields over our climate has vexed scientists for centuries. Take the British astronomer William Herschel: in the late 18th century, he compared the price of wheat in England with the number of sunspots and suggested that years with more sunspots produced good harvests, keeping the price lower.

Since the discovery of the 11-year solar cycle in the mid-19th century, many have sought to make links between different elements of solar variability and changes in climate. Here’s a snapshot of the arguments and the evidence.

Cosmic rays: One persistent claim is that cosmic rays could affect cloud formation, influencing climate - but most analyses have found little or no correlation. CERN in Switzerland is running an experiment that will provide data about how likely such particles are to cause cloud formation.

Sunspots: People have tried to link the number of sunspots during the 20th century with rising global temperatures. But average sunspot numbers have been dropping since the 1920s. Global mean temperatures, meanwhile, have risen over the same period.

Ultraviolet rays: Less easy to dismiss has been the idea that changes in ultraviolet radiation from the sun, a quantity closely linked to solar activity, could influence the climate. Direct measurements only began in 2003. However, average solar activity has fallen over the last two decades while temperatures have risen, making it unlikely that UV radiation is a dominant driver of global temperatures.

Irradiance: Measurements of the sun’s brightness - an indicator of its energy output - only began in 1977. Irradiance rose between 1977 and 1985, but has been dropping since.

Since about 1985, all the solar factors that could have warmed the climate have been going in the wrong direction, says Lockwood. “If they were really a big factor we would have cooling by now.”