Ron Arnold
NCDC USHCN in 1999 showed a nice sine wave in temperatures from 1895 to 1999 but no warming trend if you looked at peak to peak. The data was regarded as the best in the world with relatively stable stations (though as Anthony Watts showed increasingly poorly sited) and with adjustments for urbanization developed by NCDC chief Tom Karl, which offset some of this local contamination. Hansen in 1999 said after the super El Nino of 1997/98 (which was 1.1F cooler than 1934 that there was a lot of year to year variability but little long term trend with the 1930s clearly the warmest decade and 1934 the warmest year. Hansen posted a note on GISS that the US was only 1.6% of the world and local variances are always possible (even though it was known as GLOBAL warming).
This produced a dilemma for the modelers and policy makers as the global data set which unlike the US had no UHI adjustment because NCDC did not have the metadata (precise local siting info) to use the same adjustment. NCDC was pressured to make the US data consistent - and so in 2008 they removed the urbanization adjustment and substituted a new algorithm to ‘detect previously undisclosed inhomegeneities’ (station moves for example). Although this new algorithm might catch a few stations where moves had not been documented, the removal of the UHI adjustment and a final new step called homogenization resulted in a significant change so that 1998 suddenly went from 1.1F colder than 1934 to almost 0.0 to 0.1F warmer than 1934.
Enlarged
The change was about 1.3F with early cooling and late warming.
There have been a few more iterations for the US and global data - each increasing the computed warming. This March after a very cold winter had NCDC sweating, a new version of the US state data displayed at Climate at a glance took place.
See an example of what they did for one state - Maine. In 2012, I downloaded the annual data and it showed little change over time. In fact as of 2013, the NCDC Maine data showed a 0.03F/decade cooling since 1895.
After March, the new state data showed a 0.23./decade warming with a cooling of the early 1900s by up to 5F.
-------
Big Green’s Untold Billions
Ron Arnold
The ‘Kill Keystone XL’ crowd isn’t little David up against a Big Oil Goliath. As usual, conventional wisdom isn’t wisdom when the mainstream media ask all the wrong questions with commensurate answers.
Behemoth Big Green outstrips Big Oil in expendable revenue by orders of magnitude - if you know how to follow the money.
The mainstream media don’t know how. Like most liberals, their staffs are afflicted with what 20th century futurist Herman Kahn called “Educated Incapacity” - the learned inability to understand or even perceive a problem, much less a solution.
They’ve been taught to be blind, unable to see Big Green as having more disposable money than Big Oil, so they don’t look into it.
They would never discover that the American Petroleum Institute’s IRS Form 990 for the most recent year showed $237.9 million in assets while the Natural Resources Defense Council reported $241.8 million.
Nor would they discover who started the anti-Keystone campaign in the first place. It was the $789 million Rockefeller Brothers Fund (established in 1940). The fund’s program is elaborated in a 2008 PowerPoint presentation called “The Tar Sands Campaign” by program officer Michael Northrop, who set up coordination and funding for a dozen environmental and anti-corporate attack groups to use the strategy, “raise the negatives, raise the costs, slow down and stop infrastructure, and stop pipelines.” Tom Steyer’s $100 million solo act is naive underclass nouveau cheap by comparison.
Mainstream reporters appear not to be aware of the component parts that comprise Big Green: environmentalist membership groups, nonprofit law firms, nonprofit real estate trusts (The Nature Conservancy alone holds $6 billion in assets), wealthy foundations giving prescriptive grants, and agenda-making cartels such as the 200-plus member Environmental Grantmakers Association. They each play a major socio-political role.
Invisible fact: the environmental movement is a mature, highly developed network with top leadership stewarding a vast institutional memory, a fiercely loyal cadre of competent social and political operatives, and millions of high-demographic members ready to be mobilized as needed.
That membership base is a built-in free public relations machine responsive to the push of a social media button sending politically powerful “educational” alerts that don’t show up on election reports.
Big Oil doesn’t have that, but has to pay for lobbyists, public relations firms and support groups that do show up on reports.
You don’t need expert skills to connect the dots linking Keystone XL to Alberta’s oil sands to climate change to Big Green.
On the other hand, you do need detailed knowledge to parse Big Green into its constituent parts. I spoke with CFACT senior policy analyst Paul Driessen, who said, “U.S. environmental activist groups are a $13-billion-a-year industry - and they’re all about PR and mobilizing the troops.
“Their climate change campaign alone has well over a billion dollars annually, and high-profile battles against drilling, fracking, oil sands and Keystone get a big chunk of that, as demonstrated by the Rockefeller assault.”
Driessen then identified the most-neglected of all money sources in Big Green: “The liberal foundations that give targeted grants to Big Green operations have well over $100 billion at their disposal.”
That figure is confirmed in the Foundation Center database of the Top 100 Foundations. But how much actually gets to environmental groups? The Giving USA Institute’s annual reports show $80,427,810,000 (more than $80 billion) in giving to environmental recipients from 2000 to 2012.
I checked the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and found $147.3 million in assets while environmental donor Gordon E. and Betty I. Moore Foundation posted $5.2 billion.
Driessen pointed out another unperceived sector of Big Green: government donors. “Under President Obama, government agencies have poured tens of millions into nonprofit groups for anti-hydrocarbon campaigns.”
Weather Channel co-founder John Coleman adds, “The federal government is currently spending $2.6 billion [per year] on climate change research (and only those who support the “carbon dioxide is a pollutant/major greenhouse gas” receive funding).”
This web of ideological soul-mates, like all movements, has its share of turf wars and dissension in the ranks, but, as disclosed on conference tapes I obtained, it shares a visceral hatred of capitalism, a worshipful trust that nature knows best, and a callous belief that humans are not natural but the nemesis of all that is natural.
Lawyer Christopher Manes wrote “Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization.” Manes now practices tax litigation from his law office in Palm Springs, Calif., which he has not yet unmade.
The legal branch of Big Green is varied. Earthjustice, (formerly Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund) raked in $133.8 million in the past five years - comparable to many similar law organizations. Highly litigative attack groups receiving federal settlements are numerous and thriving, such as the Center for Biological Diversity ($29.2 million in the past five years).
It’s not unusual for heirs of big money to dream of unmaking the source of their wealth: Laura Rockefeller Chasin of the Rockefeller Family Fund once said, “It’s very hard to get rid of the money is a way that does more good than harm. One of the ways is to subsidize people who are trying to change the system and get rid of people like us.”
The money reported to the Federal Election Commission is barely the beginning of what’s really happening. It doesn’t show you Big Green’s mobilized boots on the ground, the zooming Twitter tweets, the fevered protesters, the Facebook fanatics or the celebrities preaching carbon modesty from the lounges of their private jets.
When self-righteous victims of Educated Incapacity insist that Big Oil outspends the poor little greenies, keep in mind the mountains of IRS Form 990s filed by thousands of groups, land trusts, lawyer outfits, foundations, and agenda-makers, just waiting for America to wake up and smell Big Green’s untold hundreds of billions.
See more here.