Consumer Reports has painted an ugly picture of the Nissan Leaf, as did an early enthusiast based in Los Angeles, who described his frustrations with the heavily subsidized, all-electric car in a recent column.

Now comes what must be the definitive example of the Leaf’s impracticality - this time from a (still) hard-core advocate, whose 180-mile Tennessee trek to visit family over the holidays required four lengthy stops to keep the vehicle moving.

Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, set out from Knoxville on Monday with his wife and son, headed for the Nashville area. His plan (appropriately) was to follow Interstate 40 West, where a series of Cracker Barrel restaurants - equipped with so-called “fast” vehicle chargers (if you want to call 30 minutes or more “fast") along the route - would provide an electricity security blanket as the Leaf’s charge diminished.

Only problem was, the Leaf’s charge dropped more rapidly than promised. In what has to be a public relations disaster for Nissan, Smith’s EV was unable to travel no farther than 55 miles on any leg of the trip - and for the most part, much less. The company, and its government backers, proclaimed the Leaf was “built to go 100 miles on a charge” (large print), with a footnoted disclaimer (small print) that it travels shorter distances (like, 70 miles) if the air conditioning or the heater is used. Turns out even that was an exaggeration.

It was about 35 degrees in the Volunteer State when Smith departed Knoxville on Monday, and Mrs. Smith and his five-year-old son apparently were not willing to forgo heat in order to make the EV cause look good. A trip that should take - according to map Web sites - less than three hours, ended up lasting six hours for the Smiths because of all the stops they had to make. The approximate intervals where they paused for recharging were as follows:

•Knoxville to Harriman: 45 miles
•Harriman to Crossville: 31 miles
•Crossville to Cookeville: 31 miles
•Cookeville to Lebanon: 50 miles
•Lebanon to destination in Antioch, just south of Nashville: 22 miles

Hence the Smiths required four recharges in order to travel approximately 180 miles. According to the account in The Tennessean, they experienced their first “hair-raiser” range anxiety before they even reached Harriman.

“The display on the dashboard of their Nissan LEAF showed a drop in available range from 100 miles to about 50, when they had only traveled about 40 miles,” reported the Gannett-owned newspaper, which also owns USA Today, a cheerleader of all “clean” energy projects regardless of viability.

If the specs promised by Nissan and Leaf advocates were to be believed, the Smiths should have been able to travel about 25-30 miles past Harriman (where it took 20 minutes to boost the battery to 80 percent) before they’d need a recharge, even when using the car heater. But because of the limited availability of so-called “fast chargers” (440 volts, 30 minutes), the intermediate stop was necessary in order to climb the upcoming Cumberland Plateau and reach the next Cracker Barrel “fast charger” in Crossville. The chargers (which, by the way, don’t work for the Chevy Volt and won’t for many future EVs planned for release) are sparse because they cost $40,000 each, and companies like Ecotality apparently can only do so much with the $115 million Department of Energy grant it received to deploy the equipment.

At Crossville, according to The Tennessean, the Smiths’ battery gauge failed them again. The reading at Harriman said they could go another 70 miles, but after 31 miles, the gauge indicated they only had 20 miles of range remaining. Obviously that wasn’t to be trusted.

“It was a little nerve wracking,” Stephen Smith told the Nashville-based newspaper. “I’m finding the range is not 100 percent accurate.”

But heading west from Crossville, according to Smith, would not be as taxing on the Leaf: “Cookeville will be about the same distance but it will be flat or downhill.” It turned out his battery gauge maintained accuracy on that leg of the trip, but when he reached Lebanon (50 miles), he found that the Ecotality “Blink” fast-charger at the Cracker Barrel was, uh, on the blink (he should have known that was possible, if not likely). So instead he had to plug in to another slower charger at the restaurant, which took an hour to boost the battery enough (they hoped) to travel the remaining 22 miles to their destination.

The Smiths arrived at their destination in Antioch with what the Leaf told them was six miles of range remaining. All that after an anxiety-filled six-hour trip that was more than twice as long as it would take in a gasoline vehicle, which could probably have been accomplished with a single stop for a bathroom break.

The Smiths’ experience echoed that of a Consumer Reports reviewer and Los Angeles columnist Rob Eshman, who called his Leaf his “2011 Nissan Solyndra.” Eshman, editor-in-chief of The Jewish Journal, experienced the same gauge inaccuracies and range anxiety that came from traversing hills and mountains and the use of his air conditioning in hot, smoggy L.A.

“My life now revolves around a near-constant calculation of how far I can drive before I’ll have to walk,” Eshman wrote. “The Nissan Leaf, I can report, is perfect if you don’t have enough anxiety in your life.”

Of course, you won’t hear words like that from the lips of passionate “Green” energy advocate Smith, who chalked up the experience to being an “early adopter” and a pioneer.

“It’s good knowing we didn’t use a drop of oil getting down here,” he said. He must have had a similar fuzzy feeling on his return trip, which “only” took five hours, since the Lebanon charger was working later in the week.

As for the heavily coal-generated electricity from the Tennessee Valley Authority that powered his trip, well, let’s not go there. Let’s just pretend that windmills and solar panels could have just as easily done the trick, if the EPA and Department of Energy would just do their jobs and eliminate all coal power plants and “invest” billions more taxpayer dollars in “renewables” deployment.

As for “why Tennessee” as part of this EV system rollout, you might ask? Thanks be to taxpayers there, also, as Nissan has in its back pocket a $1.4 billion federal loan to retrofit a plant in Smyrna - just outside Nashville - to mass-produce the Leaf. As company CEO Carlos Ghosn has said publicly, Nissan will produce EVs wherever government will produce the financial incentives.

And that’s what it takes in order for the “Green” energy industry swindle to survive.

Paul Chesser is an associate fellow for the National Legal and Policy Center.

The four submissions on December 15th to the Senate Committee by Drs. Clark, McKitrick, Veizer and Patterson) have been reformatted with all the slides by Tom Harris of ICSC. As Dr. Clark says of his presentation, it is his climate course packaged into ten minutes and for a lay audience.

Ian Clark:

Ross McKitrick:

Tim Patterson:

Jan Veizer:

So what’s up with Jim Cantore, the head hurricane chaser and “Storm Stories” honcho at the Weather Channel?  Has he gone “Warmist?”

In a Dec. 14 Newsmaker luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington, he appeared to single out “climate change” as the culprit behind this year’s spate of severe weather events afflicting planet Earth’s Garden of Eden.

Asked whether global warming causes weather extremes, Cantore responded: “We are seeing a warming world. I know there are going to be more extreme weather events.”

He then segued into a few gut-instinct observations: “And being a guy who stands out in the rain all the time ...it’s raining harder out there. And that’s really weird. It’s not scientific, but when I’m out there in it, it just seems to be raining a lot harder. More water vapor means more rainfall,” he said.

Well, OK, Cantore got the “It’s not scientific” part right.

This isn’t the first time Cantore has parroted the official anthropogenic global warming (AGP) - a.k.a. climate change - meme. (Note: we should dump the term “climate change.” The earth’s climate has been constantly changing for billions of years.) In an interview with Brian Williams on NBC Dateline last April, he appeared to blame April’s deadly tornado outbreak on global warming.

“If we have a warmer Earth, and the purpose of the jet stream is to help equalize all of that, well, because it’s warmer, it’s going to have to work a lot harder. And that, in addition to the fact that we have so much instability out there in this month of April, heat and humidity, those two things create this monster outbreak...”

Translation:  Warming of the atmosphere [which is not happening] is raising havoc with the jet stream and spawning more tornadoes. Despite Williams’ prompting, Cantore can’t quite bring himself to go full “Chicken Little”:

WILLIAMS:I guess we’re all looking for ways to explain away what happened here.

CANTORE: It’s hard to do that.

So give Cantore credit for not going off the deep end and regurgitating the “man is frying the planet” talking points peddled by the Michael Mann Hockey Stick crowd.

No evidence of human influence

‘There is, in fact, no evidence that human-induced warming is causing more extreme weather events, says Joe Bastardi, WeatherBELL chief forecaster and the former chief long-range forecaster at Accuweather, calling such claims “Alice in Wonderland forecasting.”

He says the alarmists continue to ignore two major climate indicators that have turned cold - the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the cooling of the mid-troposphere.

“Why do they always blame warmth for extreme weather while ignoring two major events - the fourth-coldest PDO we’ve ever had and the fact that mid-troposphere temperatures are the lowest since we started tracking them 10 years ago? What do you expect the weather to do when cold signals show up?”

Cold air to blame

The Warmists made much ado about the deadly tornado outbreak last spring, fingering human influence as the culprit.  But as University of Alabama-Huntsville research scientist Dr. Roy Spencer explains, tropical-type warmth rarely spawns tornadic thunderstorms.

“Instead, tornadoes require strong wind shear (wind speed and direction changing rapidly with height in the lower atmosphere), the kind which develops when cold and warm air masses ‘collide’.

“Anyone who claims more tornadoes are caused by global warming is either misinformed, pandering, or delusional.”

The extreme weather we’ve seen lately is nothing unusual, says WeatherBell Chief Forecaster Joe D’Aleo, who served as the Weather Channel’s first director of meteorology at its launch in May 1982.

“We’ve had extreme weather for centuries.  We experienced incredible heat waves and hurricanes during the Middle Ages, Little Ice Age, and throughout modern times.  In the mid 1950s, we had five hurricanes hit the East Coast in just two years - 1954 and 1955.

“And in September 1993, Life Magazine ran a cover story, ‘The Year of the Killer Weather: why Has Nature Gone Mad?’ describing the many natural disasters . . . blizzards, droughts, floods, wildfires . . . that year. The recent outbreaks of severe weather are nothing out of the ordinary.”

Scaremongering contradicted by facts

On his Real Science climate blog, Steven Goddard takes the alarmists to the woodshed, with a compendium of graphs, charts and news stories that show that today’s weather extremes are nothing out of the ordinary.  A quick glance at the facts exposes the lies behind the Warmist scaremongering: tornado and hurricane numbers are down, arctic ice is rebounding, global temperatures are on the decline, and sea levels are virtually static - even as CO2 levels (the alleged climate change culprit) continue to rise.

Writes Goddard: “Extreme weather occurred at least as often below 350 ppm [CO2]. Newspapers recorded these extreme weather events.  Claims that the weather has gotten worse are complete nonsense.”

In his research paper “A Chronological Listing of Weather Events” published in 2010, James Marusek examines in detail thousands of severe weather events that took place between 1 A.D. and 1900 A.D. His research undermines the claim that severe weather occurrences in recent years are extraordinary and the result of human influence. 

Says Marusek: “If one wishes to peer into the future, then a firm grasp of the past events is a key to that gateway. This is intrinsically true for the scientific underpinnings of weather and climate.” Unfortunately, his research has been ignored by those bent on propping up the teetering fiction of human-caused global warming.

‘Big money behind ‘consensus’

This brings us back to Cantore, whose comments, whether he believes it or not, falsely legitimize a theory that is clearly bogus. Is he is toeing the company line, afraid to deviate from the AGW talking points? He must surely know that global warming is a political hot potato, that the “climate change consensus” reigns supreme, and that big money is at stake. Given those realities and in the interests of job preservation, he might not be inclined to challenge the status quo.

By the way, it’s interesting to note that the Weather Channel’s parent company is NBC Universal, whose major stockholder is General Electric, a company that stands to reap big profits from the switch to green technologies.

As Jeff Poor at the Daily Caller writes: “. . .late last year it was reported [that] General Electric (GE), a stakeholder in . . . parent company NBC Universal, received $24.9 million in grants, much of it tied to so-called green energy technology, from the $800-billion stimulus President Barack Obama signed into law in 2009.”

GE also to stands profit from the Obama administration’s plans to push motorists into electric-powered automobiles.

According to the Detroit News, “General Electric will convert half its 30,000 worldwide fleet of vehicles to electrics . . . In all, the Fairfield, Conn.–based company, which makes charging stations, will purchase 25,000 plug-in electric cars by 2015.” It just so happens that each of those charging stations - the GE Wattsation - is eligible for up to $2,000 in subsidies - courtesy of Joe Q. Taxpayer.

The pursuit of lucrative green subsidies by the Weather Channel’s owners could explain its metamorphosis from a go-to source of timely weather reports to a politicized mouthpiece tasked with pushing the global warming agenda. If so, the plan appears to have backfired early, judging from the comments of readers responding to Andrew Freedman’s Capitol Weather Gang column a few years back:

“Many of those who commented . . . said that the mere presence of Forecast Earth on The Weather Channel’s programming schedule was so offensive that it had caused them to switch the network off altogether.

“I stopped watching the Weather Channel when they strayed from hard science and started preaching from the Global Warming alter,” wrote “Baseball Fan.”

Another commenter, “rat race escapee,” wrote that Forecast Earth had caused “millions of viewers” to change channels, and this was why it was canceled.

(For those who don’t remember, Forecast Earth was cancelled not long after climate expert Heidi Cullen, one of the program’s contributors, demanded that the American Meteorological Society revoke its Seal of Approval for any TV weatherman questioning the AGW narrative.)

‘Climate change’: the catch-all scapegoat

As their model-driven theory crumbles under the weight of real-world observational data, global warming true believers like the Weather Channel have adopted a new strategy, blaming virtually any severe weather event on human activity. Blizzards, torrential rains, droughts, fires, floods, heat waves and cold waves - every weather extreme known to man - are now the fault of the ubiquitous demon called climate change, a sinister by-product of human CO2 emissions - the grand bogeyman of global warming.

Jim Cantore, whose stormcasts are watched by millions of viewers, should take a long, hard look at the historical weather record. After a fair examination of the facts, one can arrive at only one reasonable conclusion: Ever-changing weather patterns are the norm, not the exception, and there is no evidence linking today’s extreme weather to the burning of fossil fuels.

In a last-ditch effort to salvage their pet theory, global warming zealots have resorted to the most ridiculous “blame all the crazy weather on man” absurdities, says Bastardi.

“If it snows cheese tomorrow will that also be the result of global warming.”

Regular readers will know that I think that the print media overall has done a pretty good job on covering the science of climate change, if not always getting the politics right. They will also know what I think about the “debate” over climate change and extreme events (above). But every once in a while I see a story that is so breathtakingly bad that it is worth commenting on. Today’s installment comes from Justin Gillis at the New York Times and was published on Christmas Eve. The article is so bad that it might just be the worst piece of reporting I’ve ever seen in the Times on climate change.

Where to begin? How about the start.

The NYT laments that the work of attributing the cause of extreme events in NOAA is “languishing”:

Scientists say they could, in theory, do a much better job of answering the question “Did global warming have anything to do with it?” after extreme weather events like the drought in Texas and the floods in New England.

But for many reasons, efforts to put out prompt reports on the causes of extreme weather are essentially languishing.

Set aside the unattributed “scientists say”—a favorite construction of Gillis and the Times. The article fails to explain that NOAA already has a robust effort in place focused on climate attribution and which has put out recent assessments about phenomena as varied as the 2011 US tornado season and the 2009/2010 mid-Atlantic coast snowstorms. No one from that effort was quoted in the article nor was any of their work (perhaps because it utterly contradicts the narrative of the story).

The article repeats the tired statistic that the number of billion dollar disasters have increased in recent decades:

A typical year in this country features three or four weather disasters whose costs exceed $1 billion each. But this year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has tallied a dozen such events, including wildfires in the Southwest, floods in multiple regions of the country and a deadly spring tornado season. And the agency has not finished counting. The final costs are certain to exceed $50 billion.

The article does not explain that $1 billion in 2011 is about the same as $400 million in 1980 (XLS). Nor does it explain that a $50 billion total in losses for 2011 is about exactly the same as the total in 1980, after adjusting for inflation—however, as a proportion of the overall economy those 1980 losses were 250% larger than those experienced in 2011. That is, the equivalent 1980 losses in 2011 would be $125 billion (XLS). The article completely ignores relevant peer-reviewed research on the subject (see here also).

The article fails to cite the recent IPCC report which covered this exact subject, concluding (PDF):

Long-term trends in economic disaster losses adjusted for wealth and population increases have not been attributed to climate change, but a role for climate change has not been excluded.

The IPCC SREX report has a lot of other things to say about extremes, which also contradict the narrative of the story. Also neglected is the US government’s own review of extreme events in the US, which found no long-term trends.

The article is extremely sloppy when discussing tornadoes:

Tornadoes, the deadliest weather disaster to hit the country this year, present a particularly thorny case.

On their face, weather statistics suggest that tornadoes are becoming more numerous as the climate warms. But tornadoes are small and hard to count, and scientists have little confidence in the accuracy of older data, which means they do not know whether to believe the apparent increase.

Tornadoes are not in the least bit “thorny.” You wouldn’t know from reading the article that the most powerful tornadoes - the F3, F4 and F5s which cause almost all of the damage and fatalities—have actually decreased over the past 50 years (so too has damage). Nor would you know that the NOAA Climate Attribution effort has recently looked at the 2011 tornadoes and found no evidence of causality from increasing greenhouse gases:

So far, we have not been able to link any of the major causes of the tornado outbreak to global warming. Barring a detection of change, a claim of attribution (to human impacts) is thus problematic, although it does not exclude that a future change in such environmental conditions may occur as anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing increases.

The NYT article relies on a very few people from the usual small circle of folks cited in such articles to say the usual suggestive things - Ben Santer, Jeff Masters, Peter Stott. Not one researcher is cited who actually publishes peer-reviewed work on tornadoes, economic impacts of disasters, or the long-term history of US weather extremes. However, somehow Congressional Republicans show up as the bad guys in the usual good guys-bad guys framing on this topic. No budget numbers are presented nor any specific discussion of what is going on in NOAA. Ink blot.

I still believe that the print media overall does a good job on a difficult subject, but every once in a while you see an article so detached from reality that it is worth noting. Now, I’m back to my nap by the fruit table

Reference:
Neukom, R., Luterbacher, J., Villalba, R., Kuttel, M., Frank, D., Jones, P.D., Grosjean, M., Wanner, H., Aravena, J.-C., Black, D.E., Christie, D.A., D’Arrigo, R., Lara, A., Morales, M., Soliz-Gamboa, C., Srur, A., Urritia, R. and von Gunten, L. 2011. Multiproxy summer and winter surface air temperature field reconstructions for southern South America covering the past centuries. Climate Dynamics 37: 35-51.

In order to know how unusual, unprecedented or unnatural the global warming of the 20th century was, it is necessary to do what the eighteen authors of this important paper did, so as to be able, as they describe it, “to put the recent warming into a larger temporal and spatial context.”

Working with 22 of the best climate proxies they could find that stretched far enough back in time, Neukom et al. (2011) reconstructed a mean austral summer (December-February) temperature history for the period AD 900-1995 for the terrestrial area of the planet located between 20°S and 55°S and between 30°W and 80°W—a region they call Southern South America (SSA)—noting that their results “represent the first seasonal sub-continental-scale climate field reconstructions of the Southern Hemisphere going so far back in time.”

The international research team—composed of scientists from Argentina, Chile, Germany, Switzerland, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States—write that their summer temperature reconstruction suggests that “a warm period extended in SSA from 900 (or even earlier) to the mid-fourteenth century,” which they describe as being temporally located “towards the end of the Medieval Climate Anomaly as concluded from Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions.” And as can be seen from the figure below, the warmest decade of this Medieval Warm Period was calculated by them to be AD 1079-1088, which as best as can be determined from their graph is about 0.17C warmer than the peak warmth of the Current Warm Period.

Figure 1. Enlarged. Reconstructed mean summer SSA temperatures. Adapted from Neukom et al. (2011).

The findings of Neukom et al. go a long ways towards demonstrating that: (1) the Medieval Warm Period was a global phenomenon that was comprised of even warmer intervals than the warmest portion of the Current Warm Period, and that (2) the greater warmth of the Medieval Warm Period occurred when there was far less CO2 in the air than there is nowadays, which facts clearly demonstrate that the planet’s current—but not unprecedented—degree of warmth need not be CO2-induced.

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Indeed as CO2Science has shown, according to data published by 1032 individual scientists from 590 research institutions in 44 different countries ... and counting, the Medieval Warm Period is very real and global!

See the MWP project interactive map here.

2011 Interim Report (25 August 2011)

This 2011 Interim Report presents an overview of the research on climate change that has appeared since publication of Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. Research published before 2009 was included if it did not appear in the 2009 report or provides context for the new research. Nearly all of the research summarized here appeared in peer-reviewed science journals… Read More
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), already under severe criticism for violating the requirements of academic peer review and relying on secondary sources, comes under attack again in a new report co-produced by three nonprofit research organizations.

According to the new report, “natural causes are very likely to be [the] dominant” cause of climate change that took place in the twentieth and at the start of the twenty-first centuries. “We are not saying anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHG) cannot produce some warming or have not in the past. Our conclusion is that the evidence shows they are not playing a substantial role.”

The authors of the new report go on to say “the net effect of continued warming and rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere is most likely to be beneficial to humans, plants, and wildlife.”

Both conclusions contradict the findings of the widely cited reports of the IPCC.

Lead Authors
Craig D. Idso (USA), Robert M. Carter (Australia), S. Fred Singer (USA)

Contributors
Susan Crockford (Canada)
Joseph D‘Aleo (USA)
Indur Goklany (USA)
Sherwood Idso (USA)
Madhav Khandekar (Canada)
Anthony Lupo (USA)
Willie Soon (USA)
Mitch Taylor (Canada)