We should all be grateful for the Heartland Institute and for its Nobel Mission to bring enlightenment and truth to the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) question.  The recent illegal acquiring of internal documents from this Chicago based institute helps remind us what a unique and important organization it is.  The Heartland Institute has given a great boost and encouragement to so many of us who have attended any one or up to six of their international climate science meetings that were held in New York, Wash. D.C., and Chicago between 2008-2011. 

Before the Heartland meetings and the skeptical AGW internet blog activity I felt rather alone and shunned as a result of my long-time and strongly held views regarding the lack of scientific validity of the AGW hypothesis.  It is surprising that this hypothesis has captured so much government and public support in the US, Canada, Australia and all across Europe.  If ever there was a bubble getting close to bursting, the AGW hypothesis will provide in coming years another good example.  We should expect to see future articles and/or books describing ‘The rise and fall’ of the AGW theory - similar to recent or coming books about Enron and Bernie Madoff, etc.

Heartland’s many reports and articles have given the public a more balanced and realistic assessment of the AGW theory (in my view) than have the overly biased warming pronouncements of the four IPCC reports.  The Heartland meetings have given AGW skeptics such as myself new information and showed us that we have ever so many talented colleagues from all over the globe who share our skeptical views.  The Heartland meetings have given me a stronger belief in my own AGW skepticism and a renewed desire to devote the greater part of my remaining years towards bringing honesty and scientific objectivity to this important global issue.  Too much damage has already been done by those seeking to profit from this overblown and fabricated warming threat. 

Until the basic scientific flaws in the AGW theory are recognized and broadly accepted (as they eventually will have to be) it will not be possible for the scientific community and society to put this pernicious and harmful hoax to rest.  The wide acceptance of this theory has had a profound negative influence on the US and the world.  AGW’s basic scientific flaws must be made known as soon as possible so that re-indoctrination of the public as to the fallacy of this hypothesis can go forward.  This will help reduce the current economic, political, and psychological harm which is occurring around the globe due to AGW’s unrealistic warming propaganda and prevent greater harm in future years. 

The Heartland Institute has worked hard to try to open up this much needed scientific dialog on the AGW topic.  James Taylor of Heartland has invited both warming advocates and warming skeptics to the Heartland conferences.  He has offered substantial honorariums to a number of prominent AGW proponents if they would attend and engage in open dialog.  But the global warmers have refused to come.  We think this is because the AGW advocates fear that they cannot adequately defend the physics behind their warming pronouncements against knowledgeable AGW skeptics.  In addition, the mainstream media has mostly refused to attend and report on these very enlightening AGW discussions. 

No matter what ones prior AGW views were, you could not attend any of the Heartland conferences and not come away without believing that the basic science behind the AGW hypothesis is questionable, and also thinking that the public has been presented with a very biased and exaggerated viewpoint of global warming by a compliant media.  Our country’s media has not done its usual and expected journalistic job of probing and working behind the scenes to verify the validity of the AGW hypothesis or to print hardly any contrary articles to the warming hypothesis.  The belief in the AGW hypothesis has grown rapidly.  It has become established in the public’s mind as a realistic projection of the future rise in global temperature.  This has allowed the EPA to be able to pass many needlessly restrictive regulations that are hurting our economy.  It is also leading our school children to become indoctrinated into believing this faulty warming theory and for many of them to become needlessly concerned about the future world they will live in as adults.  The media’s long and continuous unrealistic global warming reporting has caused many of our state and local government officials to pass costly legislation mandating expensive and unnecessary “save the environment” actions such as mandated shifts to various percentages of renewable energy and to undertake other costly green initiatives of marginal utility.

Funding Imbalance.  Looking over the stolen internal Heartland budget information we see how small have been Heartland’s climate related financial resources in comparison with our federal government’s vast expenditures (Figure 1).  Most of our government’s expenditures have gone to support any and all potential research that might, in any way, help verify the coming global warming arguments.  Implicit in this global warming support has been the rejection of any grant proposals intended to show faults in the global warming arguments. 

Figure 1.  2011 US government spending on climate change research by various government agencies (green) compared to the climate funding of the Heartland Institute (red).  Data is from the American Association for the Advancement of Science Report.

Despite the gross financial imbalance between the Heartland Institute and our federal government’s warming directed climate budgets, the Heartland Institute has taken on for itself the monumental task of trying to open up a scientific dialog between the pro-AGW and the AGW skeptics.  This dialog was intended to determine how realistic is the science behind the AGW hypothesis?  This has lead the Heartland Institute to confronting the large groups of scientists, government officials, environmentalists, media, etc. who have been united in their warming beliefs and proud of their success in public indoctrination of the global warming concept.  The science is settled they say and all that remains is for the world to follow their advice on the need to reduce CO2 emissions. 

The warmers say we must all start to make major alterations in our lifestyles by switching away from our dependence on fossil fuels and going to renewable energy.  However, it is estimated that (non-subsidized) renewable electrical energy generation (wind and solar) costs about 3-5 times more than does electricity generated from fossil fuels.  This is especially the case with the new shale-oil natural gas fracking techniques.  The standard of living of the industrial world will be substantially reduced if changes from fossil fuel to renewable energy were to be made in any substantial way. 

Most of us would likely agree to switch to renewable energy for a high percentage of our electricity and to making the necessary draconian changes in our life styles if we were convinced that the science behind the AGW hypothesis was rock solid.  But the science behind AGW is certainly not believable to most of us older meteorology-climate specialists who have studied the atmosphere and the oceans over our long careers.  We should not make the recommended changes from fossil fuel to renewable energy.  The global warmers have been playing the American public for suckers!  But the public is wiser than they think.  Within the next decade it will be the warmers who will be seen as the real suckers for naïvely thinking that such a flawed warming hypothesis could be forever sold to the American public.

It is impossible for us skeptics to believe that the doubling of CO2 which causes a global average infrared (IR) radiation blockage to space ~3.7 Wm-2 for doubling of CO2 can be very much of a climate altering feature.  Especially when we contrast this 3.7 Wm-2 IR blockage (from a doubling of CO2) with the much larger and continuous 342 Wm-2 average short-wave radiation impinging on the earth and the near balancing concomitant 342 Wm-2 net long-wave and solar (albedo) energy going back to space. 

The global climate will be little affected by this small amount of 3.7 Wm-2 IR energy blockage to space due to a doubling of CO2.  It is this lack of scientific believability and the large economic and social disruptions which would result if the industrial world were to switch to renewable energy that motivates us skeptics to rebel against such obvious exaggerated claims for CO2 increase.

It is only at the Heartland conferences and on the many new skeptical AGW blog sites that the many AGW scientific inconsistencies are being brought forth and discussed.  The scientific journals, for the most part, will not accept papers that do not adhere to the AGW hypothesis.  It is primarily the internet blogs on which the real AGW science is now taking place.

Intolerance of Other Points-Of-View.  More than 20 years ago, Al Gore was already condemning scientists who dared challenge the warming consensus.  In Time magazine in 1989, he wrote,

“The fact that we face an ecological crisis without any precedent in historic times is no longer a matter of any dispute worthy of recognition.  And those who, for the purpose of maintaining balance in debate, take the contrarian view that there is significant uncertainty about whether it’s real are hurting our ability to respond.”

On Gore’s repressive, suffocating approach towards science, William Happer (former Director of Energy Research for DOE) stated,

“Many atmospheric scientists are afraid for their funding, which is why they don’t challenge Al Gore and his colleagues.  They have a pretty clear idea of what the answer they’re supposed to get is.  The attitude in the administration is, ‘If you get a wrong result, we don’t want to hear about it’ ... I was told that science was not going to intrude on policy.” (Ronald Barley, “Political Science”, Reason Magazine, December 1993)

This is the type of attitude I have found so prevalent in the government agencies I have dealt with or tried to seek funding from over the last quarter century.  Funding was going to go to only those who agreed with or did not openly doubt the wisdom of the AGW hypothesis.

Learning that global warming politics was going to trump scientific objectivity a new type of modus operandi was thrust upon the research grant seekers in this broad discipline area.  A new group of recent Ph.D. and older scientists decided that to receive research grant support they had to play along with the governmental warming policies.  They quickly began cranking out paper after paper showing CO2‘s surprising strong influence on climate.  A competitive race was soon underway to see who could ‘out-warm’ the other.  And the best and most convincing of the warmers received the biggest grants and the most media coverage.  The goal was to verify that rising levels of CO2 were indeed causing climate changes that posed a serious threat to society.  Many proved to be very ingenious at arranging data sets or adjusting their numerical models to give the desired warming or climate change results.  And all the best warming scenarios made it into well trumped press releases.  Any negative results were not covered.

Origin of the AGW hypothesis.  The AGW climate scare of the last 30 years did not come to the forefront from individual scientists beginning to coalesce around the idea that rising levels of CO2 might pose a serious future climate threat to society.  This threat was, by contrast, imposed upon the world from ‘above’ by the coming together of globally influential politicians, environmentalists, internationalists, etc. who knew little about climate but saw great political opportunities to be had by using the rising CO2 levels as a scare tactic.  People respond best out of fear.  But lasting response to fear must have a firm basis in truth.  The AGW does not.

Had I not spent my whole career (of nearly 60 years) in the meteorology-climate area and knew about AGW only from what I read or heard from the mainstream media, I may have been susceptible to accepting much of the AGW propaganda.  This is why so many talented scientists from other fields have been unconsciously sucked into the wide orbit of AGW believers.  Very few individuals have the long and broad ranging technical background in meteorology-climate to be able to well understand and attack the basic flaws of the AGW hypothesis. I am surprised at how many of my younger and less experienced meteorology-climate colleagues are willing to accept the science behind the AGW arguments - many just out of mindlessly going along with the consensus, and many out of worry about being typed as an AGW skeptic and losing future research funding opportunities.  And not-a-small number of our more experienced meteorology-climate specialists, who should have known better or privately had serious doubts about AGW theory, nevertheless went along with the AGW theory in order to obtain or to continue their research support.  This posed a terrible dilemma for many who had to choose between their belief and/or their career.

The warnings of President Eisenhower of the capture of overwhelming government support by an elite industrial-military complex are now being realized.  But in this more recent version it is our country’s global warming - environmental - world government elites who have captured our country’s overwhelming government support for AGW funding and society intervention.  The just published book by Senator James Inhofe titled “The Greatest Hoax” gives much information on the recent political history of the AGW controversy and states how the warmers may now have overplayed their hand.  Senator Inhofe points out just how wild and unreasonable has been the statements of so many prominent celebrities, and high ranking government, and congressional officials, and the media people on the alleged human warming topic.  And how there is so little scientific subsidence behind their warming statements.  Another book titled “Climatism” by Steve Goreham (2010) gives a wealth of scientific background information on the many flaws and inconsistencies of the AGW hypothesis.  Goreham has suggested that the world is now experiencing the effects of a new type of ‘ism’ similar to communism, socialism, fascism, totalitarianism, of the past.  In our current political era of such wide belief in human-induced global warming, Goreham suggested that the term Climatism is appropriate.  I expect this new ‘ism’ will, in time, follow the fate of these earlier ‘isms’ and for much of the same reasons.

Industry - Business Losses.  The US industrial and business sectors and their clients and customers are being strongly swayed by the continual media and governmental harping of the dangers of rising levels of CO2.  Many American industries and businesses are expending significant resources to demonstrate to their clients and customers that they are accommodating to the threat of rising CO2 levels and global temperature rises by going green.  This is adding economic burdens to their operations.  American industry and business has, in general, accepted the governments and the media’s warming pronouncements.  They have not been skeptical enough at inquiring as to the real scientific validity of the AGW threat.  They need to realize that the government and media hyping of the warming threat could, in time, prove to have been greatly exaggerated or possibly be completely bogus. Their expensive PR actions to gain the good will of the public and their clients will have been seen, in time, to have been largely unnecessary when the AGW threat is finally exposed as the hoax it is. 

American industry and business groups should begin hedging their bets as to the AGW theory being valid.  This can be done by making financial contributions to the Heartland Institute or other private groups dedicated to an unbiased analysis of the AGW threat.  Future financial resources can be saved if it is realized that the science behind the AGW hypothesis is going to be largely discredited within the next 5-10 years. 

Private Funding Hypocrisy.  Why is the massive federal funding support that is going to climate researchers who believe in the AGW hypothesis considered a beneficial national expenditure while any comparatively pittance of private financial support that goes to those who question the validity of the AGW hypothesis believed to be tainted with charges of special interest and anti-science?  In the present climate funding milieu, AGW funding for research by our federal government is not and should not be thought of as being any less contaminated with bias than research support coming from the private sector.  With regards to the AGW question, I believe the Heartland Institute to be more objective and more honest than my federal government is and has been.

Illustration.  Peter Gleick’s purpose in hacking into the Heartland Institute’s private files was to get information on their donors - hoping that the Heartland Institute might be shown to have received contributions from energy companies or the Koch Brothers, etc.  The hypocrisy of such reasoning by Gleick and the warming crowd to assume that the federal funds they receive to justify the faulty AGW theory are not as or more contaminated with bias than would be any funds from private energy groups.  Nearly all AGW federal support at this time is reeking with warming bias.  You must have a warming bias (and/or hide any AGW skepticism you might have) to get any federal funding support in the first place.

Heartland’s courageous battle against the entangling power and ubiquitous presence of those who are attempting to push us towards a world climate crisis - world government –- and religious environmentalism should be applauded.  Heartland Director Joseph Bast and his small capable staff are confronting a juggernaut of massive federal funding and massive media propaganda.  We should admire their heroic efforts and also give our appreciation to the small group of backers who have had the courage to help and support the Heartland Institute.

I have absolutely no doubt that the AGW hypothesis will become fully discredited within the next decade or so.  A doubling of CO2 near the end of the 21st century should, by itself, only bring about a global warming of about 0.3C or only about one-tenth of the ~3C global warming projected by nearly all of the GCM models (see Appendix). 

America’s economic growth and its confidence in the future will be greatly enhanced when the false dangers of the AGW hypothesis threat have been fully exposed and put behind us.  America independence requires that we avoid the controlling tentacles of world government based on an unrealistic fear of human-induced climate degradation. 

Charlie Wilson (former CEO of GM and Secretary of DOD in the mid-1950s) made the then famous but controversial statement that “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country”.  A more relevant statement for today would be (in my opinion) ‘What is good for the Heartland Institute is good for our country and for the world’.  Ten years from now, when the scientific relevancy of the AGW theory has been thoroughly discredited we will be better able to appreciate the accuracy of this statement.

About the Author.  William M. Gray is a Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University where he has been in residence for the last 51 years.  He has forecast, taught and performed research in tropical meteorology, the global general circulation and hurricanes for his whole career.

While General Motors’ Chevy Volt assembly workers are sidelined for five weeks (and more this summer) because demand for its strongly hyped electric car is weak, the prospects for its chief rival - Nissan’s Leaf - are shaky at best.

Nissan North America, Inc. - a subsidiary of its Japanese parent - is the beneficiary of a $1.4 billion Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing loan from the U.S. Department of Energy, to convert a plant in Smyrna, Tenn. to produce the Leaf and batteries for it. The project’s promoters say the alterations will lead to 1,300 new jobs, enabling Nissan to produce up to 150,000 Leafs and 200,000 battery packs per year, which will lead to the all-important avoidance of 204,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions - or so they say.

But there’s just one problem: Sales of the Leaf are not much better than the Volt’s have been, and lately have been much worse. In 2011 Chevrolet sold 7,671 of its plug-in Volt, whose range is extended with the help of a small gasoline tank. Nissan sold 9,674 of the purely electric Leaf last year. So far through the end of March this year GM has delivered 4,095 Volts, while only 1,733 Leafs have been sold.

So if demand isn’t strong enough to keep a GM line running to build the Volt, how can the current level of sales for the Leaf justify the enormous plant investment Nissan is making in Tennessee? USA Today reported a few weeks ago that as gasoline prices reach $4 per gallon, electric vehicles still “face dark days.” Industry expert LMC Automotive predicts EV sales will remain below 1 percent through 2017.

Why would this be? Because even with billions of dollars in “investment” from the government to help Ford, Nissan, Fisker, Tesla, and The Vehicle Production Group build EVs, and to fund companies like Ecotality to build out a charging network at places like Cracker Barrel, the technology is impractical for most people. Besides the obvious range anxiety experienced by EV drivers, because the batteries don’t maintain their charge long enough, there’s the problem of lengthy times required to “fill up” again. Even the extremely expensive ($40,000 each) and hard-to-find “fast-chargers” (440 volt) take 30 minutes to get a Leaf going again for any reasonable distance, and most chargers require four to five hours to re-boost.

At least the Volt has a small gas engine that extends its range, although its (highly subsidized) $41,000 retail cost is still a lot to overcome for most consumers. But the Leaf is all-electric - no juice, no go, which may be a big reason the Volt has inched past it in sales recently. One EV enthusiast had to stop and recharge his Leaf four times to travel 180 miles last year. Besides the facts that range is reduced even more by using heating and air conditioning, or by driving on inclines, there is the issue that you can’t even depend on its battery gauge (the equivalent of a fuel gauge in a gas-powered car).

“I am ready to turn over a new Leaf - my own,” wrote Rob Eshman, editor-in-chief of The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.

While Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn would obviously love to see sales of the Leaf take off, he has said (in so many words) that government subsidies are the reason for his pursuit of EV technology, rather than successes based upon qualities such as value, styling, safety rankings, or popularity with the purchasing public.

“It does not matter if, for example, Portugal stops the incentives, as long as other countries like the United States continue to support,” Ghosn told Reuters in October. “If countries like France, Japan and the UK support and then China, that is about to start to support, that’s fine.”

The Brazilian-born Frenchman, who also chairs Renault, also does not hide the fact that he supports government control of markets and its attempts to stimulate technologies, no matter the cost.

“We must diversify the energy mix used to fuel our vehicles,” Ghosn wrote last month for Forbes. “Petroleum-based fuels now account for 96 percent of the world’s automotive energy mix. By mandating targets and requirements at the level of the state, we can increase the mix of renewable fuels.”

And, obviously, he believes in the state’s expenditure of billions of dollars on EVs. At this week’s New York International Auto Show, he repeated his assertion that Nissan’s future depended on development of EVs, predicting to the Wall Street Journal, “when we get to 500,000 sales we can be profitable.” He believes that goal will be attained in 2015-2016.

Meanwhile an analysis of fuel efficiency by the New York Times determined that it would take nine years before Leaf owners break even by saving money on gasoline versus the extra cost of the EV. That is a dubious assumption, since after that amount of time all - or a lot of - the depleted battery pack will need to be replaced. Time will tell, but if like most batteries it needs entire replacement, the cost is likely to exceed $30,000.

Nissan disputes that, of course. But is it worth risking the unknown for a vehicle that is only capable of traveling much fewer miles than would an equivalent gas-powered car such as the Nissan Versa or Chevy Cruze?

Not that that matters to Ghosn, since in his view, the purpose of the automobile business is to serve the collective through the manipulations of government.

“We have a social responsibility to ensure that this industry grows sustainably,” he wrote in his Forbes piece, “and if we uphold our responsibility, we will increase the quality of life for everyone on our planet.”

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

Predictably another ignorant demodunce, Dick Durbin suggests that if you don’t buy a hybrid car, CO2 will kill you. Mr. Durbin said scientific evidence of a tie between carbon-sparked global warming and severe weather “is indisputable.”.  Such a link “has been proven. It’s been proven time and time again, and the science is clear,” he said. “Tell me (recent weather outbreaks) are a coincidence. I don’t believe it.”

While converting to hybrid cars and other steps may be costly, “it’s your money or your life,” Mr. Durbin said. “The warming climate is changing our weather patterns. We’re experiencing more severe events.”

I just finished listening to Murry Salby’s podcast on Climate Change and Carbon.  Wow.

The abstract for his talk is here:

PROFESSOR MURRY SALBY

Chair of Climate, Macquarie University

Atmospheric Science, Climate Change and Carbon - Some Facts

Carbon dioxide is emitted by human activities as well as a host of natural processes. The satellite record, in concert with instrumental observations, is now long enough to have collected a population of climate perturbations, wherein the Earth-atmosphere system was disturbed from equilibrium. Introduced naturally, those perturbations reveal that net global emission of CO2 (combined from all sources, human and natural) is controlled by properties of the general circulation - properties internal to the climate system that regulate emission from natural sources. The strong dependence on internal properties indicates that emission of CO2 from natural sources, which accounts for 96 per cent of its overall emission, plays a major role in observed changes of CO2. Independent of human emission, this contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide is only marginally predictable and not controllable.

Professor Murry Salby holds the Climate Chair at Macquarie University and has had a lengthy career as a world-recognised researcher and academic in the field of Atmospheric Physics. He has held positions at leading research institutions, including the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, Princeton University, and the University of Colorado, with invited professorships at universities in Europe and Asia. At Macquarie University, Professor Salby uses satellite data and supercomputing to explore issues surrounding changes of global climate and climate variability over Australia. Professor Salby is the author of Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics, and Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate due out in 2011. Professor Salby’s latest research makes a timely and highly-relevant contribution to the current discourse on climate.

The podcast for his talk is here.  Unfortunately there is no video so you can’t see his graphs.  But the talk is very lucid, you can certainly get the point.  The entire podcast is an hour, with his formal presentation about a half hour, and questions for the remaining half hour.

This talk was given in June at the IUGG meeting in Melbourne Australia, and apparently created quite a stir.  A journal paper is in press, expected to be published in about 6 months.  Some of the results will be in his forthcoming book Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate that will be available Sept 30.

Andrew Bolt has some reactions in the Herald Sun:

Salby’s argument is that the usual evidence given for the rise in CO2 being man-made is mistaken. It’s usually taken to be the fact that as carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere increase, the 1 per cent of CO2 that’s the heavier carbon isotope ratio c13 declines in proportion. Plants, which produced our coal and oil, prefer the lighter c12 isotope. Hence, it must be our gasses that caused this relative decline.

But that conclusion holds true only if there are no other sources of c12 increases which are not human caused. Salby says there are - the huge increases in carbon dioxide concentrations caused by such things as spells of warming and El Ninos, which cause concentration levels to increase independently of human emissions. He suggests that its warmth which tends to produce more CO2, rather than vice versa - which, incidentally is the story of the past recoveries from ice ages.

The Earth’s carbon cycle is not a topic on which I have any expertise.  A good overview article is provided by NASA’s earthobservatory.

Climate models have begun to include an interactive carbon cycle in the CMIP5 simulations.  NASA has been trying to launch a satellite to measure global carbon, an effort which remains troubled and plagued by continuing delays.

JC comments:  If Salby’s analysis holds up, this could revolutionize AGW science.  Salby and I were both at the University of Colorado-Boulder in the 1990&2000s, but I don’t know him well personally.  He is the author of a popular introductory graduate text Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics.  He is an excellent lecturer and teacher, which comes across in his podcast.  He has the reputation of a thorough and careful researcher.  While all this is frustratingly preliminary without publication, slides, etc., it is sufficiently important that we should start talking about these issues.  I’ll close with this text from Bolt’s article:

He said he had an “involuntary gag reflex” whenever someone said the “science was settled”.

“Anyone who thinks the science of this complex thing is settled is in Fantasia.”

See more here. Sydney Institute has put up a video of this talk (with graphs). Worth a view.

--------------------
Nature will soon be posting another rushed flawed paper ...claiming CO2 preceded not follows temperatures. See evidence why that is not the case in A new paper in Nature suggests CO2 leads temperature, but has some serious problems. Meanwhile see:

Improved Proxy Record of Past Warm Climates Needed

Before the end of the present century, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is projected to reach the high levels last seen in past warm periods such as the Eocene (~40 million years ago) [Beerling and Royer, 2011]. Climate reconstructions from sediment cores (“proxy data”) and paleoclimate modeling studies show that such higher CO2 periods are characterized by warmer temperatures, smaller ice sheets, and higher sea level than today. The proxy record of past warm climates is thus fundamental in guiding scientists’ understanding of future climate changes. However, we believe that currently available data sets are not yet adequate for this task.

And also this post, actually a testimony to congress.

Until the April 26/27th 2011 tornado outbreak, The April 3rd 1974 was the biggest outbreak of tornadoes in US history. Last year, the usual suspects railed about how the outbreak was a clear consequence of global warming> climate change> climate disruption, even going so far as saying such linkage was “required by ethics” (insert facepalm here).  I called them all “Hucksters”. The wailing was sort of like when 1934 was the warmest year in the USA until James Hansen came along and “adjusted” 1998 to be warmer.

Icecap Note: Courtesy of Roger Pielke Jr and Anthony Watts. Should be stamped on most government reports, MSM articles and Science and Nature and AGW journal AGW papers as a reader beware warning.

Here is the 1974 April 3-4 Outbreak

I and many others said it connecting AGW to the 2011 outbreak was rubbish- there’s no connection in the data, and that it was what you expect to get when you have La Nina conditions like we did in the spring 0f 2011. WeatherBell’s Joe D’Aleo even predicted the likelihood of severe weather ahead of time based on La Nina conditions and snow cover. (Update: Here’s two reports from him before the outbreaks

La Ninas are often far more costly than El Ninos (PDF)

La Nina of 2010 2nd strongest (PDF)

During El Niño the jet stream is oriented from west to east across the southern portion of the United States. Thus, this region becomes more susceptible to severe weather outbreaks. During La Niña the jet stream and severe weather is likely to be farther north.

Note the collision zone in the US southeast during La Nina patterns. 1974 was a La Nina year too.

Then the wailing shifted to monetary damage claims, about how much more damage there was than in 1974 in terms of cost, not just in tornadoes, but well, everything weather related. While I can’t comment on everything, I can say with certainty the tornado claims are rubbish thanks to a new paper just published by Kevin Simmons, Daniel Sutter and Dr. Roger Pielke Jr..

Simmons, K., D. Sutter, R.A. Pielke, Jr. (2012), Blown away: monetary and human impacts of the 2011 U.S. tornadoes. Extreme events and insurance: 2011 annus horribilis (Edited by C. Courbage and W.R. Stahel) The Geneva Reports: Risk and Insurance Research , Published March 2012.

Pielke Jr. writes on his blog:

1. When using our dataset, it is best to use the damage numbers as tabulated by the US NWS as they are consistent over time

2. That said, 2011 damage is qualitatively indistinguishable from 1974 and 1954 1953 at > $20B

3. That would give a simple baseline expectation of 1 in 20 for 2011, but half or twice that would not be implausible given the uncertainties, so between 1 in 10 and 1 in 40

4. For 2012 and looking ahead there are two big question marks, one more certain than the other. Urbanization is increasing, which means that the chance of large losses increases (somewhat at the expense of smaller and medium losses of course). And there has been a notable and significant decline in the incidence of strong tornadoes in recent decades

Here’s the summary from the report:

As 2011 began, the big news in the American sports world was the showdown between Auburn and Oregon for the national championship in college football. The big political story was the Tea Party, which had just helped Republicans regain control of the U.S. House of Representatives. In Hollywood, speculation was rife on who would win an Oscar. In other words, 2011 began as most years do. No one foresaw that the first five months of the year would reset the expectations of meteorologists, insurance companies, and the public regarding the toll tornadoes can impose on the U.S. today.

The decades leading up to 2011 convinced many that the tornado threat had been reduced to the point that 100 fatality tornadoes and 500 fatality years were in the past. After all, neither figure had been exceeded in the U.S. in over 50 years. The National Weather Service implemented a nationwide network of Doppler weather radars in the 1990s. Warning lead time doubled, and then almost doubled again, providing sufficient time for families to receive a warning and take shelter. Television stations used sophisticated graphics to cover tornadoes with ever-increasing accuracy. Street level tracking software allowed TV viewers to know the exact location of a tornado and how close it might get to their home.

In this environment, a tornado that killed 10 or more people was national news and could grab the attention of the public for days and perhaps weeks. In 1999 one of the most powerful tornadoes ever documented struck a metropolitan area and resulted in 36 deaths, which while tragic, was only a fraction of the toll that might have been expected from a tornado like this at the start of the 20th century. The benchmark for what constituted a major tornado event was much different than 1974, when the 3-4 April “Super Outbreak” killed over 300 people. Things were different now, or so many people thought.

We begin by summarising the damages and fatalities from U.S. tornadoes in 2011. Next, we examine the tornado outbreak as it relates to the historical record. The next section looks at the role that extreme weather played, followed by a discussion of some of the vulnerabilities that are known to increase fatalities from tornadoes. We then consider what can be done to limit damages and fatalities from future tornado outbreaks. Finally, we discuss whether or not this was an event that can be expected to occur again and then we conclude.

Three previous seasons - 1953, 1965 and 1974 - now rival damage in 2011. Normalised damage exceeded US$20 billion in 1953 and 1965 and exceeded US$10 billion in 1974. The 1953 season provides perhaps the best historical comparison with 2011, as much of the damage in 1965 and 1974 occurred in just one outbreak. Damage in 1965 is attributable to the Palm Sunday outbreak, while damage in 1974 occurred in the 2-3 April “Super Outbreak”. 1953 had multiple damaging outbreaks in different parts of the country. One of the worst tornadoes of 1953 occurred in Worcester, MA, and ranked first in normalised damage until the Joplin tornado of 2011.

This echoes what I have been saying, from The folly of linking tornado outbreaks to “climate change”:

Historically, there have been many tornado outbreaks that occurred well before climate change was on anyone’s radar.  Here’s a few:

1908 Southeast tornado outbreak 324 fatalities, 1,720 injuries

1920 Palm Sunday tornado outbreak 380 fatalities, 1215 injuries

1925 Tri-State tornado 747 fatalities, 2298 injuries

1932 Deep South tornado outbreak 330 fatalities, 2145 injuries

1952 Arkansas-Tennessee tornado outbreak 208 fatalities

1965 Palm Sunday tornado outbreak 256 fatalities

April 3-4 1974 Super Outbreak 315 fatalities

All of these occurred before “climate change” was even on the political radar. What caused those if “global warming” is to blame? The real cause is La Nina, and as NOAAwatch.gov indicates on their page with the helpful meter, we are in a La Nina cycle of ocean temperature in the Pacific.

I recommend reading my essay: Why it seems that severe weather is “getting worse” when the data shows otherwise - a historical perspective

In a piece of defensive journalism from Tom Yulsman of the Boulder Stand challenges the Stand Climate skeptics on record heat: have a nice big slice of cherry pie.  He claims we are cherry picking when sites like Climate Depot ably compile evidence that the world is cooling even as the US has a non winter and record March.  It really frosts advocacy journalists when we have a comeback to their attempt to use extremes of all types and weather elsewhere to counter their attempts to use and extreme event, month or even season to drive home their ideology. NCAR is no objective source anymore thanks to government largesse.

In actual fact we have gone not just a decade without warming, but really no statitistically significant changes have occurred for a full 17 years globally in sharp contrast to IPCC projections. Recall none other than Ben Santer of LLL had said it falsification of AGW needed not a few years, not even a full decade but 17 years of non-warming.  Even with massive still ongoing after climategates manipulation of the data to induce false warming, the data from the site the author recommends (Wood for Trees) does exactly that - falsify man made global warming. The 17 years started in a cold period and ended in a cold period with three El Nino spikes in between. We end the period 0.3C colder than we began.

As for the Yulsman yarn, this comment by Steve Goddard “I wonder why he forgot to mention that temperatures in his hometown (Boulder, CO) have been declining since the 1930s?”

Joe Bastardi responsed as well in great detail:

Just what is so mysterious about the Change in the Pacific ocean cycle to cold 3 years ago and this response globally:

Source

So is the satellite lying?  Now let me ask you this. If this is global warming, why is the March temp globally below normal?

The temperature is above the red heat wave in the US and since the year began why is it below normal (see global average top right).

Source

IF YOU WERE IN ASIA, WOULD YOU BE TOUTING GLOBAL WARMING?

Okay let’s look at this… the correlation between temps and the oceanic cycles, we just came out of the warm PDO and are going into the cycle we were in during the 60s and 70s.

Source

Enlarged
Now contrast that with the CO2 charts vs temperatures during the leveling, and now the recent cooling.

Source

Where is the IPCC trapping hot spot that was supposed to lead to the feedback that was supposed to cause the explosive warming? Educate yourself, don’t be lead to the slaughter like sheep. READ THIS

Finally the IPCC 3 scenarios, CO2, and the actual temps.. Its below their mid point, below their bottom point and heading the other way

Another source.

So how the heck can you say its cherry picking when it fits perfectly with climate cycle theory that say the ocean cools, the air then cools above (much like turning down a thermostat, the air in your house cools before surfaces do) THEN THE LOWEST LEVELS COOL. This is right on target with forecasts made by Bill Gray years ago, since you are close to where Dr Gray is, why don’t you ask him, My forecast stands, made 4 years ago, that the cooling would start ( it has as you can see on the observed objective data) and by 2030 we are back to where we were in the late 1970s WHEN THE PACIFIC WAS ENDING ITS COLD CYCLE. Look for yourself at the PDO values above

We started objective measuring of temps via satellite in 1978, at the END OF THE COLD CYCLE. Just what do you think is going to happen globally when the world’s number one source of energy, the tropical Pacific, warms? And when the Atlantic does to, it means the global temp rises as heat is a measure of energy. The continents warm and that in turn warms the arctic. However the turn to the opposite is starting now. It is intuitive that the drop starts and it is. There is no tipping point, the IPCC panic forecast is busting and we are causing untold misery by tying up the life line of our economy over a ghost that will be proven to be a scam.

The idea that there is a well oiled machine is nonsense. I don’t ask anyone to trust me, just take an hour out of your day to read the other side of this issue and you will understand that people that are pushing this want you to believe its complex. Well it’s not. The sun, the oceans and to some extent, volcanic activity, far outstrip the ability of a “greenhouse” gas that is 400 times LESS PREVALENT than the number one greenhouse gas, water vapor, that occupies only .04% of the atmosphere, has a heavier specific gravity than air (1.5 to 1.0) heats and COOLS faster than air and has different radiative properties. Do you understand how small the odds of this having anything to do with the climate is. And the screams or derision are coming because with the change in the ocean and even solar cycles, the major disconnect has started, showing CO2’s relationship to temperature is coincidental and all we need do, since we are no where near the tipping point, since RECORD COLD has been occurring in the very places the IPCC were going to be warm with the trapping hot spots, is watch the data, WITHOUT ADJUSTMENT, just the pure satellite data that I showed you above, that you can watch every day.

Going forward, the global temp will RISE back to above normal for a time over the next 3 months, but the drop will start again against the normals and when we look at this chart next year.


Source

It will have had a lower spike down than this year.

That is the difference between me and these folks pushing this issue. I will make a forecast that you can see, right or wrong, over a definable period of time. I will ask you to read for yourself and test the ideas I have. Not simply ask you to follow like sheep to the slaughter and trust their dire predictions for many decades after many of us will be gone. Its your life, your country. At least look at the issues from all angles before you support blindly what the government’s well funded warming lobby is telling you.