By Joseph D’Aleo
Despite an active start to the month and a rather steady stream of cycle 24 microdots, the official sunspot number for June came in at 2.6 below the 3.3 needed to make November 2008 the solar minimum. This means it can’t be earlier than December, 2008. In order for the minimum to slip one more month to January 2009, July will have to end up less than 3.5, the value in June 2008, which it will replace. It will be difficult for it to slip to February because August would have to average below 0.5.
December had a 13 month average sunspot number of 1.7. Only three minima since 1750 had official minima below 1.7 (1913 1.5, 1810 0, 1823 0.1). Of course modern measurement technologies are better than older technologies so there is some uncertainty as to whether microdots back then would have been seen.
This chart maintained daily by Jan Alverstad at Solar Terrestrial Activity Report shows the increased solar spikiness in sunspot numbers in May and June but surprisingly a very low solar flux and a still rather low planetary A index number (geomagnetic activity). The sun is farthest from the earth in June/July which means the flux is lower, but official values are adjusted to account for that.
The Total Solar Irradiance as measure by SORCE (Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment) was also interesting the last two months showing two spikes but then a recent return to minimum levels.
JUNE 2008 IN THE UNITED STATES
The first half of the month was extremely cold and even snowy in south Central Canada and the northern United States. In snowed in North Dakota and in California in early June. It was also unusually cold in the southwest - well below the normal (often 10-20 degrees) in places like Palm Springs, CA. In general, the desert southwest was unusually mild. Phoenix had 15 straight days with highs below 100F, the first time in June since 1913.
June, especially the second half was very hot in the southern plains and the heat expanded north and east a bit after mid-month before being suppressed again by months end.
In the northeast, the month was unusually cold, cloudy and wet. In Boston it was 4.7F below normal in a tie for 6th coldest June (with 1982) in 138 years of record keeping, all the other years were before 1916. It was just short of two standard deviations colder then normal. The NWS spot checked the average maximum temp at Boston for the month and it appears this is the second coldest average high temp since 1872. 1903 is the record. A trace or more of rain fell on 22 days of the month. Measurable (0.01 inches or more) occurred on 16 days just short of the record of 18 set in 1942.
At Blue Hill Observatory in Milton, MA, just southwest of Boston, the month of June had between 26 and 27% of the possible bright sunshine. Normal for June is 55% and the gloomiest June in 1903 had just 25% of the possible sunshine. Second place had been June, 1998, with 36%. So, this month has taken over 2nd place, not an enviable distinction for vacationers. So little sunshine and so much cool temperatures that we have heard some reports that swamp maples in parts of Maine showing fall colors!
New York City’s Central Park was also cool, cloudy and wet. The month averaged 3.7F below normal and tied with 1897 as the 8th coldest since 1869 (151 years). It rained in 23 days of the month and ended up as the second wettest June ever falling short of 1927. Recall Joe Romm of Climate Progress had blamed the rains at the US Open on global warming and chuckled the heat waves would make the climate debate in DC all that much more exciting.
See larger image here.
The preliminary June anomaly month is shown below (CPC). Note the south central heat ridge related to the two year La Nina that produced dryness south central. Showers around this ridge (ring of fire) have kept growing areas wet and cool surrounds it. See post on ring of fire here.
See larger image here.
See pdf here.
By Judson Berger, FOXNews.com
A top Republican senator has ordered an investigation into the Environmental Protection Agency’s alleged suppression of a report that questioned the science behind global warming. The 98-page report, co-authored by EPA analyst Alan Carlin, pushed back on the prospect of regulating gases like carbon dioxide as a way to reduce global warming. Carlin’s report argued that the information the EPA was using was out of date, and that even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased, global temperatures have declined.
“He came out with the truth. They don’t want the truth at the EPA,” Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla, a global warming skeptic, told FOX News, saying he’s ordered an investigation. “We’re going to expose it.” The controversy comes after the House of Representatives passed a landmark bill to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, one that Inhofe said will be “dead on arrival” in the Senate despite President Obama’s energy adviser voicing confidence in the measure.
According to internal e-mails that have been made public by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Carlin’s boss told him in March that his material would not be incorporated into a broader EPA finding and ordered Carlin to stop working on the climate change issue. The draft EPA finding released in April lists six greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, that the EPA says threaten public health and welfare. An EPA official told FOXNews.com on Monday that Carlin, who is an economist—not a scientist—included “no original research” in his report. The official said that Carlin “has not been muzzled in the agency at all,” but stressed that his report was entirely “unsolicited.” “It was something that he did on his own,” the official said. “Though he was not qualified, his manager indulged him and allowed him on agency time to draft up ... a set of comments.”
Despite the EPA official’s remarks, Carlin told FOXNews.com on Monday that his boss, National Center for Environmental Economics Director Al McGartland, appeared to be pressured into reassigning him. Carlin said he doesn’t know whether the White House intervened to suppress his report but claimed it’s clear “they would not be happy about it if they knew about it,” and that McGartland seemed to be feeling pressure from somewhere up the chain of command. Carlin said McGartland told him he had to pull him off the climate change issue. “It was reassigning you or losing my job, and I didn’t want to lose my job,” Carlin said, paraphrasing what he claimed were McGartland’s comments to him. “My inference (was) that he was receiving some sort of higher-level pressure.”
Carlin said he personally does not think there is a need to regulate carbon dioxide, since “global temperatures are going down.” He said his report expressed a “good bit of doubt” on the connection between the two. Specifically, the report noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend over the past 11 years, that scientists do not necessarily believe that storms will become more frequent or more intense due to global warming, and that the theory that temperatures will cause Greenland ice to rapidly melt has been “greatly diminished.”
Carlin, in a March 16 e-mail, argued that his comments are “valid, significant” and would be critical to the EPA finding. McGartland, though, wrote back the next day saying he had decided not to forward his comments. “The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision,” he wrote, according to the e-mails released by CEI. “I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.” He later wrote an e-mail urging Carlin to “move on to other issues and subjects.” “I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research, etc., at least until we see what EPA is going to do with climate,” McGartland wrote.
The EPA said in a written statement that Carlin’s opinions were in fact considered, and that he was not even part of the working group dealing with climate change in the first place. “Claims that this individual’s opinions were not considered or studied are entirely false. This administration and this EPA administrator are fully committed to openness, transparency and science-based decision making,” the statement said. “The individual in question is not a scientist and was not part of the working group dealing with this issue. Nevertheless the document he submitted was reviewed by his peers and agency scientists, and information from that report was submitted by his manager to those responsible for developing the proposed endangerment finding. In fact, some ideas from that document are included and addressed in the endangerment finding.”
The e-mail exchanges and suggestions of political interference sparked a backlash from Republicans in Congress. Reps. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and Darrell Issa, R-Calif., also wrote a letter last week to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson urging the agency to reopen its comment period on the finding. The EPA has since denied the request. Citing the internal e-mails, the Republican congressmen wrote that the EPA was exhibiting an “agency culture set in a predetermined course.” “It documents at least one instance in which the public was denied access to significant scientific literature and raises substantial questions about what additional evidence may have been suppressed,” they wrote. In a written statement, Issa said the administration is “actively seeking to withhold new data in order to justify a political conclusion.”
“I’m sure it was very inconvenient for the EPA to consider a study that contradicted the findings it wanted to reach,” Sensenbrenner said in a statement, adding that the “repression” of Carlin’s report casts doubt on the entire finding. Carlin said he’s concerned that he’s seeing “science being decided at the presidential level.” “Now Mr. Obama is in effect directly or indirectly saying that CO2 causes global temperatures to rise and that we have to do something about it. ... That’s normally a scientific judgment and he’s in effect judging what the science says,” he said. “We need to look at it harder.” The controversy is similar to one under the Bush administration—only the administration was taking the opposite stance. In that case, scientist James Hansen claimed the administration was trying to keep him from speaking out and calling for reductions in greenhouse gases. Read more here.
MaCleans Canada
The new President’s ambitions could have a devastating effect on our economy. When Barack Obama met with Stephen Harper in Ottawa on Feb. 19, his message on the oil sands sounded like it could have been written in Calgary. He talked about the need for government investment in new technologies to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and he wanted to work together to achieve it. “I love this country and think that we could not have a better friend and ally,” Obama said. “And so I’m going to do everything that I can to make sure that our relationship is strengthened.” He added: “We are very grateful for the relationship that we have with Canada, Canada being our largest energy supplier.” Tom Corcoran, a former Republican congressman from Illinois and head of a Washington lobbying outfit for the oil sands and other “unconventional” fuels, remembers the day: “It was encouraging and made us feel good.”
But it turns out that Obama has a knack for making people feel good when perhaps they ought to be watching their back. “Then the realities begin to take root when you look at what is taking place here in Washington,” says Corcoran. The reality is that Obama is leading an aggressive effort to remake American energy policy with potentially severe consequences for the oil sands, and by extension, the Canadian economy.
The oil sands currently export about half of their production of 1.2 million barrels per day to the U.S. Over the next 25 years, according to the Canadian Energy Research Institute in Calgary, that production will more than double, to four million barrels per day, with most of that oil going to the U.S. For Canada, that will mean 380,000 new jobs - and an additional $1.4 trillion in GDP, which will kick off $252 billion in tax revenues, more than half of which would go to Ottawa.
So Canada has a lot at stake in the process that Barack Obama set in motion by calling on Congress to pass climate change legislation this year. In the House of Representatives, where the American clean energy and security bill has been drafted, Democratic leaders such as Speaker Nancy Pelosi and California’s Henry Waxman, the chairman of the energy and commerce committee, have Alberta’s oil patch squarely in their sights.
Oil sands production emits up to 15 per cent more greenhouse gases than the production of conventional oil, not to mention the toll it takes on the landscape. These concerns have caused American policy toward the oil sands to undergo a complete U-turn under Obama and congressional Democrats. The Bush administration saw the oil sands as a strategic continental resource. George W. Bush dispatched his energy secretary to Fort McMurray, Alta., to see the operations for himself, and the 2005 energy bill even included a section to partner with Alberta to share information on developing oil from U.S. tar sands and shale. But the 1,000-plus-page climate change bill now wending its way through Congress is full of potential uncertainty for Alberta and Canada.
The legislation, written by Waxman and Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, calls for reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by a whopping 80 per cent by 2050. It also includes a cap and trade system, and a requirement that utilities get at least 15 per cent of their electricity from renewable fuels. “Alberta has an uphill battle,” says Liz Barratt-Brown, a senior attorney for the environmental group, National Resources Defense Council in Washington, who has been closely watching the oil sands issue. “These are large reductions. They change the way we use fuels. You can see the writing on the wall for tar sands.” Even more distressing for Canada, the bill includes provisions that would punish imports from countries whose carbon regulations are deemed by Washington to be less stringent than those of the U.S.-making it a potentially much more broadly protectionist act with implications for other sectors of the economy as well.
Those measures are meant to address the potential “competitive imbalance” created for some U.S. industries by the costs of compliance with the new cap and trade regime. In order to protect domestic industry and to mitigate so-called “carbon leakage” - factories moving to countries with less stringent rules -the legislation calls for a tariff to be imposed on imports of manufactured products from countries whose carbon reduction regulations are deemed not to be “at least as stringent” as those of America. Canada’s environment minister, Jim Prentice, has denounced the measure as “green protectionism.” He told Maclean’s that he is “confident that Canada at the end of the day will have environment legislation that is commensurate with that in U.S.” However, he warned, the legislation leaves open the possibility of abuse. “Once you have protectionist authorities in the legislation, there is always the possibility for mischief in the application in a way that is prejudicial to Canada.”
The provision would apply to goods, ranging from steel and pipes to pulp and paper, from a nation whose rules are not deemed “commensurate” with that of the United States. Obama may be a self-proclaimed multilateralist, but the provision holds the potential for a unilateral economic wallop - or at least allowing Washington a very heavy hand in the writing of climate rules of its trading partners. Worries Prentice, “Like beauty and fairness, the definition of ‘commensurate’ will apparently lie in the eye of the American beholder.”
For as much as Canadians love Obama, is it possible he doesn’t love us back? His climate change legislation comes at a time of severe protectionist sentiment in Congress and an erosion of trust in Canada in response to “Buy American” provisions in the US$787-billion stimulus bill. When he met with Harper, Obama vowed that his administration would adhere to commitments in international trade agreements. But American municipalities and states have demanded only American-made steel and manufactured goods in their procurement contracts. Canadian municipalities voted this month to retaliate by excluding U.S. suppliers from municipal contracts unless the Harper government can negotiate an amended trade agreement with Washington within four months. Read more here.