By Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science Weblog
There is a news article in the Australian News by Leigh Dayton, entitled “North hottest for 1500 years”. It reads
“The northern hemisphere is hotter now than at any time in the past 1500 years, according to the most comprehensive reconstruction of the earths temperature over the last two millenniums.
It’s likely the southern hemisphere is also warmer than ever although data is sketchier, claim US and British scientists. While the new research also concluded that the so-called Medieval warmth from 950-1100 was hotter than previously thought, the last decade was hotter still. “The findings deeply reinforce the incontrovertible conclusion that we are warming rapidly outside natural variability,” said climate scientist Andy Pitman, co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW.
The new findings come from a team led by Michael E. Mann, director of the Environmental Systems Institute at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. Writing in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they reported that they’d pulled together the largest ever set of climate data, enabling them to assess changes on decadal and centennial scales. Associate Professor Mann and his colleagues used “natural climate archives” like tree-rings, corals and ice cores, along with historical documentary records and recently updated instrumental data to reconstruct the climate of past centuries in unprecedented detail and compare it with existing conditions. “Our results extend previous conclusions that recent northern hemisphere surface temperature increases are likely anomalous in a long-term context,” they claimed.
According to Professor Pitman, the work showed clearly that despite “wiggles” of warming and cooling in the past, driven by natural variation, surface temperatures in the modern period (1961-1990) show an upward trend not triggered by solar variability or other natural processes. He also said the report highlighted the need to obtain more southern hemisphere data. That would help scientists further refine the climate change models used to predict future conditions in regions around the world.”
This is, quite frankly, a very poor (and erroneous) news report. The data used for its construction are not temporally homogeneous (such as kludging a thermometer record on the end of a proxy temperature record) as well as ignoring the very substantial evidence of a warm bias in the surface temperature record that is summarized here and here.
If the scientists are quoted correctly in the news release [which is always a question!], then they have failed to examine the substantive issues that have been raised with the surface temperature record. The Reporter certainly neglected to properly investigate the claims of the authors and, as a result, has presented the public with yet another biased news article on climate.
See Roger’s post here.
Posted on August 30, 2008 by chillguy33 on hypsithermal.wordpress.com
Mother nature dumps 63 times more oil into the ocean than does drilling and extraction, through natural seepage. The Santa Barbara channel seepage is not exceptional, apparently. Seepage of oil into the ocean and U.S. coastal waters is widespread, even typical.
See larger image here
Oil in ocean is largely a natural phenomonon. See “Mother Nature, the biggest oil polluter on Earth”/ Some documentation here: CRS REport for Congress, Oil Spills in U.S. Coastal Waters.
The time to switch to solar energy, or to wind power, not only is not today; it may be never. The alternatives to oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy so often cited as if they are silver bullets in the battle to prevent imaginary global warming simply are not economically viable, on any scale.
In this abortive Massachussetts attempt (below) to prevent imaginary global warming, 19 turbines produced only 27% of planned energy. Other turbines produced only 17% and 15% of planned output, according to the Massachussetts Technology Collaborative. On the other hand, if T. Boon Pickens wants to build us a half-trillion dollar transmission system, he should get started. But he doesn’t, because he knows it cannot pay.
The practical and proven solution is build more nuclear plants, drill more oil and more natural gas. Convert coal to gas; then make hydrogen fuel. But we better do it quickly. We have no guarantee that Earth is not about to cool off by more than 5 degrees Farenheit; in fact, the climate gives every indication of doing exactly that. Read more here.
By Dr. Roy Cordato
At the present time the North Carolina Legislative Commission on Climate Change - co-chaired by Rep. Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford, and John Garrou, lawyer, environmental activist, and husband of Sen. Linda Garrou, D-Forsyth - is considering a set of policy proposals that, if enacted, would dramatically reduce our freedoms and impact our prosperity. The alleged goal of these proposals is to change the climate a hundred or so years from now. The actual effect is to micromanage our lives today. If enacted, these mandates would, through regulations and taxes, attempt to tell the citizens of North Carolina:
How we can travel and commute,
Where we can live,
The size homes we can live in,
The amount of land we can live on,
The size cars we can drive,
How we can generate electricity,
How much energy we can use,
The kinds of appliances we can have in our homes,
How we can light, heat, and cool our homes, and even
How we can purchase automobile insurance.
And there is no evidence that these restrictions on our freedom, even if enacted by every country on the planet, will have any noticeable impact on the climate - not in 100 years, not in 200 years.
Let me point out that this list represents only a fraction of the 56 proposals that, if enacted, begin the process of remaking the lifestyles of North Carolinians in the image of environmental ideologues and extremists. As Al Gore has pointed out, the fight against global warming will require “a wrenching transformation of American society,” and as Barack Obama has warned (threatened?): “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times”
This power grab is happening in the name of reducing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and fighting global warming - a warming that, according to all temperature records, stopped about 10 years ago. That’s right, there’s been no net warming this decade. And for the last 60 years warming has occurred for less than a 25-year period from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s. The real “deniers” in this debate are those who ignore these facts.
Carbon dioxide is unlike other regulated emissions. First, it has no toxic effect on human beings, unlike real pollutants such as lead or carbon monoxide. But more importantly there is nothing that humans can do, including breathing, that does not involve emitting CO2, and its presence in the atmosphere is essential for all life on earth. Without it we die, the plants die, and the earth freezes over. And yet the environmental zealots in and out of government have propagandized us into calling this life-giving gas in our atmosphere a pollutant. Read more here.
Dr. Roy Cordato, Vice President for Research and Resident Scholar at the John Locke Foundation. See also this SPPI Analysis of the State Climate Action Plan and the reality of the climate of North Carolina, unbelieveably totally ignored by the activists pushing their plans on the good citizens of North Carolina.