By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM

March saw the cold ease in the north central and southeast U.S. as global anomalies fell in the NOAA analysis data (base period of 1981-2010) that goes into the computer models. Despite this global anomaly of just 0.233C, NOAA and NASA announced it was the warmest March in the record back to 1895.

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Satellite remote sensing cover the entire globe far better than the land station and ocean data sources and can be trusted to give a more accurate data assessment. On land in the current global data sets, some1200 stations are used. Many are biased warm, especially at night by urban heat island contamination. Also as the GAO found over 41% of the stations did not meet NOAA’s own established minimum requirements for siting and had warm biases,

The situation with the oceans, which cover 71% of the globe, is no better especially with historical data. We currently have a global buoy data set with good coverage since 2004 but before we relied on patchwork data from ships with slowly changing methodology to estimate the global temperatures for the oceans.

To make matters worse, NOAA and NASA have also added adjustments to the data that enhance the apparent warming by cooling the past, perhaps to better match the climate models they run. This allows them and the media to proclaim each month and year was the warmest or among the warmest ever. An investigation in ongoing into how much they have changed the data and what the real data says. We have old data sets and they tell us the adjustments are larger than justified and always in the same direction (more warming). But we will let the experts have their say.

RSS showed this March was 10th warmest in 37 years. 2014 March was 13th warmest.

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RSS March Global

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UAH had March as the 11th warmest and 2014 March the 14th warmest.

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UAH 6.0 March Global

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The new UAH data show no warming for 219 months, and for the RSS data, it’s 220 months.

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Longer term, there is slow erratic rise up to about 1998 but the apparent warming is greater due to the cooling volcanic periods in the early 1980s (El Chichon and Mt. St. Helens) and early 1990s (Pinatubo and Cerro Hudson).

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Next will come April where Africa, Australia, India, eastern Europe, the Middle East and western and eastern FSU and much of Antarctica was cold. Observation data compiled for the models show a cooling to just 0.097C above normal. We will see whether NCDC and NASA proclaim it the warmest April.

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Note see also Paul’s Silencing Skeptics on the Congressional Democrats and Vatican join White House and Leftist assaults on basic rights.

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Saint Edith Stein, also known as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, (12 October 1891 - 9 August 1942), was a German Jewish philosopher who converted to the Roman Catholic Church and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She is a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church. She said “Don’t accept anything as love that lacks truth”.  The poor is entitled to the Holy Father’s love. The Holy Father loves the poor but does he have the truth?

April 28, the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences will hold a “workshop” on climate change, to outline the Pope’s positions and pave the way for his forthcoming encyclical on the topic. A team of experts from the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Heartland Institute will be there.

This message to Pope Francis summarizes many of the points they will make as discussed in my previous articles, and in an open letter to the Pope by the Cornwall Alliance’s Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, who joins the CFACT/Heartland team in Rome. The article explains how the “dangerous manmade climate change” agenda violates the scientific method, Judeo Christianity’s commitment to true science as the basis for tremendous improvements in human lives and environmental quality, and our obligation to care for the poorest and most vulnerable among us.

Thank you for posting the article, quoting from it, forwarding it to your friends and colleagues and perhaps adding your name to Dr. Beisner’s letter to Pope Francis.

Best regards,

Paul

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A message for Pope Francis

It’s not climate change but energy restrictions based on climate fears that threaten the poor

Paul Driessen

Pope Francis plans to deliver an encyclical on climate change this summer. To pave the way and outline the Pope’s positions, the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding a workshop on the topic, April 28 in Rome. The Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Heartland Institute will be there.

Cardinal Peter Turkson, director of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and an author of the draft encyclical, says the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has determined that “our planet is getting warmer.” Christians have a duty to help the poor, “irrespective of the causes of climate change,” and address what Pope Francis apparently believes is an imminent climate crisis. The encyclical will likely present global warming as “a critical moral issue” and increase pressure for a new climate treaty.

That raises serious questions, which I have addressed in many articles and which prompted Dr. E. Calvin Beisner and the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation to write an open letter to Pope Francis. The articles and letter reflect our years of studying climate change assertions and realities, and the ways climate-related restrictions on energy harm poor families far more than climate change will.

At the most fundamental level, too many IPCC reports and the apparent new papal position represent the rejection of Judeo-Christianity’s illustrious tradition of scientific inquiry, which has brought monumental improvements to our understanding of nature and creation and to humanity’s once “nasty, brutish and short” lives on this planet. As Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman explained, we begin with a guess about a law of nature. Then we compute the consequences that would result if our hypothesis is correct and compare actual observations, evidence and experimental data to the predicted consequences.

If the hypothesis and predictions are borne out by the observations, we have a new rule. But if the hypothesis “disagrees with the experiment, it is wrong,” Feynman says. That is honest, genuine science.

Alarmist climate science is precisely the opposite. That distorted version of science began with the hypothesis that carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels cause global warming. It served as the basis for computer models that assume rising CO2 and GHG levels will cause planetary temperatures and sea levels to soar, and hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts to increase in number and intensity. The models predicted many such “scenarios” over the coming decades.

But Earth stopped warming 18 years ago; no major hurricane hit the USA for a record 9-1/2 years; seas are rising at barely seven inches per century; and even IPCC experts agree that long-term trends in weather disasters are not out of historic norms and are not attributable to human causes. The CO2-driven global warming disaster hypothesis and models do not reflect reality and are obviously wrong.

So alarmists began talking about “climate change,” blaming extreme weather events on human emissions and manipulating temperature data. They say terrible things are happening at unprecedented levels, when they are not. Worst, they say we must slash hydrocarbon energy use that has brought once unimaginable health, prosperity, living standards and life spans to billions of people, after countless millennia of crushing poverty, malnutrition, disease, and death before age 40. Fossil fuels still represent 85% of the world’s energy and they are essential if the rest of humanity is to catch up and improve their lives.

Denying humanity the use of still bountiful hydrocarbon energy is thus not simply wrong. It is immoral and lethal. This is the real reason that climate change is a critical moral issue. No one has a right to tell the world’s poor they cannot use fossil fuels to improve their lives, or to tell others they must reduce their living standards, based on speculation and unfounded fears about a manmade climate crisis.

As Dr. Beisner notes, “Alongside good science in our approach to climate policy must be two preferential options: for humanity and, among humanity, for the poor.” This does not mean pitting humanity against nature, any more than to pit the poor against the rich. It means any effort to protect the environment must be centered on scientific truth and human well-being, and in particular the well-being of the poor, because they are more vulnerable, and less able to protect themselves. Climate alarmism does not do that.

Over the past three decades, fossil fuels helped 1.3 billion people get electricity and escape debilitating energy poverty over 830 million because of coal. China connected 99% of its population to the grid and increased its steel production eight times over, mostly with coal, energy analyst Roger Bezdek points out.

Abundant, reliable, affordable motor fuels and electricity empower people and support mobility, modern agriculture, homes and hospitals, computers and communications, lights and refrigerators, job creation, life and study after sundown, indoor plumbing, safe drinking water, less disease and longer lives. In conjunction with property rights and entrepreneurship, protected by laws enforced by limited, responsive, responsible governments, fossil fuels will continue transforming lives and nations the world over.

They will also enable people to respond and adapt to future climate changes and extreme weather events, floods and droughts, heat waves, new “little ice ages” and other disasters, natural or manmade. More plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would enhance wildlife habitats and food production.

However, 1.3 billion people (the population of the United States, Canada, Mexico and Europe combined) still do not have electricity. In India alone, more people than live in the USA still lack electricity. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 730 million (equal to Europe) still cook and heat with wood, charcoal and animal dung. Hundreds of millions get horribly sick and four million die every year from lung and intestinal diseases, due to breathing smoke from open fires and not having clean water, refrigeration and safe food.

Imposing fossil fuel restrictions and renewable energy mandates in the name of stabilizing planetary climate that has never been stable would perpetuate Third World poverty, disease and death. In developed nations, it would reduce living standards, affect everything we make, grow, ship, eat and do and cause thousands to die during cold winters, because they cannot afford to heat their homes properly.

It would be a needless tragedy, an unconscionable crime against humanity, if the world implemented policies to protect the world’s still impoverished and energy-deprived masses from hypothetical manmade climate dangers decades from now, by perpetuating poverty and disease, and killing millions tomorrow.

Just eight years ago, Pope Benedict XVI warned that any proposed “solutions” to global warming and climate change must be based on solid evidence, and not on computer models, unsupported assertions and dubious ideology. He suggested that concerns about man-made emissions melting ice caps and causing waves of unprecedented disasters were little more than fear-mongering. He argued that ecological concerns must be balanced against the needs of current and future generations of people.

Pope Francis apparently does not share his predecessor’s view about climate change fears. However, if he is truly committed to advancing science, the poor and creation, he should reject climate chaos claims unless and until alarmists can provide solid evidence to back up their assertions and models.

He should recognize that the issue is not global warming or climate change. It is whether human actions now dominate climate and weather fluctuations that have been common throughout Earth and human history and whether those actions will cause dangerous or catastrophic changes in the future. Science-based answers to these questions are essential if we are to forecast future climate and weather accurately and safeguard poor families, modern living standards and environmental quality.

Dr. Beisner has posted his letter to Pope Francis, for others to endorse this commonsense approach.

It is unwise and unjust to adopt policies requiring reduced use of fossil fuels, unless it can be conclusively shown that doing so will stabilize Earth’s fickle climate and prevent future climate disasters, Dr. Beisner concludes. “Such policies would condemn hundreds of millions of our fellow human beings to ongoing poverty.” We therefore respectfully ask Pope Francis to advise the world’s leaders to reject those policies.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power Black death, and coauthor of Cracking Big Green: Saving the world from the Save-the-Earth money machine.

See also this insightful letter FROM Rome about the possible outcomes.

See what the EPA which has orchestrated the assault on the Catholic religion really is trying to do here. The EPA’s Gina McCarthy has been advising the Vatican Scientific Advisory Board.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation has enlisted an international team of five distinguished scientists to carry out a full inquiry

Christopher Booker

Last month, we are told, the world enjoyed “its hottest March since records began in 1880”. This year, according to “US government scientists”, already bids to outrank 2014 as “the hottest ever”. The figures from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were based, like all the other three official surface temperature records on which the world’s scientists and politicians rely, on data compiled from a network of weather stations by NOAA’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN).

But here there is a puzzle. These temperature records are not the only ones with official status. The other two, Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and the University of Alabama (UAH), are based on a quite different method of measuring temperature data, by satellites. And these, as they have increasingly done in recent years, give a strikingly different picture. Neither shows last month as anything like the hottest March on record, any more than they showed 2014 as “the hottest year ever”.

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Back in January and February, two items in this column attracted more than 42,000 comments to the Telegraph website from all over the world. The provocative headings given to them were “Climategate the sequel: how we are still being tricked by flawed data on global warming” and “The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest scientific scandal”.

My cue for those pieces was the evidence multiplying from across the world that something very odd has been going on with those official surface temperature records, all of which ultimately rely on data compiled by NOAA’s GHCN. Careful analysts have come up with hundreds of examples of how the original data recorded by 3,000-odd weather stations has been “adjusted”, to exaggerate the degree to which the Earth has actually been warming. Figures from earlier decades have repeatedly been adjusted downwards and more recent data adjusted upwards, to show the Earth having warmed much more dramatically than the original data justified.

So strong is the evidence that all this calls for proper investigation that my articles have now brought a heavyweight response. The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has enlisted an international team of five distinguished scientists to carry out a full inquiry into just how far these manipulations of the data may have distorted our picture of what is really happening to global temperatures.

The panel is chaired by Terence Kealey, until recently vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham. His team, all respected experts in their field with many peer-reviewed papers to their name, includes Dr Peter Chylek, a physicist from the National Los Alamos Laboratory; Richard McNider, an emeritus professor who founded the Atmospheric Sciences Programme at the University of Alabama; Professor Roman Mureika from Canada, an expert in identifying errors in statistical methodology; Professor Roger Pielke Sr, a noted climatologist from the University of Colorado, and Professor William van Wijngaarden, a physicist whose many papers on climatology have included studies in the use of “homogenisation” in data records.

Their inquiry’s central aim will be to establish a comprehensive view of just how far the original data has been “adjusted” by the three main surface records: those published by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss), the US National Climate Data Center and Hadcrut, that compiled by the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (Cru), in conjunction with the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction. All of them are run by committed believers in man-made global warming.

Below, the raw data in graph form

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For this the GWPF panel is initially inviting input from all those analysts across the world who have already shown their expertise in comparing the originally recorded data with that finally published. In particular, they will be wanting to establish a full and accurate picture of just how much of the published record has been adjusted in a way which gives the impression that temperatures have been rising faster and further than was indicated by the raw measured data.

Already studies based on the US, Australia, New Zealand, the Arctic and South America have suggested that this is far too often the case.

But only when the full picture is in will it be possible to see just how far the scare over global warming has been driven by manipulation of figures accepted as reliable by the politicians who shape our energy policy, and much else besides. If the panel’s findings eventually confirm what we have seen so far, this really will be the “smoking gun”, in a scandal the scale and significance of which for all of us can scarcely be exaggerated.

More details of the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s International Temperature Data Review Project are available on the inquiry panel’s website.

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Solar Cycle 24 Continues To Be Quietest In Almost 200 Years...Sun’s Polar Fields Weakest Since 1900 -

By P Gosselin on 12. April 2015

Although over the last 2 years the current solar cycle saw some activity, it recently has quieted down considerably and it continues on the path to being one of the quietest since observations began over 350 years ago. PG

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The Sun In March 2015

By Frank Bosse and Fritz Vahrenholt
Translated, edited by P Gosselin

Last month our sun gave a really sluggish impression. The sunspot number (SSN) was only 38.4: only 46% of what is normal at this time into a cycle for all the cycles observed since 1750.

Fig. 1: The current solar cycle 24 compared to the mean of all previous cycles (blue) and to solar cycle no. 1, 1755-1766, (black).Enlarged

Comparing the individual cycles to each other further confirms that the current cycle is a quiet one compared to those we saw in the second half of the last century:

Fig. 2: Comparison of all the solar cycles. The figures represent the summed SSN deviation from the mean for first 76 months into the cycle, for all cycles. The current cycle so far is the 4th most inactive since observations began in 1750. Enlarged

The current cycle is the quietest since solar cycle no. 7, which occurred around 1830. When it comes to the question of why, the polar magnetic fields of the sun are decisive. We reported on this in detail (see “The sun in Jaunary 2014 and news about the polar solar field"). Its been a few months since the last data recording and today we are 2 years past the suspected smoothed maximum. The polar fields went through the zero-point already in March 2013, as can be seen from the data from the Wilcox Solar Observatory (WSO). There it can be seen that especially the north polar field is still barely established.

How does that compare historically?

Recording of data for the polar fields first began in the early 1970s, which means the time period is still too short to allow real comparisons to be made. But in a paper from 2012 the authors led by Andres Munoz-Jaramillo used the observations of solar flares made since 1900 as a proxy for the sun’s polar fields. The lead author of the paper kindly agreed to share the data with the authors of this article and so it is possible to compare the current relationships with the long-term series:

Fig. 3: The relative strength of polar solar fields since 1900. Enlarged

Here it is clear to see that in the second year past the cycle peak, the polar fields have never been so weak. Consider that the strength of the sun’s polar fields during the solar sunspot minimum is a decisive indicator for the activity of the next solar cycle. A very recent paper by Robert Cameron and Manfred Schussler confirms this.

We only need to be patient a little longer and to pay further attention to the ongoing development of the sun’s polar fields in order to attempt a forecast. The preliminary indications do point to a low level of activity and thus perhaps an even weaker solar cycle 25 beginning around 2022.