Dismantling the EPA’s extremist views regarding CO2, Patriot Post.
By Joe Bastardi · July 16, 2013
The systematic assault on economical energy sources and the economy by the EPA was given de facto approval, if not encouragement by President Obama in his speech two weeks ago on the environment. As his words sunk in it became apparent that he seeks to isolate and demonize those who wish to confront him on this matter with facts, and by doing so, destroy opposition to a policy that his EPA has enacted based on easily disproven assumptions. Give the fact that poverty rates continue to rise in our nation under his watch and that the true workforce continues to drop, he seems dangerously out of touch with the facts. Yet he accuses others of such behavior either out of ignorance, arrogance, or both. His EPA has been ruling by decree based on ideas that ignore facts and disregard the harm they are doing to the nation.
There are three lines of evidence the EPA uses to back their environmental policies.
(1) Greenhouse Gas Trapping Hot Spot Theory.
(2) The so-called unusual rise in GAST (Globally Averaged Surface Temperatures).
(3) Assumed validity of climate models, used for policy analysis purposes. (See, for example, SOUTHEASTERN LEGAL FOUNDATION, INC., ET AL., Petitioners, v. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY, ET AL. Nos. 12-1268, 12-1269, 12-1272.)
One at a time, let’s show why they don’t have a leg to stand on.
Greenhouse Gas Trapping Hot Spot
There is none. In fact, temperature trends in the middle and upper troposphere are flat. For example, a look at the 200 mb level from the Hadley Center Balloon Data shows no rise at all.
The entire layer—the surface to 18km—shows no rise.
The figure bellow shows the Tropical Central Pacific Temperatures. Similarly, it shows no statistically significant slope. There is simply no evidence of EPA’s assumed Tropical Hot Spot.
Unusual rise in GAST
Their second line of evidence of a catastrophic rise in Globally Averaged Surface Temperatures (GAST) in the last 50 years due to CO2 concentrations is easily debunked when one looks at reality.
First of all, there has been a lot of fudging of data since the satellite era started—not with the objective satellite data, but the pre-satellite era where researches have adjusted temperatures down. What is most egregious is the estimation of Arctic temperatures which could not be reliably measured in a widespread fashion without the use of satellites prior to 1978. So right off the bat, there are questions about the “fox guarding the henhouse” with data manipulation. But even taking that into account, the fact is that the link between CO2 and temperatures disappeared once the cyclical warming of the oceans—a natural occurrence—was accounted for in the atmosphere. A temperature leveling and turnaround has begun (the leveling has been occurring over the last 17 years). But let’s look at this so-called “catastrophic” warming. (Amazing how mankind is now living in the most advanced age with more people supported on the planet, in large part due to the freedoms fossil fuels have supported.)
The warming linked to the earth coming out of the cold cycle of the Pacific can clearly be seen below, followed by the leveling off.
The disconnect with CO2 can be seen here:
But is the warming over the entire period as unusual as the EPA claims?
The 1930s still stick out far and away as the decade with the most current high temperature records. The following graph depicts state records by decade.
There is simply no justification for the idea that CO2 is driving a catastrophic warmup. Quite the contrary, man has never been more prosperous on a whole, or produced so much as during the current age we are living in.
Assumed validity of climate models
This is almost laughable. Anyone who works in the field every day—as we do in the private sector—knows how bad models can be. In fact, in spite of the heat wave in the Northeast and Midwest this week, the coming cool—combined with the coolness of the summer overall which was not predicted in many circles before the summer—is saving this country billions of dollars in energy and agriculture costs (a record corn crop is likely). This was not the pre-summer missive from the modeling (my company Weatherbell.com predicted a cooler summer than the previous three, saying that the Midwest could turn into the Garden of Eden agriculture-wise this year rather than a drought driven heat wave as was opined by some). But the point is that the models are a mathematical representation of a chaotic field and I can not even fathom that this could be one of their reasons. It shows the ignorance as to the nature of the climate. It also shows the willingness of those that truly don’t understand weather and climate to place trust in a model. It’s flabbergasting.
One picture destroys the whole premise. Dr. John Christy, who testified before congress on this matter, has put this graph together:
The following graph from Dr. Dr Roy Spencer is even more dramatic. While Dr. Christy shows the average, Dr. Spencer shows how the individual predictions of 19 US models are all well above actual observations. And the EPA is trying to base policy on this?
Why anyone would think they could justify EPA’s regulatory plans or suggest a carbon tax as an alternative given the facts presented above is beyond me.
The facts clearly reveal that the EPA and the president do not have a leg to stand on as their policies assault the very energy lifeline of our economy at this critical time in our nation’s history. The EPA’s decisions are based on erroneous ideas. Quite sinister is the fact that the foundational core values of this country—the encouragement of liberal free thinking, competition and tolerance—are all opposite of what the EPA and this president are doing in regards to climate change. Their policy is to shut down exposure to the facts, destroy the chance to compete in a free and vibrant market, and not tolerate any dissent.
There is more than just a cat fight among scientists involved here, and in fact I would argue that it is a side show to the main agenda despite the fact that each of the EPA’s lines of “evidence” are invalid as shown above. People are already getting hurt. Close to 150 coal plants have been shutdown, throwing people out of work and driving up costs. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It prompted this:
Democratic Senator Joe Manchin (WV) said Obama was waging “a war on coal ... a war on jobs ... a war on America.”
Given the immense problems facing our nation today—which includes the increasingly turbulent Middle East; America could be energy independent and more prosperous by exploiting the resources we have here—why are people pushing these policies? They are either frightfully out of touch with the situation, or worse, they may have an agenda that is weakening the fiber of the nation.
You see the evidence. What is your verdict?
Joe Bastardi is chief forecaster at WeatherBELL Analytics, a meteorological consulting firm.
By Joseph D’Aleo
It is behavior consistent with what you should expect as outlined in Leon Festinger’s ‘When Prophecies Fail’. First after the cessation of warming for 16 years and cooling for 10 and the slowing of sea level rises proved to be persistent, they switched to hyping extremes. Roger Pielke Jr in the EPW hearing pretty much disabused the congress of that idea by presenting the facts that showed there were no trends in any of these although don’t expect the media to get it. You see extremes gets eyeballs and sells newspapers (or used to).
So they have moved onto the Trenberth’s ‘Where’s Waldo’ idea that the heat somehow is hiding in the deep oceans and if nothing else this threatens sea life and coral and fisheries and will eventually reemerge to destroy life as we know it. But the oceans have shown no trend down to 300m in the tropical Pacific which the theory says should be warming most significantly.
Trenberth continues to embarrass himself and the science with claims like “Global warming is continuing but it’s being manifested in somewhat different ways.” (like cooling and more snow - makes perfect sense). But depending on where you are, the media is starting to regard global warming as a joke. Even here in the US, some writers are paying attention - even at the Washington Post where Ed Rogers wrote:
Two things are happening that undermine President Obama and the Democrats’ attempts to control our lives via climate change policy. First, according to a Pew Research Center for the People & the Press poll, fewer and fewer Americans say global warming is a serious problem. Only 33 percent of Americans now say global warming is a serious problem, compared to 39 percent six months ago.
And second, the globe is not getting warmer or at least, it hasn’t in the last 15 years. As the March 30 print edition of The Economist reported, “Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse gas emissions have continued to soar.”
Much of this resulted from the winters in the northern and southern hemisphere which instead of disappearing became as bad as they have seen in decades even centuries. What to do? First they proclaimed with the first winter or two that that was weather not climate. That argument was made fun of in the media along with the UKMO forecasts which were biased by their belief in the AGW theory and consistently too warm for the last decade. So along came little Jennifer Francis of Rutgers who happened to notice that warm water in the North Atlantic (around the Barents and Kara Sea) entered the arctic and led to melting of ice and subsequent warming a few years later. This of course has ben used by yours truly and other meteorologists and written on by Polyakov of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska. See the University of Alaska Fairbanks IARC analysis here
The National Snow and Ice Data Center, before it was taken over by extremists in the record-setting (since satellite monitoring began in 1979) summer melt season of 2007, noted the importance of both oceans in the arctic ice.
“One prominent researcher, Igor Polyakov at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska, points out that pulses of unusually warm water have been entering the Arctic Ocean from the Atlantic, which several years later are seen in the ocean north of Siberia. These pulses of water are helping to heat the upper Arctic Ocean, contributing to summer ice melt and helping to reduce winter ice growth.
Another scientist, Koji Shimada of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, reports evidence of changes in ocean circulation in the Pacific side of the Arctic Ocean. Through a complex interaction with declining sea ice, warm water entering the Arctic Ocean through Bering Strait in summer is being shunted from the Alaskan coast into the Arctic Ocean, where it fosters further ice loss. Many questions still remain to be answered, but these changes in ocean circulation may be important keys for understanding the observed loss of Arctic sea ice.”
See my story that shows this is the case.
She then theorized that this lack of arctic ice caused a polar amplification of the jet stream causing large waves instead of a more gentle, more zonal east west flow that bring warmer ocean are inland into North America, Europe. This amplification is what delivers the cold and snow to Eurasia and North America. This was of course jumped on by Jeff Masters now part of the new NBC Universal embarrassment conglomerate called the Weather Company that now even is affiliated with the lefty warmists from Climate Central like Heidi Cullen who embarrassed herself in front of the EPW this week. They fail to explain why if the ice returned to normal in October why we had the record snows and cold in the late winter well into the spring from late February to May in both the US and Europe.
But the story now shift to the southern hemisphere where a major cold wave and snow event lasting a week is afflicting South America. You see the same amplified pattern we saw in the Northern Hemisphere is occurring down under.
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The snow has been falling in Argentina and Uruguay and soon will begin in Brazil. These places have seen snow in recent years, a throwback to the 1960s in much the same way as the cold and snow in the Northern Hemisphere has resembled the snowy 1960s.
Uruguay, July 2013
Brazil, 1965
If the polar amplification theory were to hold then the antarctic must be melting right? Rignot (another warmist wingnut) said days ago the antarctic ice cap is breaking up. The data shows we are nearly 2 STD positive and nearing the new record.
Sorry guys, it doesn’t fly. Try the sun, which years ago, I was told by Hurd ‘Doc’ Willett led to periods of great amplification and persistence like we are seeing (near solar minima).
Indeed Hansen’s own modeler, Drew Shindell has shown the low solar (low UV) Maunder minimum led to widespread cold but Atlantic blocking in the models that included ozone and UV.
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But should they agree with the Russian scientists that we are heading into a Maunder and it will have a significant impact, its all over for the movement. But if Festinger is right, look for them to find another excuse like particulates from China coal plants, just like the cults awaiting the spaceship to take them away say they must have miscalculated on the date and time and will find another day to meet. When they fail, they are forgotten. Remember the hype about the catastrophic solar event in 2012? The Millennium bug that cost trillions? Will we look back on the AGW movement that almost destroyed Europe’s economy and threatens the US and think of the 1980s to 2000s as the good old days with the climate optimum we should of enjoyed instead of wasting trillions to end?