Tag: environmentalism

The Fantasy of Extreme Weather

10:06 am

This week there were three stories describing new research proving that global warming is going to cause an increase in the number and violence of extreme weather events. Each was published in one of the world’s three most important scientific journals.

Sounds gloomy, doesn’t it? Not only will extreme heatwaves, cold waves, and droughts tear apart the very fabric of society, you will not be able to drink your soda in peace on your next airplane ride!

However, one little detail, buried in one of these stories as a single sentence, literally makes hogwash out of everything else said in these three articles.
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Global warming: time to rein back on doom and gloom?

1:57 pm

From a global warming advocate: Global warming: time to rein back on doom and gloom?

Prediction, as they say, is tough, especially when it’s about the future – and that’s especially true when it comes to the climate, whose complexity we only partially understand. It is, as we all know, naturally immensely variable. And the effect of human intervention is subject to long timelags: it will be decades, even centuries, before the full consequences of today’s emissions of carbon dioxide become clear.

As a result, scientists and policymakers draw on the past to predict the future. Until now, they have therefore placed much weight on the rapid temperature increases in the Eighties and Nineties. But for at least a decade, these have dramatically slowed, even as carbon dioxide emissions have continued to increase. [emphasis mine]

Or as I like to say, every climate model proposed by every global warming scientist has been proven wrong. They all predicted the climate would warm in lockstep with the increase in CO2. It hasn’t.

This is not to say the climate hasn’t warmed in the past five centuries (though some of the data used in for the past 150 years is sadly suspect). What isn’t clear is why. It might be the rise in carbon dioxide. It might also simply be the lingering warming the Earth is experiencing as the last ice age ends. Or it might be because of the Sun.

The field of climate science is very complex, confusing, and in its infancy. We just don’t know yet, and anyone who says they do is not a good scientist.

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James Hansen is retiring from NASA and will dedicate his time to global warming activism.

5:26 pm

James Hansen is retiring from NASA and will dedicate his time to global warming activism.

All that is really changing is that Hansen will no longer work for the government. The activism has been going on for a very long time.

Also, it is interesting how this New York Times article seems very unaware of this fact, which makes all of Hansen’s global warming claims very suspect. Might the Times not want the public to know this annoying detail?

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“We’re just not interested in continuing to support bureaucracies and talkfests.”

2:14 pm

Canada to the UN environmental movement: “We’re just not interested in continuing to support bureaucracies and talkfests.”

The country has pulled out of a UN program supposedly aimed at “combating desertification,” noting that

only 18% of the roughly CAD$350,000 per year that Canada contributed to the U.N. initiative is “actually spent on programming,” [Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper] told Parliament this week during question period. “The rest goes to various bureaucratic measures. … It’s not an effective way to spend taxpayers’ money.”

As is their normal approach to debate, there is a lot of wailing, gnashing of teeth, and name-calling among the environmentalists, but no substantive response to counter Harper’s point above.

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“The fact that global surface temperatures have not followed the expected global warming pattern is now widely accepted.”

10:38 am

The uncertainty of science: “The fact that global surface temperatures have not followed the expected global warming pattern is now widely accepted.”

This quote above refers to scientists in the climate field, who are now admitting that for the past 20 years the climate has shown no warming, despite the continuing increase in CO2 in the atmosphere and their computer models that all predicted increased temperatures because of that CO2.

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More fraud in climate science

3:17 pm

Fraudalent data

Steve McIntyre, the man who had demonstrated that Michael Mann’s hockey stick graph was a fraud, has now demonstrated that the work of a group of climate scientists attempting to resurrect it is even more fraudulent. It seems that in order to recreate the illusion of warming in the past four hundred years, the scientists, led by geologist Shaun Marcott, changed the dates on a series of ocean cores in order to get the results they wanted.

McIntyre found that Marcott and his colleagues used previously published ocean core data, but have altered the dates represented by the cores, in some cases by as much as 1,000 years.

Most significantly, the scientists made no explanation for changing these dates. It is as if they wanted to hide this decline, y’know?

The chart on the right, by McIntyre, illustrates the fraud. The black line shows the temperature numbers of the ocean cores used by Marcott. The red line shows the temperature numbers, as originally published in the scientific literature, for these ocean cores.

The discrepancy here is so egregious that it screams at you. More important, as John Hinderaker says,
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The dirty little secret of electric cars.

6:17 pm

The dirty little secret of electric cars.

A 2012 comprehensive life-cycle analysis in Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that almost half the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an electric car come from the energy used to produce the car, especially the battery. The mining of lithium, for instance, is a less than green activity. By contrast, the manufacture of a gas-powered car accounts for 17% of its lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions. When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission. The amount for making a conventional car: 14,000 pounds. …

So unless the electric car is driven a lot, it will never get ahead environmentally. And that turns out to be a challenge. Consider the Nissan Leaf. It has only a 73-mile range per charge. Drivers attempting long road trips, as in one BBC test drive, have reported that recharging takes so long that the average speed is close to six miles per hour—a bit faster than your average jogger.

In other words, government subsidies for electric cars are nothing more than another feel-good program, accomplishing nothing.

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New computer models find that the tropical rain forests will not be harmed by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

4:06 pm

The uncertainty of science: New computer models find that the tropical rain forests will not be harmed by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Tropical forests are unlikely to die off as a result of the predicted rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases this century, a new study finds. The analysis refutes previous work that predicted the catastrophic loss of the Amazon rainforest as one of the more startling potential outcomes of climate change.

In the most extensive study of its kind, an international team of scientists simulated the effect of business-as-usual emissions on the amounts of carbon locked up in tropical forests across Amazonia, Central America, Asia and Africa through to 2100. They compared the results from 22 different global climate models teamed with various models of land-surface processes. In all but one simulation, rainforests across the three regions retained their carbon stocks even as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration increased throughout the century.

The study provides “robust evidence for the resilience of tropical rainforests”, says lead author Chris Huntingford, a climate modeller at the UK’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford. But uncertainties remain, he adds.

First, this prediction is based on a computer model, which is as likely to be as right as the previous pessimistic predictions. With that in mind, no one should start dancing for joy. The long term consequences of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere remain unknown.

Second, I am baffled by the previous predictions that favored catastrophe for the tropical jungles because of increased levels of carbon dioxide. Plants breath CO2. They prosper from it. If you put more in the atmosphere they will thrive. Moreover, the tropical jungles are already hot, and the plant life there is adapted to that heat. Raising the global temperature should not hurt them significantly.

Finally, faced with a result that defuses all the crisis-mongering of the global warming crowd, the author of the article feels obliged at the end to emphasis their new bugaboo: extreme weather! It’s coming! Duck your heads!

But don’t worry. When weather extremes also fail to appear, they will find something else to scream about.

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In an interview in Australia, the head of the IPCC has admitted that the climate has stopped warming now for the past seventeen years.

3:29 pm

Consensus! In an interview in Australia, the head of the IPCC has admitted that the climate has stopped warming now for the past seventeen years.

No computer climate model offered in any IPCC report predicted this long pause in warming. They all instead insisted that because of the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the global temperature would have to rise, and do so quickly and with catastrophic results.

In other words, those models were wrong. The climate is very complicated, and we don’t yet understand very well how it functions.

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In an effort to save money and protect the environment, the U.S. Navy has decided to move away from fossil fuels and back to non-toxic and environmentally friendly wind power.

9:14 am

In an effort to save money and protect the environment, the U.S. Navy has decided to move away from fossil fuels and back to non-toxic and environmentally friendly wind power.

Not letting Republican obstructionism of the budget process go to waste, President Obama’s national defense team is putting together a plan to retrofit US warship with ‘tried-and-true’ sails, taking advantage of free, naturally occurring wind rather than diesel and nuclear fuels that put crews at constant risk of causing an ecological disaster.

Used by many advanced cultures for thousands of years, sails were the environmentally sound propulsion system for naval vessels until the 20th century.

Many experts agree that their return might just usher in a new era of ‘green military technology’ – if it can overcome opposition from the generals and the fossil fuels lobby, whose alleged “concerns” about military readiness only serve to ensure more profits for the military-industrial complex.

Read the whole thing. It makes perfect sense!

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A new poll of Earth scientists has found that a majority are skeptical of human-caused global warming.

4:10 pm

Consensus! A new poll of Earth scientists has found that a majority are skeptical of human-caused global warming.

Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.

This is fun to note, but this poll is as worthless in determining the climate of the Earth as every previous poll that said the opposite. What matters is the data. However, this quote about the poll is significant:
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The founder of the green movement sees the light.

8:57 am

The founder of the green movement sees the light.

I am an environmentalist and founder member of the Greens but I bow my head in shame at the thought that our original good intentions should have been so misunderstood. We never intended a fundamentalist Green movement that rejected all energy sources other than renewable, nor did we expect the Greens to cast aside our priceless ecological heritage because of their failure to understand that the needs of the Earth are not separable from human needs. … Although well-intentioned it is an erosion of our freedom and draws near to what I see as fascism.

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Norwegian scientists admit that the climate has shown no warming since 2000.

10:28 am

Norwegian scientists admit that the climate has shown no warming since 2000.

They then spend a lot of time trying to explain this — and failing — in the context of the theory of global warming. The bottom line remains, however. All the predictions and models of the global warming advocates have been shown to be wrong. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has continued to rise, without causing any increase in global climate temperature.

Or to put it plainly: We don’t know what’s going on.

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James Hansen, activist global warming scientist, teams up with leftwing Occupy Wall Street.

9:10 am

Birds of a feather: James Hansen, activist global warming scientist, teams up with leftwing Occupy Wall Street.

Hansen gave a lecture this morning to OWS, detailing “the harsh realities of the climate emergency and what needs to be done to address it.” I would love to see some footage, as I expect what he advocated was harsh government regulation, to great applause.

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A new study has found that five Gulf Coast states have so many vague environmental laws that anyone who does anything outdoors can be found guilty of something.The rise of facism: A new study has found that five Gulf Coast states have so many vague environmental laws that anyone who does anything outdoors can be found guilty of something.

11:20 pm

The rise of fascism: A new study has found that five Gulf Coast states have so many vague environmental laws that anyone who does anything outdoors can be found guilty of something.

And it has happened. Read the article.

Then there’s this good news: “Any federal regulation enacted by Congress or executive order…offending the constitutional rights of my citizens will not be enforced by me or my deputies.”

Update: A second Oregon sheriff has joined the first in declaring he will not enforce any federal regulation that violates the Constitution.

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Our government’s modern scientific method:
Proving others are wrong is not allowed!

10:39 am

An Interior Department official has been accused of trying to disband a fish research division specifically because its research is politically incorrect.

The research division, the Fisheries Resources Branch, had repeatedly found good evidence that the salmon of the Klamath River in the northwest were not suffering significantly from the presence of the dams on that river, contradicting the accepted wisdom that the dams had to be removed in order for these species to survive. The Interior official, Jason Phillips, along with the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), did not like these results, and decided that scientific work that “proved others wrong” was unacceptable and had to be squelched. From the actual complaint [pdf]:
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A new National Research Council report honestly admits the possibility that the Sun might be an important factor in climate change.

10:01 pm

Pigs fly! A new National Research Council report honestly admits the possibility that the Sun might be an important factor in climate change.

The article, from NASA, itself is a remarkably fair assessment of the field’s state of knowledge (which in truth is quite spotty since we really do not yet understand what is going on with the climate). This, as far as I can remember, is the first time in years, since the early 1990s before the global warming advocates took over the climate field and shut down debate, that an official article from a government organization like NASA has been so open about these issues and not toed the politically correct line that “fossil fuels and carbon dioxide are causing global warming and don’t you dare say anything different!”

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Not only have the models failed to predict temperature, they also have failed to predict the amount of methane in the atmosphere.

3:05 pm

Another IPCC failure, revealed in the leaked report: Not only have the models failed to predict global temperature, they also have failed to predict the amount of methane in the atmosphere.

The graph at the link is just like the temperature graph I posted on Monday. It compares actual observations with the predictions of the computer models, which all called for a hefty rise in atmospheric methane. All the models got it wrong.

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A preliminary copy of the next IPCC report has been leaked.

10:27 am

IPCC figure

A preliminary copy of the next IPCC report has been leaked.

In the coming days there will be much discussion of this document — such as how it appears the IPCC has finally acknowledged the importance of the Sun’s variability to climate change — but for now, I post on the right what is probably its most important admission. This graph from the leaked report shows the rise in global temperatures as predicted by all the different climate models used by the IPCC, compared to actual observed temperatures. As you can see, since the late 1990s there has been no significant increase in global temperature. Moreover, the observed data now sits outside the predicted margin of error for all the models, making every single one of these models completely wrong.

But don’t worry, these facts aren’t important. In fact, any facts that contradict the religion of global warming must be ignored. It is far more important to shut down all industry and live like cavemen, just because we have faith in our belief in global warming.

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Climate experts are now calling for an end to the regularly scheduled mega-climate summits.

11:31 am

Good news: Climate experts are now calling for an end to the regularly scheduled mega-climate summits.

That these summits haven’t accomplished anything but allow climate bureaucrats to burn tons of airplane fossil fuel to gather in some of the world’s nicest warm weather cities during the winter — thereby making them all look like hypocrites — is not the reason these experts want to cancel the summits. They want to cancel the summits because the summits aren’t getting them the results they want: strict regulation on the lives of everyone else.

Nowhere does the article address the simple fact that in the past three years, since the release of the climategate emails, the creditability of the entire climate change field has gone to zero. The public doesn’t buy their sales pitch anymore, and thus neither do politicians, which is why no one is willing to make a deal at these summits. No one believes anything these climate experts are saying, especially since they have refused to clean up the corruption within their field.

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Scientists have found that the method used by the IPCC to measure droughts has significantly overestimated their number during the the past 60 years.

8:48 am

The uncertainty of science: Scientists have found that the method used by the IPCC to measure droughts has significantly overestimated their number during the the past 60 years.

Although previous studies have suggested that droughts have increased over that 60-year period, the team’s new analysis hints that the increase in drought has been substantially overestimated. For instance, the new assessment technique found that between 1980 and 2008, the global area stricken by drought grew by approximately 0.08% per year—less than one-seventh the increase estimated by the temperature-only [IPCC method].

The IPCC and the global warming activists that run it had claimed that the warming climate was causing more droughts. It turns out that claim was essentially false. The number of droughts has apparently not gone up. Note that this fact is actually not a surprise to those who have read the IPCC reports carefully. Deep down past their simplistic summaries, the reports have consistently pointed out that these conclusions were very uncertain and could be found to be wrong.

Not surprisingly, the article above spends a lot of time trying to rationalize this new data, quoting one scientist who insists there is nothing to see here, move on! The trouble is that there is plenty to see here. Our knowledge of the climate remains very incomplete.

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This is the first time since 1988 that climate hasn’t been mentioned in the presidential debate cycle

12:46 pm

Good news: “This is the first time since 1988 that climate hasn’t been mentioned in the presidential debate cycle.”

When you try to sell government policy based on crisis, and that crisis doesn’t take place as predicted, and in fact is shown to be based on fraud and dishonesty, the sales job will eventually fail. Thus, better to forget the whole thing and make believe it never happened.

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“There is no statistical case to be made for a global temperature increase in the past 15 years.”

8:32 am

“There is no statistical case to be made for a global temperature increase in the past 15 years.”

The database is the one created by the Met Office in Great Britain. Also this:

None of these adjustments are, considering the errors of measurement, statistically significant, but they do affect the ranking of years, which is important if the associated errors are not considered, as is often the case in the media. The overall conclusion is that global temperature datasets are fluid and change from month to month, and this must be taken into account in any analysis. It would be nice to have explanations for such changes.[emphasis mine]

Because of the unexplained adjustments, 1998 is no longer the hottest year on record, a “fact” trumpeted loudly by global warming scientists for more than a decade.

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Polar bear fraud

2:00 pm

The scientist famous for identifying drowning polar bears in the Arctic has been reprimanded for leaking emails and following “inappropriate” procurement procedures at his job at the Department of Interior.

The investigation also criticized the scientist, Charles Monnett, for fudging his data in reporting the death of the polar bears, a report that the global warming movement used extensively to falsely prove that global warming was causing the destruction of the polar bear population.

The Nature story above tries to make light of Monnett’s misconduct, especially in connection with his polar bear report as well as his work in awarding contracts. The report itself [pdf] is far more harsh.

In connection with Monnett’s contract work, it appears he actually helped one contractor write his proposal, then sat on the board that awarded the contract to that contractor.
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James Hansen’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies has once again been caught changing its past climate temperature data without explanation.

3:21 pm

James Hansen’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies has once again been caught changing its past climate temperature data without explanation.

Surprise of surprise, the change had the effect of making the long-term temperature record support conclusions of faster warming. The biggest changes were mostly pre-1963 temperatures; they were generally adjusted down. That would make the warming trend steeper, since post-1963 temperatures were adjusted slightly upward, on average. Generally, the older the data, the more adjustment.

Hat tip to reader jwing who alerted me to this story. As I commented to him, this “also is old news, to my mind, even though this is a new discovery of corruption. This kind of fraud has now been on-going for the past decade, with no signs of any effort to fix it. Worse, the climate science field even denies that it has a problem. Thus, I don’t trust anything they tell me. I check everything twice, and then have doubts besides. Which is why I remain entirely skeptical of any claims these climate scientists make.”

And in this case, the climate scientist in question is James Hansen.

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