Tag: climate

New ice core data from Antarctica suggests in the past 10,000 years temperatures have often been higher than today, and that the rise in temperatures during the past 100 years is also not unprecedented.

12:37 pm

The uncertainty of science: New ice core data from Antarctica suggests that in the past 10,000 years temperatures have often been higher than today, and that the rise in temperatures during the past 100 years is also not unprecedented.

These results are actually not news. Climate scientists have known for decades that today’s climate is not unique, and that the Earth has gone through similar temperature fluctuations in the past. The results simply reconfirm this fact, and make any global warming claims to the contrary less believable.

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Sunspots and climate

8:54 am

Scientists have found new evidence that the solar sunspot cycle has influenced the Earth’s climate in the recent past.

Sirocko and his colleagues found that between 1780 and 1963, the Rhine froze in multiple places fourteen different times. The sheer size of the river means it takes extremely cold temperatures to freeze over making freezing episodes a good proxy for very cold winters in the region, Sirocko said.

Mapping the freezing episodes against the solar activity’s 11-year cycle — a cycle of the Sun’s varying magnetic strength and thus total radiation output — Sirocko and his colleagues determined that ten of the fourteen freezes occurred during years when the Sun had minimal sunspots. Using statistical methods, the scientists calculated that there is a 99 percent chance that extremely cold Central European winters and low solar activity are inherently linked.

Also this:
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Are the glaciers in the Himalayas shrinking? A third paper published today falls between one study that said no and another that said yes.

11:17 am

The uncertainty of science: Are the glaciers in the Himalayas shrinking? A third paper published today falls between one study that said no and another that said yes.

The new estimate raises further questions about satellite and field measurements of alpine glaciers, and ”will set the cat among the pigeons,” says Graham Cogley, a remote-sensing expert at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. … Although the ICESat results show twice as much ice loss as the re-interpreted GRACE data, this figure is still three times lower than regional losses estimated on the basis of field studies.

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The failed predictions of the last half century of scientific doomsayers.

7:39 pm

The failed predictions of the last half century of scientific doomsayers.

It is entertaining to read this long list of foolish predictions describing the certain and soon-to-arrive end of humanity. Maybe the best is the prediction of Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, who in 2007 predicted that “if there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late … This is the defining moment.”

However, it is Ridley’s concluding thoughts about climate change that are maybe the most worthwhile:

We hardly ever allow the moderate “lukewarmers” a voice: those who suspect that the net positive feedbacks from water vapor in the atmosphere are low, so that we face only 1 to 2 degrees Celsius of warming this century; that the Greenland ice sheet may melt but no faster than its current rate of less than 1 percent per century; that net increases in rainfall (and carbon dioxide concentration) may improve agricultural productivity; that ecosystems have survived sudden temperature lurches before; and that adaptation to gradual change may be both cheaper and less ecologically damaging than a rapid and brutal decision to give up fossil fuels cold turkey.

Read the whole thing. It is a truly educational experience.

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A modern intellectual looks at the Syrian revolt and immediately concludes it was global warming that caused it

1:02 pm

A modern intellectual looks at the Syrian revolt and immediately concludes that it was caused by global warming!

Climate change: is there anything it can’t do?

Seriously, the drought in Syria might be a factor behind the revolt, but to assert that the drought was caused by global warming is weak at best. There is no data to make that assertion, none at all. All we have is the opinion of some global warming scientists that such extreme droughts might happen more frequently as the Earth warms. And since the temperature increase as predicted by those very same scientists has not occurred, we should take all their predictions with a big grain of salt.

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“inadequate oversight, lax bookkeeping, sloppy paperwork, haphazard performance agreements and missing financial documentation.”

10:00 am

An inspector general’s report of the State Department’s climate change office has uncovered “inadequate oversight, lax bookkeeping, sloppy paperwork, haphazard performance agreements and missing financial documentation.”

Other than that, the Obama administration’s management of its climate research budget is just fine.

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The reason an environmental polar bear scientist has been suspended and under investigation is because while tasked to review and approve research proposals he played favorites, helping to write and revise the government proposal while working against a proposal from private oil companies.

9:35 am

The reason an environmental polar bear scientist has been suspended and is under investigation is because — while tasked to review and approve research proposals — he played favorites, helping to write and revise his preferred proposals while working against proposals from others.

Documents obtained by Nature through the Freedom of Information Act do not reveal the investigators’ conclusions but they suggest a more specific context for Monnett’s troubles: he assisted in the writing of a proposal from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that he was also responsible for reviewing for the [US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM)]. He also resisted a separate initiative by oil companies.

Over five years, the NOAA study would synthesize knowledge of different elements of the Arctic environment — from marine mammals to fish to zooplankton — and offer conclusions about the overall impact of oil-and-gas exploration there. The NOAA team was awarded the contract last year.

Monnett exchanged e-mails with the NOAA researchers between February and May 2011, made edits to their draft proposal and talked on the phone with them about how to strengthen it. Nature has seen emails from within the BOEM showing that the reason for his suspension in 2011 was management concern about similar assistance being provided to a grant applicant on another contract, which Monnett was also responsible for reviewing.

This is the same scientist whose paper on drowning polar bears has become a favorite with the environmental movement.

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After mandating the sale of 15% ethanol gasoline — that can damage engines and lower fuel efficiency — the EPA is now going to require that you buy at least 4 gallons in order to reduce the damage.

5:35 pm

How nice of them: After mandating the sale of 15% ethanol gasoline — which can damage engines and lower fuel efficiency — the EPA is now going to require that you buy at least 4 gallons when you fill your tank in order to reduce the damage.

The entire auto industry has made it very clear its opposition to 15% ethanol because that mixture is harmful to vehicle engines. So, does the EPA back off? No, it instead doubles down, increasing its regulatory control in a manner that is complex, unenforceable, and impractical.

And when this new regulation doesn’t work and vehicles begin to fail, don’t expect the EPA to pay for the repair. Instead, I expect we will soon have EPA regulators standing at every gas station, checking to make sure we use the right gasoline in the right amounts, ready to fine or arrest us if we dare to do something different.

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Despite a 3x increase in the use of gasoline and diesel fuel since the 1960s, the amount of vehicle-related pollution in the Los Angeles area has declined by 98 percent during that same time.

9:50 am

Good news: Despite a 3x increase in the use of gasoline and diesel fuel since the 1960s, the amount of vehicle-related pollution in the Los Angeles area has declined by 98 percent during that same time.

While many on the left will argue that this proves the validity of government regulation, I only see it as evidence that the initial regulations imposed in the 1970s did their job, and that there is no reason for stricter regulation now, something that the EPA, the Obama administration, and the left continue to demand.

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Using today’s most advanced climate models Indian meteorologists were still unable to correctly predict this year’s monsoon rainfall.

9:39 am

The uncertainty of science: Using today’s most advanced climate computer models and data, Indian meteorologists were still unable to correctly predict this year’s monsoon rainfall.

The rains during the four-month-long monsoon season (June to September) – accounting for more than 80% of India’s annual rainfall – is crucial for the agricultural economy. In April, the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) had predicted that the monsoon season would see normal or above-average rainfall. On 2 August, however, it confessed that more than half of India has received “deficient or scanty” rains, and that the monsoon rainfall for the entire country is likely to be 19.7 % less than normal.

Because they were trying to predict a long term weather pattern, the overall rainfall produced by the yearly monsoon, this prediction was not unlike most of the climate temperature predictions produced by the IPCC’s global warming climate scientists. Moreover, this monsoon prediction likely used similar algorithms and the same data as the IPCC models.

Thus, this failed prediction of monsoon rainfall gives us another peek into the accuracy of those global warming climate models. And that peek is not encouraging. It suggests once again that we should not yet put much faith in the predictive accuracy of the IPCC’s models. The science is simply not advanced enough yet.

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The Sun continues to fizzle

9:56 am

Yesterday NOAA posted its monthly update of the ongoing sunspot cycle of the Sun. You can see this latest graph, covering the month of July, below the fold.

As we have seen now for almost four years, the Sun continues to under-perform the predictions of solar scientists when it comes to the number of sunspots it is producing. In fact, that the sunspot number did not rise in July is surprising, as July had appeared to be a very active month for sunspots, with some of the strongest solar flares and coronal mass ejections seen in years. Instead, the number declined ever so slightly.
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A journalist takes objective look at global warming

10:13 am

For the past week there has been a new spat of articles written about human caused global warming, instigated by an op-ed (subscription required) written by scientist Richard Muller in the New York Times, where he wrote:

Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

Not surprisingly, the mainstream press has jumped on this op-ed and the public release of new data by Muller’s team as further proof that the debate over global warming is settled and we should all bow to our governmental overlords and agree to any regulations they propose to save the planet.

Not so fast.
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most of the weather stations in the US are so poorly sited that their temperature data is unreliable.

7:28 pm

“Most of the weather stations in the US are so poorly sited that their temperature data is unreliable.”

The article describes a new paper which analyzed the reliability of the weather stations in the U.S. and found that NOAA not only favored the data from the more untrustworthy stations — which also happened to have a warming bias — they then adjusted the overall data upward even more.

In other words, any temperature data from the last few decades cannot be trusted.

The full details can be found at Watts Up With That, but I haven’t given that as the main link because the page takes so long to load due to the many comments. You can also go here for additional information.

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British police have closed their investigation trying to find out who leaked the climategate emails.

9:47 am

British police have closed their investigation trying to find out who leaked the climategate emails.

“We are naturally disappointed that those responsible for this crime have not been caught and brought to justice,” said Edward Acton, [University of East Anglia]’s vice chancellor, in a statement. “The misinformation and conspiracy theories circulating following the publication of the stolen emails – including the theory that the hacker was a disgruntled UEA employee — did real harm to public perceptions about the dangers of climate change.”

Phil Jones, research director of CRU … said he hoped the end of the case would “draw a line under the stressful events of the last two and half years”.

How can the release of these emails be “misinformation” when both UEA and Phil Jones have admitted the emails are actually their emails? They can’t. Nothing was faked, and the content of those emails was chilling, as they showed a scientist (Phil Jones) willing to fake data, delete evidence, and destroy the careers of his critics. That East Anglia did not investigate and then fire Phil Jones after reading these emails tells us that East Anglia has no interest in the honest pursuit of science.

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A review by the IPCC of its earlier reports has admitted to serious problems and fundamental biases.

9:51 am

A review by the IPCC of its earlier reports has admitted that the manner in which the reports were produced had serious problems and fundamental biases.

The IAC reported that IPCC lead authors fail to give “due consideration … to properly documented alternative views” (p. 20), fail to “provide detailed written responses to the most significant review issues identified by the Review Editors” (p. 21), and are not “consider[ing] review comments carefully and document[ing] their responses” (p. 22). In plain English: the IPCC reports are not peer-reviewed.

The IAC found that “the IPCC has no formal process or criteria for selecting authors” and “the selection criteria seemed arbitrary to many respondents” (p. 18). Government officials appoint scientists from their countries and “do not always nominate the best scientists from among those who volunteer, either because they do not know who these scientists are or because political considerations are given more weight than scientific qualifications” (p. 18). In other words: authors are selected from a “club” of scientists and nonscientists who agree with the alarmist perspective favored by politicians.

The rewriting of the Summary for Policy Makers by politicians and environmental activists — a problem called out by global warming realists for many years, but with little apparent notice by the media or policymakers — was plainly admitted, perhaps for the first time by an organization in the “mainstream” of alarmist climate change thinking. “[M]any were concerned that reinterpretations of the assessment’s findings, suggested in the final Plenary, might be politically motivated,” the IAC auditors wrote. The scientists they interviewed commonly found the Synthesis Report “too political” (p. 25). [emphasis mine]

The sad part is that almost none of these problems have been addressed by the IPCC in producing its next report, due out sometime in 2013 or 2014.

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A new study suggests that the glaciers in the Himalayas are shrinking, with different regions shrinking much faster than others.

11:59 am

The uncertainty of science: A new study suggests that the glaciers in the Himalayas are shrinking, with different regions shrinking much faster than others.

This study both supplements and contrasts other work which suggested that the western Himalayan glaciers were not shrinking.

It is interesting that the article above does not give any specifics on the rate of shrinkage, other than to say it is getting faster in some areas. Instead, the focus of this work centers more on the discovery that India’s monsoon winds have a significant influence on glacier growth or retreat.

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The House Appropriations Committee has approved a $1.4 billion cut in the budget of EPA, also including 31 additional riders limited the agency’s regulatory powers.

1:57 pm

The House Appropriations Committee has approved a $1.4 billion cut in the budget of EPA, also including 31 additional riders limiting the agency’s regulatory powers.

That would make the 2013 EPA budget equivalent to its budget in the early 2000s, numbers that would hardly be crippling.

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New research has found that from 20,000 to 7,000 years ago Great Britain was surrounded by a vast area of dry land that reached as far as Denmark.

4:07 pm

New research has found that from 20,000 to 7,000 years ago Great Britain was surrounded by a vast area of dry land that reached as far as Denmark.

The research suggests that the populations of these drowned lands could have been tens of thousands, living in an area that stretched from Northern Scotland across to Denmark and down the English Channel as far as the Channel Islands.

As the ice age ended and sea levels rose, this land was slowly swamped and engulfed by the North Sea.

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A skeptic takes an educated look at alternative energy.

12:52 am

A skeptic takes an educated look at alternative energy.

The matter of affordable costs is the hardest promise to assess, given the many assorted subsidies and the creative accounting techniques that have for years propped up alternative and renewable generation technologies. Both the European Wind Energy Association and the American Wind Energy Association claim that wind turbines already produce cheaper electricity than coal-fired power plants do, while the solar enthusiasts love to take the history of impressively declining prices for photovoltaic cells and project them forward to imply that we’ll soon see installed costs that are amazingly low.

But other analyses refute the claims of cheap wind electricity, and still others take into account the fact that photo­voltaic installations require not just cells but also frames, inverters, batteries, and labor. These associated expenses are not plummeting at all, and that is why the cost of electricity generated by residential solar systems in the United States has not changed dramatically since 2000. At that time the national mean was close to 40 U.S. cents per kilowatt­-hour, while the latest Solarbuzz data for 2012 show 28.91 cents per kilowatt-hour in sunny climates and 63.60 cents per kilowatt-­hour in cloudy ones. That’s still far more expensive than using fossil fuels, which in the United States cost between 11 and 12 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2011. The age of mass-scale, decentralized photovoltaic generation is not here yet.

Then consider the question of scale. Wind power is more advanced commercially than solar power, but with about 47 gigawatts in the United States at the end of 2011 it still accounted for less than 4 percent of the net installed summer generating capacity in that country. And because the capacity factors of U.S. wind turbines are so low, wind supplied less than 3 percent of all the electricity generated there in 2011.

Read the whole article. It is detailed, thoughtful, and blunt.

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The IPCC has decided that it is too difficult to purge non-peer-reviewed envionmental activist press releases from its next report.

3:37 pm

The IPCC has decided that it is too difficult to purge non-peer-reviewed envionmental activist press releases from its next report. Instead,

[A]ny information they choose to use will be considered peer reviewed just by being posted on the Internet by the IPCC.

In addition, the IPCC has decided “to impose gender and geographical quotas on IPCC membership,” rather than simple pick the best scientists.

And climate scientists wonder why the public no longer believes anything they say.

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New data from Antarctica suggests that the south pole icecap is not warming, as predicted by climate models.

12:53 pm

New data from Antarctica suggests that the south pole icecap is not melting, as predicted by climate models.

It turns out that past studies, which were based on computer models without any direct data for comparison or guidance, overestimate the water temperatures and extent of melting beneath the Fimbul Ice Shelf. This has led to the misconception, Hattermann said, that the ice shelf is losing mass at a faster rate than it is gaining mass, leading to an overall loss of mass. The model results were in contrast to the available data from satellite observations, which are supported by the new measurements.

The team’s results show that water temperatures are far lower than computer models predicted, which means that the Fimbul Ice Shelf is melting at a slower rate. Perhaps indicating that the shelf is neither losing nor gaining mass at the moment because ice buildup from snowfall has kept up with the rate of mass loss, Hattermann said.

In other words, the climate models were wrong. When actual data was obtained, first by satellites and now from the water under the ice shelf itself, the new data found that the ice shelf is stable, not melting as predicted.

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Global warming: Second thoughts by an environmentalist.

5:53 pm

Global warming: Second thoughts by an environmentalist.

For many years, I was an active supporter of the IPCC and its CO2 theory. Recent experience with the UN’s climate panel, however, forced me to reassess my position. In February 2010, I was invited as a reviewer for the IPCC report on renewable energy. I realised that the drafting of the report was done in anything but a scientific manner. The report was littered with errors and a member of Greenpeace edited the final version. These developments shocked me. I thought, if such things can happen in this report, then they might happen in other IPCC reports too.

He then very clearly outlines what we do and do not know about the Earth’s climate, and pinpoints the important uncertainties that presently exist.

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