Tag: climate

Oh no! Climate panel might include skeptics!

10:24 am

According to this Washington Post article, the Trump administration is considering naming some skeptical climate scientists to the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, something that the newspaper, the global warming crowd, and some EPA employees apparently consider a horrible taboo.

[T]he inclusion of a handful of climate contrarians has caused early concern among environmental groups and some employees at the agency. “We should be able to trust that those who serve the EPA are the all-stars in their fields and committed to public service,” said Michael Halpern, deputy director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. He said the upcoming round of appointments will test whether EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is “remotely interested” in independent scientific advice. “He already has a parade of lobbyists and advisers providing him with the perspectives from oil, gas, and chemical companies. The Science Advisory Board is a check on political influence and can help the agency determine whether the special interests are telling it straight.”

What I find really hilarious in reading the article is its description of the various skeptics, almost all of which are qualified climate scientists. The article quotes their skeptical positions as if these positions are the insane ravings of an idiot, but everything these skeptics say is accurate and well documented by research over the past century. For example, there is this quote:

Another scientist, Craig Idso, is chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, where he has written that “the modern rise in the air’s CO2 content is providing a tremendous economic benefit to global crop production.”

Yet another scientist, Richard Keen, is a meteorologist and author who traveled with the Heartland Institute to Rome in 2015 for a “prebuttal” to Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change. There, he argued that “in the past 18 years and how many months, four months, there has been no global warming.” Another candidate, Anthony Lupo, is an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Missouri. In 2014, he told a local Missouri media outlet, KOMU 8, that “I think it is rash to put the climate change completely on the blame of humans.”

Idso is correct. Crops benefit from more carbon dioxide. This is common knowledge in the agricultural community, and has been amply proven by numerous studies.

Keen is also correct. In 2015 there had been no warming for almost two decades, and that pause only ceased last year because of El Nino, and appears now to have resumed.

Lupo is also correct. The theory that human behavior is the sole cause of global warming has not been proven, and if anything, the failure of every computer model based on this theory to predict the pause in rising temperatures suggests it is wrong.

If anything, the article illustrates the ignorance of its author and the newspaper, both of whom appear completely unaware of the actual uncertainties that exist in the climate field.

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Senate committee approves funding for UN global warming bureaucracy

10:40 am

Our beloved Democratic-controlled Senate: A Senate committee today rejected Trump’s proposal to cut all UN spending for its global warming bureaucracy, including the IPCC, and re-installed the $10 million budget item.

It is important to note how the vote went:

The amendment passed 16-14. Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee voted in favor, as did all committee Democrats except for West Virginia’s Joe Manchin.

Essentially, the Senate is now controlled by the Democrats, with the help of a handful of fake Republicans. I should add that the Republican leadership is partly allowing this, by not imposing any party discipline on any of its members.

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“Witches, Jews And Climate Deniers”

11:02 am

Link here. This is the introduction:

Throughout history, hate groups have looked for scapegoats to blame things on.

In the 16th century progressive hate groups blamed bad weather on witches, and burned tens of thousands of witches at the stake. In the 1930’s and 1940’s progressives put millions of Jews in gas chambers as scapegoats for Germany’s problems, and now progressive hate groups blame the weather on people who resist their climate scam. They want to criminalize and prosecute free speech and scientific inquiry.

It goes on from there, documenting the anger and hate and certainty of the pro-global warming crowd, and their increasing intolerance for any dissent, or any facts that counter their positions or certainty. Read it all. It is worth it.

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Sunspot update for August 2017

10:52 am

Yesterday NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, covering sunspot activity for August. That graph is posted below, with annotations.

August 2017 Solar Cycle graph

The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The red curve is their revised May 2009 prediction.

The long slow decline to solar minimum has now shown itself. Up until now, the ramp down from solar maximum had been fast and steep, unlike past solar cycles where the ramp down is slow and steady. The last few months the ramp down had practically ceased. In this August graph the ramp down turned into a temporary ramp up. Considering the strong activity going on right now as well as the past week, I expect the September numbers to also show this increase.

None of this means that the ramp down has ended, or that we will not see a solar minimum. All it means is that it takes awhile for the Sun to slowly calm down after each solar maximum. The sunspots we are seeing right now, all near the equator, are from the solar cycle now slowly ending. We will know the minimum is coming as well as the next solar maximum when the first tiny and rare sunspots appear in high latitudes. These high latitude sunspots will belong to the next cycle, and will have reversed polarity.

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New study claims global warming caused 2015 spike in road deaths

9:41 am

This is why global warming activists have little credibility: A new study has concluded that global warming, not increased use of cell phones, caused the increased number of road deaths in 2015.

Combining government data for the 100 most densely-populated U.S. counties for miles driven, vehicle fatalities and weather, researcher Leon Robertson found that motorists clock up extra miles as temperatures and precipitation rates rose. When temperature rose by a degree Fahrenheit (0.5 Celsius), vehicles were driven an additional 60 miles (95 kms) per person over a year, Robertson said in the study, which was published in the academic journal Injury Prevention.

Using mathematical models, the retired Yale University epidemiologist also found that for every additional inch (2.5 cm) of rainfall, cars and trucks racked up an average of 66 more miles (105 kms) per motorist for a year. Hotter than normal outdoors temperatures likely accounted for most of the extra deaths in 2015, Robertson said.”If millions more people drive cars because the temperature is getting warmer … then that adds up to a lot of miles,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“Mainly it’s a simple multiplication.”

Since road deaths apparently dropped in 2016, does this mean that global warming has ceased?

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Global warming and Glacier National Park

10:05 pm

One of the main activities for almost everyone visiting Glacier National Park is to drive across the park on Going-to-the-Sun Road, which crosses the mountains and probably has some of the most spectacular scenery of any road in the United States. During our visit this week we entered the park from the west side, spent several days there hiking trails, then took this road across to the east side, where we did more hiking.

The highest point on Going-to-the-Sun Road is Logan Pass. The park service has built a visitor center there, where everyone stops to do a short hike and admire the views. The trail head for the more challenging Highline Trail, which we did soon after arrival, is also here.

Outside the Logan Pass visitor center are a variety of displays. One focused on the changing environment at Glacier, and not surprisingly, it made a point of talking about the documented shrinkage of the glaciers during the past century. Below is an image of the pertinent quote from that display:

Display outside Logan Pass visiter center

When I saw this I was quite amused. The glaciers in the park are expected to be gone in only three more years, by 2020? Not a chance. I thought, they are going to have to change this sign soon. In fact, based on my experience with past failed global warming predictions, I was actually surprised they had let this display stay there this long, and hadn’t already made it vanish to be replaced with a new doomsday prediction that was far enough in the future that they could use if for awhile to generate new fear (and funding) before it too turned out to be wrong.

Anyway, in driving east and down from Logan Point, Diane and I eventually reached the east entrance to the park, where there was another visitor center. Like Logan Pass, this center also had a collection of outdoor displays, with one display once again focused on the park’s changing environment. Below is the pertinent quote from that display:
» Read more

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Trump administration to end climate panel

8:16 am

The Trump administration has decided to not renew a pro-global warming climate panel set to expire this week.

The panel is part of the National Climate Assessment, a group aimed at helping officials and policy makers integrate the US Government’s climate change analysis into their long-term planning. A mandate for the 15-member Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment is set to expire on Sunday, and will not be renewed.

The press will paint this panel as an objective collection of climate scientists put together to provide the president with good advice on the climate. In truth, it is a part of the propaganda machine for the global warming part of the climate science community, designed to push their conclusions while excluding any skeptical input.

Once again it appears that while Trump might be wishy-washy on many issues, on climate he is serious about dismantling the corruption that has worked its way into that field while eliminating the over-regulation that this corruption has imposed on American society.

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Australian weather bureau caught tampering with temperatures

9:59 am

The weather bureau in Australia has been caught tampering with temperatures measured by its weather stations, changing them so that cooler temperatures were warmer than what was actually measured.

Meteorologist Lance Pidgeon watched the 13 degrees Fahrenheit Goulburn recording from July 2 disappear from the bureau’s website. The temperature readings fluctuated briefly and then disappeared from the government’s website. “The temperature dropped to minus 10 (13 degrees Fahrenheit), stayed there for some time and then it changed to minus 10.4 (14 degrees Fahrenheit) and then it disappeared,” Pidgeon said, adding that he notified scientist Jennifer Marohasy about the problem, who then brought the readings to the attention of the bureau.

The bureau would later restore the original 13 degrees Fahrenheit reading after a brief question and answer session with Marohasy.

The bureau claimed that software had automatically and incorrectly thrown out the record-setting 13 degree temperature, and say they are reviewing that software now.

This story actually broke in early July, in Australia. I read the initial posts about it then, but somehow never got around to posting the story. When this story appeared today in the U.S. press, I didn’t report it initially because I thought I had already done so, but reader Keith Douglas’s request that I do a post forced me to search Behind the Black and discover that I had never reported it.

Regardless, it is worth reading the initial story from Australia, as it clearly documents what happened and shows that outright temperature tampering surely appears to be going on.

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Global warming activists tremble as Trump administration reviews their work

9:09 am

This could be a victory: The science journal Nature today published a story, entitled “Fears rise as Trump officials take reins on US climate assessment”, which described the terror that is spreading through the global warming climate field because the Trump administration is bringing in skeptical scientists to review the work done by these government scientists.

Many climate scientists are particularly uneasy about the potential for interference by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), one of 13 agencies that must approve the science report before its expected release in November. EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, who rejects well-established climate science, has raised the possibility of organizing an adversarial ‘red team–blue team’ review of such research. And he has help from the Heartland Institute, a think tank in Chicago, Illinois, that promotes scepticism about climate change.

“We can’t allow science to be held hostage,” says Donald Wuebbles, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and co-chair of the report. “I’m hopeful it won’t get to that, because it would look really bad for the administration to fight this.”

Well, ain’t that just too damn bad! This fake scientist seems to think that his work is so pure it shouldn’t be challenged or peer reviewed. The Nature article at the link is itself an example of fake news, as the author never bothered to interview anyone from the Trump administration, or quote or name any of the skeptical scientists doing the reviewing, something that any good journalist specializing in this field should have no trouble identifying. Had he, he might have found the skepticism reasonable. In fact, the scientific method is founded on skepticism. To believe that your work should never be questioned only proves that you aren’t really a scientist at all.

Be prepared for a lot of squealing when these reviewers step in and request that this climate assessment get reworked to remove any global warming propaganda from it.

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Denmark facing the first “summerless” July in four decades

10:14 pm

Does this mean anything? Denmark is facing the first July in four decades with no days warmer than 77 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature the weather bureau there defines as a summer day.

According to the Danish Meteorology Institute (DMI), July is likely to end without a single ‘summer day’, which is defined as any day in which temperatures top 25C (77F) at least somewhere in Denmark. If the next five days come and go without hitting 25C as predicted, it will mark the first time that Danes will have suffered through a summer-less July in nearly four decades.

“There are only three years in our records in which July contains a big fat zero when it comes to summer days and temps above 25C. That’s 1962, 1974 and 1979,” climatologist John Cappelen said on the DMI website. DMI’s database goes back to 1874.

Actually, this doesn’t mean a lot. It is however an interesting factoid that once again raises questions about the NASA and NOAA claims that this year (along with the past few years) were the hottest on record.

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Computer simulations prove that we can geoengineer the climate!

9:34 am

What could possibly go wrong? Global warming scientists have discovered, using computer simulations, that combining several different geoengineering techniques, what they call a “cocktail,” will save the planet and do no harm.

The team—which includes Carnegie’s Ken Caldeira, Long Cao and Lei Duan of Zhejiang University, and Govindasamy Bala of the Indian Institute of Science—used models to simulate what would happen if sunlight were scattered by particles at the same time as the cirrus clouds were thinned. They wanted to understand how effective this combined set of tools would be at reversing climate change, both globally and regionally. “As far as I know, this is the first study to try to model using two different geoengineering approaches simultaneously to try to improve the overall fit of the technology,” Caldeira explained.

The good news is that their simulations showed that if both methods are deployed in concert, it would decrease warming to pre-industrial levels, as desired, and on a global level rainfall would also stay at pre-industrial levels. But the bad news is that while global average climate was largely restored, substantial differences remained locally, with some areas getting much wetter and other areas getting much drier.

And if you believe that this simulation captures what will really happen should global warming scientists dump vast amounts of light-reflecting particles in the upper atmosphere while also adding chemicals to thin cirrus clouds, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you. We don’t even really know if the climate is warming as these political activists (they are not really scientists) claim. We don’t really understand how the climate actually works. We don’t even understand fully how the Sun really fluctuates, and it is without doubt the climate’s most important influence. And these guys claim they now know what will happen if we play god with the atmosphere? Give me a break.

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Is the Arctic icecap now larger than in 1971?

11:37 am

This story compares a 1971 National Geographic map of the Arctic Ocean and its icecap with modern satellite data, and finds that the icecap is actually significantly larger now.

Take a look. Then come back to read my analysis.

Back? Okay. First, we are presently in the midst of summer in the Arctic, so the icecap shown on the modern map should shrink somewhat this year. Second, it is not clear what time of year the National Geographic map portrays. Is it maximum ice during the winter? Or they average for the year?

These questions however avoid the bigger point here, which is that there doesn’t really appear to be any significant change overall to the Arctic icecap in the past half century. The icecap had seen some major shrinkage during the first decade of the 21st century, but in recent years it has begun recovering. So much for the many past predictions by global warming activists that the Arctic will be ice free in summer because of global warming, by 2008, 2014, or 2018.

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