Tag: environment

Oregon forest fires blamed on federal ban on logging

7:12 pm

We’re here to help you! The logging industry is blaming the increased number of severe forest fires in Oregon during the past three years on the federal ban on logging in federal forests.

Logging on federal lands was first limited in the early 90’s. More severe limits on logging on any roadless federal land were then passed by President Bill Clinton in 2000, essentially ending the practice on federal lands.

[Andrew Miller, CEO of Stimson Lumber, one of the state’s largest lumber companies] said this was a huge mistake. “As soon as the ban on logging took effect, fire conditions worsened,” he said. “Four or five years after the ban was put in place fires started to really ramp up.” The reason for the increase is simple, he said. When logging in these areas stopped, more and more trees began to fill the lands. These trees, particularly ones that have died and become dried out, rather than be chopped down by a logging company, give the fire easily combustible fuel. “Once logging was stopped the forests got older and older and more and more trees died off,” Miller said.

The article is well written, and includes a response by a Forest Service official, who dismissed the lack of logging as the cause and instead blamed the increase in fires to extreme weather and less snowfall in the western states.

I am willing to bet that a close look at the weather in the Northwest will find that the only extreme weather they have seen in the past three years has been snow, contradicting the Forest Service official’s claim. I do not know this, and could easily be wrong, but I am still willing to bet.

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The one climate prediction that has come true

1:23 pm

Fraud at NOAA: Several years ago Steve Goddard predicted that, no matter what the temperature records told us, NOAA scientists would begin to declare every month the hottest on record. It turns out he was 100% right!

Be sure and look at the next to last graph at the link. It shows the increasing difference between the raw, unadjusted temperature data and the adjustments made by NOAA scientists. Not surprisingly, the adjustments all increase the trend towards warming, and have been doing so more and more with each year. Nothing can justify such adjustments, under any rational scientific argument. These guys are either incompetent, stooges for their political bosses, or political hacks. Or all three.

Posted on the outskirts of Phoenix.

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A calculator beats IPCC supercomputer models in predicting climate

10:22 am

IPCC computer models vs observations

The uncertainty of science: A simple climate model [pdf], designed to run on a calculator and not relying on the premise that man-made carbon dioxide is causing global warming, appears more accurate at predicting the climate than the high-powered supercomputer models of the IPCC.

The current climate models fueling belief in manmade global warming do have fairly good “fit” to the data on which they were tested. However, the predictivity isn’t that great – see the recent warming “pause” or have a look at the figure above. They’re also hella complex, requiring thousands of hours of supercomputer computations.

Early this year, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, David Legates of the University of Delaware, and Matt Briggs, “Statistician to the Stars” and sometimes PJM contributor, published a paper in Science Bulletin (the Chinese equivalent of Science) entitled “Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model”.

They took a different approach. Observing the issues with the current climate models, they constructed a very simple model working from first principles. “Irreducibly” here means “it can’t get simpler and reflect basic physics.” … This model is about one step advanced from a “back of the envelope” calculation, since it requires taking a natural logarithm as well as some multiplication, but it’s easily done with a scientific calculator — or even a slide rule.

But it models actual temperature observations better than the complex models. [emphasis in original]

The figure on the right is from the new Monckton paper, and shows the utter failure of every complex global-warming climate model to predict the global climate for the past 35 years. Whether this new very simple model is more accurate than these supercomputer models, however, remains to be seen, but their work definitely points out the uncertainty and failure of the present theories to explain the climate. They simply don’t do so, and thus are not a useful tool for gauging what we should do about the climate, if anything. As the writers of the simple model conclude,

The general-circulation models now face a crisis of credibility. Not one of them predicted a stasis of as long as 18 years 6 months in global temperatures. Indeed, it is often stated that periods [greater than] 15 years without warming are inconsistent with models’ predictions. For instance, [two IPCC papers] state: ‘‘The simulations rule out (at the 95 % level) zero trends for intervals of 15 year or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate’’.

The models relied upon in [the IPCC reports] predicted twice as much warming from 1990 to 2014 as has been observed. All models predicted a warming rate in the crucial tropical mid-troposphere considerably in excess of observation. It is no longer credible to ignore these ever-widening discrepancies between prediction and observation. IPCC itself has recognized that, at least as far as medium-term prediction is concerned, the models have failed, raising the legitimate question whether the longer-term predictions may also have been exaggerated, perhaps as greatly as the medium-term predictions.

As I say over and over again, the science of climate is incredibly complex and uncertain. No one yet understands fully how the Earth’s climate functions, and anyone who claims they do is either an ignorant fool or an outright liar. Keep that in mind as this presidential election cycle unfolds and candidates are challenged by the mainstream press (made up mostly of ignorant fools and outright liars) to comment on man-made global warming.

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Ecologists try to control reporting of their presentations

9:37 am

At its annual conference last week, the Ecological Society of America (ESA) demanded that audience members not tweet about presentations unless given permission by the speaker.

The request to gain consent from speakers before tweeting about their presentations rankled many. In a blog post, Terry Wheeler, an entomologist at McGill University in Quebec, Canada, said that ESA was “taking a step backward” from its open social-media policy of past years. But Liza Lester, a communications officer at ESA, says that the society supports tweeting at conferences and did not intend to change its stance. “It was a misunderstanding,” she says.

Writing on the Lyman Entomological Museum blog, Wheeler says that the Twitter restriction caused a lot of frustration among ESA meeting attendees and long-distance observers, who wondered why there was such a lull in social-media chatter. He notes that the last-minute announcement differs from the code of conduct printed in the conference programme, which says that attendees cannot take photographs of slides or posters without permission and that they should avoid posting online “detailed information from presentations.” Those restrictions, he writes, seem reasonable. But the policy in the programme made no mention of requiring permission to live-tweet.

For members of this science organization the restrictions might rankle, but as fellow scientists they will feel some compulsion to obey. However, science conferences like this normally encourage journalists to attend, and if so, such restrictions are garbage. If I was there as a journalist, I would tweet, photograph, and post reports on my webpage to my heart’s content, ignoring these absurd and unenforceable rules.

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“When EPA is not ignoring Supreme Court limitations on it, it is blithely disregarding rule-making laws required of it.”

9:00 am

The story that has the quote above outlines the EPA’s recent and past history of ignoring the law and court rulings to write and impose its regulations. It also details the many times the environmental agency has used its ability to impose fines to extort concessions from private landowners, including the recent Colorado mine disaster.

Like the IRS, the EPA has become an out-of-control agency, a haven for fascists eager to use their power to squelch anyone that opposes them. With the former, this power is used by partisan Democrats to help the Democratic Party and hurt its opponents. With the latter, this power is used to destroy private property rights in the name of leftwing environmental fantasies, even if that use of power ends up doing terrible damage to the environment.

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NOAA scientists predict developing El Niño could be strongest ever

9:06 am

The uncertainty of science: NOAA scientists yesterday predicted that the developing El Niño in the Pacific could be strongest ever recorded.

They appear to base this prediction on two factors:

It started unusually early — in March instead of June. This could be because warm waters left over from last year’s weak El Niño gave it a head start, says Anthony Barnston, chief forecaster at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University in Palisades, New York.

And this would be the second El Niño year in a row, following the weak El Niño that developed late last year, Barnston adds. A similar El Niño double-header happened between 1986 and 1988, but forecasters predict that the current El Niño will become stronger than either of those two events.

A strong El Niño would help end the drought in California. However, I wouldn’t bet the house on this prediction, considering how poorly last year’s prediction fared. Scientists really don’t yet understand all the factors behind this phenomenon, so their predictions are pretty much guesses at this point.

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The sunspot decline continues

2:59 pm

On Monday NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, showing the Sun’s sunspot activity in July. As I have done every month since 2010, I am posting it here, below the fold, with annotations to give it context.

Sunspot counts continue to decline at a rate faster than predicted or is usual during ramp down from solar maximum. Normally the ramp down is slow and steady. This time it has so far been more precipitous. While the 2009 prediction of the solar science community (indicated by the red curve) suggests minimum will occur sometime after 2020, the actual counts suggest it will occur much sooner.

» Read more

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Solar panels more climate damaging than coal

9:02 am

Surprise, surprise! A comparison of the entire production process for both solar and coal power has found that solar power is more damaging to the environment and the climate.

Not only does the production, transport, and use of solar panels dump more total CO2 into the atmosphere than coal power plants, the manufacture of the solar panels adds many more toxic chemicals to the environment than coal.

According to Ferroni, the other huge drawback presented by PV systems are the nasty chemicals and industrial gases used for their manufacture. The production of solar panels in China entails nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), which are extremely potent heat-trapping gases that leak out during the process. NF3 has a greenhouse gas potency that is 16,600 times greater than CO2; SF6 is 23,900 times more potent. Reports show that these gases emitted annually into the atmosphere from the manufacture of solar panels is equivalent to over 70 million tonnes of CO2 in terms of greenhouse effect. In 2010 over 17.5 GW of rated capacity of solar cells were installed. Thus the emissions per square meter of solar panels comes out to be 513 kg CO2 – a huge amount!

The manufacture of solar cells also uses other chemicals like (HCl), silizium carbide, and silver among others. The total alleged warming potential of these chemicals comes out to be an estimated 30 kg CO2 per square meter of PV module. Oddly (likely to avoid embarrassment) the solar industry has yet to release any detailed data on the warming potential and impacts of the chemicals used in their manufacture.

But President Obama tells us solar power is good! It must be true!

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Four skeletons at Jamestown identified

9:57 am

Archeologists have now linked four recently discovered skeletons at the first British North American settlement at Jamestown with historic individuals among the first settlers.

Skeletal remains buried beneath a historic church in Jamestown, Virginia, belonged to four prominent settlers of North America’s first English colony. The group included a minister, two military captains and the first English knight ever buried on the continent, a research team announced on 28 July at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. “These men witnessed the first three years of the establishment of the colony,” said James Horn, the president of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation.

Smithsonian anthropologists teamed up with archaeologists at Jamestown Rediscovery to identify the four incomplete skeletons, which were excavated in 2013. First, the researchers narrowed down the potential candidates by analysing a handful of surviving documents from the colony’s early years. Then they used chemical tests, genealogical records, digital analysis of bones and artefacts and contextual clues to make the final identifications.

Having studied the history of Jamestown in great detail for my own masters degree, I can say that this scientific work is spectacular. I would add that I hope that the researchers, having identified these remains, will now allow them to be buried again in peace.

If you want to be amused, you can also read Science’s short article on this discovery. As is typical of that politically driven journal, the article feels compelled to insert a comment about global warming, even though it has nothing to do with this particular research and the claim — that “some scientists think Jamestown (on the Virginia coast) could be overtaken by rising sea levels by the end of this century” — has not yet been proven and is in fact a very speculative assertion.

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The Earth from a million miles away

8:54 am

Earth from a million miles away

Cool image time! NASA’s DISCOVR solar observation probe has released its first image of the Earth, taken from its station-keeping position a million miles from Earth.

This camera was originally designed for Al Gore’s proposed propaganda mission where a spacecraft would take daily pictures of the Earth to pound home his environmental agenda. Eventually NASA found a real use for the satellite’s overall structure and location, observing the Sun’s activity and give us advance warning of dangerous flares or coronal mass ejections.

They left the Earth-viewing camera on board, partly because it was built already (it would cost money to remove) and partly because daily images like this can be of some scientific value.

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A new double dynamo theory to explain the Sun’s solar cycle

10:45 am

A team of solar scientists have proposed a new theory that they think explains the ebb and flow of the Sun’s eleven year solar cycle, and if right can explain the periodic occurrence of grand minimums where there are essentially no sunspots for decades, such as the Maunder Minimum in the 1600s.

The theory proposes that the Sun has two different dynamos that produce different magnetic waves in its interior. Like waves that can either cancel each other out or combine for more power, these two dynamos do the same over time and thus effect the Sun’s sunspot/solar cycle.

“We found magnetic wave components appearing in pairs, originating in two different layers in the Sun’s interior. They both have a frequency of approximately 11 years, although this frequency is slightly different, and they are offset in time. Over the cycle, the waves fluctuate between the northern and southern hemispheres of the Sun. Combining both waves together and comparing to real data for the current solar cycle, we found that our predictions showed an accuracy of 97%,” said Zharkova.

Zharkova and her colleagues derived their model using a technique called ‘principal component analysis’ of the magnetic field observations from the Wilcox Solar Observatory in California. They examined three solar cycles-worth of magnetic field activity, covering the period from 1976-2008. In addition, they compared their predictions to average sunspot numbers, another strong marker of solar activity. All the predictions and observations were closely matched.

Looking ahead to the next solar cycles, the model predicts that the pair of waves become increasingly offset during Cycle 25, which peaks in 2022. During Cycle 26, which covers the decade from 2030-2040, the two waves will become exactly out of synch and this will cause a significant reduction in solar activity.

“In cycle 26, the two waves exactly mirror each other – peaking at the same time but in opposite hemispheres of the Sun. Their interaction will be disruptive, or they will nearly cancel each other. We predict that this will lead to the properties of a ‘Maunder minimum’,” said Zharkova. “Effectively, when the waves are approximately in phase, they can show strong interaction, or resonance, and we have strong solar activity. When they are out of phase, we have solar minimums. When there is full phase separation, we have the conditions last seen during the Maunder minimum, 370 years ago.”

And on this same subject, last week NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, showing the Sun’s sunspot activity in June. As I have done every month since 2010, I am posting it here, below the fold, with annotations to give it context.
» Read more

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When to doubt a scientific consensus

9:39 am

Link here.

This is a beautifully written and thoughtful analysis of the state of climate science, and why intelligent and educated citizens should continue to remain skeptical of the claims coming from the global warming activist community (which now includes the Pope).

He gives a dozen different reasons for remaining skeptical of the claims of the global warming community, based both on the science as well as how they sell their position. Number 10 — “When [the claimed consensus] it is being used to justify dramatic political or economic policies” — is probably the most important:

Imagine hundreds of world leaders and nongovernmental organizations, science groups, and United Nations functionaries gathered for a meeting heralded as the most important conference since World War II, in which “the future of the world is being decided.” These officials seem to agree that institutions of “global governance” need to be established to reorder the world economy and massively restrict energy resources. Large numbers of them applaud wildly when socialist dictators denounce capitalism. Strange philosophical and metaphysical activism surrounds the gathering. And we are told by our president that all of this is based, not on fiction, but on science — that is, a scientific consensus that human activities, particularly greenhouse gas emissions, are leading to catastrophic climate change.

We don’t have to imagine that scenario, of course. It happened in Copenhagen, in December 2009. It will happen again in Paris, in December 2015.

Now, none of this disproves the hypothesis of catastrophic, human induced climate change. But it does describe an atmosphere that would be highly conducive to misrepresentation. And at the very least, when policy consequences, which claim to be based on science, are so profound, the evidence ought to be rock solid. “Extraordinary claims,” the late Carl Sagan often said, “require extraordinary evidence.” When the megaphones of consensus insist that there’s no time, that we have to move, MOVE, MOVE!, you have a right to be suspicious.

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Anti-drilling environmentalists trash environment during protest

3:46 pm

Environmental activists protesting the launch of a drilling rig in Seattle did serious damage to a nature reserve, costing $10K to clean it up.

I am not surprised. The left and environmental movement has this annoying habit of blaming everyone else for the world’s problems, insisting that only they have the solutions. When their solutions fail, or when they screw up, however, they are never willing to admit their error, take personal responsibility, and look for a more effective solution. To them, it is always someone else’s fault.

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Flashback to ABC’s 2008 climate predictions for 2015

11:53 am

Working for leftist global warming activist community and the Democratic Party (but I repeat myself): In 2008 ABC News did a special on what global warming was going to do to the climate in the coming years, and predicted disaster by June 2015.

New York City underwater? Gas over $9 a gallon? A carton of milk costs almost $13? Welcome to June 12, 2015. Or at least that was the wildly-inaccurate version of 2015 predicted by ABC News exactly seven years ago. Appearing on Good Morning America in 2008, Bob Woodruff hyped Earth 2100, a special that pushed apocalyptic predictions of the then-futuristic 2015. The segment included supposedly prophetic videos, such as a teenager declaring, “It’s June 8th, 2015. One carton of milk is $12.99.” (On the actual June 8, 2015, a gallon of milk cost, on average, $3.39.) Another clip featured this prediction for the current year: “Gas reached over $9 a gallon.” (In reality, gas costs an average of $2.75.)

On June 12, 2008, correspondent Bob Woodruff revealed that the program “puts participants in the future and asks them to report back about what it is like to live in this future world. The first stop is the year 2015.” As one expert warns that in 2015 the sea level will rise quickly, a visual shows New York City being engulfed by water. The video montage includes another unidentified person predicting that “flames cover hundreds of miles.” Then-GMA co-anchor Chris Cuomo appeared frightened by this future world. He wondered, “I think we’re familiar with some of these issues, but, boy, 2015? That’s seven years from now. Could it really be that bad?”

ABC is also the same network that sees nothing wrong with its main news anchor, George Stephanopolos, giving tens of thousands of dollars to aid the presidential campaign of Democrat Hillary Clinton. Think of these details the next time you see any news reporting from them.

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Ramp down to solar minimum continues

12:11 pm

On Sunday NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, showing the Sun’s sunspot activity in May. As I have done since 2010, I am posting it here, with annotations to give it context.

May 2015 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.

Sunspot activity once again increased in May, though it continues to remain below the 2009 prediction of activity. Though it is still early in the ramp down, a look at the present pattern suggests that (as I also noted last month) sunspot activity is declining much faster than normal. In the past, the ramp down after solar maximum was long and drawn out, while ramp up was much faster. This ramp down seems much more precipitous than past solar cycles.

I should add that in early April Sunspot Index and Long-term Solar Observations (SILSO) had declared that the peak of the solar maximum had occurred in April 2014, and that they could now sum up the overall weakness of this maximum.

Cycle 24 proves to be 30% weaker than the previous solar cycle, which reached 119.7 in July 2000, and thus belongs to the category of moderate cycles, like cycles 12 to 15, which were the norm in the late 19th and early 20th century. Compared to strong cycles, such cycles typically feature a broader maximum, with a 3-year plateau on top of which two or more surges of activity can produce sharp peaks of similar height.

I had missed this announcement when it was first posted. It is worth noting however, especially since their discussion in April is interesting to read in the context of what has happened since.

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Senator proposes criminal charges against global warming skeptics

11:09 am

Fascists: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) has proposed that racketeering charges be considered against fossil fuel companies who express skepticism about human-caused global warming and dare to disagree with any environmental regulations imposed based on this theory.

As he writes today in his Washington Post op-ed:

 The fossil fuel industry, its trade associations and the conservative policy institutes that often do the industry’s dirty work met at the Washington office of the American Petroleum Institute. A memo from that meeting that was leaked to the New York Times documented their plans for a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign to undermine climate science and to raise “questions among those (e.g. Congress) who chart the future U.S. course on global climate change.”

Gee, industry skeptics of global warming wish to use their first amendment rights to debate the issue! How dare they! Worse, they might use money to finance their effort! (I wonder why I and most other skeptic bloggers never get any of this cash.)

As noted at the first link, the idea that any disagreement with global warming advocacy should be criminalized is not a new thing, and has increasingly been advocated by that leftwing community. Whitehouse is now tying this to the criminalization of the use of money to express that disagreement. Tie that to the effort of the Democratic Party to rewrite the first amendment to allow government to restrict speech, and you have the basic outline of a fascist movement intent on squelching freedom.

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NOAA caught tampering with temperature data again

9:51 pm

A close look at NOAA’s temperature data for Maine has revealed that sometime between 2013 and 2015 the data was drastically adjusted to cool the past and warm the present.

No explanations for these changes has been offered. For some years they cooled the past as much as 4 degrees Fahrenheit, an adjustment that cannot be justified under any scientific method. As asked at the link, “Would someone please try to explain why this isn’t the biggest scandal in the history of science?”

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Coral islands defy sea level rise

9:39 am

The uncertainty of science: Despite having some of the highest rates of sea level rise in the past century, the 29 islands of Funafuti Atoll in the Pacific show no signs of sinking.

Despite the magnitude of this rise, no islands have been lost, the majority have enlarged, and there has been a 7.3% increase in net island area over the past century (A.D. 1897–2013). There is no evidence of heightened erosion over the past half-century as sea-level rise accelerated. Reef islands in Funafuti continually adjust their size, shape, and position in response to variations in boundary conditions, including storms, sediment supply, as well as sea level.

Be aware as well that the cause of the rise in sea level here is not clearly understood. It could be the global warming we have seen since the end of the Little Ice Age of the 1600s, or other more complex factors.

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Nature ignores the elephant in the room

8:45 am

In an article on the possibility that a section on the edge of the Antarctica icecap might be melting, the journal Nature illustrated some of the political agenda-driven science that corrupts climate science and the journalism that covers the field by never noting that the icecap is presently setting size records.

Read the article at the link. Though they never mention global warming, they hint at it repeatedly by noting the arrival of new warm ocean currents. More importantly, they fail to place the whole issue in context by never noting the record-setting growth of the icecap in recent years. For a section of the icecap fringe to suddenly accelerate its “surge to the sea five years ago” during a period when the icecap has been expanding in an unprecedented manner is hardly surprising, and is hardly an indication of global warming. Instead, it suggests the icecap is behaving exactly as one would expect, shedding excess ice as it expands.

By not mentioning the icecap’s recent growth the article allows an uneducated reader to come the incorrect conclusion: that only global warming could cause this melting. It also avoids revealing the complexity and uncertainties that surround this climate research.

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Top scientists to review data adjustments of temperature data

5:44 pm

The uncertainty of science? A panel of five scientists has been formed to review the adjustments to the global temperature data at NOAA and the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) that have consistently cooled the past but warmed the present, thus creating the illusion of more warming than the raw data suggests.

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 global warming scientists at NOAA and GISS are finally going to challenged to explain their adjustments, something they have so far refused to do. For my part, I will be very surprised if they can come up with a scientifically justified explanation.

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Seven big failed environmentalist predictions

3:49 pm

Link here.

Like the author, I remember every single one of these doomsday predictions. I also remember how every single one of these predictions was wildly wrong. Until these fear-mongers can reliably predict things, I see no reason to believe them.

His article however does provide one entertaining tidbit:

You know how old I am? I’m so positively ancient that I remember when one of Jimmy Carter’s big answers to the impending shortage of oil was to increase federal funding for research on how to extract oil from shale. It ended the way you would expect: it went nowhere. But some decades later, private oil companies did find a way to more economically extract oil from shale—and environmentalists promptly made it public enemy #1.

All true. And just one more example of how the government fails at something while private enterprise, fueled by the profit motive, finds a way to make that exact same thing happen.

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The distortion of the global surface temperature datasets

11:33 am

Link here. Goddard does a good job of illustrating the differences between the measured and reported climate temperature datasets, and how the reported numbers are consistently shifted to make the past cooler than measured and the present hotter than measured.

He often attributes this bias to dishonest tampering with the data to support the theory of global warming. He might be right, but it is important to remember that you shouldn’t necessarily assign malice to things that are just as easily explained by human error or stupidity. In this case he also notes that almost all the weather stations that have been decommissioned in the past few decades have been located in rural areas. To replace their data, global warming scientists average the data from nearby stations, most of which are in urban areas that exhibit warmer temperatures because city constructs tend to cause local warming. The result? The recent datasets tend to show a strong trend upward.

What is causing a cooling in the datasets from prior to 1970 however is not explained by mere error. The data hasn’t changed. Someone must be deciding to adjust it downward, for reasons that are simply not justifiable.

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Global Warming advocates debunk their own theory

10:32 am

Climate models vs climate reality

The statements and data provided by advocates of human-caused global warming themselves provide strong evidence that their theory of human-caused global warming is wrong.

The article is detailed and includes a lot of hard but easy-to-digest data, such as the graph on the right, which shows how all the computer models predicting global warming have failed to predict the lack of warming for the past eighteen years. (The models predicted the rising colored lines. Actual global temperatures are shown by the black line.) This quote however is a nice summation:

Allow us to cite one more example out of many that could be brought to bear. On June 6, 2007, the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition published an analysis of seasonal climate predictions made by the New Zealand Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) showing that the Institute did not even achieve 50 percent accuracy. Director Dr. Jim Renwick’s response was telling. “Climate prediction is hard, half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don’t expect to do terrifically well,” he told the New Zealand Herald. Dr. Renwick, who is an IPCC lead author and a member of the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Commission for Climatology Expert Team on Seasonal Forecasting, stated on New Zealand Radio, “The weather is not predictable beyond a week or two.”

This is huge! Phil Jones, a top AGW guru, admits “we don’t know what natural variability is doing,” and Judith Curry says that the climate models are “imperfect and incomplete” and natural causes “dominate” human effects on global temperatures. And IPCC/WMO bigwig Jim Renwick concedes his organization’s climate predictions are wrong more than half the time — and they can’t predict the weather more than two weeks out. Yet, we are supposed to empower national and international politicians and bureaucrats to completely regulate, re-engineer, tax, and regiment human civilization on a planetary scale, based upon the same faulty computer models that have universally, spectacularly failed — over and over again.

I hate to say this, but it appears that the only “deniers of reality” we have in this debate are the political advocates of human-caused global warming, people like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Al Gore, who continue to refuse to recognize the reality that there has been no warming during the past eighteen years.

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The sunspot crash continues

11:12 am

On Sunday NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, showing the Sun’s sunspot activity in March. I am posting it here, with annotations to give it context, as I have done since 2010.

March 2015 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.

In February the Sun’s sunspot activity plunged, dropping way below the prediction of the solar science community. In March that plunge continued. Even though activity had seemed to track that prediction through most of 2014, the overall levels were always less than the prediction. The sunspot numbers for the past two months have simply made this fact obvious once again, dropping to levels almost as low as those last seen in 2011, before the onset of the solar maximum.

That the ramp down at this time is so precipitous is especially intriguing, as historically the ramp down from previous solar maximums has been slow and steady. It is once again evidence that the Sun is doing things that solar scientists have never yet had the opportunity to observe.

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Another global warming advocate demands the arrest of skeptics

10:32 am

Fascist: Continuing in what is becoming a pattern for the left, another global warming advocate has called for the arrest of anyone who dares question the existence of human-caused global warming.

You can read his entire rant here. This quote is especially telling:

Those denialists should face jail. They should face fines. They should face lawsuits from the classes of people whose lives and livelihoods are most threatened by denialist tactics.

Let’s make a clear distinction here: I’m not talking about the man on the street who thinks Rush Limbaugh is right, and climate change is a socialist United Nations conspiracy foisted by a Muslim U.S. president on an unwitting public to erode its civil liberties.

You all know that man. That man is an idiot. He is too stupid to do anything other than choke the earth’s atmosphere a little more with his Mr. Pibb burps and his F-150’s gassy exhaust. Few of us believers in climate change can do much more—or less—than he can.

This is why, at this time especially, I refuse to cede any further power to government and its allies. A significant percentage of our population is in favor of using that power to oppress their opponents. Give them any more power and they will do it.

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New study finds fracking does not contaminate drinking water

8:19 am

The uncertainty of science: A new study, using data from more than 11,000 drinking water wells in northern Pennsylvania, has found no evidence that fracking causes contamination.

The new study of 11,309 drinking water wells in northeastern Pennsylvania concludes that background levels of methane in the water are unrelated to the location of hundreds of oil and gas wells that tap hydraulically fractured, or fracked, rock formations. The finding suggests that fracking operations are not significantly contributing to the leakage of methane from deep rock formations, where oil and gas are extracted, up to the shallower aquifers where well water is drawn.

The result also calls into question prominent studies in 2011 and 2013 that did find a correlation in a nearby part of Pennsylvania. There, wells closer to fracking sites had higher levels of methane. Those studies, however, were based on just 60 and 141 domestic well samples, respectively.

The article outlines in detail the many disagreements and uncertainties of both the old studies and this new one. It also however contains this one key quote about the earlier studies, buried in the text, that illustrates the politics influencing the reporting of the anti-fracking research:

The two papers seemed to show that fracking was leading to increased concentrations of methane in drinking water. Dissolved methane is not toxic, and drinking water often contains significant background levels of the gas from natural sources. [emphasis mine]

The earlier studies were blasted everywhere by the media. They were used to show the harm fracking does, and were the justification for the banning of fracking in New York. Yet, the methane they found was not necessarily caused by fracking, and isn’t even a health concern anyway.

I wonder if the press will give this new report as much coverage. It might not be right, but it sure does indicate that the science is unsettled, and that the risks from fracking are, as usual in these days of doom-saying environmentalism, overblown.

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Federal government moves to seize water rights from Montanans

2:58 pm

Under the radar theft: The federal government, in league with the Montana state legislature, is moving to seize the privately-held water rights of 100,000 Montana citizens and hand those rights over to the Flathead Indian Reservations, after which the rights would be controlled and administered by the federal government.

The tale of woe begins with the Hellgate Treaty of 1855 that created the Flathead Indian Reservation. Article III of the Treaty is the point of contention, as it states the Indian tribes have an established “right of taking fish” in waters not on the reservation. The article has been selectively interpreted and further manipulated to this end: the tribes must be able to ensure water quality of their fishing sites; therefore, the water rights in 11 counties must fall under the Tribal jurisdiction.

Enter the EPA to set standards of water quality, the Water Compact Commission, a board that is relentlessly pushing the compact on the populace, the Department of the Interior, the bureaucracy that will collect and manage revenue “on behalf” of the tribes, and the DHS, the enforcement arm of compliance. Should the tribes and the aforementioned players win this fight, all surface water and wells (private wells, mind you) within the boundaries imposed by the Compact will be metered and taxed.

The whole thing is a travesty and should be a moot point in reality: Article I of the same treaty ceded, relinquished, and conveyed (by the tribes) all rights or claims to any land and waters except the Reservation. The State Senate just voted on it a few weeks ago. The Senate holds 29 Republicans and 21 Democrats; however, 11 Republicans voted for the Compact and the measure passed, 32-18. The bottom line: there was not one dissenting Democratic vote on the whole measure.

The conflict here is obviously complex, but the result seems pretty simple. While before private citizens owned their own private wells (dug with their money and sweat), afterward those wells would be controlled by government bureaucrats, who will use that power to tax and regulate the use of those wells. As the article notes, if this should pass it will “set a precedent for the courts throughout the United States by the Federal Government to deprive us of our water rights.”

But who cares? Let’s instead go ga-ga over a stupid ill-advised publicity campaign from a stupid overpriced coffee company.

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