Tag: environment

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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One of Kepler’s reaction wheels — used to orient the space telescope — has failed.

7:08 pm

Bad news: One of Kepler’s four reaction wheels — used to orient the space telescope — has failed.

Kepler only needs three wheels to function – one to control the probe’s motion along each axis – and the probe resumed its observations on 20 July. “Kepler is functioning very well on three reaction wheels,” says mission manager Roger Hunter of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. If the glitch can’t be fixed, though, Kepler will be left without a backup wheel. “This is reducing the odds of making the mission go as long as we can,” says Kepler chief scientist William Borucki of NASA Ames, who doubts that Kepler could point accurately enough to look for transiting planets if reduced to two reaction wheels. “It was a disappointing surprise to find this wheel stopped so early.”

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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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National Park Service is proposing the removal of several historic bridges in Yosemite because they interfere with water flow, according to environmentalists.

5:55 pm

The National Park Service is proposing the removal of several historic bridges in Yosemite because they interfere with water flow, according to environmentalists.

Look, why don’t they simply admit it: They really want don’t want any humans to visit these parks, and simply outlaw them all? That way, the job of the National Park Service will be so much easier: They — and their environmentalist buddies — will finally have the park to themselves to play in without being bothered by all those disgusting American citizens.

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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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While thousands protest the restarting of any nuclear power plants in Japan following last year’s earthquake, some scientists have questions about one particular plant.

9:35 am

While thousands protest the restarting of any nuclear power plants in Japan following last year’s earthquake, some scientists have questions about one particular plant.

The article’s headline falsely suggests that the scientists oppose all nuclear power plants, which is not the case. If anything, the overall manner in which the Fukushima power plant withstood the biggest earthquake in history demonstrated that most of Japan’s nuclear power plants are probably safe from future earthquakes. For scientists to have concerns about one particular plant seems reasonable, however, and is not the same thing as opposing all nuclear power.

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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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Forbidden by the Forest Service from using powered equipment, a shovel brigade of 60 people last weekend made temporary repairs to Tombstone’s water line.

7:30 pm

Forbidden by the Forest Service from using heavy equipment, a shovel brigade of 60 people last weekend made temporary repairs to Tombstone’s water line.

“It took 60 people two days to complete a work project that could have been done in two hours with the appropriate equipment,” Barnes said. “We have a lot more work that needs to be done up there, but we don’t have the permits from the forest service to go back.”

For reasons that only bureaucrats understand, the Forest Service decided that the use of heavy equipment like a bulldozer is more harmful to nature than 60 people with shovels, even though in the end the work done is exactly the same, and that this same work was done repeatedly in the past by heavy equipment.

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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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A UCLA professor who exposed corruption while also challenging the legitimacy of certain California fuel regulations, has sued the university for firing him.

12:09 am

The McCarthyism of the environmental movement: A UCLA professor who exposed corruption while also challenging the legitimacy of certain California fuel regulations, has sued the university for firing him.

Enstrom charged in 2008 that his colleagues exaggerated the adverse effects of particulate matter in order to justify expensive diesel fuel regulations to the California Air Resources Board (CARB). Enstrom testified in the same year to the state Senate that the lead contributor to the CARB report, Hien T. Tran, paid $1,000 for his Ph.D. from a fake university, and members of a CARB panel had exceeded their mandated three-year term limits by decades.

Shortly after Enstrom revealed the misconduct, UCLA began sending him notices of termination and has refused to compensate him for more than a year’s worth of work….

Tran was eventually suspended for 60 days, and one professor who had served on the CARB panel for 26 consecutive years was removed and later put back on the panel. John Froines, who has publicly supported diesel fuel regulations, was on a committee that voted to dismiss Enstrom.

Read the whole thing. It illustrates why attending UCLA for a science education is clearly a waste of time. They don’t want to teach their students science. They want to teach them propaganda.

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The North Carolina legislature has passed a bill that requires its coastal planning commission to ignore the accelerated sea level rise predictions of global warming scientists and instead use more conservative numbers.

10:11 am

The North Carolina legislature has passed a bill that requires its coastal planning commission to ignore the accelerated sea level rise predictions of global warming scientists and instead use more conservative numbers.

To put it another way, North Carolina has decided, for coastal planning purposes, to use the slower linear rise in sea level that can be extrapolated from the actual data that scientists have gathered for the past century, and not use the models pushed by the IPCC and other global warming scientists that predict an acceleration of sea level rise in the next century due to human-caused global warming.

This decision by North Carolina has happened because increasingly people of good conscience no longer believe anything the global warming activists in the climate field are telling them. These scientists either perpetuated scientific fraud to sell the idea of human-caused global-warming, or have been willing to whitewash the fraud of other scientists. Rather than listen to them, the North Carolina legislature has decided to interpret the data independently. The legislature might very well be wrong, but what else can they do? They certainly can’t trust the claims of the climate field.

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Off to Nevada

5:00 am

Nevada

For the next seven days my daytime posting is going to be spotty, as I will be in some remote areas of Nevada working on an on-going Forest Service project to inventory and survey caves in an area in the northeastern area of the state. The project is mostly over, but as I have surveyed, sketched, and done the cartography for many eastern U.S. caves, the guy running the project asked if I would be interested in participating. Interested? I was thrilled.

Though we will be in a somewhat remote area, I still hope to post periodically during the week, not only about the usual topics but also about some of the caves we will have surveyed, some of which are rarely visited. I will also try to post some pictures of the spectacular country we expect to visit. (The photo on the right was provided to me by Tom Gilleland, who is running the project.) Stay tuned.

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Environmental activists have launched a petition drive to stop SpaceX from building a commercial spaceport in Brownsville, Texas.

1:45 pm

The wrong side of history: Environmental activists have launched a petition drive to stop SpaceX from building a commercial spaceport near Brownsville, Texas.

“I love the space program as much, if not more, than anyone,” said Environment Texas Director Luke Metzger. “But launching big, loud, smelly rockets from the middle of a wildlife refuge will scare the heck out of every creature within miles and sprays noxious chemicals all over the place. It’s a terrible idea and SpaceX needs to find another place for their spaceport.”

This guy obviously doesn’t know that almost all of the Kennedy Space Center is a wildlife refuge, and a successful one at that. But then, what do facts have to do with most environmental causes?

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A government study has found that the more educated in science and math an American is the more likely they will be skeptical of the dangers of global warming.

8:28 am

A government study has found that the more educated in science and math an American is, the more likely they will be skeptical of the dangers of global warming.

The results of the survey are especially remarkable as it was plainly not intended to show any such thing: Rather, the researchers and trick-cyclists who carried it out were doing so from the position that the “scientific consensus” (carbon-driven global warming is ongoing and extremely dangerous) is a settled fact, and the priority is now to find some way of getting US voters to believe in the need for urgent, immediate and massive action to reduce CO2 emissions.

Having discovered that educating the public will defeat these activists in their goals, the researchers than suggest, like Paul Krugman, that maybe the U.S. government should stop trying to educate people and focus on fake propaganda instead.

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A graveyard of ships in the desert

9:35 am

A graveyard of ships — in the desert.

This environmental disaster in the Soviet Union was caused more by that failed country’s centralized state-run command society than the technological society they were trying to create. Though technology in any kind of society can certainly do harm to the environment, when all decisions are controlled by a single entity — in this case the communist Soviet government — it is practically impossible to adapt and adjust when things start going wrong.

In a free democracy, however, you have many safety valves. No project is ever so big that it effects everything, and if things start to go wrong the chaos of freedom will allow people to choose differently, correcting the problem more quickly.

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Climategate continues

4:27 pm

Climategate continues.

The article describes more evidence that the tree ring data used by global warming scientists was fraudulently manipulated to suggest a warming in the past half century when the full data set showed no such thing.

Until the climate field cleans house and admits to this wrong-doing, no one is going to trust anything they say.

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