Tag: environment

Sunspot update for January 2018

11:51 pm

Today NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, covering sunspot activity for January 2018. Below is my annotated version of that graph.

As you can see, the low sunspot activity of the past two months continued in January. November 2017 remains the most inactive month for sunspots since the middle of 2009. January is now the second most inactive month, with December a very close third.

January 2018 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.

Though activity continues to track close to but considerably below the 2007 weak prediction, the difference appears to be increasing as the ramp down to solar minimum continues. While I have said in past updates that the trend suggests an early arrival of the solar minimum, a close look at the previous ramp down in 2007 and 2008 shows that when activity became this weak, the ramp down slowed considerably. This previous pattern suggests that we could see another year or two of similarly low activity before the minimum arrives.

Regardless, the low activity, this soon, continues to suggest that the next maximum will also be weak, and might even not come at all, as some solar scientists have proposed. Instead, we might be heading toward another Grand Minimum, with no significant sunspots for decades.

Will that Grand Minimum produce cold weather worldwide, as it appears to have done during the last Grand Minimum in the 1600s? There is circumstantial evidence in the past decade that it might. We will not know, however, until it happens, and that possibility remains very uncertain.

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Polar bears are starving! (NOT)

9:57 am

Fake science: Two articles yesterday from the so-called science journals Nature and Science today illustrate once again how pervasive the corruption in the climate field has now spread to almost anything that relates to climate.

Both articles refer to a paper published this week in Science, though the Nature article is far more detailed and longer. Researchers had tracked 9 polar bears during the spring months in three separate years, and had found that 5 of them had lost weight during this time period. From the Nature article:

Polar bear calorie use in spring

On average, the bears needed nearly 12,325 kilocalories per day — 1.6 times more energy than previously thought. To meet such energy demands, a female bear on the spring sea ice should eat either one adult or 19 newborn ringed seals every 10 to 12 days, the scientists concluded.

But nearly half of the bears didn’t catch enough food — and were forced to fast or scavenge carcasses. These animals lost 10% of their body mass over about 10 days. “That’s dramatic,” says physiologist John Whiteman at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. It’s as if a person weighing 80 kilograms shed 8 kilograms in just over a week, he says.

Catching enough to eat isn’t the only challenge polar bears face. As rising temperatures thin the sea ice, wind and currents make it drift faster on the ocean surface. “Think about a treadmill,” says Merav Ben-David, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. If the sea ice moves faster under their paws, polar bears have to walk faster — or for longer — to remain in the same spot3, which forces them to expend more energy, she says. [emphasis mine]

Oh my god! The polar bears are dying! And global warming is killing them!

What a joke. A quick look at the graph above, captured from the Science video, reveals that what the researchers really found is that four bears lost weight, four bears gained weight, and one stayed about the same. The bears studied weren’t “starving,” they represented what looks like an ordinary cross-section of population.

Moreover, this study is incredibly uncertain in that it only studied 9 bears, and only during the spring months during three years. What happens during the rest of the year? What would happen if they studied a larger population? While the data here teaches us something about the polar bear’s diet, calorie intake and calorie requirements, it is absolutely insufficient to provide any conclusions about the future of the bear population.

Worse, while both articles were quick to mention the threat from global warming, neither mentioned that the polar bear population continues to thrive, and has been doing so for the past decade, with no declines in almost all Arctic regions.

Further compounding the bad reporting here, while both articles repeated their religious belief in global warming and the impending disappearance of the Arctic icecap, there remains zero evidence in all data gathered of the ice pack by satellites and ground research that the icecap is shrinking significantly. In fact, while it had shown a steady decline through the first decade of the 21st century, in the past few years there has been a marked recovery. While these scientists might want the ice cap to disappear for political reasons, it simply isn’t doing so.

This is junk journalism and fake science. In fact, it is downright pitiful. That the reporting at such important science journals as these has become so slipshod speaks badly for the future of science in general.

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Almost 500 science papers in 2017 challenge “global-warming consensus”

9:36 am

The uncertainty of science: A survey of climate papers published in 2017 shows that 485 directly challenged the so-called “consensus” that activists claim exists about global warming.

Author Kenneth Richard found that during the course of the year 2017, at least 485 scientific papers were published that in some way questioned the supposed consensus regarding the perils of human CO2 emissions or the efficacy of climate models to predict the future.

According to Richard’s analysis, the 485 new papers underscore the “significant limitations and uncertainties inherent in our understanding of climate and climate changes,” which in turn suggests that climate science is not nearly as settled as media reports and some policymakers would have people believe.

This really is not a surprise for anyone who spends even a little time reading actual climate research. If you do, you immediately realize that the absurd claims of politicians (mostly Democrats) and activists about the certainty of human-caused global warming are based on their complete ignorance of the science. Some examples:

My point isn’t to say that human-caused global warming isn’t happening. We simply don’t know. The evidence so far is very inconclusive. And for those who advocate this theory, their own models have consistently failed to match the data. Skepticism is called for, which by the way is actually the hallmark of good science.

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Sunspot update for December 2017

2:40 pm

The precipitous decline in sunspots continues. While November 2017 remains the most inactive month for sunspots since the middle of 2009, December was a very close second.

Below is my annotated version of NOAA’s monthly update of the solar cycle, covering sunspot activity for December, which they posted on Sunday.

December 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.

December 2017 sunspot record

The graph on the right, produced by SILSO (Sunspot Index and Long-term Solar Observations) on December 31, shows only 14 days during the month when there were sunspots active on the Sun’s visible hemisphere. This is only four more days then seen in November. And like November, the few sunspots were weak, resulting in tiny sunspot numbers total.

The first graph above illustrates how weak this on-going sunspot cycle has been. While the curve most closely matches the 2007 weak prediction of half the solar science community, it has one very notable difference. The actual ramp up to solar maximum started two years later than predicted, even though it appears to be ending when that prediction expected. The result is a very very short solar cycle, something that has historically always been associated with very active and intense sunspot activity. Instead, this short cycle has only seen weak activity, generally below all the predictions.

All signs continue to point to an early arrival of solar minimum. They also suggest that the next maximum will also be weak, and might even not come at all, as some solar scientists have proposed. Instead, we might be heading toward another Grand Minimum, with no significant sunspots for decades.

So, is it cold outside right now? Well, that’s weather, not climate. Nonetheless, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that few sunspots correspond with a cooling climate on Earth. (The last grand minimum occurred in the 1600s, during what was called the Little Ice Age.) There is even some preliminary evidence to suggest that cosmic rays might be a cause. (Watch the video at the end of this link.).

Whether any of this will happen however remains unknown. We will need to wait to find out.

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More data tampering to prove global warming, this time with tidal gauges

1:16 pm

An analysis of the adjustments made to three Indian Ocean tidal gauges suggests that this was not to correct errors but to tamper with the data to prove global warming and an accelerating rise in sea level because of it.

The authors do not mince their words. They refer to these adjustments as “highly questionable” and “suspicious.”

That’s because they can find no plausible scientific explanation for the adjustments.

The last sentence is the bottom line. At no time are such adjustments ever justified with any credible or plausible scientific evidence. They are always “arbitrary,” a word used repeatedly in the paper. And as the paper’s author’s also note,

It is always highly questionable to shift data collected in the far past without any proven new supporting material.

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Argentine scientist indicted for creating census of glaciers

9:44 am

An Argentinian scientist has been indicted on criminal charges for the standard manner in which he designed Argentine’s glacier census.

The lawsuit was filed by a grassroots group after the Veladero mine in northwestern Argentina spilled cyanide into the Jáchal watershed in September 2015. Another spill in the same area occurred this past September.

[Ricardo] Villalba, who led the National Institute of Snow, Ice and Environmental Research (IANIGLA) in Mendoza from 2005 to 2015, launched Argentina’s first comprehensive glacier inventory in 2012. Based on satellite images, the inventory set a minimum glacier size of 1 hectare. “The process of making that inventory wasn’t unusual. That size cutoff is standard practice,” says Bruce Raup of the University of Colorado in Boulder, who is also director of the Global Land Ice Measurements from Space project, an international glacier monitoring project. Argentina’s inventory includes 30 ice masses covering about 400 hectares in the Veladero area, Villalba says.

The indictment argues that the 1-hectare limit and the lack of an on-site inspection led to “the exclusion—and resulting lack of protection—of many bodies of ice” around Veladero that should have been considered priorities because of their importance as water sources.

I would say that this is an example of the dog biting the hand that feeds it. The article notes that Villalba is “sympathic” to the activists who filed the lawsuit. They however don’t care about that. They instead want to use his research and the law to distort how glacier research is done in order to gain power over water use that actually has little if anything to do with glaciers.

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The Sun goes quiet! Sunspot update for November 2017

11:51 am

The past month was the most inactive month for sunspots since the middle of 2009, when the last solar minimum was just ending and the Sun was beginning its ramp up to solar maximum.

NOAA on Sunday posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, covering sunspot activity for November. As I have done every month since 2010, I have posted that graph below, with annotations.

November 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.

I have also added a straight yellow line near the bottom of the graph, indicating how the lack of activity this past month corresponds with the lack of activity in the summer of 2009, just when that unusually long and deep solar minimum was beginning to end.

November 2017 sunspot record

To get an idea how few sunspots were seen in November, the graph on the right, produced by SILSO (Sunspot Index and Long-term Solar Observations) on December 1, shows only 10 days during the entire month when any sunspots were active on the Sun’s visible hemisphere. And even those sunspot were few and weak, resulting in tiny sunspot numbers total.

Nor is December looking any different, with no sunspots recorded so far, four days into the month.

The plunge to solar minimum continues to appear to be happening faster than normal. At this pace, solar minimum will arrive in early 2018, making this one of the shortest solar cycles on record. That in itself would be unprecedented, as short cycles in the past have always accompanied very active solar maximums, not weak maximums like the maximum we have just seen.

I still expect the ramp down to solar minimum to slow down and stretch out to 2019, as would be more normal, but I also would not bet any money on this expectation, at this point.

The big question remains: Will the solar cycle continue as normal after this upcoming solar minimum, or will we instead see our first grand minimum since the Maunder Minimum in the 1600s, a period lasting for about a century with no obvious sunspots that also corresponded to the Little Ice Age?

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Sacrificing Scientific Skepticism

10:59 am

Phil Berardelli, who periodically comments here and who is a veteran science journalist who worked for the journal Science for a number of years, has written a very cogent four part essay on the subject of climate change for the think tank Capital Research Center.

Berardelli very carefully outlines the uncertainties that dominate our knowledge of the Earth’s climate, while explaining clearly why consensus is never what good science relies upon. As he notes,

Science is not primarily about proof; science is about disproof. Nothing in science, absolutely nothing, should ever be taken at face value. This view isn’t new; it’s age old.

Read it all, especially if you are one of the people who reads my writing and questions my skepticism about much of what I see in the climate field, especially coming from NASA and NOAA. Berardelli illustrates how doubt and skepticism are the hallmarks of science, and should always be honored, not denigrated with slurs like “denier.”

Full disclosure: Phil Berardelli was also my editor when I did a weekly column for UPI called Space Watch for six months in 2005.

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Physicists once again fail to detect dark matter

9:25 am

The uncertainty of science: The most sensitive detector yet created by physicists has once again failed to detect dark matter, casting strong doubt on all present theories for its existence.

The latest results from an experiment called XENON1T at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, published on 30 October, continue a dry spell stretching back 30 years in the quest to nab dark-matter particles. An attempt by a Chinese team to detect the elusive stuff, the results of which were published on the same day, also came up empty-handed. Ongoing attempts by space-based telescopes, as well as at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, have also not spotted any hints of dark-matter particles.

The findings have left researchers struggling for answers. “We do not understand how the Universe works at a deeper and more profound level than most of us care to admit,” says Stacy McGaugh, an astrophysicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

The process here has been a good demonstration of the scientific method. Observers detect a phenomenon that does not make sense, which in this case was that the outer regions of galaxies rotate so fast that they should fly apart. Theorists then come up with a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon, which here was dark matter, subatomic particles that have weight but do not generally interact with the rest of the universe except by their mass, which acts to hold the galaxies together. Observers than try to prove the hypothesis by finding these theorized particles.

When the particles are not found, the theorists begin to rethink their theories. Maybe dark matter does not exist. Maybe (as is mentioned near the end of the article) a rethinking of the nature of gravity itself might be necessary. Or possibly the unseen matter is not subatomic, but ordinary matter not yet detected.

If only the climate field would apply this basic scientific method to its work. There, scientists found that carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere. Some theorists posited an hypothesis that said that this increase might cause the climate to warm, and created numerous (almost a hundred) models to predict this warming. After more than thirty years, however, none of those models has successfully worked. The climate has not warmed as predicted, which suggests the hypothesis is flawed, and needs rethinking. Sadly, the leaders in the climate field refuse to do this rethinking. Instead, they appear willing to adjust and change their data to make it fit, sometimes in ways that are downright fraudulent.

This is not how science is done, and it is doing a terrible disservice to both science and society in general.

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Sunspot update for October 2017

9:23 am

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

October 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.

After two straight months of rising sunspot activity, the number of sunspots plunged in October, returning the numbers almost exactly back to the general trend we have seen since 2014 when the solar maximum ended. While the short two month increase indicated that the minimum will not occur as soon as this long term trend suggests, the quick return to that trend this month suggests that it will.

Meanwhile, November is six days old and has yet to see any sunspots at all.

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Tesla stock crashes due to possible loss of tax credit

10:13 am

The stock of Elon Musk’s Tesla electric car company crashed this week, dropping 7% on Wednesday, with the revelation that the Republican tax plan proposes eliminating the $7,500 tax credit for buying an electric car.

Its share price fell more than seven per cent to about $296 apiece from Wednesday’s $321. The draft law emerged as the Elon-Musk-led automaker announced its worst-ever quarter, recording a $671m loss and admitting it had not met its production target for its new Model 3 car, producing just 220 of them against its 1,500 target.

Economists believe that the tax credit is a key driver for electric car sales, and cite the example of when the state of Georgia cut its $5,000 tax credit and saw sales of electric cars slump from 1,400 a month to just 100 a month in response.

What this story highlights is that electric cars are simply not economical at this time, and that the government is distorting the market by pushing them. Without government aid, practically no one would buy them.

It would be far better for everyone to let the market decide. Not only would this save us tax dollars, it would allow the industry to focus its innovative efforts on upgrades that are cost effective and profitable, rather than on pie-in-the-sky fantasies that actually do no good at all.

Hat tip Wayne DeVette for pointing me to this story.

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Scientists receiving EPA grants will no longer serve on EPA advisory panels

6:13 pm

EPA head Scott Pruitt today announced that any scientist receiving EPA grants will no longer be allowed to serve on three EPA science advisory panels.

In the past three years, members of the Science Advisory Board, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, and the Board of Scientific Counselors received about $77 million in direct EPA grants while serving, according to agency calculations. “Strengthening independence from EPA; increasing state, tribal, and local government participation; and adding geographic diversity and fresh perspectives will improve the integrity of EPA’s scientific advisory committees,” Pruitt told reporters, government officials, and policy analysts in attendance.

The issue is a conflict of interest. These same scientists could not fairly advise EPA since they depended on that agency for major funding. The result was that these panels would often recommend the EPA to fund research that these scientists favored and were known to focus on, thus giving them an advantage in obtaining grants. Not surprisingly, this research often pushed the theory of global-warming and anti-industry regulation. This old-boy network for funneling funds to the right people, regardless of its legitimacy, is now hopefully cut off.

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Scientists propose adding smog to atmosphere to fight global warming

9:44 am

What could possibly go wrong? Global warming scientists have proposed injecting sulphate aerosols (another name for pollution) into the upper atmosphere in order to counter their predicted global temperature rise.

Experts are considering ploughing sulphate aerosols into the upper atmosphere which would cause some of the suns rays to be reflected back out into space. This could potentially cool the Earth down and help counter the effects of climate change, scientists say.

The move would also help reduce coral bleaching and help calm powerful storms.

James Crabbe, from the University of Bedfordshire, is leading the study and his initial results suggest the plan could help cool the planet.

This proposal is based on such flimsy science it appalls me that any scientist would even consider it, especially when you think about the unknown consequences.

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Since 2016 almost a 1000 published papers have challenged the theory of human-caused climate change

9:02 am

Link here. What the author does is quote from numerous scientific papers where they either note the lack of evidence that human activity has caused the recent warming of the climate since the 1600s, or note other natural phenomenon where the evidence of influence is far stronger. Here’s one example:

Rosenblum and Eisenman, 2017

Observations indicate that the Arctic sea ice cover is rapidly retreating while the Antarctic sea ice cover is steadily expanding. State-of-the-art climate models, by contrast, typically simulate a moderate decrease in both the Arctic and Antarctic sea ice covers.

Here’s another, with a link to the actual peer-reviewed published paper:

Blaauw, 2017 [pdf]

This paper demonstrates that global warming can be explained without recourse to the greenhouse theory

He quotes many more, and has found 900 papers since 2016 that challenge the accepted-wisdoms pushed by global-warming theories.

The point here is not to say the climate doesn’t change, or that increased CO2 is not a concern, but to point out that the science is not settled, and anyone who makes that claim is either ignorant, or lying.

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WHO fakes data to claim weedkiller causes cancer

8:43 am

Par for the course: IARC, the agency of the World Health Organization (WHO) that focuses on cancer research, has apparently faked data so that it could make the claim — in opposition to every other published paper in the world — that a commonly used weedkiller causes cancer.

This detail about the man in charge might explain what happened:

The chairman of the IARC sub-group tasked with reviewing evidence of glyphosate’s effect on laboratory animals was Charles Jameson, an American toxicologist. In testimony as part of personal-injury lawsuits against Monsanto in the United States, Jameson told lawyers for Monsanto he did not know when, why or by whom the edits had been made.

Monsanto is facing multiple legal claims in the U.S. from plaintiffs who allege glyphosate gave them or their loved ones cancer. Jameson is an expert witness for the plaintiffs. He did not respond to questions for this article. [emphasis mine]

If you want to read the whole ugly story, go to the second link above. This report cites numerous examples where IARC clearly fudged their reports to hide the fact that their conclusions were consistently debunked by other research.

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Trump administration backs off plans to end or reduce ethanol policy

9:48 am

The swamp wins: Scott Pruitt, EPA head, has retreated from his plans to reduce or end the program that subsidizes and encourages the use of ethanol in automobile gasoline.

After heavy pressure from lawmakers and other stakeholders, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt on Thursday night sided with pro-ethanol lawmakers and said his agency will abandon many controversial changes to the nation’s ethanol mandate — prompting a top biofuels leader to claim that Mr. Pruitt apparently has had an “epiphany” over the past few days.

In a letter to seven key senators, Mr. Pruitt — who had been critical of ethanol during his time as Oklahoma attorney general — shot down several major concerns about looming adjustments to the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), the federal law that requires the blending of ethanol with gasoline.

The letter comes just days after Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican and perhaps the loudest pro-ethanol voice in Congress, threatened to hold up nominees for top-level EPA posts if Mr. Pruitt didn’t acquiesce to their demands on the RFS.

It is going to take many years to drain the swamp, since it presently holds great power and is willing to use it to maintain its corrupt control over taxpayer money.

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NOAA declares record-setting warming where it has no data

11:20 am

NOAA’s September update on the climate has declared that central and southern Africa experienced “record warmth,” even though NOAA itself admits it has no ground data for this region, and the satellite data shows temperatures normal.

Except for the satellite data, which comes from a different research source, all the graphs at the second link are from NOAA itself. Despite admitting in one graph that they have zero data for most of Africa, they declare in a different graph that most of Africa experienced record-setting warming.

This is not the first time NOAA has done this. I noted similar intellectual dishonesty by NOAA two years ago. In the interim they have followed this pattern repeatedly, claiming new warming records all over the globe in many areas where they have absolutely no surface data and the satellite data remains inconclusive.

There is an intellectual corruption in the climate field, especially within government agencies like NOAA, that is ruining our ability to really learn what is going on with the climate. And until someone in power steps in and either demands a forthright explanation that justifies these actions (something that I think is impossible) or demands that it stop, this corruption is only going to get worse.

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EPA will no longer quickly settle lawsuits with environmental activists

10:03 am

The Trump administration has decided that it will no longer quickly settle lawsuits from environmental activist groups, an Obama policy that not only provided these groups a significant amount of easy funding from the federal government but also allowed them control over the regulatory process.

This is a step in the right direction but the article suggests that EPA head Scott Pruitt set a limit on the number of lawsuits the EPA can settle. This means it can settle some suits. It also suggests that the EPA will be able to argue for settling additional suits on a case-by-case basis.

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Recent CO2 increase comes from tropical jungles, not human activity

9:13 am

The uncertainty of science: Scientists using the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2) have found that the bulk of carbon dioxide increase in recent years came from tropical jungles at the equator, not human activity located mostly in the northern hemisphere.

I guarantee the climate science community, dependent of government funds given based on the crisis mode of human-caused global warming, will spin this somehow to link it with human activity, but if they do they are either fooling themselves, or lying to everyone else. The models all assumed that OCO-2 would find the increase coming from the industrial regions where fossil fuels burn. That is not what they found, which means once again that the models are crap. We do not yet understand the climate.

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Database of presumed human-caused earthquakes created

9:52 am

The uncertainty of science: Geologists have assembled a database of more than 700 earthquakes they think might have been caused by human activity.

The Human-Induced Earthquake Database, or HiQuake, contains 728 examples of earthquakes (or sequences of earthquakes) that may have been set off by humans over the past 149 years. Most of them were small, between magnitudes 3 and 4. But the list also includes several large, destructive earthquakes, such as the magnitude-7.8 quake in Nepal in April 2015, which one paper linked to groundwater pumping.

Miles Wilson, a hydrogeologist at Durham University, UK, and his colleagues describe the database in a paper set to be published on October 4 in Seismological Research Letters2. The scientists say that HiQuake is the biggest, most up-to-date public listing of human-caused quakes ever made. By bringing the data together in this way, they hope to highlight how diverse induced quakes can be — and help society to understand and manage the future risk.

Many of these quakes were likely caused by human activity. Many however might not have been. The jury is still out, as the article reluctantly admits near the end.

All possible instances of induced quakes were included “without regard to plausibility”, writes the team, because of the difficulty involved in deciding what constitutes absolute proof that an earthquake was caused by human activity. But that could mislead people about the real hazard from induced quakes, says Raphaël Grandin, a geophysicist at the Institute of Earth Physics in Paris. “When you put a dot in the database, and a scientific reference behind it, then you may lead the non-expert to think that the earthquake was caused by humans,” he says. Such a listing might hide scientific uncertainty, as with the Chinese quake: despite the paper linking it to reservoir filling, many seismologists do not believe it was triggered by human activity.

In other words, they included every quake that had the slightest suggestion it was connected to human activity, without noting the uncertainties. This makes this database to me somewhat suspect. Rather than identify the known reliable links between human activity and quakes in order to learn what causes them, this database seems more designed as a political propaganda tool aimed at limiting future human activity. It certainly doesn’t clarify our knowledge on this subject, but instead muddies the water significantly.

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Global warming scientists admit their models predict too much warming

12:28 pm

The uncertainty of science: This week the global warming community was shaken by a new paper, written by global warming scientists, that admitted that their models for global warming have been predicting too much warming.

Computer modelling used a decade ago to predict how quickly global average temperatures would rise may have forecast too much warming, a study has found.

This look at that story catches some interesting quotes by these same scientists, who only a few years ago were so certain that the climate was overheating that they wanted to dump freedom and democracy.

According to The Times, another of the paper’s authors, Michael Grubb, a professor of international energy and climate change at University College London, admitted his earlier forecasting models had overplayed how temperatures would rise.

At the Paris climate summit in 2015, Professor Grubb said: “All the evidence from the past 15 years leads me to conclude that actually delivering 1.5C is simply incompatible with democracy.” [Emphasis mine]

These same global warming scientists were also so certain of the rightness of their earlier models that they had the nerve to call anyone who questioned them “science deniers” in an effort to smear them as no different then Holocaust deniers. Instead, the skeptics have once again proven to be the correct ones.

But then, skepticism is what built science in the first place, not certainty. Certainty is what leads to bad science, and things far more evil.

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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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EPA stonewalls investigation into its Gold King Mine disaster

11:00 am

The EPA is refusing to release a criminal investigation by its inspector general into the 2015 Gold King mine disaster, caused by the EPA, that polluted water supplies throughout the southwest.

The EPA’s Inspector General (IG) provided the Department of Justice evidence that an employee involved in the August 2015 Gold King Mine disaster violated the Clean Water Act and made false statements. The Justice Department declined to prosecute him, the IG announced in October 2016.

The watchdog wrote a report on its completed investigation but is now keeping it secret. “The material you requested … are part of one or more open law enforcement files,” EPA IG associate counsel Susan Barvenik told TheDCNF in a letter. Producing “such records could reasonably be expected to interfere with ongoing enforcement proceedings.”

An EPA spokeswoman provided conflicting information about the probe.

In other words, the report exposed clear violations of law, but no one in Washington wants to pursue those violations and they are doing whatever they can to bury them in order to protect themselves.

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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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