New NASA data has confirmed that the flat climate temperatures that started around 1998 has continued in 2013.
The link above catches the real story that most mainstream news organizations missed, focusing instead on NASA’s weak claim that last year was one of the warmest on record.
You might have noticed a plethora of stories in the last couple of days, reporting claims by NASA and NOAA that 2013 was one of the hottest years ever on record.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Tuesday released its global temperature figures for 2013. The average world temperature was 58.12 degrees (14.52 Celsius) tying with 2003 for the fourth warmest since 1880. NASA, which calculates records in a different manner, said Tuesday that 2013 was the seventh warmest on record, with an average temperature of 58.3 degrees (14.6 Celsius).
How can this be, if there has been a pause in global warming for the past 17 years, as has been admitted by the UN’s IPCC and climate scientists everywhere?
The answer, in my opinion: outright fraud.
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A U.S. Geological Survey science team has determined that the grizzly bear population has recovered enough that the bear can be taken off the endangered species list.
A report delivered in November by the US Geological Survey’s Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team describes a resilient and healthy bear population that has adapted to the loss of pine nuts by eating more elk and bison, keeping fat stores at levels that allow the bears to survive and reproduce. For Christopher Servheen, a biologist who oversees grizzly-bear recovery efforts at the Fish and Wildlife Service in Missoula, Montana, that is not surprising. “Bears are flexible,” he says. “It’s easier to say what they don’t eat than what they do eat.”
Not surprisingly, environmental activists don’t like this decision. They claim that, wait for it, global warming threatens the bear enough that it should not be delisted.
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The uncertainty of science: A comparison between reality and the predictions of global warming scientists from 1988 reveals an epic fail.
Look especially at the charts at the link. While carbon dioxide emissions increased at a higher rate than predicted, the global temperature — predicted to increase from 2 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit — has instead remained completely flat.
Honesty! The UN climate chief this week declared that communism is the best way to fight global warming.
United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres said that democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming. Communist China, she says, is the best model. China may be the world’s top emitter of carbon dioxide and struggling with major pollution problems of their own, but the country is “doing it right” when it comes to fighting global warming says Figueres. “They actually want to breathe air that they don’t have to look at,” she said. “They’re not doing this because they want to save the planet. They’re doing it because it’s in their national interest.”
Putting aside the minor detail that communist states have routinely had the worst environmental record — “ghastly” as the article above accurately notes — this statement by Figueres is remarkably refreshing in that might be the first time an environmentalist has admitted the movement’s true agenda. They don’t want to save the environment, they want to gain power and then use it to squelch everyone else’s freedom.
Global warming devastates America.
Just read it. You will laugh, it will make your day, and you will learn just a little more about the foolishness of the fear-mongers among us.
Eleven global warming stories from 2013 you probably never heard of.
#5 is the most revealing, I think.
From the second to the final draft of its newest report the IPCC significantly slashed its predictions for how much the climate will warm in the coming decades.
In the second draft of the Fifth Assessment Report it had broadly agreed with the models that the world will warm by 0.4 to 1.0 Cº from 2016-2035 against 1986-2005. But in the final draft it quietly cut the 30-year projection to 0.3-0.7 Cº, saying the warming is more likely to be at the lower end of the range [equivalent to about 0.4 Cº over 30 years]. If that rate continued till 2100, global warming this century could be as little as 1.3 Cº.
This will bring the IPCC’s predictions more in line with the reality of the past two decades, which has seen a complete pause in any warming.
This is actually very good news, as it suggests that the good scientists in the climate community are beginning to regain control of the science. Rather than bend to the political winds, the IPCC is being forced to bend to the data itself. Nonetheless, no one should be sanguine about the situation. As noted by Christopher Monckton at the link,
Multiple lines of evidence now confirm that the models and consequently the IPCC have overestimated global warming. Yet neither that misconceived organization nor any of its host of unthinking devotees has displayed any remorse. Instead, they persist in maintaining that the warming is temporarily paused, though they cannot really explain why; or they blame particulate aerosols, their get-out-of-jail-free fudge-factor; or they pretend warming is really continuing unabated, saying it has gone into hiding deep in the oceans where, conveniently, we cannot measure it, or that the Earth-atmosphere system has a fever driven by four atom-bombs’-worth of heat content increase every second.
What they are not prepared to countenance, notwithstanding the real-world, measured evidence, is the growing probability that they and their precious models have so badly misunderstood the climate, or so well understood it and so badly misrepresented it, that global warming is simply not going to occur at anything like any of the exaggerated rates that they had until now so confidently over-predicted.
Read the whole thing. Look especially at Figure 9, the last figure, as it shows the data in comparison with the predictions in all the IPCC reports.
How global warming activists ended up getting stuck in the ice fields surrounding Antarctica.
The first error expedition leaders made was under-estimating the prevailing sea ice conditions at Mawson Station, their destination. The scientists seemed to be convinced that Antarctica was a warmer place today than it had been 100 years earlier, and thus perhaps they could expect less sea ice there. This in turn would allow them to charter a lighter, cheaper vessel.
And then there’s this:
Why the vessel got trapped in the first place may be because [project leader and professor Chris] Turney never bothered to look at sea ice charts, which showed near record high levels of sea ice surrounding Antarctica. Moreover, Turney even denied that the overall sea ice trend was expanding around the continent. Fox News writes, “Turney said it was ‘silly’ to suggest he and 73 others aboard the MV Akademic Shokalskiy were trapped in ice they’d sought to prove had melted. He remained adamant that sea ice is melting, even as the boat remained trapped in frozen seas.”
Did he expect to find less ice than Mawson did 100 years earlier? This appears to be what he expected, given his expedition’s planning. [emphasis mine]
In other words, this group and its so-called scientific leader are typical of the entire global warming climate community. Facts are irrelevant. The Earth is warming, the icecaps are disappearing, and to hell with any data that says otherwise.
Eventually, however, reality bites. Personally, I would much rather focus on reality first, so that I am prepared to deal with it when it jumps up at me.
The uncertainty of science: Global sea ice area is now at its second highest level ever recorded and is closing in on an all time record.
The link is also amusing in that it includes some interesting predictions made by global warming scientists and politicians in recent years, all predicting that the Arctic Ocean would be ice free by 2013.
The certainty of the global warming crowd: Reddit bans everyone from expressing skepticism of global warming.
In a move that has been described by one British academic as “positive censorship”, a Reddit moderator has announced that Reddit is becoming “increasingly stringent with deniers”. The Reddit moderator says climate “contrarians” were too often expressing “uninformed and outspoken opinions”, and so the site decided to adopt a much more “proactive moderation”. Now, whenever a user makes a “potentially controversial submission” on climate change, the moderators issue that user with a “warning”. If the user persists in posting “potentially controversial submissions”, he’s “banned from the forum”.
The worst part of this is the reaction of Reddit’s moderators:
Reddit’s moderators are really happy with the results of their war against the expressers of “outspoken opinions” on climate change. They found that by “negating the ability of this misguided group to post to the forum” (a long-winded way of saying “banning them”), there has been a “change in the culture within the comments”. “Where once there were personal insults and bitter accusations, there is now discussion of the relevant aspects of [scientific] research”, we are told. In short, having expelled outspoken, controversial “deniers” from its forums, Reddit now finds that its discussions of climate change are more measured – that is, on-message, conformist, uncontroversial.
How convenient. You don’t like the opinions of those who disagree with you, so you ban them. Sure solves the problem of winning debates, doesn’t it?
I wouldn’t object if the moderators just banned insulting and offensive comments. I do that here at Behind the Black. What they’ve apparently done instead is to ban all opposing opinions, which is far different.
More than half the U.S. is covered with snow this November, the most in ten years.
The certainty of climate scientists:
Kevin Trenberth, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, agreed the surprising amount of snowfall is a separate issue from climate change. “If you warm up the atmosphere, you can actually get heavier snowfalls in winter,” Trenberth said. “That’s one of the ironic things about global warming. Maybe we can say that without climate change, it would be colder still. [emphasis mine]
In other words, according to Trenberth the increased snow cover and cold temperatures are evidence of global warming.
No more seasonal hurricane predictions from Colorado State University.
They lost their funding, which is no surprise.
At the beginning of this year’s season, the team predicted 18 named storms. Nine of those, it said, would become hurricanes. Four would be major hurricanes. Here’s how it shook out: There were 13 named storms. Only two became hurricanes. Neither was a major hurricane.
They, like NOAA, expected an increase in extreme hurricanes and were wrong. In fact, they were so wrong that they illustrated clearly how much a guess all of these climate predictions are. You might as well flip a coin.
The uncertainty of climate science: This year’s hurricane season, predicted to be above average, was the weakest in decades.
This failure also continues a pattern seen in recent years, where the number of actual hurricanes ends up far below their prediction, but the number of named hurricanes still ends up about right (see the charts on the prediction link above). I noted this in 2012, and now it has happened again. As I said then,
I wonder if their naming process was fudged to get them the numbers they wanted. While it might be possible to do that with the naming process of tropical storms, it is far more difficult to fudge the number of actual hurricanes. My skeptical nature and the recent willingness in the climate field to fiddle with data probably makes me more suspicious than I should be.
Thus to me, these seasonal hurricane predictions are becoming increasingly suspect.
The uncertainty of science: A new study suggests that the variation of the cosmic ray flux during the solar cycle has little influence on the climate.
The study seems statistical in nature, which leaves me skeptical. Nonetheless, the link between cosmic rays and climate change remains tenuous, with only one study at CERN providing any evidence that cosmic rays might have an influence.
It is always best to admit when you are wrong as soon as you find out. Last month, in reporting NOAA’s monthly update of the solar cycle, I unequivocally stated that
My interpretation of this data tells me that almost certainly the solar maximum has ended. We might see some later fluctuations whereby the sunspot number jumps, but the Sun is clearly beginning its ramp down to solar minimum.
Well, I spoke too soon. Last night NOAA posted the newest update of the solar cycle, and it shows that in October the Sun was more active then it has been in two years. In fact, for only the second time this entire solar cycle the Sun’s sunspot activity actually came close to matching the predictions of scientists. This month’s graph is posted below the fold, with annotations.
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Leftwing tolerance: Global warming activists enthuse about the LA Times’ policy of restricting debate.
The campaign is to get media outlets to agree to refuse to publish any letter or op-ed by anyone who expresses skepticism about human caused global warming. In other words, their response to any disagreement is simply to say, “Shut up!”
Another global warming prediction fails: Extreme weather events in 2013 are at an all time low.
There have been many forecasts in the news in recent years predicting more and more extreme weather-related events in the US, but for 2013 that prediction has been way off the mark. Whether you’re talking about tornadoes, wildfires, extreme heat or hurricanes, the good news is that weather-related disasters in the US are all way down this year compared to recent years and, in some cases, down to historically low levels.
As I wrote back in April,
Global warming scientists have spent the past two decades telling us that we were all gonna die from increasing temperatures caused by the increase in CO2. Now that this prediction has proved false, they apparently are shifting gears. Instead, it is extreme events — big storms, long droughts, intense heatwaves — that are going to kill us.
But not only have they no evidence that the increase in CO2 will cause these extreme events, there is no evidence that more of these extreme events are even occurring.
In other words, these stories are mere political advocacy. They have nothing to do with science, but with propaganda, based on fantasy with the goal of trying to convince everyone that we are all gonna die if we don’t do exactly what these scientists say. [emphasis in original]
The true global warming crisis: The lies underlying the theory.
Read it. He details nicely the lies in the most recent IPCC report.
Yesterday, despite the government shutdown, NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, and as I do every month, I am posting it here, below the fold, with annotations.
My interpretation of this data tells me that almost certainly the solar maximum has ended. We might see some later fluctuations whereby the sunspot number jumps, but the Sun is clearly beginning its ramp down to solar minimum.
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