Tag: environmentalism

Antarctica defies global warming predictions

6:15 pm

The uncertainty of science: Despite numerous climate model predictions during the past two decades predicting that the ice cap in Antarctica will shrink because a global warming, recent data shows its ice cap to have grown to record size.

Climate models predicted Antarctic sea ice would shrink as a result of global warming, but the opposite happened. Antarctic sea ice actually increased in the last two decades. Chinese scientists compared climate model sea ice predictions to actual observations from 1979 to 2005 and found “the main problem of the [climate] models is their inability to reproduce the observed slight increase of sea ice extent.” As it turns out, natural variability plays a big role here as well. “Sea ice extent is strongly influenced by the winds and these have increased from the south over the Ross Sea, contributing to a small increase in total Antarctic sea ice since the late 1970s,” Turner said. “The increase in ice seems to be within the bounds of natural variability.”

Had Chinese researchers gone beyond 2005, they would have found more than just a slight increase. 2014 was the first year on record that Antarctic sea ice coverage rose above 7.72 million square miles. By Sept. 22, 2014, sea ice extent reached its highest level on record — 7.76 million square miles.

The data overall suggests that all the fluctuations seen so far Antarctica appear to be entirely attributable to natural variation, not climate change.

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The Earth’s shifting waters

10:38 pm

Using satellite data gathered over the past 30 years scientists have now mapped the changes from water to land and land to water across the Earth’s land surface.

Two quotes from this article illustrate once again the incredible uncertainty of climate science. First in the continental interiors they saw an overall increase in land.

They found that 115,000 sq km (44,000 sq miles) of land is now covered in water and 173,000 sq km (67,000 sq miles) of water has now become land. The largest increase in water has been on the Tibetan Plateau, while the Aral Sea has been the biggest conversion of water to land.

More significant, however, was the changes on the continental coasts.

Coastal areas were also analysed, and to the scientists surprise, coastlines had gained more land – 33,700 sq km (13,000 sq miles) – than they had been lost to water (20,100 sq km or 7,800 sq miles). “We expected that the coast would start to retreat due to sea level rise, but the most surprising thing is that the coasts are growing all over the world,” said Dr Baart.”We’re were able to create more land than sea level rise was taking.”

The researchers said Dubai’s coast had been significantly extended, with the creation of new islands to house luxury resorts. “China has also reconstructed their whole coast from the Yellow Sea all the way down to Hong Kong,” sid Dr Baart[emphasis mine]

I suspect that a careful analysis of this data will show that most of these changes have little to do with climate change. However, the fact that human activity has actually increased the amount of land on the coasts despite the slow rise in sea level suggests once again that climate change is not the serious threat it is often made up to be. As a friend of mine once noted, “We’re not going to stand on the beach for decades and let the ocean drown us.” The change is slow enough that the human ability to adapt will easily outstrip it.

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“Our projections were completely wrong.”

11:09 am

The uncertainty of science: Despite predictions that global warming would destroy the world’s coral reefs, scientists as well as divers who visit the reefs regularly have found that they are instead thriving, with almost no damage.

[R]ecent research has shown some coral reefs are coming back to life much more quickly than scientists believed possible. Scientists found Coral Castles teeming with life during a 2015 dive, despite declaring the reef dead 13 years ago. “Everything looked just magnificent,” said Jan Witting, the dive’s lead scientist who works at the Sea Education Association, told The New York Times. “Last year, the whole place was holding its breath,” Witting said. “The whole ocean’s in bloom this year.”

Rangiroa lagoon in French Polynesia had rebounded just 15 years after being devastated by the incredibly strong 1998 El Nino warming event. “Our projections were completely wrong,” marine biologist Peter Mumby told BBC News in 2014. “Sometimes it is really nice to be proven wrong as a scientist, and this was a perfect example of that.”

These bad predictions, some as recently as April 2016, not only were not based on facts, they did serious harm to the tourist industry and the people who depend on it.

“Scientists had written off that entire northern section as a complete white-out,’’ Chris Eade, owner of the diving boat Spirit Of Freedom, told The Courier-Mail in an interview. “We expected the worst,” Eade said. “But it is tremendous condition, most of it is pristine, the rest is in full recovery. It shows the resilience of the reef.”

Eade said dire predictions about the demise of the Great Barrier Reef has hurt tourism businesses — a $5 billion industry. He’s particularly angry with scientists who estimated bleaching had hurt 93 percent of the Great Barrier Reef, mostly concentrated in the northern half. “Between 60 and 100 percent of corals are severely bleached on 316 reefs, nearly all in the northern half of the Reef,” Terry Hughes, the lead coral reef scientist at Australia’s James Cook University, said in April. Hughes’ research was based on aerial surveys of 911 reefs, and found 316 reefs were “severely bleached.” But that’s not what Eade and other reef tourist operators have observed taking people out for daily dives. [emphasis mine]

In other words, the scientist really didn’t look at the reefs. Instead, he took a quick distant survey and declared disaster, probably to promote the agenda of global warming.

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EPA never did ethanol studies required by law

9:58 am

The law is such an inconvenient thing: Despite a legal mandate from Congress to conduct studies on the use of ethanol in vehicles the EPA has admitted that it simply ignored the law and never did any.

The Obama administration has failed to study as legally required the impact of requiring ethanol in gasoline and ensuring that new regulations intended to address one problem do not actually make other problems worse, the Environmental Protection Agency inspector general said Thursday. The conclusion in the new audit confirmed findings of an Associated Press investigation in November 2013. The AP said the administration never conducted studies to determine whether air and water quality benefits from adding corn-based ethanol to gasoline. Such reports to Congress were required every three years under the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.

Instead, they have been pushing to increase the amount of ethanol used in gasoline, even though they have no idea whether this helps or hurts the environment, and have been told by practically every automotive industry expert that increased ethanol will damage car engines.

But then, who cares what the law says? Who cares what other experts say? The EPA is made up of righteous perfect liberal individuals who simply know better. How dare Congress, or anyone for that matter, tell them what to do!

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One Year on Earth – Seen From 1 Million Miles

6:01 pm

An evening pause: This video release from NASA made the rounds a few weeks ago. It isn’t news, but it is cool. One important fact noted during this video is that the Earth’s cloud cover both warms and cools the planet. What wasn’t noted was that there is gigantic uncertainty about how much the clouds warm and cool, which is one of the main reasons no climate models have been even close to successfully predicting the climate.

Hat tip Wayne DeVette.

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Sunspot ramp down continues

9:36 am

Below is NOAA’s monthly update of the solar cycle, posted by them on August 7. It shows the Sun’s sunspot activity in July, with annotations.

July 2016 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.

As expected, there was a recovery in sunspot activity in July compared to June. Also as expected, the recovery was not significant, so that it appears, based on the past two months, as if the ramp down to solar minimum is accelerating so that solar minimum will occur sooner than expected, possibly as soon as two years.

I would not put much stock on that prediction, however. When sunspot activity first reached this level during the past solar cycle in late 2005, it still took three more years before solar minimum was reached. If this cycle matches the last, that would mean that this cycle, from minimum to minimum, will have lasted 10 years, making a short solar cycle though not one of the shortest. However, it is more likely that the ramp down will stretch out, as it usually does, gliding downward to solar minimum in a slow gentle curve that makes for a full cycle of about 11 years.

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Trump considers fracking businessman for Energy Secretary

10:11 am

Good news if true: Reuters today reported that presidential candidate Donald Trump is considering nominating Oklahoma businessman Harold Hamm as energy secretary if he wins the election.

In addition to considering Hamm, who has also functioned as Trump’s informal energy adviser in recent months, the article also noted this:

Trump, who has yet to make any announcements about his prospective cabinet, has already surrounded himself with strong advocates of traditional energy sources like oil, gas, and coal and has promised to gut environmental regulations to boost drilling and mining if elected. He tapped U.S. Congressman Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, a climate skeptic and drilling advocate, to help draw up his campaign energy platform, and picked Indiana Governor Mike Pence, also a climate skeptic, as his running mate.

Both moves cheered the energy industry but alarmed environmental activists who say a Trump presidency would set back years of progress on issues like pollution and climate change. “Given that Hamm’s as close as we’ve got to a fracker-in-chief in this country, it would be an apropos pick for a president who thinks global warming is a hoax manufactured by the Chinese,” said leading environmental activist Bill McKibben.

I keep saying it: Should Trump win, the best way we can guarantee that he favors conservative values is if he is surrounded by conservatives. These moves suggest that that Trump is agreeable to this, though there is also possibly a bit of some crony capitalism going on here as well. While these guys will likely advocate for less environmental regulations, I also doubt that they will work to eliminate the gobs of corporate welfare the federal government presently hands out.

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New climate model works better, but doesn’t!

9:57 am

New climate model
Image from Junk Science. I indicated the pause

The uncertainty of science: Scientists have developed a new computer climate model that does a better job of predicting the actual climate, until you get to the pause in warming during the past 18 years. The graph on the right, from the paper, shows the model’s prediction compared to the raw data. The two line up perfectly, until around 1998, when the pause or hiatus in global warming began. From that point, the model fails.

I especially like this quote from the press release, made by one of the paper’s two authors:

“Most of the difference between the raw data and new estimates is found during the recent 18 years since 1998,” said Xie. “Because of the hiatus, the raw data underestimate the greenhouse warming.” [emphasis mine]

Note how he reverses things. For him, the raw data is wrong, as it underestimates their perfect model of human-caused greenhouse warming. In reality, it is their model that has failed, as it fails to predict the pause in warming, showing that it must be missing important factors that are influencing the climate. Or as physicist Richard Feynmann so cogently put it,

“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”

Note also that this research paper, released today, recognizes the pause, which shows again that the claims by some scientists that the pause did not exist have not been convincing to other climate scientists. This in turn once again illustrates the overall uncertainty of this field of science.

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Ban AC for DC

10:42 am

Link here. As Glenn Reynolds notes

I’m inspired by Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Tex., who noticed something peculiar recently. It seems that EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, who spends a lot of time telling Americans that they need to drive less, fly less, and in general reduce their consumption of fossil fuels, also flies home to see her family in Boston “almost every weekend”; the head of the Clean Air Division, Janet McCabe, does the same, but she heads to Indianapolis. In air mileage alone, the Daily Caller News Foundation estimates that McCarthy surpasses the carbon footprint of an ordinary American. Smith has introduced a bill that wouldn’t target the EPA honchos’ personal travel, though: It provides, simply, that “None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to pay the cost of any officer or employee of the Environmental Protection Agency for official travel by airplane.”

This makes sense to me. We’re constantly told by the administration that “climate change” is a bigger threat than terrorism. And as even President Obama has noted, there’s a great power in setting an example: “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.”

Likewise, it’s hard to expect Americans to accept changes to their own lifestyles when the very people who are telling them that it’s a crisis aren’t acting like it’s a crisis. So I have a few suggestions to help bring home the importance of reduced carbon footprints at home and abroad:

Reynolds than goes on to suggest further restrictions on the fossil fuel use of the hoi poloi in Washington, including heavy taxes on fuel used by private jets, heavy taxes on coastal regions like liberal cities like New York, Boston, and Washington to prepare for sea rise, and the banning air-conditioning in the District of Columbia.

Obama makes a great point about setting the thermostat at 72 degrees. We should ban air conditioning in federal buildings. We won two world wars without air conditioning our federal employees. Nothing in their performance over the last 50 or 60 years suggests that A/C has improved things. Besides, The Washington Post informs us that A/C is sexist, and that Europeans think it’s stupid.

Makes sense to me!

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Two anti-fracking/anti-oil industry environmental papers retracted

11:40 pm

Thank goodness these were peer reviewed! Two environmental papers, one claiming increased air pollution near fracking sites and the second claiming that the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill caused air contamination, have now both been retracted because of “crucial mistakes.”

According to the corresponding author of both papers, Kim Anderson at Oregon State University, the journal plans to publish new versions of both papers in the next few days. In the case of the fracking paper, the conclusions have been reversed — the original paper stated pollution levels exceeded limits set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for lifetime cancer risk, but the corrected data set the risks below EPA levels.

The fracking paper received some media attention when it was released, as it tapped into long-standing concerns about the environmental dangers of hydraulic fracturing (fracking), which extracts natural gas from the earth. A press release that accompanied the paper quoted Anderson as warning: “Air pollution from fracking operations may pose an under-recognized health hazard to people living near them.”

Both papers, published in Environmental Science and Technology, were retracted on the same day (June 29), both due to mistakes in reported levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), pollutants released from burning oil, gas, and other organic matter.

They say that the errors were due to an “honest spreadsheet error.”

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A short but weak solar maximum?

3:03 pm

On July 4th NOAA released its monthly update of the solar cycle, showing the Sun’s sunspot activity in June. It is annotated and posted below.

June 2016 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.

Not surprisingly, the time periods with no sunspots in June, including a 12 day stretch that just ended today, is reflected by the graph’s precipitous drop in June.

What is significant to me is the speed with which this solar maximum seems to be ending. Normally, weak solar cycles are also long solar cycles. The Sun not only doesn’t get as active, but the ramp up and down is extended, as is the period of the solar minimum. This is what happened during the solar minimum from 2007 to 2010. It was longer than normal, which meant that the solar maximum occurred much later than predicted by the 2007 predictions of the solar science communities (shown in green).

This recent stretch of blank days however is now suggesting that the solar maximum is going to end much sooner than the later 2009 prediction (shown in red). Even more astonishing, the numbers in June aligned with the 2007 high prediction, which would make this one of the shortest solar maximums on record!

I don’t expect these low numbers to continue. I expect sunspot activity to recover and continue, with the minimum likely occurring after 2018. If it does come sooner, however, that will once again be evidence suggesting we are heading for a Grand Minimum, with no sunspots for decades.

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