Tag Archives: Global warming

Don’t Panic–Here’s The Picture

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As a major snowstorm bears down on the northeastern United States and a bunch of scientists and tourists are stuck in unusually thick ice in Antarctica, the U.K. Telegraph proclaims that the earth is warming faster than ever.

The rebuttal can be found at wattsupwiththat in an article entitled, “IPCC silently slashes its global warming predictions in the ARS final draft.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released its Assessment Reports on Science (ARS).

The article at wattsupwiththat reports:

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.

A graph in the article explains the problem with the old model on global warming:

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Unfortunately, global warming science has become more about obtaining funds for studies and about redistribution of wealth. I think when we finally look at global warming objectively (if we ever do), we will be amazed at how easily we were deceived.

 

 

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Imagine Those Feudal Lords Running Around In Their SUV’s

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The global warming people have a problem again–the facts just aren’t supporting their claims. Yesterday’s Daily Caller posted an article about a Swedish study that concluded that the earth was warmer during Roman times and during the Middle Ages than it is today.

The article reports:

The study, by scientist Leif Kullman, analyzed 455 “radiocarbon-dated mega-fossils” in the Scandes mountains and found that tree lines for different species of trees were higher during the Roman and Medieval times than they are today. Not only that, but the temperatures were higher as well.
“Historical tree line positions are viewed in relation to early 21st century equivalents, and indicate that tree line elevations attained during the past century and in association with modern climate warming are highly unusual, but not unique, phenomena from the perspective of the past 4,800 years,” Kullman found. “Prior to that, the pine tree line (and summer temperatures) was consistently higher than present, as it was also during the Roman and Medieval periods.”

This is not new information. Another study reported similar data (rightwinggranny.com) last year.

The article at the Daily Caller reminds us that scientific data shows that the earth’s temperature stopped rising in 1998 for no obvious reason. Since that time, scientists have begun to look at solar activity and normal global cycles as the causes for recent temperature changes.
The article concludes:

A study by Dr. Roy Spencer from the University of Alabama, Huntsville found that about half the warming that occurred since the 1970s can be attributed to El Niño weather events, which had a warming effect on the planet.

The Pacific Ocean’s natural warming and cooling cycles last about 30 years, with La Niña cooling being dominant from the 1950s to the 1970s and El Niño warming events dominating late 1970s to the late 1990s. Spencer suggests that the world may be in a La Niña cooling period.

It would be a good idea for all of us to take a step back and take a deep breath. The bottom line here is that we really don’t know. The equation is complicated by the fact that many very powerful people have an economic interest in convincing the rest of us that global warming is real and that we are the cause of it. We need to look carefully before we buy into that argument.

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This Happens A Lot

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Some conservatives call it the “Al Gore Effect.” Almost every time global warming groups plan a big meeting in Washington, they get snowed out (you’d think they would get smart and move their meetings to Florida). Well, it happened again.

Western Journalism reported yesterday that this week the White House hosted the State, Local, and Tribal Leaders Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience. The group headed to Washington, D.C. to discuss a plan of action against the perceived threat of global warming just as a massive winter storm struck the nation’s capital.

The article reports:

One of the participants, Gov. Pat Quinn of Obama’s beloved Illinois, made the trip Tuesday after Chicago experienced its coldest night in nearly 20 years. Everyone on the task force got a taste of reality as D.C. was largely shut down due to inclement weather.

Though government offices were closed, the global warming summit continued as planned. This delicious irony was apparently lost on these cult-like adherents to a flawed climatological hypothesis.

There is a school of meteorology that has been warming of global cooling due to the slow down in the number of solar flares (rightwinggranny.com). These scientists believe that the sun has a very large impact on the earth’s climate.

Meanwhile, global warming meetings keep encountering unexpected snow storms.

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A Scientific Reports That Ignores Scientific Evidence

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Brietbart.com posted a story today about the recently released report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Because the IPCC could not explain why the earth has not warmed significantly over the past fifteen years (rising only 0.05 degrees Celsius (0.09 degrees Fahrenheit), they simply ignored the fact.

The article reports:

There have been many reports that have shown how climate models have vastly overestimated “warming.” For instance, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change “compared 117 climate predictions made in the 1990’s to the actual amount of warming” and 114 of those predictions overestimated the amount of warming. Other studies have found that various climate models used by the United Nations have “forecasted two times more global warming than actually occurred.” 

As Breitbart News reported, a group of 50 international scientists released a comprehensive new report, which cited thousands of peer-reviewed articles the United Nations-sponsored panel on climate change ignored, “concluded that evidence now leans against global warming resulting from human-related greenhouse gas emissions.”

There are serious questions about the scientific method behind the global climate studies. So far none of them have actually been accurate even in the short term. If you remember, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicted that due to global warming, this year would be one of the most active hurricane seasons on record. Admittedly, the season isn’t over yet, but so far that prediction falls somewhat short of the mark.

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Don’t Assume That Scientists Always Get Things Right

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The U.K. Daily Mail posted a story yesterday with two amazing pictures:

global cooling

As much as I love the idea of global warming, the pictures seem to indicate that it is just not happening. I would like to point out that in the past we have had cycles of both global warming and global cooling. These cycles occurred long before the industrial revolution and were not related to anyone’s carbon footprint.

The article reports:

Some eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century – a process that would expose computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming as dangerously misleading.

The disclosure comes 11 months after The Mail on Sunday triggered intense political and scientific debate by revealing that global warming has ‘paused’ since the beginning of 1997 – an event that the computer models used by climate experts failed to predict.

In March, this newspaper further revealed that temperatures are about to drop below the level that the models forecast with ‘90 per cent certainty’.

The pause – which has now been accepted as real by every major climate research centre – is important, because the models’ predictions of ever-increasing global temperatures have made many of the world’s economies divert billions of pounds into ‘green’ measures to counter  climate change.

Those predictions now appear gravely flawed.

The article concludes:

‘The IPCC (UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) claims its models show a pause of 15 years can be expected. But that means that after only a very few years more, they will have to admit they are wrong.’

 Others are more cautious. Dr Ed Hawkins, of Reading University, drew the graph published by The Mail on Sunday in March showing how far world temperatures have diverged from computer predictions. He admitted the cycles may have caused some of the recorded warming, but insisted that natural variability alone could not explain all of the temperature rise over the past 150 years.

Nonetheless, the belief that summer Arctic ice is about to disappear remains an IPCC tenet, frequently flung in the face of critics who point to the pause.

Yet there is mounting evidence that Arctic ice levels are cyclical. Data uncovered by climate historians show that there was a massive melt in the 1920s and 1930s, followed by intense re-freezes that ended only in 1979 – the year the IPCC says that shrinking began.

Professor Curry said the ice’s behaviour over the next five years would be crucial, both for understanding the climate and for future policy. ‘Arctic sea ice is the indicator to watch,’ she said.

The bottom line here is that we simply don’t understand the earth’s climate cycles. We know they exist, but we don’t know how they work or if human activity impacts them. I am in favor of clean water and clean air, but I am not in favor of crippling economic growth for faulty science. We need to learn balance, and we need to realize that much of the panic we have heard regarding global warming has to do with the desire on the part of some world leaders to transfer wealth from successful free countries into the hands of third-world tyrants. The route to economic success for any third-world country has to include freedom for its people. If there is no incentive, there will be no economic growth.

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I Guess It Depended On Where You Were

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New England had a hot July this summer. I live in a house without central air-conditioning, and we ran between two and three air conditioners most of the month. Usually we run two for about two weeks. Well, I guess there were other places that just weren’t quite that warm.

This is a map from a website called climatedepot.com:

RecordEvents-21Aug13

The map shows high and low record temperatures from July 24 through August 21. This was posted on their website yesterday.

Meanwhile, Steven Hayward at Power Line points out that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will begin its battle to convince us that global warming is real and man-made within the next few weeks. The IPCC will bring out its report in three sections–Science, Impacts, and Mitigation. The Science report is due out next month.

We already know from past scandals that much of the data used to prove global warming was cherry-picked–important warming periods were left out to skew the data. We have the emails to prove this. So why is the UN trying to convince us that global warming is real and that we are responsible? Because any bureaucracy in any governmental organization likes to grow and likes to control more people and more money. If the IPCC can convince Americans and other wealthy countries that unless they give all kinds of money to non-wealthy countries we will all die, chances are we will give them the money. Unfortunately, this is not about concern for the earth–this is about taking money from wealthy countries and giving it to other countries (generally run by tyrants who will live gloriously at our expense while giving nothing to the people of their countries.)

The earth’s climate goes through cycles. It has gone through cycles before man was here. Those cycles are somehow built into the way the earth works. So far we have not successfully figured out how those cycles work. In recent years the National Weather Service in America has predicted catastrophic hurricane seasons caused by global warming. We have had some severe hurricanes, but it has been a long time since we have seen a catastrophic hurricane season.

The bottom line here is that we as people do not control the earth. We could give all the money we have to corrupt dictators in third-world countries, and we still would not control the earth. We need to do everything we can to keep our air and planet clean, but giving money to countries that will not spend money responsibly helps neither us or the earth.

 

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Greetings From The Flat Earth Society

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On June 25, President Obama gave a speech on the subject of climate change. He also detailed his plan (which incidentally does not include Congress) to structure America’s energy policies in order to avoid climate change.

In the process of that speech, President Obama declared, “But I don’t have much patience for anybody who argues the problem is not real. We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society.” I guess at some time I joined the flat earth society.

On Sunday, the Boston Herald posted an article about the President’s speech.

The article reminds us:

However, most international and national agencies have found no increase in storm activity. Warming? The alarmist British Meteorological Office finds no warming since 1998 while the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased by 7.4 percent.

Doomsday scenarios depend largely on unreliable computer models whose builders have no explanation for such conflicts.

The bottom line here is simple. As much as our over-inflated egos would like to think that we totally understand changes in the earth’s climate and that we can control them–we don’t. And we probably won’t for a long time. I am not against doing what is possible to control pollution. I am against using unproven science to cripple America’s energy production and economy.

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The Problem With Playing Politics With A Tragedy

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In the current world of the Internet, it would behoove politicians to look into past statements regarding a tragedy before making total fools of themselves.

Yesterday’s Daily Caller posted a story about comments made by Rhode Island’s Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse after the tornado outbreak in Oklahoma. Senator Whitehouse spent 15 minutes chastising GOP senators for denying the theory of anthropogenic global warming. The implication being, of course, that the tornadoes were the result of global warming and that if the Republicans would just acknowledge global warming, the tornadoes wouldn’t have happened. Right. He somehow forgot to mention that tornadoes in the middle of the country in the spring are more common that hurricanes on the east coast in the summer. But it gets better.

A blogger named Steven Goddard posted the following Newsweek article from April 1975:

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ScreenHunter_375 May. 20 18.51

This is the link to the entire article.

The Senator does not need to play politics with this tragedy. What he does need to do is to figure out a way to get aid to the people affected by creating a bill that will help them that does not include tons of pork-barrel spending. I strongly suggest that he devote his time to crafting that bill rather than citing science that has already been proven to be faulty.

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Faux Science

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John Hinderaker at Power Line posted an article yesterday about some recent facts that have come out regarding global warming. It seems that we have been misled.

The chart below is from the article. It shows the difference between the made-up numbers and the scientific numbers:

The article explains how geologist Shaun Marcott had created his graph by changing the dates of reported temperatures to get the results he wanted.

The article quotes the Financial Post:

Stephen McIntyre of climateaudit.org began examining the details of the Marcott et al. work, and by March 16 he had made a remarkable discovery. The 73 proxies were all collected by previous researchers, of which 31 are derived from alkenones, an organic compound produced by phytoplankton that settles in layers on ocean floors, and has chemical properties that correlate to temperature. …

According to the scientists who originally published the alkenone series, the core tops varied in age from nearly the present to over a thousand years ago. Fewer than 10 of the original proxies had values for the 20th century. Had Marcott et al. used the end dates as calculated by the specialists who compiled the original data, there would have been no 20th-century uptick in their graph, as indeed was the case in Marcott’s PhD thesis. But Marcott et al. redated a number of core tops, changing the mix of proxies that contribute to the closing value, and this created the uptick at the end of their graph. Far from being a feature of the proxy data, it was an artifact of arbitrarily redating the underlying cores.

The earth routinely goes through climate cycles. As of yet, scientists do not totally understand these cycles. However, I believe that the scientific method calls for a study of the facts in order to reach a conclusion–not altering the facts to reach a desired conclusion.

Just for the record, I am not for pollution. I think we have a responsibility as residents of earth to keep things as clean as possible. I do think, however, that we have to balance the well being of the residents of earth with the price of progress. The current environmental movement may desire a clean planet, but they have lost their sense of balance.

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Broken Hockey Sticks

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This is one of those articles I occasionally write where I know nothing about the subject. I am not a scientist, but I do have a fairly effective truth alarm. The source of this story is reliable, and I trust the judgment of the author.

John Hinderaker at Power Line posted an article today about the latest global warming panic. A group of climate alarmists headed by geologist Shaun Marcott has tried to resurrect Michael Mann’s discredited hockey stick and has.sounded the alarm that the temperature of the oceans is rising at an alarming rate.

The article at Power Line reports:

Now Steve McIntyre, who was principally responsible for showing that Mann’s original hockey stick was a fraud, has gone over Marcott’s data on the key proxies he uses for 20th century temperatures, ocean cores. McIntyre found that Marcott and his colleagues used previously published ocean core data, but have altered the dates represented by the cores, in some cases by as much as 1,000 years.

Statistics are amazing things, and by making minor changes in them, you can get them to tell any story you choose to tell.

This is the graph from the article:

I will make no attempt to explain the graph, but strongly suggest that you follow the link to the Power Line article to read John Hinderaker’s explanation. Mr. Hinderaker also relies on my favorite site for any real information on climate change, wattsupwiththat.

The bottom line here is simple. The numbers are being fudged. The obvious questions are, “Who is fudging the numbers?” and “Why are the numbers being fudged?” What do the scientific community and the politicians gain by convincing us we are doomed unless we listen to them and do exactly what they say (I think I just answered my own question)? Do we really want to give that kind of control to anyone? I would be a whole lot more impressed by their insistence that we listen to them if they were practicing what they preach. Has anyone calculated Al Gore or Barack Obama’s carbon footprints lately?

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About That Global Warming Thing…

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Again, the best site on the Internet for climate change information is wattsupwiththat.com. I strongly recommend that you visit that site any time you hear alarming news about global warming. It will give you the real information.

Meanwhile, UpNorthLive is reporting that a new ice island has formed in Lake Michigan.

The article reports:

An island has sprung up off the coast of Lake Michigan and this one isn’t made of dirt.

“It was just a bunch of blocks piled on top of each other and they were welded together with the wind and snow,” Outdoor enthusiast Josh Baker explained.

Over the weekend, Baker and his family stumbled across this giant island floating in Lake Michigan outside of the small town of Good Hart.

Sunday, he decided to climb the jagged, 15–foot ice mountain. Once he made it to the top, he noticed the structure was different on the other side.

“The side facing the lake was almost sheer, it was pretty neat. So the side I was on was all jumbled and the opposite side was just sheer down to the water,” Baker said.

That has to be an amazing sight! I guess we will have to wait another year for some serious global warming on Lake Michigan.

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The “Gore Effect” Strikes Again

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It seems that every time global warming believers try to get together for a rally or a government meeting it snows or we have record cold temperatures. This has become known as the “Gore effect.” Well, the Gore effect has struck again.

Politico is reporting today that the House Science, Space and Technology Committee announced that it’s postponing its environmental subcommittee’s scheduled 10 a.m. hearing on the state of the science behind climate change. As a reason, it cited “weather.” Washington is expecting as much as 11 inches of snow today and tonight.

The article reports:

The session was apparently designed to shore up the knowledge of subcommittee members ahead of expected new carbon regulations from President Barack Obama. As of Tuesday evening, a committee spokesman had insisted the show would go on.

From the start, the idea of holding a climate hearing during a paralyzing D.C. snowstorm seemed ripe for snarky comments.

Don’t buy into global warming science? Here’s your March snowstorm — call up Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and his grandchildren for help with your Al Gore igloo project.

In case you are a new reader of this blog, one of the best websites explaining what is actually happening with the earth’s climate is Anthony Watts’ site, WattsUpWithThat. I highly recommend it as an antidote to the climate change hysteria on the political left.

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Something To Think About As The Temperature Drops

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I am not a cold weather person. I think New England is a beautiful place, but I really am not a cold weather person. I’m not real fond of intense heat either–I enjoy my creature comforts. Thus, I love the following story.

Yesterday’s Washington Post posted a story about a study by Tulane University, Carnegie Mellon University, the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showing that air conditioning has played a major role in reducing deaths of Americans on extremely hot days by keeping them cool. That makes perfect sense.

The article reports:

The likelihood of a premature death on an extremely hot day between 1929 and 1959 was 2.5 percent, the academics found, dropping to less than 0.5 percent after 1960. The paper, which is under review at an academic journal, compared days on which temperatures exceeded 90 degrees Fahrenheit with days when they ranged between 60 and 69 degrees Fahrenheit.

Because the article is in the Washington Post, the article goes on to explain how air conditioning will help all of us survive global warming. Putting that aside, isn’t it ironic that the thing the global warming camp criticizes as being one of the causes of global warming also saves lives.

The article reports:

The study’s results could be particularly important for nations such as India, where only a small portion of the population has residential air conditioning. The typical person in India experiences 33 days per year where the temperature rises above 90 degrees Fahrenheit; that could increase by as much as 100 days by the end of the century, according to some climate projections.

Anand Patwardhan, a visiting professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland in College Park, said he expects home air conditioning to become more common in India, but not as a conscious response to global warming.

“While it is certainly the case that residential air-conditioning helps in reducing mortality due to temperature extremes, the rapid growth of air-conditioning in the past is perhaps more due to rising incomes and increasing affordability of air-conditioning,” he wrote in an e-mail.

First of all, global warming is a political hoax designed to take money from economically successful countries and give it to third world dictators who will spend it on themselves while their people starve (remember food for oil–it worked the same way). The best scientific source of information on global warming is a website called wattsupwiththat. I strongly recommend it.

Anyway, the fact is that as countries become more wealthy, they consume more energy. The only real way to lower energy consumption is to lower standards of living. Americans who buy into unproven global warming theories might want to consider whether it is worth lowering their standard of living based on an unproven theory.

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Some Interesting News From The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

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John Hinderaker at Power Line posted a story yesterday about the current draft of the report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The draft has been leaked and contains one very interesting paragraph.

This is the paragraph:

Many empirical relationships have been reported between GCR or cosmogenic isotope archives and some aspects of the climate system (e.g., Bond et al., 2001; Dengel et al., 2009; Ram and Stolz, 1999). The forcing from changes in total solar irradiance alone does not seem to account for these observations, implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link. We focus here on observed relationships between GCR and aerosol and cloud properties.

I am not a scientist, and to me that paragraph is a foreign language, but Mr. Hinderaker is kind enough to explain what it means.

He explains:

It shouldn’t be a surprise that variations in the Sun’s output are responsible, at least in part, for variations in Earth’s temperatures. The problem is that if you simply do the math on radiant heat, the known increase in solar activity during the second half of the 20th century accounts for only a small portion of the assumed increase in temperature over that period. So the alarmists have denied that the Sun plays a significant role. More recent work has strongly suggested that solar radiation plays a role above and beyond radiant heat, by influencing cloud cover, which is a key factor in temperature. Given the strong correlation between solar activity and temperature, this work has been persuasive.

The bottom line here is simple–we didn’t do it! The progress of civilization is not the major cause of global warming–the sun and the sun’s impact on cloud cover play a major role in global climate.

So what is really going on in the IPCC? The United Nations is no longer controlled by freedom-loving countries. It has been taken over by a block of third-world nations who feel that the developed nations of the world should finance the dictators and thugs running their countries. There is no concern here for science, truth, or preserving the planet. The concern is, “How can I get money to build a bigger house for myself while my people starve?” We saw that in the UN-run food-for-oil program in Iraq. Now we are seeing the same corruption in the blackmail attempts under the guise of combating ‘global warming.’

The entire leaked report (and more scientific analysis) can be found at wattsupwiththat.com. Please take the time to look at the leaked draft before it is changed!

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Climate Change Really Is All About Money

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This article is based on three articles, one posted at Power Line yesterday, one posted at Tulsa World on Saturday, and one posted at the Daily Caller yesterday. All three articles are related to the United Nations climate conference at Doha.

The article at Power Line quotes Walter Russell Mead in it’s closing remarks:

The Kyoto protocol, the ineffectual walking dead climate treaty, will lurch on for a few more years, toothless and brain dead. The rich countries yet again remain vague about what for most developing countries is the only real point of the whole thing, substituting vague pledges of good well for the annual $100 billion in green gold demand by the third world countries whose clueless militancy turned the General Assembly into a pointless sideshow decades ago.

The inexorable decline of the climate movement from its Pickett’s Charge at the Copenhagen summit continues. The global green lobby is more flummoxed than ever. These people and these methods couldn’t make a ham sandwich, much less save Planet Earth.

The Daily Caller reports:

However, the Kyoto extension — which lasts until 2020 — was only backed by 37 out of 194 countries, accounting for 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the German publication FOCUS magazine. There is still no clear deal on how much these countries would reduce their emissions.

Der Spiegel online also reports that only 37 countries have agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions beyond 2012, but that no reduction targets were specified.

Tulsa World reports some of the background on the United Nations and climate charge:

“Three years ago, President Obama helped create a United Nations Green Slush Fund that would redistribute over $100 billion from developed countries to developing countries,” Inhofe (U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe) said.

“While he has been racking up huge deficits and talking up tax increases, the president has already sent billions of American taxpayer dollars to the United Nations – and he’s managed to do it quietly so that no one will notice.”

The U.S. also subsidizes fossil fuel use – at five times the rate of alternative fuels, according to some sources – in developing countries, but those subsidies do not threaten the status quo.

In his video message to the Doha group, Inhofe quotes U.N. Climate Chief Christiana Figueres as saying her job involves “transformation” directed by “a centralized policy perspective.”

“This is the top U.N. climate chief,” Inhofe said. “She sees herself as the overseer of ‘transforming’ the lives of everyone on the planet.”

This is a worldwide redistribution of wealth program. I would be truly wise of the United States to refuse to cooperate.

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EPA Transparency

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Yesterday the Washington Times posted an article stating that the House of Representatives science committee has asked EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to turn over all information related to an email account under the name of “Richard Windsor.” The charge is that Ms. Jackson used an email alias to try to hide correspondence from open-government requests and her agency’s own internal watchdog.

The article reports:

The researcher who uncovered the “Richard Windsor” alias email, Christopher Horner, has repeatedly battled the administration over its global warming efforts.

Earlier this year he his colleagues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute sued to demand the release of emails from “secondary” accounts from EPA, and cited a memo saying the practice began during the Clinton administration under then-administrator Carol Browner.

Mr. Horner uncovered the existence of the secret emails while researching a book, “The Liberal War on Transparency,” published last month. Mr. Horner said after the book came out, two former EPA officials told him about the “Richard Windsor” email and said it was “one of the alternate email addresses she used.”

Using an alternate email address is contrary to the federal open-records laws. These laws are designed to make information available in the present time and in the future for the National Archives.

The article points out:

There are strict rules on the use of email addresses, and the rules prohibit using private emails to try to circumvent open-records laws.

There are differing opinions as to whether or not global warming is being confused with normal global climate cycles. The emails of the EPA regarding global warming should be part of the public record.

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When The Media Manufactures A Story

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There have been a number of incidents of data being altered by scientists claiming that global warming will kill us all yesterday. It is good to remember that these are many of the same scientists who in 1985 warned us of the coming Ice Age. Well, we are still here, and the weather warms and cools as it always has. Well, now some of the media people who support the theory of global warming have really gone over the edge.

On Thursday the Daily Caller posted a story about a blog called ThinkProgress that posted a picture of melting street lights in Oklahoma and claimed that the melting was due to global warming. It turns out that the melting was caused by a nearby dumpster fire–global warming had nothing to do with it, but the story didn’t end there. ThinkProgress corrected the story when they were informed of the truth. However, according to WattsUpWithThat Yahoo, which also ran the story, did not bother to correct it.

This is the related press release from Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma. The source is the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works. The heading of the Press Release (dated August 2) is “Inhofe Exposes Another Epic Fail by Global Warming Alarmists.”

Washington, D.C. – Today the far-left blog Think Progress posted a photo (originally posted on KFOR‘s facebook page) of street lights in Oklahoma that had melted, they claimed, because of extreme heat. Global warming alarmist Bill McKibben took to Twitter immediately to publicize what he believed to be proof of global warming, tweeting to Senator James Inhofe (Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, “Senator Inhofe, God may be trying to get your attention. Check out this picture.”

Not long after the picture surfaced, Oklahomans posted comments on Think Progress’ blog saying that these lights had melted due to a fire – which makes sense considering that the two front lights were melted while the two back lights remained unscathed. Once this news came to light, Think Progress immediately removed the post and provided an update that reads: “After we published this piece, we saw reports from people on the ground in Stillwater that the melting streetlights were due to a nearby fire. The person who took the photo, Patrick Hunter, described the scene: ‘Being the person that actually took this photo, I’d say that this was due to a fire semi-close by coupled with the unbelievable heat we are experiencing.’ Still an amazing photo and not fake as many are saying on here. Enjoy!”

This afternoon, KFOR confirmed that the melted lights in the photo were not caused by hot temperatures but a nearby dumpster fire.

“Poor Bill McKibben – he’s been trying to get something to melt for ages but it keeps backfiring,” Senator Inhofe said. “These alarmists never learn their lesson. Remember Bill McKibben was the one who was going to melt a giant ice sculpture in the shape of the word ‘hoax’ on the national mall, but his group had to cancel because there wasn’t enough interest. Now, after proclaiming that street lights in Oklahoma are melting because of global warming, we have confirmation that a fire caused this scene.

“Amid the resurgence of hysteria from my friends on the left, I appreciated climatologist Dr. John Christy who testified this week before the Environment and Public Works committee saying that instead of proclaiming this summer is ‘what global warming looks like’ it is ‘scientifically more accurate to say that this is what Mother Nature looks like, since events even worse than these have happened in the past before greenhouse gases were increasing like they are today.’

“This isn’t the first time alarmists have tried these stunts and it certainly won’t be the last – when will they finally realize they’ve lost this debate?”

After a while, you being to wonder why those who support global warming are willing to go to such lengths to prove their case even after much of their research has been proven wrong.

 

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The Earth Is Warmer Near The Air Conditioning Exhaust

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In August 2008, in the early days of this blog (rightwinggranny.com), I posted an article about surface stations–the measuring devices used to calculate changes in the earth’s temperature. The article linked to a website called surface stations.org, which posted pictures of various surface stations used to measure global temperatures.

For example:

The location of the air conditioning exhaust and the cell tower might have something to do with how the temperature at this particular surface station seems to be increasing.

Well, a few years later, a scientific type (which I am definitely not) has done further research.

WattsUpWithThat posted the following Press Release today:

A reanalysis of U.S. surface station temperatures has been performed using the recently WMO-approved Siting Classification System devised by METEO-France’s Michel Leroy. The new siting classification more accurately characterizes the quality of the location in terms of monitoring long-term spatially representative surface temperature trends. The new analysis demonstrates that reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward. The paper is the first to use the updated siting system which addresses USHCN siting issues and data adjustments.

The new improved assessment, for the years 1979 to 2008, yields a trend of +0.155C per decade from the high quality sites, a +0.248 C per decade trend for poorly sited locations, and a trend of +0.309 C per decade after NOAA adjusts the data. This issue of station siting quality is expected to be an issue with respect to the monitoring of land surface temperature throughout the Global Historical Climate Network and in the BEST network.

This is the image that appears in the article along with the Press Release:

I am not a scientific type. I do not claim to fully understand what I have read in this article or even what is shown by the pictures. I strongly suggest that you follow the link to WattsUpWithThat and read the article for yourself. I am pretty good at bottom lines, though, and the bottom line here seems to be that global warming is not happening at the frightening rate that we have been told it is happening. We can now all take a deep breath and continue on with life as we know it. I strongly suggest that we do try to be stewards of our beautiful planet, but I also strongly suggest that we don’t overreact to the fear mongering that has been going on in recent years.

In 1975 Newsweek warned us of the “Coming Ice Age.” Now we are warned of the global warming catastrophe. I think we can safely conclude that scientists really don’t know as much as they think they do.

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Some Perspective On The Current Heat Wave

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One of my favorite websites is WattsUpWithThat.com. It is a bit scientific for me, but it has one of the most down-to-earth, practical views on global warming I can find. Yesterday WattsUpWithThat posted an article with their take on the current heat wave. The article included this picture:

The comment underneath the picture was blunt:

This is weather, not climate. It is caused by a persistent blocking high pressure pattern. In a day or two, that red splotch over the eastern USA will be gone.

Every summer temperatures climb. There may be climate change due to climate cycles that have been with us since the Earth was formed.,but we have had heat waves since I was a small child (back in the age of dinosaurs). There was a recent article noting that there has been global warming on Mars. If this is the case, I would tend to look at the sun as the culprit–not carbon dioxide or SUV‘s.

In case you are like charts better than pictures, this is the weather in June over the past 30 years or so:

I’m really not worried about global warming yet.

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Whoops!

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On June 15th, WattsUpWithThat posted a graph of climate predictions made in 1988 contrasted with what has actually occurred. This is the graph:

Figure 1: Temperature forecast Hansen’s group from the year 1988. The various scenarios are 1.5% CO 2 increase (blue), constant increase in CO 2 emissions (green) and stagnant CO 2 emissions (red). In reality, the increase in CO 2 emissions by as much as 2.5%, which would correspond to the scenario above the blue curve. The black curve is the ultimate real-measured temperature (rolling 5-year average). Hansen’s model overestimates the temperature by 1.9 ° C, which is a whopping 150% wrong. Figure supplemented by Hansen et al. (1988) .

As the chart clearly shows, there was definitely something wrong with their calculations.

The article concludes:

The CO 2 emissions since 2000 to about 2.5 percent per year has increased, so that we would expect according to the Hansen paper a temperature rise, which should be stronger than in model A. Figure 1 shows the three Hansen scenarios and the real measured global temperature curve are shown. The protruding beyond Scenario A arrow represents the temperature value that the Hansen team would have predicted on the basis of a CO 2 increase of 2.5%. Be increased according to the Hansen’s forecast, the temperature would have compared to the same level in the 1970s by 1.5 ° C. In truth, however, the temperature has increased by only 0.6 ° C.

It is apparent that the next to it by the Hansen group in 1988 modeled temperature prediction by about 150%. It is extremely regrettable that precisely this type of modeling of our politicians is still regarded as a reliable climate prediction.

This is more science than I am comfortable dealing with, but the bottom line is simple–they got it wrong. The politicians in many countries are still using these faulty predictions as an excuse to grab more power and limit the ability of their citizens to prosper. It’s time we held them accountable for their reliance on faulty information. The global warming debate was never about saving the planet–it was about more government control.

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The Agenda Behind The Myth Of Global Warming

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Today’s Washington Examiner posted a story about the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development to be held in Rio next week.

The article reports on one agenda item at the conference:

“We recognize that subsidies for non-renewable energy development should be eliminated and replaced with a global tax on the production of energy from non-renewable energy sources,” the UN draft agenda, amended by non-governmental organizations at the invitation of the UN, says. “The income of this tax should be allocated to renewable energy development.” The draft agenda was obtained by the Center for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a group skeptical of the UN’s position on global warming.

There is no proof of global warming or that man contributes to it. This is simply a way to redistribute the weath of countries that have prospered to countries that have not prospered. Generally speaking, countries that have prospered are countries with private property rights, freedom, and free economies not controlled by their governments. If the UN really wanted to bring prosperity to the poorer nations of the world, shouldn’t they be working toward establishing freedom in the countries where poverty is rampant?

The article further reports:

CFACT reported in December that negotiators at the UN conference on climate change in Durban, South Africa, discussed the future implementation of “a new tax on every foreign currency transaction in the world,” that would disproportionately fall on the United States because “transactions within the Eurozone won’t have to pay this new tax.”

It really is time for the United States to get out of the United Nations.

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Things Are Not Going Well For The Global Warming Crowd

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Last Saturday the Miami Herald posted a story about some delays Shell Oil is experiencing as it is poised to begin drilling for oil in the Arctic.

The article reports:

The summer ice melt in the Arctic has often reached record levels in recent years in what many scientists believe is a sign of climate change. But this year a high pressure zone over the coast of Alaska, low winter temperatures and certain ocean currents have combined to bring unusually large amounts of ice not only to Alaska’s northern coast, but farther south in the Bering Sea as well, National Weather Service officials said.
“I do think it’s going to be a slow breakup this year,” Kathleen Cole, sea ice program leader for the weather service, told the Los Angeles Times.
The result is that while Canadian waters in the far northern Atlantic have relatively low ice levels, Alaska is an iceberg – at least for now.

I guess Alaska didn’t get the message about global warming. The bottom line here is that man does not control the weather and has a very limited impact on it. There are natural climate cycles that the earth goes through (there was a period of global warming in the Middle Ages–long before the industrial revolution). Somehow it all evens out.

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Were The Feudal Lords Driving SUV’s ?

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Yesterday the U.K. Daily Mail posted a story that will create some problems for those who believe that global warming is man-made and caused by our use of carbon fuels. Recent evidence shows that global warming occurred in the Middle Ages in many areas of the world.

The article reports:

A team of scientists led by geochemist Zunli Lu from Syracuse University in New York state, has found that contrary to the ‘consensus’, the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ approximately 500 to 1,000 years ago wasn’t just confined to Europe.

In fact, it extended all the way down to Antarctica – which means that the Earth has already experience global warming without the aid of human CO2 emissions.

Whoops.

Professor Lu based his conclusions on a rare mineral called ikaite, which forms in cold waters.

The article explains:

It turns out the water that holds the crystal structure together – called the hydration water – traps information about temperatures present when the crystals formed.

This finding by Lu’s research team establishes, for the first time, ikaite as a reliable way to study past climate conditions

The article further reports:

The scientists were particularly interested in crystals found in layers deposited during the ‘Little Ice Age,’ approximately 300 to 500 years ago, and during the Medieval Warm Period before it.

Both climate events have been documented in Northern Europe, but studies have been inconclusive as to whether the conditions in Northern Europe extended to Antarctica.

Lu’s team found that in fact, they did.

Now that we have a reliable way of studying past climate conditions, we may be able to actually understand the things that do actually impact our global temperatures.

 

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Whoops! I Guess They Were Wrong Again

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Three Polar bears approach the USS Honolulu, 2...

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The Register, a British website, reported today that scientists have now discovered that the increasing amount of fresh water being added to the Arctic Sea is not due to glaciers melting but to an eastward shift in the path of the Russian runoff through the Arctic Ocean.

The article reports:

The team attributes the redistribution to an eastward shift in the path of Russian runoff through the Arctic Ocean, which is tied to an increase in the strength of the Northern Hemisphere’s west-to-east atmospheric circulation, known as the Arctic Oscillation. The resulting counterclockwise winds changed the direction of ocean circulation, diverting upper-ocean freshwater from Russian rivers away from the Arctic’s Eurasian Basin, between Russia and Greenland, to the Beaufort Sea in the Canada Basin bordered by the United States and Canada. The stronger Arctic Oscillation is associated with two decades of reduced atmospheric pressure over the Russian side of the Arctic.

This is another example of the fact that we really don’t as much as we need to know about climate science and man’s impact on climate. That is another reason to be very careful about what we do to solve a problem that we do not fully understand. All the suggested solutions to ‘global warming’ involve a major redistribution of wealth in the world–oddly enough from free countries with private property rights to dictatorships with no private property rights. To take money from countries where people are free and give it to tyrants who rule countries where people are not free does not help global warming or anything else. It does nothing to address the needs of the poorest people in the world–it simply improves the lifestyles of the crooks that lead them.

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Starting A Trade War With Carbon Credits

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An Icelandair Boeing 757-200 takes off from Lo...

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CNS News is reporting today that starting January 1, all American airlines flying into European airports will be be liable for charges for emitting greenhouse gases blamed for “global warming.”

The article reports:

Under an E.U. directive that comes into effect in just 10 days, airlines using European airports will be allocated tradable allowances covering a certain amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted each year, based on historical emissions data. CO2 emissions beyond the allowance must be paid for, and airlines can trade permits among themselves depending on how much carbon they produce.

Proponents say aviation accounts for three percent of total greenhouse gas emissions.

Please read the sentence above again.

If you are a believer in global warming, there is an aspect of this you need to keep in mind. Paying an extra $10 to $52 a ticket to fly to Europe actually has no impact on pollution–it is a way for someone to collect money from your activities. If the surtax decreases the number of people flying to Europe, it means fewer people in each plane, thus each person in the plane has a bigger carbon footprint–not a smaller one! It is the equivalent of your going up to someone and saying, “If you pay me five dollars, I won’t take a shower today and that will help the planet.” It won’t make a significant difference, and depending on what your daily activities are, it might even make your corner of the planet a little less pleasant.

Global warming, unfortunately, is about redistribution of wealth. The science is not settled and the people pushing the panic button have an agenda other than the welfare of the planet. As I have stated before, one of the best sources on the current science of climate change is wattsupwiththat. It is a very scientifically oriented site and is quite often well over my head, but there are great charts and graphs explaining what is actually going on with the earth’s climate–both now and in the past.

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