Tag Archives: Watts Up With That?

The Supreme Court Gets It Right

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The role the courts have assumed in our government is not in line with what the Founding Fathers envisioned. We were supposed to be governed by elected officials that we could hold accountable in elections–not by courts and unelected bureaucrats.

On Sunday, Watts Up With That posted an article about a recent 8-0 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The article reports:

In a rare but resounding act of judicial sanity, the Supreme Court of the United States has delivered an 8-0 ruling that reins in one of the most abused weapons in the bureaucratic arsenal: environmental obstructionism. The case, Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, stemmed from a challenge to a planned railway in Utah, a project that environmentalists attempted to kneecap through endless litigation under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). In a time when green tape has been weaponized to stall or cancel everything from pipelines to housing, this decision marks a turning point—and it’s worth celebrating.

Let’s start with the heart of the ruling. Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh emphasized that,

“NEPA does not allow courts, ‘under the guise of judicial review’ of agency compliance with NEPA, to delay or block agency projects based on the environmental effects of other projects separate from the project at hand”.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/23-975_m648.pdf

Translation: judges can’t play fortune teller and block infrastructure because of speculative “ripple effects” on theoretical future projects. In other words, environmental lawfare just hit a serious snag.

This case was triggered by the Surface Transportation Board’s approval of an 88-mile railway to carry crude oil from Utah’s Uinta Basin to the national rail network. Eagle County, Colorado, and its usual cast of green litigators tried to stop the project, arguing that the environmental review should have considered other hypothetical projects or downstream effects that may—or may not—result from this railway’s existence.

But the Court decisively said no. Agencies aren’t expected to possess clairvoyant powers. As Kavanaugh clarified,

“The fact that the project might foreseeably lead to the construction or increased use of a separate project does not mean the agency must consider that separate project’s environmental effects”.

The article concludes:

For too long, infrastructure has been hostage to hypotheticals, paralyzed by process. This ruling loosens those chains. And that’s a victory not just for Utah’s railway, but for every American who still believes in building things.

Here’s to the rare sound of a gavel striking in favor of progress.

Here’s to getting back to legislation passed by Congress and not regulations passed by bureaucrats.

An Island Is Drowning?

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Recently, Anthony Watts at WattsUpWithThat posted an article about the island of Cartí Sugdupu in Panama. The BBC recently posted an article claiming that the island is sinking because of climate change. Evidently, that is not the case.

The article reports:

The BBC’s recent article “Climate change: The Panama community that fled its drowning island,” claims that the island of Cartí Sugdupu in Panama is being swallowed by rising sea levels due to climate change. This is false. The reality is that the island’s inhabitants are not being forced to relocate because of rising oceans, but due to overcrowding, poor infrastructure, and a lack of resources—issues that have nothing to do with climate change. Furthermore, real-world examples and peer-reviewed research contradict the idea that small islands are disappearing due to rising seas. Instead, many islands are growing, adapting, and naturally shifting over time. The BBC’s report is misleading at best, deliberately deceptive at worst.

Cartí Sugdupu is one of Panama’s San Blas Islands, home to the indigenous Guna people. The BBC’s article, painting a picture of climate-induced displacement, completely ignores the fact that the island is severely overcrowded, with more than 1,000 people packed into a tiny space of just 0.028 square miles. That’s a population density higher than New York City! The primary reason the residents are moving is not rising sea levels, but poor living conditions, lack of fresh water, and a shortage of space—issues that have been pressing for decades.

The article concludes:

The real reason for the relocation of Cartí Sugdupu’s residents has nothing to do with climate change. Instead, it comes down to basic infrastructure challenges:

  • Overpopulation – As seen in the head photograph, the island is overcrowded, with nowhere to expand. Unlike coral atolls that naturally grow, Cartí Sugdupu is an isolated, heavily inhabited island with no room for additional housing or development.
  • Lack of Freshwater and Sanitation – Many small islands struggle with freshwater availability. The BBC ignores this and instead attributes all hardships to climate change.
  • Economic and Government Decisions – Panama’s government is relocating the residents as part of a planned move, not an emergency evacuation due to rising waters.

The BBC’s reporting is a prime example of climate alarmism dressed up as journalism, with the organization pushing a narrative, while ignoring crucial facts. Rather than investigating the real reasons behind Cartí Sugdupu’s relocation—overpopulation, lack of infrastructure, and government decisions—the BBC misleadingly claims climate change is forcing its residents to relocate. It is the government that has made that decision, and not because the seas are rising at a historically unusual rate. The BBC ignores peer-reviewed research disproving its claim that islands are disappearing, fails to mention historical sea level trends, and omits crucial local factors that explain the island’s challenges. This isn’t objective reporting—it is activism disguised as news. The BBC’s audience deserves better, it deserves the truth.

Please follow the link to the article. At the top of the article is a picture, I believe, of the island. There isn’t even enough space on that island to breathe! This is another incident where a media outlet has chosen a narrative over actual facts.

Don’t Let Science Get In The Way Of Your Agenda

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The Church and science have been at odds in the past, but I really thought that times had changed. Well, I guess they haven’t. This article is based on two sources, one is an article posted at the Daily Caller today and the other was posted at the U.K. Independent today.

The article at the Daily Caller states that the data from the climate stations in the United States reveals that we have been in a ten-year cooling period. (There are people in the midwest and New England who would most definitely agree with that statement). NOAA has adjusted those numbers to make it appear that there has been no cooling period.

The article at the Daily Caller reports:

NOAA’s latest temperature update did not include USCRN (U.S. Surface Climate Observing Reference Networks) data. One reason for this may be that the USCRN stations only have about a decade of data on them, which could be considered too short of a time period to use them in their analysis.

It should also be noted that USCRN only covers the U.S., including Hawaii and Alaska, but the rest of the world lacks these high quality weather stations that don’t require temperatures to go through ex post facto adjustments by NOAA.

Skeptics, however, argue that USCRN data could deflate future arguments of rapid warming made by NOAA and others.

“So, since this state of the art network requires no adjustment, we can most surely trust the data presented by it. Right?” Watts (Anthony Watts, a veteran meteorologist and publisher of the science blog Watts Up With That) asked.

“While we seldom if ever see the USCRN mentioned in NOAA’s monthly and annual ‘State of the Climate’ reports to the U.S. public, buried in the depths of the [National Climatic Data Center] website, one can get access to the data and have it plotted,” Watts added. “We now have 10 years, a decade, of good data from this network and we are able to plot it.”

The bottom line here is that if you don’t manipulate the data, the areas of earth where we can get accurate temperature measurements have been cooling for the past ten years.

The article at the U.K. Independent dealt with the content of an upcoming Papal speech detailing the dire threat of climate change. I am truly surprised that the Pope has waded into the middle of this discussion.

The article at the U.K. Independent states:

Pope Francis is also extremely concerned about the prospect of mass migration of animals, plants and humans as global warming means they cannot function in their traditional habitat.

He calls for a new global political authority tasked with tackling the reduction of pollution and the development of poor countries and regions.

Although he accepts that there may be some natural causes of global warming, the pope lays most of the blame for climate change squarely at the feet of mankind.

“Humanity is called to take note of the need for changes in lifestyle and changes in methods of production and consumption to combat this warming or at least the human causes that produce and accentuate it,” he wrote.

The pope is very critical of anybody who stands in the way of tackling the problem of global warming – whether they are merely indifferent or actively sceptical.

“The attitudes that stand in the way of a solution, even among believers, range from negation of the problem, to indifference, to convenient resignation or blind faith in technical solutions,” he wrote.

It is unfortunate that the Pope has chosen to further the myth of man-made global warming. The Bible commands man to be stewards of the environment–it requires that man be responsible in using the earth’s resources. There is nothing about man being able to influence climate. The push to end global warming is nothing more than a push toward one-world control of world finances and resources combined with an attempt to blackmail those countries that are prosperous.

If the Pope truly wants to combat global poverty (as countries become more prosperous, they generally become more environmentally conscious) and help fight world poverty, he needs to come out in favor of private property rights. There are two things that economically successful countries have in common–one is equality under the law and the other is private property rights (see rightwinggranny). The problem is not greed or materialism–it’s government control of what should be free markets. A free-market economy benefits the rich and the poor. That would be a Papal doctrine I could support. Unfortunately, those people who like to be in control are generally against giving away that much freedom.

It’s Getting Harder To Know Who To Believe

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Yes, I know that should be ‘whom’ to believe, but who sounds better. Steven Hayward posted an article at Power Line today about another scientific fraud. For those of you who still believe that you are responsible for global warming, please see any post at wattsupwiththat to find out how climate scientists have been fudging their data. For those of you concerned about statistical information concerning support for gay marriage, stay tuned.

The article at Power Line states:

New York magazine has a terrific piece up this weekend that tells the whole story of how the Green-LaCour Science magazine article on changing support for gay marriage by way of a canvas was exposed as a fraud—by another graduate student. It’s a long piece, but worth an extra-grande latte and a good slow read. In addition to the details of the fraud itself—which involved LaCour fabricating emails with a non-existent senior executive at the survey company he said he used—there are some clear subtexts of this article that reveal endemic problems within the world of academic political science.

The article at Power Line is complex and takes time to read. It is worth it to take the time to read the entire article, but if you are impatient, this is the conclusion:

Even if the data had been gathered legitimately, there is simply no way to assure data quality in a survey exercise of this sort, and by its very design it likely pre-determined the outcome. Even if legitimate, this study was close to useless for the serious business of settling our moral disagreements about gay marriage. That ought to be as much of a scandal to academic political science as fake data. For all of its statistical sophistication, this study was entirely superficial.

By the way, for further reading, here is the devastating review (PDF file) of the LaCour-Green paper that Broockman and two co-authors produced.

Again, the things that we are told are scientific facts are not always as they are explained to us. It is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish science from politics.

 

About That Global Warming Thing

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A picture is worth 1,000 words. This picture is from the U.K. Telegraph. They posted it on Saturday.

In my opinion, the best website for honest information on global warming, climate change, etc. is wattsupwiththat.com. It is scientific, but generally things are explained in a way that those of us who are not scientifically minded can understand them.

Climate change has happened on the earth since the earth began. Man is not in control of the earth’s climate. There is a very strong possibility that TIME Magazine was right when it reported in the 1980’s that we were entering another Ice Age. The only thing we can be sure of is that over time, the earth’s climate changes. We have not yet put together successful scientific models to tell us when and how the climate is changing. We simply do not know as much as some people like to think we know.

 

They Really Aren’t Melting

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On Saturday, WattsUpWithThat posted an article about the Himalayan glaciers. These glaciers were supposed to melt by 2035 according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Well, the glaciers are simply not cooperating.

Here is the picture:

himalayan_glaciers_stable

Please follow the link to the article to read the details–I myself have a very unscientific brain, and the picture works better.

Global warming (and cooling) are a natural process is the history of the earth. During the warming period in the Middle Ages, there were not a lot of SUV‘s around to create the problem. The current panic over global warming is simply a tool to take money away from people who have earned it in free societies and give the money to people who have not earned it in dictatorships and tyrannies.

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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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Yes, It Really Is Cold Outside

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Route 3 southbound in Crofton, MD during a lat...

Image via Wikipedia

On Saturday, November 5, my favorite scientific site, wattsupwiththat, posted a story stating that the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) data shows that the United States has experienced cooler summers and colder winters in the past 10 years.

The article featured the chart below.

As anyone who regularly reads this blog knows, I hate cold weather. Now I know that the fact that I am convinced that I am freezing most of the time in New England is not just my imagination.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. There are all kinds of charts showing changes in temperature in America over the past century. The bottom line is very simple–global warming is a myth. We don’t need to cripple the American economy due to junk science!

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Another Global Warming Ooops

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A helicopter is taking off Greenland Ice Sheet

Image via Wikipedia

On September 17, WattsUpWithThat posted a story about the growing number of complaints about the new Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World. The Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) disputes the information about Greenland given in the Atlas.

The article at WattsUpWithThat reports:

“There is no scientific evidence that the area of the Greenland ice sheet since 1999 has shrunk by 15% as the latest edition of the ‘Times Atlas shows,” says climate researcher Ruth Mottram, DMI.

The article further reports:

The error may have occurred if katograferne from the ‘Times Atlas have used satellite images of Greenland to assess ice spatial distribution.

“When I look at satellite images of Greenland, it looks real enough dark along the coast, but that does not mean that the ice has disappeared” says climate researcher and continues: “The dark color is caused by dirt, dust and volcanic ash that makes the ice dark especially in Southeast Greenland. “

I am not by any means a scientific type, but I can understand the mistake. It’s always easier to draw the conclusions that back-up your pet theory. However, when your pet theory has the potential to ruin the global economy, maybe it’s time to reconsider.

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