Warwick Hughes and others have been banging on for a long time about urban heat island effects as a distorting influence on global temperature measurements. They mostly exhibit the problem by comparing urban and non-urban records. A reader has however just sent in a much more direct comment on the problem -- as follows:
I'd like to relate a story that will confirm your observations regarding value of surface temperature variations. I went to the NOAA station open house in Oxnard Oct, 23, 2003. During the tour I asked if they are continually annoyed by having to move their sensor packages in response to encroaching urbanism. The reply absolutely floored me. They do not move the sensors, they "adjust" the data to reflect their best guess impacts. The specific case of the LA downtown "civic center" location was mentioned as being many degrees (F) to a dozen degrees more extreme (up and down) in absolute recorded temperatures (mostly hotter) than when the scientist telling us this first joined the NOAA. There you have it, any evidence of global warming from US surface temperature data is worthless.
I hope I don't need to point out how hopelesly unscientific the above NOAA procedure is. Given such careless procedures, the entire warming effect that is usually quoted could well be an a measurement artifact. And as urban centres expand, we would EXPECT average temperatures so recorded to go up year by year
DOUBLESPEAK ABOUT POLAR BEARS
An heroic attempt below to create a story out of nothing without actually lying. Note the bits highlighted in red. The scare is of course an old one which I have dealt with on a number of occasions previously. See for example here
Global warming may be forcing polar bears into cannibalism and suicidal swims as the temperature change melts away their home, some researchers claim. The reports, described in a news story this week's issue of the research journal Nature, are unproven, the article said. "Experts say it is too early to be sure, but that these are the kind of impacts expected as melting sea ice leaves the bears with longer distances to travel," the report added.
Some of the reports came from a biennial conference on the biology of sea mammals in San Diego, California, last week, the article said. At the meeting, marine biologists from the U.S. Minerals Management Service reported finding four bears drowned off the northern coast of Alaska last autumn, according to Nature.
They also spotted an unusually large number of bears swimming in the open sea, some as far as 95 kilometres offshore, the report claimed-types of swim for which they're poorly adapted. Twenty percent of bears seen in the area in September were in the water, Nature cited the scientists saying, while records from previous years show that 4 percnet of sighted bears were swimming.
Tonje Folkestad, climate-change officer at the World Wildlife Fund's Arctic programme in Oslo, Norway, told Nature that "We can't say at the moment that there is a trend for polar bears to drown. But we do expect to see more of this kind of event in the future." Spending more time in the open sea increases bears' exposure to the risks of the effect of cold, exhaustion or rough seas. "Common sense tells you that if they have to swim 60 miles instead of 20, drowning is more likely," Folkestad told the journal.
Folkestad added that melting Arctic ice, the main habitat for polar bears, presents major problems for them. The Arctic ice sheet is shrinking at a about 10 percent per decade, with Arctic summer temperatures climbing to around 2 degrees Celsius higher than they were 50 years ago. About 1.3 million square kilometres, an area equivalent to three times that of California, have been lost over the past four years.
Rangers in Yakutia, northeastern Russia, saw two incidents of one bear killing another, with some media reports claiming that starving bears were practicing "cannibalism," Nature noted. "These observations are not rare or extraordinary in themselves," Folkestad told Nature. "What was unusual was the lack of sea ice in the area."
Source
OUTRAGEOUS GREENIE HIT ON THE TAXPAYERS' POCKETS
Badly needed new road obstructed all the way
Queensland taxpayers will be forced to pay an extra $150 million for the Gold Coast Tugun bypass to protect endangered plants and animals, including a rare frog. Tough new conditions imposed by the NSW Government led to the huge extra cost. The 50 conditions and rising construction prices mean the cost of the bypass will rise from $360 million to as much as $510 million.
But the NSW Government has flatly refused to help fund the increased cost, despite Queensland Premier Peter Beattie blaming it for part of the cost blowout. But Mr Beattie vowed to push ahead with the road and said extra money would be borrowed if necessary to ensure work started in March. He joined NSW Premier Morris Iemma at Tweed Heads yesterday to announce NSW Government planning approval for the long-awaited road, which should halt the area's infamous gridlock.
The approval ends 18 months of interstate wrangling over the bypass, first proposed eight years ago. Only about 2km of the 7km bypass route is in NSW but the Iemma Government will own the road and Queensland taxpayers will have to foot the maintenance bill for the first 10 years.
Two years ago, the NSW Government blocked the so-called C4 bypass route because of fears for orchids, potoroos and the endangered wallum sedge frog.
Mr Iemma said yesterday his Government had given the bypass planning approval but with 50 "stringent environmental controls". They include building tunnels for endangered mammals and frogs, the preservation of an 80ha site to conserve threatened species including the common planigale native mouse and a cultural heritage management plan to protect ancient Aboriginal sites. There will also be a network of drains to allow unhindered groundwater movement. Mr Iemma defended the conditions as necessary to protect the area's "ecological and cultural heritage".
More here
POLLUTION IS GOOD FOR YOU!
Cleaning the air could accelerate global warming, according to a new study. The particles in the soot and haze from industrial and domestic fires, called aerosols, cause respiratory diseases and other health problems for people in polluted areas, including many Asian cities. But aerosols also dim the sky over land and sea, and so cool the planet. By scattering and absorbing sunlight - how much depends on the particles' size and optical properties - they prevent the Earth from heating up more than it already has owing to the greenhouse effect.
The balance between the two effects has been a wildcard in climate predictions. In its last report, published in 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) could put only a broad range of possible values on aerosol cooling. Now researchers at the UK Met Office in Exeter and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, have provided the first calculation based on observations, rather than models. The team concludes that the cooling effect of aerosols is probably at the high end of IPCC estimates. So cleaning the air will lead to substantial warming. Without aerosols for example, since 1900 the planet might have warmed at least an additional 0.3 °C above the 0.7 °C rise that actually happened.
The team, led by Met Office researcher Nicolas Bellouin, calculated the amount of aerosols in the air using data from NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites and observations made from aircraft. The researchers then calculated how much light that material would absorb. They publish the results in Nature this week. The result is the most comprehensive measurement of soot so far. "This is a very timely addition to modellers' work," says Meinrat Andreae, an atmospheric scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Recent models have pointed to a huge range of effects from aerosols, he says. Observations will help sort out the confusion.
In a recent model of his own, Andreae concluded that without aerosol cooling, global temperatures could rise between 6 and 10 °C by 2100 - well beyond current IPCC predictions. Aerosols partly disguise the sensitivity of our climate to rising levels of greenhouse gases, he says. Soot and haze could be even more cooling than Bellouin's team calculates, says Andreae. Aerosols affect other climate properties, such as cloud formation, the effects of which have yet to be measured.
Industrial aerosol emissions have dropped in the United States and Europe since 1990. Worldwide, however, Asia's economic growth is feeding a modest upward trend in their output. But Asian emissions are growing less sharply than was expected, thanks to policies such as a switch to clean energy in the industrial areas around Beijing and Shanghai.
Source
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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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