Antarctica 4 °C warmer 130,000 years ago

And pretty much all important organisms were the same 130,000 years ago as what they are today

According to a new paper, "The deuterium excess records of EPICA Dome C and Dronning Maud Land ice cores (East Antarctica)", by B. Stenni and 14 European co-authors -- which was published in Quaternary Science Reviews 29 (2010) -- new high-resolution ice core data from two sites in eastern Antarctica show temperature proxies more than 4°C higher during the last interglacial (~130,000 years ago) than the present interglacial.



The high resolution data provides more accurate determination of the temperature proxies, shown at lower left of each graph above.

Unless you are a young Earth creationist, it should be obvious to you that the paper shows that comments that 4 °C or even 2 °C of warming would be threatening for life don't seem compatible with the reconstructions of the climate. Pretty much all important organisms were the same 130,000 years ago as what they are today.

The graph shows that the typical maximum-minimum temperature difference associated with the glaciation cycles is as high as 12 °C, at least at various places. Any man-made correction that is much smaller than that should simply be viewed as unimportant - a tiny modification within the natural variability. Still, there will be people who will never be convinced by any empirical evidence.

In his article "Reluctance to let go", Sean Carroll urged the mankind to eliminate both religions and global warming realists. He doesn't seem to realize that the mental defects that lead him to his proclamations about the climate are at least as irrational as the spiritual drivers that lead other people to religions such as Christianity. And the Academia is unfortunately contaminated by thousands of similar Carrolls.

SOURCE





Currents and Current Cooling

Excerpt from another report on the IPCC4 conference

For years now, alarmists have arrogantly ignored the cooling we’ve experienced worldwide since 1999, continuing their demands that we sacrifice everything – jobs, money, comfort, progress and ultimately, freedom -- to halt fictitious “runaway global warming.” Such unfounded hysteria seems all the more inane after hearing the unvarnished truth from the experts at ICCC-4, beginning with their predictions that the global cooling will likely continue for the next few decades.

Geologist Don Easterbrook was one of many attending scientists attributing natural climate variations to solar irradiance and deep ocean currents. His ICCC-4 announced paper, The Looming Threat of Global Cooling, noted the undeniable link between the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) shifting to its warm mode in 1915 and 1977 and global warming resulting both times. Conversely, in 1945 and 1999 the PDO moved to its cool mode and the globe cooled right along, despite a rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 during the period. What’s more, climate changes in the geologic record show a regular pattern of alternate warming and cooling with a 25-30 year period for the past 500 years. Easterbrook thereby concludes that we should “expect global cooling for the next 2-3 decades that will be far more damaging than global warming would have been.”


Fig. 1 – From Don Easterbrook. Since 1900, global temperatures have closely correlated with the PDO Index. This belies AGW and portends a coming big chill

Easterbrook noted a strong correlation between PDO and solar activity, as did geophysicist Victor Manuel Velasco Herrara, who believes an even longer cold spell (60-80 years) has begun -- triggered by a decrease in solar activity. Habibullo Abdussamatov agrees, and illustrated how the 18 Little Ice Ages that occurred in the past 7500 years can all be attributed to “natural bicentennial variations in the average annual values of the total solar irradiance (TSI)” and its secondary subsequent feedback effects (natural changes in the albedo, water vapor abundance, etc.). Abdussamatov demonstrated that each time the TSI reached a peak (up to 0.2%) a period of global warming began “with a time lag of 15±6 years defined by the thermal inertia of the Ocean (despite the absence of anthropogenic influence).” Contrarily, “each deep bicentennial descent in the TSI caused a Little Ice Age.” Based on the present cycle, the astrophysicist expects “the beginning of the new Little Ice Age epoch approximately in 2014.”

Hurricane specialist William Gray also brought along some mighty convincing charts proving that most of the warming experienced in the past thousand years can be attributed to deep ocean circulations, strengthened and weakened by century-scale salinity variations. While the relationship of Sea Surface Temperatures to evaporation, rainfall and wind patterns, albedo and, ultimately, air temperature is complex and beyond the scope of this article, suffice it to say that this translates to ocean – not carbon -- driven global temperatures.

Gray believes the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a result of a multi-century slowdown of the Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC), similar to that experienced in the 20th century and corresponded to similar warming. Conversely, the Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of stronger than average MOC, as we are beginning to see today. Gray, too, predicts that strengthening ocean currents portend global cooling over the next few decades, even as carbon dioxide levels continue to climb.

So how is it that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center just declared this year’s January-May period the warmest on record?

“If we torture the data long enough, it will confess”

AT readers are no doubt well aware that, thanks in large part to the efforts of WUWT’s indefatigable Anthony Watts, we’ve known for years that over 90% of American stations misreport temperature data by between 1ºC and 5ºC. Furthermore, “smoothing” adjustments to “homogenize” station data to that of surrounding stations and dismissal of the biasing phenomenon known as the Urban Heat Island Effect have grossly exaggerated 20th-century warming.

Not coincidentally, Dr. Craig Loehle concluded that after subtracting UHIE and other measurement artifacts, a 59 year natural cycle of warming and cooling remains. And while that cycle matches that of the PDO to a tee, the MSM respond as though only “deniers” could possibly suggest a link.

But last November we learned just how far ideologues at England’s Climate Research Unit were willing to go when glaring evidence that its scientists had doctored climate data to remove previous warm periods from the history books while exaggerating modern warming and suppressing modern cooling surfaced.

And further investigation uncovered by a team lead by ICCC-4 presenter Joe D’Aleo revealed that the two primary U.S. sources of global temperature have also been manipulating land-based instrumental readings. NOAA has been strategically deleting cherry-picked, cooler-reporting weather observation stations from the temperature data and NASA has intentionally replaced the dropped NOAA readings with those of stations located in much warmer locales.

More HERE




It takes Britain for extremes of nuttiness

Firms paid to shut down wind farms when the wind is blowing!

Britain's biggest wind farm companies are to be paid not to produce electricity when the wind is blowing. Energy firms will receive thousands of pounds a day per wind farm to turn off their turbines because the National Grid cannot use the power they are producing.

Critics of wind farms have seized on the revelation as evidence of the unsuitability of turbines to meet the UK's energy needs in the future. They claim that the 'intermittent' nature of wind makes such farms unreliable providers of electricity.

The National Grid fears that on breezy summer nights, wind farms could actually cause a surge in the electricity supply which is not met by demand from businesses and households. The electricity cannot be stored, so one solution – known as the 'balancing mechanism' – is to switch off or reduce the power supplied.

The system is already used to reduce supply from coal and gas-fired power stations when there is low demand. But shutting down wind farms is likely to cost the National grid – and ultimately consumers – far more. When wind turbines are turned off, owners are being deprived not only of money for the electricity they would have generated but also lucrative 'green' subsidies for that electricity.

The first successful test shut down of wind farms took place three weeks ago. Scottish Power received £13,000 for closing down two farms for a little over an hour on 30 May at about five in the morning. Whereas coal and gas power stations often pay the National Grid £15 to £20 per megawatt hour they do not supply, Scottish Power was paid £180 per megawatt hour during the test to switch off its turbines.

It raises the prospect of hugely profitable electricity suppliers receiving large sums of money from the National Grid just for switching off wind turbines.

Dr Lee Moroney, planning director of the Renewable Energy Foundation, a think tank opposed to the widespread introduction of wind farms, said: "As more and more wind farms come on stream this will become more and more of an issue. Wind power is not controllable and does not provide a solid supply to keep the national grid manageable. Paying multinational companies large sums of money not to supply electricity seems wrong."

Earlier this year, The Sunday Telegraph revealed that electricity customers are paying more than £1 billion a year to subsidise wind farms and other forms of renewable energy.

The proceeds of the levy, known as the Renewables Obligation (RO), are divided between the main renewable energy sources, with wind receiving 40 per cent, landfill gas 25 per cent, biomass 20 per cent, hydroelectric 12 per cent and sewage gas 3 per cent.

Professor Michael Laughton, emeritus professor of electrical engineering at the University of London, said: "People will find it very hard to understand that an electricity company is getting paid the market rate plus a subsidy for doing nothing. It is essentially a waste of consumers' money."

A National Grid spokesman said: "The trial demonstrates that wind can help balance supply and demand just like other generation types: this is potentially useful to us on warm but windy summer days when generation outstrips the low demand – and a higher proportion of generation is made up of wind and inflexible nuclear."

The spokesman added: "The trial is something supporters of wind energy should welcome, as it gives evidence to their case that wind generation does not bring insurmountable problems to balancing supply and demand."

A spokesman for RenewableUK, the trade body which represents the renewable energy industry, said all suppliers to the National Grid periodically were asked to reduce output to control the balancing mechanism. He said it was simply evidence of the growing part wind energy had to play in Britain's supply needs that turbines would occasionally be taken off the National Grid.

He added: "REF exists to misrepresent any piece of information and turn it into a scandal or crisis. The reality is the National Grid's job is to ensure we have adequate capacity to meet demand at any one time."

SOURCE





A forgotten past

If you think cars are dirty, just think about their precedessors like horse-drawn contraptions, steam locomotives and traction engines

One of the greatest legacies of the rise of the motor vehicle is the favour it did to the horse.... when horsepower meant exactly that, the horse had a terrible time of it.

Working horses in cities could live for as little as three years before they were fit for nothing more than dog food and glue, and it was only the coming of internal combustion that allowed them to shed the yoke of thankless service to humankind's unrelenting quest to improve its lot.

My relationship with horses has always been quite poor. They don't like me, and I'm not sure I really like them, or at least not as a means of transport. But I wouldn't want the witless beasts to suffer. A horse's brain is incredibly small, and quickly filled with the comprehension of its own misery, to the exclusion of all other thought, I reckon.

Horses also poo a lot. These days we see the brass-bedecked brewer's dray-horse as a happy throwback to a time of bucolic and pre-global innocence when life was sedate and conducted to the strains of olde English airs such as Early One Morning, Angels Guard Thee and The Ash Cloud. But no one mentions all the poo - tons of it, everywhere, and covered in flies.

I followed a troop of horses through town the other day, on a motorcycle, and every few dozen yards one of them deposited another malodorous mini-roundabout on the Queen's highway. It was like a shit slalom.

And this was just a dozen or so horses, not the many thousands that once tramped the roads of London. So the piston engine not only saved the horse from its burden, it saved us from its ordure. This was a good thing.

The steam engine also did its bit to save the horse, but dropped its own industrial excrement in the form of soot produced by burning coal. I reckon this was better than the horse poo, but still not great.

Before you all write in, I know the significance of coal in industrialising the world and making it a better place. I realise that coal, in a roundabout sort of way, saved trees as well. But I also think we may have forgotten just how dirty it was.

Walk into an old railway tunnel, a place not washed by the rain or cleaned up by ambitious local councils, and notice how blackened it is, even to this day, more than 40 years since the demise of steam on our mainline railways. Coal did that.

When steam engines were everywhere, and coal was burned in the home and in urban power stations, everything looked like that, including people's faces.

I have spoken recently to old men who recount how they had to swap the interchangeable collars of their shirts by the time they arrived at work because the ones they had put on after breakfast were by then already filthy. So the cult of coal gave us the fashion for coloured shirts with white collars, which is pretty unforgivable.

I sometimes think that everything must have tasted of coal in the olden days. That slightly dusty, faintly sulphurous quality is a tasting note revered by wine connoisseurs, but imagine if cornflakes were like that, or a prawn salad. Horrible. Internal combustion saved us from all this as well.

My point is this: the world is actually becoming cleaner, all other things concerning usage being equal. If everyone who now has a car had a horse or a traction engine, we would be consumed by cack within days.

Obviously, the car as we know it will soon be replaced. We don't know by what, but I bet it will be cleaner still, and whatever it is will be dirty compared with what comes after that. Pretty soon the world will be so clean that it will be perfectly possible to eat safely off any vaguely flat surface, or have your appendix out in the middle of the road.

The message, I think, is clear. Left to its own devices, humanity naturally embraces the thing we are constantly being nagged about - reduced emissions. How marvellous is that?

SOURCE





Green/Left War on Land Owners, Home Owners and Shareholders

Comment from Australia

The Carbon Sense Coalition today claimed that the war on carbon was just another battle in the long war on property rights by populists in Parliament.

Speaking yesterday at the well attended annual meeting of Property Rights Australia in Emerald, the Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that Mark Twain was right – “No man’s life liberty or property is safe while parliament is sitting”.

He added: “The war on property rights is always carried out under the spurious slogan of “the public interest”. “It is always secretly serving a private interest. “Mainly it is being used by politicians to buy votes from swinging voters or to attract green preferences.

“Currently ‘global warming’ and ‘carbon pollution’ are their preferred vote winners. As these scams are exposed as grubby schemes to serve private interests in the carbon trading and alternate energy industries, new slogans will be found. “But always it will be an attack on the right of property owners to use and enjoy the security of their own property.

“Farmers have been robbed of their rights by bans on controlling woody weeds and regrowth on their properties. Seaside property values are being damaged by sudden changes in zoning laws and development plans using the excuse of possible sea level changes. Shareholders in mining companies have seen the value of their retirement funds slump under the threat of super taxes needed by the federal government to balance the books after the extravagant stimulus packages and roof insulation disasters. Real job opportunities for aboriginal people are destroyed by ‘Wild Rivers’ legislation. Fishermen are being deprived of the right to fish, and foresters are locked out of the forests.

“And at this moment many property rights are being trampled to force feed the unnatural growth of the wind, solar and natural gas industries, using various spurious climate excuses. Those whose assets are suffering include landowners, miners, tax payers, shareholders and electricity consumers.

Mr Forbes advised members of Property Rights Australia to focus on the real problem, which is in parliament. “It is not other property owners such as miners, gas producers and native title claimants who are your main enemy – they too have bits of paper signed by politicians giving them rights which are often vague and, too often, overlap and degrade your property rights. These overlapping property rights are at the root of all discord between various classes of property owners.

“My advice to all land owners is “Know your rights, get good legal advice, negotiate hard with other conflicting property owners, but keep out of court battles with them – the only winners in that battle are the lawyers. “Focus your legal weapons and court actions on government property invaders, and make sure your politicians feel the heat.

“And as the global warming scam is exposed, watch for their next excuse for grabbing control of your lives and property. “There will be one – bio-diversity, sustainability, soil conservation, ocean acidity, saving something cuddly, energy conservation, or, most likely, all of the above.”

SOURCE





Guess who holds a patent for a carbon-trading plan

Disgraced Fannie Mae CEO set to cash in for millions



Former Clinton and Obama budget adviser Franklin Raines owns a key carbon-emissions patent he developed as CEO of the government-sponsored mortgage giant Fannie Mae, positioning him and his partners to make millions of dollars if it is used in any carbon-capping scheme implemented by the Obama administration.

Raines and his associates led Fannie Mae and Congress to believe Fannie Mae owned the patent, despite public records to the contrary, a WND investigation has found.

Raines and his partners carried out their plan by quietly filing for and receiving a second nearly identical carbon-emissions patent that superseded the first patent, according to government records. The second patent was never assigned to Fannie Mae or any other party.

As WND reported, an Enron-like accounting scandal enabled Raines to earn $90 million in his five years as Fannie Mae CEO, from 1999 to 2004....

As WND reported, Raines and two other top Fannie Mae executives agreed to pay $24.7 million, including a $2 million fine, to settle a civil lawsuit filed in December 2006 accusing them of manipulating Fannie Mae earnings, allowing executives to pocket hundreds of millions in bonuses from 1998 to 2004.

Raines was forced to give up Fannie Mae stock options valued at $15.6 million as part of the settlement.

On July 17, 2008, the the Washington Post ran a profile piece on Raines stating he "has been quietly constructing a new life for himself" in which he takes "calls from Barack Obama's presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters."

More HERE

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