Piers Corbyn on SatelliteGate

Corbyn seems to be the world's most accurate weather forecaster, basing his forecasts mostly on celestial events and rejecting any influence from CO2.

He comments below on the recent absurdities found in satellite temperature measurements and notes that whenever faults are found in climate data, the errors are always in the direction of overstating warming!

WELL DONE to all involved in this SATELLITEGATE expose!

It helps explain puzzles many have had including some I had - namely that even with the Solar-Lunar climate driver I developed recently (although there are other factors too) smoothed world temperatures (both land and reported satellite) over recent years especially this year/last decade (?) seemed 'too high'.

This revelation further confirms something I and Tom Harris said on Russia Today TV Feb (5th) 2010 namely that WE JUST DO NOT reliably KNOW what world temperatures are and have been doing over the last decade or century. See Laura Emmet's superb ClimateGate report here (Video)

We do know local things of course like it has been and is very hot in Russia and has been astoundingly cold in parts of South America and Australia compared with normal, but these monstrous data blunders will obscure rational discussion and temperature reportage.

The climate hype industry will do everything in its power to put a lid on this one. Imagine if it were found the satellite data had been reading minus 200F in Michigan etc and that had been used in input for world averages, THERE WOULD BE FRONT PAGE NEWS AND ENRAGED QUESTIONS IN EVERY ELECTED (and unelected) PUBLIC FORUM IN THE WORLD coupled with public sackings of the scientists involved and the most dire 'end of the world' warnings possible and redoubled calls for carbon supertaxes

The key questions are:-

Why are ALL the errors and tricks in data collection and processing found since Climategate broke of the sort which make temperatures too high?

How bad is this error and how long has it been going on for?

Are there other errors in satellite data?

What parts of the globe does it mainly concern?

WHEN and HOW will we get a reliable world temperature data set; and just WHAT is the best (most reliable) data set around?

Could it be that the world temp peak (believed) of around 1998 - 2003 was no higher than that around 1935-1940?

Are we actually heading for the next ice age as lake Michagan boils according to [satellite] measurements?!

SOURCE

Corbyn also comments on the recent Russian heatwave here. Excerpt:

"The present and recent superheat in Russia, superfloods in Pakistan and supercold in much of South America (Odd we haven't heard much about that bit of 'Climate Change') might be new to them but they are nothing new to the world and are part of essentially PREDICTABLE natural solar-magnetic lunar cycles."





Blacklisted Scientist Challenges Global Warming Orthodoxy

I am not sure how much got lost in translation in the following summary of Miskolczi's work but he clearly rejects the absurd yet orthodox notion that a gas (such as CO2) can "trap" anything

Today Hungarian atmospheric physicist Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi, says he has found and proven that the IPCC and their experts are wrong in their theory about how the greenhouse effect works. In the process, he has shown that changing CO2 concentrations are not the determining factor the IPCC and other scientists claim.

Over the last 20 years Miskolczi achieved several results which prove that the greenhouse effect in the Earth’s atmosphere is completely dependent on energy. The IPCC would have the world believe that it is the ingredients of the atmosphere which matter more than the energy, and that it is rising levels of CO2 that are causing global warming.

Working with a number of sets of temperature and humidity data from all over the world, Miskolczi has found that the greenhouse effect is a balance of energy dependent primarily on the sun. This is something reasonable people have recognized for some time but haven’t been able to prove without the same sort of heavy science and math the IPCC experts have been using.

Those who disagree with the IPCC’s conclusions have needed some form of proof to back their positions. Until now, those proofs have been too few in number to slow Anthropogenic Global Warming’s (AGW) momentum backed with billions of dollars. Solid science which can be verified and recreated has been needed and Miskolczi claims that his research has finally provided just that. New mathematical equations seem to have put the players in this climate game into their proper places.

To put it very simply, Dr. Miskolczi has described previously unknown properties of our atmosphere.

Unfortunately it isn’t as clean and easy as E=mc2. The very complexity of climate science has been used to kick sand into the eyes of the public, blinding us to alternative theories whether they are correct or not. The science is so difficult to follow that no one can refute the IPCC without discussing concepts most of the public don’t have the time or desire to learn. So by default the IPCC has owned the conversation and the playing field. What’s more, they have some big allies in supporting positions.

At the time of his original discovery Dr. Miskolczi was a contractor for NASA and had published many times in renowned journals with his colleagues there; he resigned his position in 2005 when NASA refused to publish work contradicting AGW.

Despite being blacklisted by the scientific community supporting AGW, he has continued his research proving and refining his results. However, this same community is also the one which peer reviews work like this. When a scientist is tossed off this team, they can’t get their work reviewed and pushed to the press as being “peer reviewed.” Despite this handicap Miskolczi has persevered, just this month publishing yet again, this time proving with observations that the greenhouse effect is actually stable.

Miskolczi does not appear to be saying that global warming or cooling doesn’t occur. Instead, he shows that CO2 does not and cannot increase the surface temperature of the Earth independently of incoming energy. In his paper he provides a graph spanning 61 years from 1948-2008. It shows that the greenhouse effect remains constant while CO2 concentrations have risen. Miskolczi has found physical proof that the greenhouse effect works differently than previously thought and it isn’t affected by changes in carbon dioxide.

Lacking now is an honest scientific community’s review of his work, something hard to get once you have been kicked off the team.

The American and international press have also ignored this publication. Though more articles appear daily contradicting the IPCC, this single decisive discovery, if true, completely dismantles the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Amazingly it has yet to make the front page.

For more information Dr. Miskloczi’s latest paper can be found here: Ferenc Miskolczi: The stable stationary value of the earth’s global average atmospheric Planck-weighted greenhouse-gas optical thickness (Energy & Environment Vol. 21 No 4, 2010 August Special Issue: Paradigms in Climate Research), and is available at Multi-Science Publishing Co., Great Britain.

SOURCE





Greenland Glacial Calving and Sea Level

Last week another alarmist story appeared in the Guardian quoting Richard Alley, professor at the once great Penn State University in which it reported on the natural calving of a large chink of the Petermann glacier in Greenland. They noted "Greenland shed its largest chunk of ice in nearly half a century last week, and faces an even grimmer future, according to Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University.

"Sometime in the next decade we may pass that tipping point which would put us warmer than temperatures that Greenland can survive," Alley told a briefing in Congress, adding that a rise in the range of 2-7 C would mean the obliteration of Greenland's ice sheet."

We asked a real expert on sea level, Nils-Axel Morner to comment. Here is what he had to say:

No ”huge rise in sea level” to foresee: Observation rules out modelling

Recently, “a panel of leading geoscientists told the US Congress” that sea level is likely to rise by 7 metres within this century. What nonsense, we must say. Not only, is this against observational facts, it is also against physics.

At the Last Ice, the huge ice caps over Europe and North America had their southern margins way down at mid latitudes (at Hamburg in Europe and at New York in North America). When climate changed, the ice melted at a very rapid rate. At Stockholm, for example, the ice margin was displaced northwards at a rate of about 300 m per year. Indeed, an enormous speed.

Still, global sea level did not rise more than about 10 mm per year or 1 metre in a century. This rate sets the absolutely ultimate physically frame of any possible sea level rise today. Any claim exceeding this value must be classified as sheer nonsense. It is as simple as that.

The Greenland Ice Cap did not melt during the postglacial hypsithermal (some 5000 to 8000 years ago), when temperature was about 2.5 oC higher than today. Nor did it melt during the Last Interglacial when temperature was about 4 oC higher than today. As to time, it would take more than a millennium (with full thermal forcing) to melt the ice masses stored there.

The panel also talk about a possible “tipping point”. Well, the only event of that type we can be fairly sure about, seems to be the approaching turn from a Solar Maximum (just passed) to a Solar Minimum (calculated at around 2040).

The view presented by the panel is another sad expression of IPCC propaganda. What they say is not founded in geoscientific knowledge and physical laws.

The World is far too full of real problems that call for immediate consideration to waste time on wild exaggerations.

SOURCE





Reports of the Earth’s Death are Greatly Exaggerated

Here’s a letter to the New York Times Book Review by Don Boudreaux, a Professor of Economics:

Reviewing Andrew Beahrs’s book about Mark Twain’s culinary tastes, William Grimes remarks that the author of Huckleberry Finn lived in “a country soon to be overwhelmed by industrialized agriculture and ecological catastrophe” (“Your Tired, Your Poor and Their Food,” August 8).

“Ecological catastrophe?!” Mr. Grimes confuses his fashionable suppositions with actual history. A genuine ecological catastrophe would have made human existence a nightmare in the 100 years since Mr. Twain’s death. Instead, the past century has witnessed unprecedented improvements in living standards.

Agricultural output is several times higher today, both in absolute amount and in yield-per-acre. Available supplies of nearly all minerals continue to increase. Americans of all income levels are much better fed, much better clothed, much better housed, and much better cared for medically. The automobile cleaned America’s streets of the dung and flies that once cursed denizens of cities and towns. Electricity and petroleum have replaced far-filthier coal and wood as major sources of household energy. Perhaps most significantly, life expectancy in 2010 is 30 years longer than it was in 1910.

Let’s hope that this “catastrophe” continues.

SOURCE






The Incandescent Bulb Ban: Another Regulatory Overreach

Is the modern incandescent light bulb ready to retire from society and find its final resting place in the halls of the American History Museum? Politicians seem to think so, but consumer behavior indicates otherwise. According to an article in The New York Times,

Despite a decade of campaigns by the government and utilities to persuade people to switch to energy-saving compact fluorescents, incandescent bulbs still occupy an estimated 90 percent of household sockets in the United States. Aside from the aesthetic and practical objections to fluorescents, old-style incandescents have the advantage of being remarkably cheap.

The government solution to replace incandescent bulbs is to regulate them out of the marketplace and forcefully restrict consumer choice. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 placed stringent efficiency requirements on incandescent bulbs in an attempt to phase them out between 2012 and 2014 and replace them with more expensive but more energy-efficient bulbs, the most popular being compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs).

Critics of CFL bulbs argue that exposure to mercury vapor is dangerous if the bulbs are broken, and others complained about CFL bulbs causing migraines and epilepsy attacks, resulting in medical groups asking for exemptions for those with health problems. Proponents of CFL bulbs argue that the increased energy efficiency will offset the higher sticker price, but critics argue it will take an exceptionally long time where people use lights infrequently, such as closets and attics.

In effort to meet tougher regulations, the new incandescent light bulbs are also selling at record rates, but also at record prices. A new bulb presented by Philips Lighting’s Halogena Energy Savers is selling at 20 times the price of a standard bulb ($5 compared to 25 cents)—an immense price increase for a 30 percent efficiency improvement. However, the new bulbs last three times as long as a standard bulb, bringing the price ratio down to less than seven times the price of a standard bulb.

Although this law could mean the end of a century-old industry and all the jobs that go with it, bulb manufacturers are demonstrating a remarkable resilience against needless regulations through market innovation. Yet there is only so much that the industry can do to stay a step ahead of legislation, and whether incandescent bulbs will survive the government’s regulatory whip remains to be seen. A few dollars more here and there may not seem like much, but CFLs sell at around $1 each. Although fluorescent bulbs are currently not favored by households, they could soon become the chosen bulb, an unnatural leaning that will create false information for the light bulb market.

If consumers truly preferred fluorescents to incandescents, they would purchase them without any legal incentive. Yet they do not. Many prefer the soft yellow lighting of incandescents to the unnaturally white light of fluorescents. More might prefer the simple affordability of incandescents. Demand for cheap incandescent light bulbs is not going to change because of legislation (and, in fact, could lead to hoarding), so the only option left to environmentalists is to remove the incandescent light bulb from the market altogether and make it impossible for consumers to light their houses inexpensively.

This is one example of the absurdity of federal regulations and how bureaucrats pointlessly try to change human behavior. The regulatory burden grew tremendously during President George W. Bush’s tenure and is only getting worse under President Obama’s. It is a trend that restricts freedom and choice in the marketplace and costs taxpayers billions of dollars. It is a trend that the government should reverse.

SOURCE






In the “green” economy, the poor pay more

Cap-and-trade legislation has died, with little hope of resurrection for a long time to come. What the representatives of the people cannot accomplish, however, the Environmental Protection Agency can.

The EPA’s Lisa Jackson has denied ten petitions filed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Republican attorneys general from Texas and Virginia, and other conservative groups. The petitioners asked the EPA to reconsider its finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, and therefore must be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The EPA has refused to reconsider, and plans to regulate emissions from new cars and trucks this year, and emissions from power plants next year. The state of Texas is now threatening not to conform to the new regulations.

Christians believe that when God created the world and created people in His image, He gave mankind a mandate to be stewards of the creation. Therefore, Christians should be especially concerned about treating the natural world with care and respect. At the same time, the stewardship responsibility includes all of the resources we have – nature, the ecosystem, and technology; as well as our bodies, talents, and relationships with other people.

People of faith have no intention or desire to pit these responsibilities against one another. When a proposal to improve the environment negative consequences for our economic and technological ability to steward our resources and care for people created in God’s image, Christianity teaches that we should investigate whether the environmental policy is truly necessary to accomplish its stated goal, and whether it is possible to care for the environment in a way that also enhances human life and productivity.

To restrict energy usage is to restrict human ability to productively steward God’s creation. God ordained work as a good thing for Adam and Eve to do in the garden of Eden before sin came into the world. For this reason, Christians believe that productive cultivation of natural resources can improve, rather than damage, the health of God’s creation.

However, the Environmental Protection Agency generally treats human economic activity as climate enemy number one. Unfortunately, discussing climate issues through the EPA bureaucracy does not lend itself to a full and open investigation of the options and issues at stake. The legislative branch set up the bureaucracy in such a way that it can make difficult policy choices without facing electoral accountability. Joe Postell of The Heritage Foundation has explained why the progressive movement began setting this system in place several decades ago:

"The progressives sought to circumvent representative government by transferring power from Congress to a newly created fourth branch of government, our modern bureaucracy. Congress would no longer make laws but merely pass bills that consist of assignments to agencies. The actual laws then would be passed by agencies in the form of "rules" carrying the full force of law."

If the EPA believes it knows the best way to promote “public health and welfare,” it will not easily admit that it might be. EPA officials may have the best of intentions for crafting the best policy, but there’s no guarantee that they are safe from the lure of self-interest, much less from their own fallibility.

For instance, the EPA believes that regulating emissions will improve the American economy by creating “green” jobs. The evidence, however, does not support this line of reasoning. The government simply cannot create jobs in one industry without destroying jobs elsewhere. For every “green” job Spain has created by subsidizing wind and solar energy, it has destroyed 2.2 jobs created by the private sector. Green jobs have done nothing to improve Spain’s 19 percent unemployment rate. Denmark actually spends more money on creating jobs in the wind energy industry than the jobs actually pay.

Politicians in the United States have already tried unsuccessfully for years to create technological innovation by legislative mandate, and there’s no logical reason to expect that more government mandates will produce efficient energy technology.

Rather than stimulating the American economy, full regulation of carbon emissions will damage it severely. Essentially, a cap or a regulatory burden on carbon emissions would create energy scarcity, making it just as expensive to purchase energy from fossil fuels as it is to purchase energy from “renewable” sources. The supply of efficient energy would drop in order to encourage production and consumption of inefficient energy, and prices would skyrocket as a result. Politicians themselves, including Barack Obama as a presidential candidate, have admitted that skyrocketing prices are a crucial component of the carbon regulation strategy.

Under the cap-and-trade bill considered by the House of Representatives, the average American family would likely face a 90 percent increase in electricity prices, according to research done by The Heritage Foundation. Gasoline and natural gas prices would also rise by over 50 percent. The economic impact of EPA regulation would be even worse than the impact of cap-and-trade legislation, because regulation would involve more compliance, administrative, and legal costs.

Skyrocketing energy prices would cause the prices of most other goods and services to rise as well, because energy is the lifeblood of the economy. Almost nothing happens – no manufacturing, no transportation, and no sales – without energy.
For people who already have plenty of money – think John Kerry and Bill Gates – this is not much of a problem. But economically vulnerable groups already spend much larger portions of their budgets on basic necessities than do those who are better off. The poor have less discretionary income to spend on things they don’t absolutely need, and therefore less room to breathe when expenses rise.

This economic burden would come in addition to other financial woes caused by carbon regulation. An economy struggling under dramatic decreases in employment, household income, and national GDP would make it even more difficult for low-income families to cover expenses, especially utilities. Families who could not afford to heat or cool their homes, especially the elderly, would risk their health and could end up homeless. After inability to pay rent, inability to pay utilities is the most common cause of homelessness.

The Environmental Protection Agency justifies this onerous economic burden with its finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. However, its proposed regulation of emissions could endanger public health and welfare even more. Christian doctrine teaches that it is not acceptable to treat the poor unjustly, or take from them the ability to earn their own living and to productively steward the resources God has given them. Rather, we should investigate whether human economic productivity could be an ally rather than the enemy of our natural resources.

SOURCE

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