Warmists seeing what they want to see

There is a post at the Warmist "Real Climate" site in which they compare predicted warming with actual temperatures so far. There is some match between the two so the post and the comments on it ooze self-satisfaction.

A comment by Doug Proctor rather pricks that balloon, however. He points out that the absolute degree of warming shown in the 30 years of data that they use is quite small and just what you would expect of the long term warming that was going on long before the period usually pointed to by Warmists. So there has been some warming in recent years but no sign of an anthropogenic signal.

Proctor's comment is reproduced below. Gavin Schmidt added a reply to it but did not address the low magnitude of the warming. "CAGW" means "Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming"

Comment 51

"In your graph of temperature measurements vs model projections, you discuss Scenario B, while it appears that Scenario C is almost identical to HadCrut3 and GisTemp. All three are about 0.185K/decade. Is this not the general trend from 1900, and considered a reflection of natural warming coming out of the LIA?

The CAGW worry I have is based on 3K/century. I expected that we would be in the acccelerating >2.0K/century by now, 22 years after the 1988 initiation of the concerns. At any rate, while global warming is certainly still occurring, doesn’t your graph here suggest that there is only a “background” type of warming going on, the non-feedback type that we thought would be such a problem?

I’m also confused by the comparison between the temperature graphs and the ocean warming graphs, certainly by the Lyman portion of the ocean heating graph. If the oceans take up and hold the heat so much more than the atmosphere, and then warm the atmosphere because the oceans are warmer, why do the two trends of ocean heat and atmospheric temperature not follow each other? Up to 2002 the Lyman measurements match, as if the ocean and atmosphere were in equilibrium. Then they diverge, and do so from the other data compliers’. Did Lyman’s methodology change in 2002?

Rather than support the CAGW, this post seems to support global warming of a moderate level, but not of a disastrous level. The Lyman divergence is very odd. It is possible that Lyman is measuring a transfer of oceanic heat from warm waters to cool waters through circulation changes than increased retention of solar energies?"





Astrophysicist Piers Corbyn on the claim that 2010 was unusually warm

"The Claim 2010 is '2nd warmest year on record' - is delusional, irrelevant & disingenuous – the last gasp of the failed global warming cult”

"The latest claims about World average temperatures by Government Weather organizations around the World such as UK MetOffice, apart from being contrary to the actual experience of the majority of the world population – notably USA, Europe, IndoChina and South America, raise four points.

1. "The originators of this data are the same people and organizations who were caught fiddling data in the ‘ClimateGate’ affair,” said Piers. "The various whitewash enquiries arranged to cover-up their vandalisation of the scientific method cannot dodge the question:

WHY is there a statistically highly significant systematic inverse relationship between the number of stations they selected for ‘official’ use and the average temperatures resulting? What average temperature would result from the 62% of stations they removed since around the 1960s - which had the coldest temperature averages and the highest number of stations - up to the present decade - which is officially the warmest and has the least number of stations?

Anyone with a brain can see that this systematic connection means that either temperature is magically determined by the number of stations or there has been systematic selecting of data which is best described as data fraud”, said Piers.

"This question requires an international inquiry which is independent of any of the organizations involved in this data creation. (See See slide 9 in presentation here and here)

2. "The experience of EXTREME cold for prolonged periods this year in a number of parts of the world – such as Britain, West Europe, most of the USA and much of South America (to name just a few) and the inane ‘cold is warm’ incantations, show the world average supposed extra warmth (which only exceeds the coldest year of the decade under their figures by 0.12 degree C - less than one quarter of a degree F) - is of no consequence or forecasting value whatsoever to man or beast.

A one quarter of a degree F increase in world average temperatures whether real or fraudulent has no bearing on whether or not a blizzard will hit Connecticut; any more than a world population rise CAUSES more babies to be born in Birmingham” said Piers.

3. "The innuendo that this supposed ‘warmest year’ is somehow the driver of extreme events is baseless anti-science. It is no accident that the Met Office, BBC and New York Times / Guardian / Independent etc put forward various descriptions of circulation patterns such as La Nina as a cause of the things these phenomena describe and then pop-in that 2010 was the warmest year as if there were a connection.

Why not tell us there is a Royal wedding this year, that would be more interesting. The only connection is their desperation to save their failed cult ideology.

ALL the global warmist predictions since 2000 have failed and the OPPOSITE types of extremes (floods, supercold and blizzards) to their predictions (droughts, warm winters and the end-of-snow) have occurred, so their warmist (or warm is cold) explanations for extreme events are as useless as saying "Wet days cause rain”.

If weather were just entertainment this would not matter but their refusal to accept their total failure forces up energy and food prices through low carbon cult measures and holds back real science which directly prevents governments and authorities from applying useful forecasts which can reduce suffering and save lives.

People have died on UK and Europe’s roads through lack of winter salting due to Met Office failed warmist winter forecasts and Australian floods are worse because the Govt cut dam projects under Green ‘expect droughts’ advice. The Global warming cult ideology is reducing living standards and causing needless suffering and death, and must be stopped.”

4. The real causes of extreme weather were known and their results predicted: The very extreme weather events around the world last year and this year are caused by solar-lunar DRIVEN ‘sticking’ of the normal motions of the jet streams in the North and South hemisphere and of the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ).

(i) Piers Corbyn of WeatherAction warned in June 2010 that such sticking and consequent SEVERE EXTREMES would be consequent to PREDICTABLE solar-lunar effects in periods to follow which we now expect will be years and he specifically correctly predicted:

(ii) The West Russian heatwave and when it would end to the day (along with the ending of the associated superfloods in Pakistan) driven by events on the sun – See link of the double sunspot solar explosion (video) and subsequent thunderstorms in St Petersburg Aug 15th 2010 - Will the warmists tell us that solar flares are caused by CO2 on Earth?!

(iii) That Britain (Central England) would have the coldest December for 100 years. NB The UK Met Office had said on their web in October that winter would be mild and then when it was cold claimed they had actually said it would be cold while their website still carried the chart published in October which stated it would be mild Yet THESE same people expect us to believe their world temperature data is worth a dime!

More HERE





Yes, Virginia, A Climate Cover-Up

Democrats in Virginia are trying to stop their attorney general from probing climate fraud carried out by university researchers at taxpayer expense. Are they afraid of finding the inconvenient truth?

It's not the crime, it's the cover-up, as the saying goes. In the case of former University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann and his supporters, it may be both. Not only did Mann participate in perhaps the greatest scam of modern times, but he may have also have fraudulently used taxpayer funds to do so.

At least Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli thinks so, and has been diligently trying to obtain from U.Va. documents and e-mails related to Mann's work there. Mann reportedly received around $500,000 from taxpayer-funded grants from the university for research there from 1999 to 2005.

Cuccinelli is alleging a possible violation of a 2002 statute, the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act. The AG has said that he wants the documents, including grant applications and e-mails exchanged between Mann and 39 other scientists and university staffers, to help determine whether Mann committed fraud by knowingly manipulating data as he sought the taxpayer-funded grants for his research.

Mann was at the heart of the ClimateGate scandal when e-mails were unearthed from Britain's Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. In one e-mail sent to Mann and others by CRU director Philip Jones, Jones speaks of the "trick" of filling in gaps of data in order to hide evidence of temperature decline:

"I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." It was that attempt to "hide the decline" through the manipulation of data that brought down the global warming house of cards.

Mann was the architect behind the famous "hockey stick" graph that was produced in 1999 but which really should be called the "hokey stick." Developed by Mann using manipulated tree-ring data, it supposedly proved that air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts in the 20th century.

Mann et al. had to make the Medieval Warm Period (about A.D. 800 to 1400) and the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1600 to 1850) statistically disappear.

The graph relied on data from trees on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia. Here, too, the results were carefully selected. Just 12 trees from the 252 cores in the CRU's Yamal data set were used. A larger data set of 34 tree cores from the vicinity showed no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the middle ages. They were not included.

Attempting to block Cuccinelli and rising to Mann's defense are Virginia state senators Chap Petersen and Donald McEachin. They are backing legislation that would strip the attorney general's office of its power to issue "civil investigative demands," otherwise known as subpoenas, under the 2002 statute.

They claim they are defending academic freedom, but they are trying to hide what many consider academic fraud, work that found its way into the reports of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It led to Kyoto and Copenhagen, and formed the basis for the EPA's endangerment finding that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that needs to be regulated.

After Mann left U.Va., he went to Penn State, which the Obama administration awarded with $541,184 in economic stimulus funds to save, according to recovery.gov, 1.62 jobs so that Professor Mann could continue his tree-ring circus fraudulently advancing the myth of man-made global warming that through equally bogus remedies like cap-and-trade and EPA regulations would bring the U.S. economy to its knees.

In a glaringly arrogant e-mail, Mann said he was grateful to the legislators for pressing the issue and hoped the action would give Cuccinelli "some second thoughts about continuing to waste their time and resources attacking well-established science." Hide the decline, then hide the truth.

We hope the legislation fails, the truth will come out and Mann et al. will be held accountable for engineering a scientific and economic fraud that would have made Bernie Madoff blush.

SOURCE





The evils of fireplaces: The latest Greenie nuttiness

The fact that the human race has been sitting around fires for a million years does not faze Greenie fanatics

Hard as it may be to believe, the fireplace — long considered a trophy, particularly in a city like New York — is acquiring a social stigma. Among those who aspire to be environmentally responsible, it is joining the ranks of bottled water and big houses.

“The smoke from a fire smells very nice,” said Diane Bailey, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco. “But it can cause a lot of harm.” The tiny particles, she said, “can cause inflammation and illness, and can cross into the bloodstream, triggering heart attacks” as well as worsening other conditions.

Or as Starre Vartan, a 33-year-old blogger who goes by the name Eco-Chick, put it: “Any time you are burning wood or cow dung, you’ll be creating pollution. It’s like junk food: if you do it once a month, then who cares? But if it’s something you do every day, it’s important that you mitigate it somehow. It’s a hazard.”

Not surprisingly, the green community has been sounding the alarm for some time. For the last several years, TheDailyGreen.com, an online magazine, has advocated replacing all wood-burning fireplaces with electric ones; an article published in September by Shireen Qudosi, entitled “Breathe Easier With a Cleaner Fireplace,” argued that there is no such thing as an environmentally responsible fire: “Switching out one type of wood for another is still use of a natural resource that otherwise could have been spared,” Ms. Qudosi wrote. And last fall, an article on the Web site GreenBlizzard.com, “Cozy Winter Fires — Carbon Impact,” called wood-burning fires “a direct pollutant to you, your family and your community.”

Organizations like the American Lung Association are issuing warnings as well: the group recommends that consumers avoid wood fires altogether, citing research that names wood stoves and fireplaces as major contributors to particulate-matter air pollution in much of the United States.

Wood smoke contains some of the same particulates as cigarette smoke, said Dr. Norman H. Edelman, the chief medical officer for the American Lung Association, as well as known carcinogens like aldehydes; it has also been linked to respiratory problems in young children.

“We now know from lots of studies that wood smoke is very, very irritating,” Dr. Edelman said. “It contains a lot of irritating gases and it also contains damaging particulate matter. It’s probably not good for anybody, and it’s especially bad for anybody who has a chronic respiratory problem.” So the association strongly advises people not to use the traditional fireplace, he said.

Certainly, there are many who consider this eco-overkill. In Greek mythology, fire is a gift from the divine, stolen from Zeus by Prometheus and handed over to shivering humanity. What could be more natural than sitting around a crackling fire on a winter night, at a campsite in the Berkshires or in a Brooklyn brownstone?

But growing concerns about the air pollution and health problems caused by smoke from wood fires are prompting a number of areas across the country to pass laws regulating them.

“A lot of municipalities are taking action,” said Ms. Bailey, adding that the weather-based measures called burn bans are perhaps the most widespread restriction. When the weather is cold and the air is still, or pollution is high, the Bay Area in California, Puget Sound, Wash., Denver and Albuquerque are among the places with restrictions on residential wood-burning. These measures can be mandatory or voluntary, and can become more restrictive as air quality declines. So far, most of the wood-burning regulations tend to be out West. A few examples: Idaho offers tax incentives to people who replace uncertified wood stoves with “greener” ones; San Joaquin County in California forbids selling a home unless its wood stove is replaced with an E.P.A.-certified one; and Palo Alto and other municipalities in California prohibit wood-burning fireplaces or stoves in new construction.

In any case, most fireplaces are used far too infrequently to cause any real damage to the environment, said Stephen Sears, the vice president of marketing and member services for the Brick Industry Association, voicing an opinion shared by some. In the East, he wrote in an e-mail, air pollution is at its worst in the summer, and in the West the regulations are an overreaction: “Because it is not realistic to test each unique masonry fireplace in a laboratory” to evaluate its emissions, he noted, “it is easier for some municipalities to arbitrarily limit” the use of all wood-burning fireplaces.

Karen Soucy, an associate publisher at a nonprofit environmental magazine, isn’t swayed by that argument. She refuses to enter a home where wood has been burned, even infrequently.

Ms. Soucy, 46, blames fumes from a wood fire for sending her to the emergency room 25 years ago with a severe asthma attack. She had been staying at a friend’s house in Stowe, Vt., for about a day, she said, when her lungs seized up. She was taken to a hospital in an ambulance, and got two shots of adrenalin; the doctors blamed her friend’s cat.

“It was only later, working with a team of allergy doctors and pulmonologists, did we determine the culprit to be the wood-burning fumes from the various fireplaces,” Ms. Soucy said.

Now her husband scouts out any place they go in advance, to be sure it’s free of fireplaces, and she passes up countless dinners and parties. “I’m the one who feels guilty for always being the one to decline invitations or for making people go out of their way to clean their home,” she said. Even then, she added, “the smell lingers on everything.”

Wickham Boyle, 60, a writer and consultant for nonprofit arts organizations, installed a soapstone stove in her Hudson Valley house after a saleswoman explained that it had a catalytic combustor that converts smoke into water and carbon dioxide. Guests sometimes ask her if she feels guilty about burning wood, she said, but she recites a laundry list of the stove’s high-efficiency features, explaining to them that the environmental impact is negligible due to the combustor, and that she mainly uses fallen wood cleared from her land or other properties nearby.

Not everyone can afford such a stove, which can cost upward of $2,000, including installation (Ms. Boyle paid $3,000 for hers).

Converting a wood-burning fireplace to gas can be just as expensive, and while electric fireboxes are cheaper — just a few hundred dollars — most consider them a poor substitute for a real fire, since there is no flame. So some people are simply using their fireplaces less often, or not at all.

Even the greenest of the green, though, sometimes throw caution to the winds when it comes to wood fires. Sue Duncan, a 52-year-old landscaper in Austin, Tex., uses native drought-tolerant plants in her landscaping work and hasn’t thrown away an aluminum can since 1974, she said. She has installed a programmable thermostat and fluorescent lighting in her 1,600-square-foot house and has a rainwater collection system out back.

But somehow, she still hasn’t gotten around to retrofitting her fireplace. Every time she builds a fire, it causes “inner conflict,” she said. “It’s a guilty pleasure.”

More HERE





Has someone not got the message that polar bears are "endangered"?

Why are more of them being allowed to be killed, if they are so endangered?

Polar bear hunting season has started on Baffin Island almost a month earlier than usual. This year, the Inuit will harvest up to 32 males and nine females up from the usual limit of 16 males and seven females. The Davis Strait population of polar bears is one of the few that all parties (NGOs, science and Inuit) agree is increasing.

The increase in the Davis Strait population is both on account of changing ice patterns/good ice seasons in the eastern Arctic but also from an explosion of seal populations. I have heard that since the seal harvest was reduced in Newfoundland/Labrador that Harp Seal populations have not only increased dramatically in that area but have spread north. Polar bears being who they are, of course, have capitalized on this new bounty.

Of course, politically speaking no one is actually saying this is an increased quota – just using up credits that have accumulated over the past years. Hard to say what the real story is (it always is muddled in the north) but this really seems like the Inuit sending a bit of a message to NGOs, science and the south.

More HERE





The fantasy world of Noam Chomsky again

From an interview with the great man. See the highlight in red below. What on earth is he referring to? He is confusing his fantasies with reality

Mickey Z.: I recently watched a video on climate change in which you were one of the featured interviewees. You talked quite somberly about the recent elections being a "death knell" for humanity and us "kissing our species goodbye." I've read your work for decades but can't seem to recall you using such language in this context. In your view, have we humans waited too long to take action? Do you believe we can/should downsize our industrial culture before it downsizes itself?

Noam Chomsky: If I said the elections are a death knell, I went too far. But I think it's fair to say that they do threaten that outcome. Even the business press is concerned. Bloomberg Business Week reported that the elections brought into office dozens of climate change deniers, swelling support for Senator James Inhofe, who has declared global warming to be the "greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people" and feels "vindicated" by the election. He probably is also celebrating the ascendance of representative John Shimkus who assures us that God would prevent dire effects of climate change; analogues would be hard to find in other societies.

And probably is also celebrating the fact that according to recent polls, barely a third of Americans now believe that human activities are a factor in climate change -" very likely the result of a major corporate propaganda offensive, openly announced, to achieve this result. It's important to bear in mind that those who orchestrate the campaigns know as well as the rest of us that the "hoax" is real and ominous, but they are pursuing their institutional role: maximizing short-term profit and putting aside "externalities," in this case the fate of the species.

More HERE




Australia: Fad food policy bad for the environment

"Organic" and "natural" foods are a concern of environmentalists, so it seems that we once again are seeing contradictory goals among them

Coles [supermarket chain] has defended its "no added hormones" beef campaign, which critics say could damage Australia's $7.6 billion beef industry and add to the environmental damage caused by meat production.

Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA), which represents 47,000 cattle, sheep and goat producers, accused Coles of shocking consumers into thinking beef from cattle raised on growth-promoting hormones was unsafe, despite years of scientific testing showing the meat posed no risk to humans.

The group said it was too early to tell if the Coles policy, introduced on January 1, had convinced shoppers to abandon other retailers. "It is crucial that consumers maintain their trust in the product - that the safety of Australian beef is not brought into doubt unnecessarily," MLA said.

Human growth promotants are used widely in beef production but were banned in Europe in 1988 over concerns about links to diseases including cancer. The World Health Organisation and the federal Department of Health, however, found no scientific evidence to support the ban.

Woolworths said the Coles campaign, which features celebrity chef Curtis Stone, was a "gimmick that will be bad for the environment and bad for Australian farmers". Woolworths stocks hormone-free meat in its organic range but has no plans to extend the policy.

"Removing technology means you need more cattle, eating more food, on more land, producing more methane over more time to produce the same beef," spokesman Simon Berger said. "Someone will pay for that - either farmers or customers, as well as the environment."

Coles spokesman Jim Cooper said that Coles was not saying beef raised with hormones was unsafe, but that hormone-free beef was of a higher quality. The initiative would cost the company millions because Coles would have to pay its suppliers more to farm a greater number of animals to produce the same amount of meat.

MLA said increasing the cattle herd would raise water and feed costs, placing greater strain on farmers.

SOURCE

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