A very strange Warmist

He makes the most alarming predictions and then admits it's all speculation!  Why does he bother?  He even makes predictions about the 23rd century!  Spare us!

And I think his physiology is wrong too.  I grew up in a place (Cairns in tropical Australia) where very hot days  -- over 30 degrees Celsius -- were common and where the humidity was also high (being beside the seaside).  And funnily enough I am not dead.  And Cairns people just go about their business every day as they would in any other city of the developed world.

I think he is just an attention-seeker who will say anything to gain kudos

The problem is not just temperature, but a combination of temperature and humidity. Humans are remarkably resilient to high temperatures – provided the air contains little moisture. This is because we possess an effective cooling mechanism, namely sweating. When sweat evaporates from our skin, which it will do rapidly in hot, dry air, it will remove a great deal of energy from your body. The same thing happens when you breathe in and out – the water evaporating from the lining of your lungs and respiratory tract also evaporates cooling you down quite dramatically. That is why, provided you stay out of direct sunlight and provided you have enough water to drink, you can survive indefinitely in temperatures of 45C or even more. Provided, again, the humidity is low.

But make the air more humid and you are in trouble. When the air is fully saturated (contains as much water vapour as possible depending on its temperature and pressure) sweating no longer works. On Earth this ‘wet bulb’ temperature (so called because you can gauge it by using a thermometer wrapped in a wet cloth) rarely reaches 30C – the temperature of the hottest, sweatiest jungles in the tropics. The startling difference between wet-bulb and dry-bulb temperatures can be seen if you fly from the hot desert of, say, the American southwest (where temperatures may be well into the 40s) to somewhere like Singapore (where it usually hovers in the high 20s). You will be hot, but fairly comfortable in the deserts, but drenched and deeply uncomfortable after an hour or so in Singapore.

But if the wet-bulb temperature climbs to more than 35C you will not just be uncomfortable, but dead. Even at this seemingly modest temperature, if the humidity is high enough a human – even a naked human, standing still, in the dark, in front of a powerful fan, will die of heatstroke.

Currently nowhere on Earth sees wetbulb temperatures exceed 31C. But according to Steven Sherwood, an Atmospheric Scientist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, rising overall temperatures will mean that this limit will soon regularly be breached and the 35C limit of human survivability will be surpassed on a regular basis.  “I just knew from basic physics that there would be a point where heat and humidity became intolerable, and it didn’t seem that anyone had looked at that from a climate change perspective.”

By the last 23rd Century, the cities of Houston, Shanghai, New Orleans, Tel Aviv and Lagos will be abandoned – not because of sea level rises but because in the summer months at least they will simply be uninhabitable. Humans walking around outside will die. No one will live in Florida any more, or Louisiana. Much of the American sunbelt will be reduced to a depopulated desert or swamp. Even in our lifetimes we could see tens of thousands dying of heat stress in ever more frequent heatwaves.

This is, of course, speculation. Global temperatures will have to rise a great deal for heat stress to cause the evacuation of the Deep South and that is far from being a given. As I have said many times when it comes to models, it is often a case of rubbish in, nonsense out. But pump enough CO2 in and something nasty is going to happen.

SOURCE





Shhh… Serious Scientists At Work

USA Today of course sucks this crap up without doing any fact checking.

   Iowa scientists: Drought a sign of climate change

    The report was signed by 138 scientists and researchers from 27 Iowa colleges and universities. They said they wanted to release the updated report now while the drought is still fresh in the public’s mind.      “The drought is sort of a teachable moment,” said Jerry Schnoor, co-director of the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research at the University of Iowa.

Brilliant theory – except that Iowa has been getting wetter and experiencing fewer droughts.



More HERE  (See the original for links)




A Hurricane of Global Warming Lies‏

By Alan Caruba

At his recent press conference, President Obama, in response to a question, said “You know, as you know, Mark, we can’t attribute any particular weather event to climate change. What we do know is the temperature around the globe is increasing faster than was predicted even ten years ago.” That is a flat out lie. The temperature of the Earth has been cooling for at least sixteen years.

The devastation that Hurricane Sandy wrought defies the imagination, particularly for those on the East Coast where so much destruction was inflicted. It mirrored 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and it is only natural for people to believe there has been an increase in hurricanes striking the U.S. homeland, but there hasn’t.

Despite 2009’s “Climategate” that revealed that global warming is a hoax, many still believe it exists. In a letter to Fred Upton, the Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on November 11th, meteorologists and climatologists joined to warn that “Global warming that has not actually occurred can scarcely have contributed much to vast destruction wrought by Sandy.”

Dr. Bill Gray, the nation’s expert on hurricanes, was joined by Dr. Willie Soon, Prof. Fred Singer, and Lord Christopher Monckton, a science advisor to Britain’s former Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, to say that “Hurricane Sandy was a freak storm, not the type of extreme weather event that climate scientists have said will become more frequent and more severe if we fail to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.”

“After almost 16 years without global warming, there are still a few who implausibly try to blame this non-existent global warming for causing various weather-related disasters in the past two or three years.” The letter advised against holding hearings on the recent hurricane. “With the election behind us, we will have an opportunity to begin again and give this matter the attention it deserves—none at all.”

Writing in Forbes magazine, James Taylor, the Heartland Institute’s editor of Environment and Climate News, spelled out the actual record of hurricane activity in the decades prior to the global warming hoax which began in the late 1980s and since.

“The National Hurricane Center (NHC) provides information on major U.S. hurricanes during the past 100-plus years. According to the NHC, 70 major hurricanes struck the United States in the 100 years between 1911 and 2010. That is an average of seven major hurricane strikes per decade.”

In all the decades back to 1961, the 100-year average remained intact with major hurricanes ranging from as few per decade as four and as many as seven. Not a single decade varied from this.

In the decades since the 1980s when alarmists began warning of a major increase in the overall temperature of the Earth, claiming it would trigger major weather events like hurricanes, nothing changed. In the decades in which carbon dioxide emissions were said to be the cause, the average remained the same.

Taylor examined the preceding 50 years before “the alleged human-induced global warming crisis.” He spelled out the data from 1951 to 1920 that reveals that the 100-year average was unchanged.

Despite the global warming claims “during the past four decades, the time period during which global warming alarmists claim human-induced global warming accelerated rapidly and became incontrovertible, the fewest number of major hurricanes struck during any 40-year period since at least the 1800s.”

In the first two years of this current decade “exactly zero major hurricanes struck the United States.”

Despite this, the calls for carbon taxes are being heard; taxes that would affect all industry and businesses nationwide. Such a tax, already in place in California, would drive large scale manufacturing out of the nation and take with them hundreds of thousands of jobs. It would impact the nation’s utilities and drive up the cost of electricity, the life blood of the nation.

If Americans do not wake up to this threat, do not realize that hurricane activity has not increased, and realize, too, that the Earth has been in a cooling cycle since 1998, they will fall victim to the vast matrix of environmental organizations, government agencies, and the mainstream media that continues to spread alarm in the name of global warming and climate change.

SOURCE




Obama’s war on energy is a war on jobs

Three hours west of Washington, D.C., U.S. Route 50 emerges from the West Virginia forest in a gentle curve. On the south side of the highway rises an enormous natural gas drilling rig. To its left and slightly behind it is a gas separation plant under construction. This is the "wet gas" portion of the Marcellus shale-gas play that underlies Appalachia. The separation plant will divide the wet gas into propane, pentane, butane and the like. In front of the rig and closest to the highway is a kind of filling station with color-coded fittings instead of hoses on the pumps. When it's completed, 40 tanker trucks a day will pull up and load the various gases for delivery to plants up the chemistry food chain.

Watching over this process was a man about 50 years old in a new but dusty white pickup. He's the site-preparation foreman, there to make certain everything is squared away properly. Natural gas drilling is a second career for him. He worked for many years in the aluminum plant in Ravenswood, W.V., until it closed. He's visibly tired because he's been working hard, probably with a lot of overtime, but for once in his life, he is making excellent wages and benefits. During the summer, he got a little time off and took his wife deep-sea fishing off Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Since the end of World War II, there have been three economic revolutions: the jet engine, integrated circuits (modern electronics) and the Internet, all of them either invented by or developed by Americans. A monthlong, 5,000-mile journey by four-wheel-drive pickup through the back roads of the Marcellus in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio, the Bakken in northern North Dakota and the Eagle Ford in South Texas made it overwhelmingly clear that hydro-fracking for shale oil and gas is the fourth one. Fracking has been around for a long time, but it's the new technology, particularly the horizontal drilling aspect, that makes it so exciting. Dow Jones reports that the International Energy Agency believes that the global energy map is being redrawn by the resurgence in oil and gas production in the United States.

All an observer has to do is stand and watch the activity in little towns like Waverly, W.V., Nixon, Texas, or Killdeer, N.D., and it is impossible not to be caught up in the excitement. Nixon, for example, has no stoplight, but it does have a four-way stop sign. From the west comes a line of diesel-fuel tankers, from the north the flatbeds loaded with drilling pipe, from the east the gravel and cement trucks, all turning south toward Karnes City, a center of the Eagle Ford drilling operations. Up from the south comes a line of empties. All the drivers are very polite. Everyone takes his turn at the four-way because this is not a one-off; it's a continuous process.

Numbers? How about $5.1 trillion in capital spending to rejuvenate the American manufacturing sector, or 3.5 million new jobs, all rippling their way through the American economy over the next 10 to 20 years? These numbers come from respected oil analyst Daniel Yergen. Add in the hundred years of new natural gas reserves in the United States and the 50 percent reduction in emissions that natural gas gives over traditional means of electrical generation, and the tens of billions of dollars in new downstream chemical plants that depend on natural gas feed stocks.

My investigation was originally intended to look at an exhilarating new industry, but discovered a startling series of human-interest stories. A young man in his early 20s from upstate New York drives a gravel truck in North Dakota. Two very tired Hispanic diesel mechanics in their 30s enjoy a quick lunch at the Dairy Queen near Leal, Texas. All make do very well, all contributing to American energy security. Arguably, the most sensitive cases are those who have seen hard times and are getting a second chance, like the recovering addict in his 40s from Chicago who is clean because the companies are strict about random drug tests. Now he's a rigger battling winter ice in North Dakota, working long hours but making more money than he has ever seen in his life.

Sadly, all of this has its enemies. Within hours of President Obama's re-election, the National Journal released a profile, saying, "The man who crushed [the] Keystone [pipeline] is targeting fossil fuels in an anti-apartheid campaign." Mr. Obama himself sent out the semaphore signals in his victory speech election night, calling for efforts to make certain America "isn't threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet." Watch out for rule by decree. It may be coming.

SOURCE



Speak loudly and carry a busted hockey stick

Walter Starck comments from Australia

The average temperature for the Earth, or any region or even any specific place is very difficult to determine with any accuracy.  At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. Weather stations are relatively few and located very irregularly. Well maintained stations with good records going back a century or more can be counted on one’s fingers. Even then only maximum and minimum temperatures or ones at a few particular times of day are usually available.  Maintenance, siting, and surrounding land use also all have influences on the temperatures recorded.

The purported 0.7°C of average global warming over the past century is highly uncertain. It is in fact less than the margin of error in our ability to determine the average temperature anywhere, much less globally. What portion of any such warming might be due to due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions is even less certain. There are, however, numerous phenomena which are affected by temperature and which can provide good evidence of relative warming or cooling and, in some cases, even actual temperatures. These include growth rings in trees, corals and stalactites, borehole temperature profiles and the isotopic and biologic signatures in core samples from sediments or glaciers. In addition, historical accounts of crops grown, harvest times, freezes, sea ice, river levels, glacial advances or retreats and other such records provide clear indication of warming and cooling.

Recent Warming Nothing Unusual

The temperature record everywhere shows evidence of warming and cooling in accord with cycles on many different time scales from daily to annual, decadal, centennial, millennial and even longer. Many of these seem to correlate with various cycles of solar activity and the Earth’s own orbital mechanics. The temperature record is also marked by seemingly random events which appear to follow no discernable pattern.

Over the past 3000 years there is evidence from hundreds of independent proxy studies, as well as historical records, for a Minoan Warm period around 1000 BC, a Roman Warm Period about 2000 years ago, a Medieval Warm Period (WMP) about 1000 years ago and a Modern Warm Period now developing. In between were markedly colder periods in the Dark Ages and another between the 16th and 19th centuries which is now known as the Little Ice Age (LIA). The warmer periods were times of bountiful crops, increasing population and a general flourishing of human societies. The cold periods were times of droughts, famines, epidemics, wars and population declines. Clearly life has been much better in the times of warmer climate, and there is nothing to indicate that the apparent mild warming of the past century is anything other than a return of this millennial scale warming cycle.

Good News Unwelcome to Alarmists

This rather good news about a possibly warmer climate has not met with hopeful interest from those who purport to be so concerned about the possibly dangerous effects of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). On the contrary, their reaction has overwhelmingly been a strong rejection of any beneficial possibility. It is apparent that their deepest commitment is to the threat itself and not to any rational assessment of real world probabilities or the broader consequences of any of their proposed remedies.

Fabricating a Hockey Stick from Hot Air

This blanket rejection of any possibility other than the hypothetical threat of AGW has led to some strange behaviour for people who modestly proclaim themselves to be the world’s top climate scientists.  Not only have they ignored and dismissed the hundreds of studies indicating the global existence of a Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, they have set out to fabricate an alternate reality in the form of a graph purporting to represent the global temperature for the past thousand years. It portrays a near straight line wiggling up and down only a fraction of a degree for centuries until it begins an exponential rise gradually starting at the beginning of the 20th century and then shooting steeply up in the latter part of that century. This hockey stick-shaped graph was then heavily promoted as the icon of AGW. It appeared on the cover of the third climate assessment report of the IPCC published in 2003 and was reproduced at various places in the report itself.

Among the emails between leading climate researchers released in the Climategate affair were a number which revealed a concerted effort to come up with some means to deny the existence of the MWP. The implement chosen to do this became known as the Hockey Stick Graph.

The methodology used to construct the graph involved the use of estimates of temperatures from a very small sample of tree growth rings from the Yamal Peninsula in far northern Siberia and ancient stunted pine trees from near the tree line in the High Sierras of California. This data was then subjected to a statistical treatment later shown by critics to produce a hockey stick form of graph even when random numbers were used as raw input data. To make matters even worse, the same tree ring data also indicated a significant decline in temperature for the 20th century, but this was hidden by burying it in a much larger number of data points from instrument measurements. The resulting study was published in the prestigious scientific journal, Nature in 1998. Remarkably, this very small, highly selected and deceptively manipulated graph was proclaimed to be an accurate representation of global temperatures and the extensive body of contrary evidence was simply ignored.

Continuing the Game With a Busted Stick

 When serious shortcomings of the hockey stick study began to be exposed and questioned the climate alarmists closed ranks and proclaimed their preeminent authority and expertise but refused to engage in any genuine scientific debate with their critics. Instead, they appealed to a supposed consensus of experts, peer review, and personal denigration of any who dared to disagree.

All of the name calling, pissing contests over credentials and abstruse statistical manipulations made it difficult for the general public to come to any conclusion. Regardless of various provable errors and conflicting evidence, the alarmists could and did simply ignore it all and claim the HS graph as gospel truth.

Then came Climategate. Obvious scams, lies and connivance are something that doesn’t require a computer model or a PhD to recognise. In the Climategate emails discussion of things like things like “…Mike’s Nature trick…,”, manipulations to “…hide the decline”,  requests to destroy correspondence, efforts to supress publication of conflicting studies, vilification of critics, and abuse of peer review were matters anyone could see were not ethical. Certainly they were not the kind of behaviour we should expect from high level scientists whose advice we are being asked to accept in policies that could be expected to have major effects on the prosperity of our entire society.

The loss of public trust and credibility resulting from Climategate was immense and has been compounded by additional ongoing exposures of misconduct, repeated failures of alarmist predictions and the slow motion economic train wreck of green energy initiatives.

Although one might rationally expect that the obvious collapse of alarmist momentum would have them reassessing their approach and perhaps even the validity of their earlier assumptions, it seems that the idea that they may have been wrong in any respect must be be inconceivable to them. Instead, their response to conflicting reality and declining credibility has been only to declare still greater certainty and ratchet up the alarm to an even less believable level of hype.

If at First You Don’t Succeed, Repeat the Failure

Introduction of the carbon tax in Australia was supposed to lead the world along the path of righteousness toward cheap renewable energy and environmental correctness. Unfortunately for the current government both economic reality and climate itself have not co-operated. The intended good example is becoming one of an obvious foolishness to be avoided and nobody is following. Ongoing exposure of scientific misconduct by alarmist researchers and repeated failure of their predictions haven’t helped either. The alarmist community is in disarray and becoming increasingly shrill in the tone of their pronouncements. The need for strong new scientific evidence to reinforce the shredded remnants of their discredited claims is becoming desperate.

CSIRO has tried to help with a series of increasingly dire predictions but having become a heavily bureaucratised and politicised institution they have been careful to cover their backsides with qualifiers and disclaimers which dull the sharp edge of hype, certainty and urgency needed by government. However, through generous grants government has also bought and paid for reliable cadres of university based academics whose funding and even whole careers are now based on research into Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW). Although science may aspire to value free objectivity, it is observable fact that when generous funding is provided to study a purported problem, one thing is certain. It will never be found that there really wasn’t one.

Climatology - Science or Ideology?

Climatology is no longer recognisable as a science but has morphed into a fundamentalist ideology of a millenarian nature. Science only serves it to enhance claims of authority and certainty. Scientific ethics and evidence are employed selectively in accord with the noble cause of saving the planet from the corruptions of humanity and capitalism. Any conflicting reason or evidence is never sufficient for doubt but is only a test of faith to be overcome. Any opposing argument is not simply incorrect but driven by wilful evil, in league with big business if not Satan himself.

More HERE



World Bank warns of “4 degree” threshold

It's just prophecy and the idea that a bank has any expertise at prophecy is laughable.  How come they have so many bad loans if they can foresee the future?

The World Bank is urging stepped-up efforts to meet world carbon-reduction goals after looking at what it says would be the catastrophic consequences if average world temperatures rise more than 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century.

In what World Bank President Jim Yong Kim acknowledged was a “doomsday scenario,” a new study by the organization cited the 4-degree increase as a threshold that would be likely to trigger widespread crop failures and malnutrition and dislocate large numbers of people from land inundated by rising seas.

World climate goals aim to hold the mean temperature increase to less than 2 degrees Celsius, by curbing emissions of greenhouse gases that trap heat — a phenomenon already thought to have boosted average temperatures nearly 1 degree from levels present before the start of the industrial age, Kim said in a briefing last week.

That goal is unlikely to be met, he said, with an increase of 3 or 3.5 degrees Celsius now considered probable.

The report noted that a drop in average temperature of around 4.5 degrees Celsius (8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) triggered the last ice age, and it predicted that a temperature increase of that magnitude would similarly reshape the planet.

In looking at the effects of a 4-degree increase, Kim said the bank was hoping to encourage countries to act more aggressively to achieve climate goals and to prompt poorer nations to begin planning ways to offset the long list of potential impacts.

Those could include sea levels as much as three feet higher than currently expected — a potentially devastating problem for large coastal cities in Asia and Africa. Warming on such a scale could also limit access to fresh water for irrigation and cause heat, drought and disease-related problems that could make it more difficult to meet world food demands and improve health.

“The kind of sea level rise we are talking about is going to make the process of urban planning and services to the poor absolutely fundamental,” said Rachel Kyte, the World Bank’s vice president for sustainable development. “The race to [develop] heat-resistant and drought-resistant strains [of staple food crops] becomes fundamental.”

Kyte said the organization has begun more intense and frequent talks with poorer nations over how to prepare for climate change — usually at the instigation of officials who have seen the effects of shifting weather and climate patterns and now feel they need to plan for the worst.

Countries such as Nigeria, Vietnam and Thailand “are coming and saying, ‘help us think through the options,’ ” Kyte said. “This is an absolute change in the conversation we are having with our clients.”

The bank’s report, “Turn Down the Heat,” cast some doubt on how much can be done to avoid the worst outcomes.

Predicting the course of the world’s climate is a difficult science, and it is impossible to forecast how technology, demographics and politics will shape what the world looks like in 90 years — regardless of the temperature.

But the report concluded that a 4-degree jump in average temperatures would push some countries or regions to the brink of collapse, regardless of how hard they try to adapt.

“A 4°C world is likely to be one in which communities, cities and countries would experience severe disruptions, damage, and dislocation,” the report said. “There is no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible.”

SOURCE

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