Warmest year ever in 2% of the earth's surface;  global temperature steady

So sad for the Warmists.  They at last have a lovely set of warming numbers for part of the USA but the globe is not co-operating.  The U.S. figures are just an isolated hotspot.  Below is the global record:


Via meteorologist Joe Bastardi

The British figures in the article following also talk of global temperature flatlining

What I have just said represents the latest data accurately but you would never guess it from the article below.  It wasn't even warmest in the whole of the USA:  Just in the contiguous states (2% of the globe).  Alaska was unusually cold.

And the  new figures are deliberately preliminary, using only the most accessible data.  The final figures using all the data tend to be lower, low enough to make the year unexceptional.  The deception never stops

If you found yourself bundling up in scarves, hats, and long underwear less than usual last year, you weren't alone: 2012 was the warmest year on record in the contiguous United States, according to scientists with The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The average temperature for 2012 was 55.3 degrees Fahrenheit, 3.2 degrees above normal and a full degree higher than the previous warmest year recorded -- 1998 -- NOAA said in its report Tuesday. All 48 states in the contiguous U.S. had above-average annual temperatures last year, including 19 that broke annual records, from Connecticut through Utah.

“We’re taking quite a large step,” said Jake Crouch, a climate scientist from the NOAA National Climatic Data Center, which has recorded temperatures in the contiguous U.S. for the past 118 years.

It was also a historic year for "extreme" weather, scientists with the federal agency said. With 11 disasters that surpassed $1 billion in losses, including Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Isaac, and tornadoes across the Great Plains, Texas, and the Southeast and Ohio Valley, NOAA said 2012 was second only to 1998 in the agency's "extreme" weather index.

A long-term warming trend for the U.S., combined with drought and a northerly jet stream, led to the record heat, explained Crouch.

"During the winter season, the jet stream tended to stay further north of the U.S.-Canadian border, so that limited colder outbreaks in the country. It also limited precipitation. So that led to a warm and dry winter season, and that persisted through the spring," he said.

"That warm and dry spring and winter laid the groundwork for the drought we had this summer... . When we have drought, it tends to drive daytime temperatures upward."

More HERE





Global warming at a standstill, new Met Office figures show

The Met Office has downgraded its forecast for global warming to suggest that by 2017 temperatures will have remained about the same for two decades.

A new scientific model has revised previous figures for the next five years downwards by around a fifth.

The forecast compares how much higher average world temperatures are likely to be than the “long-term average” from 1971-2000.

It had been thought that this would be 0.54C during the period 2012 -2016 but new data puts the figure for the 2013-2017 period at 0.43C.

This figure is little higher than the 0.40C recorded in 1998, the warmest year in the Met Office Hadley Centre’s 160-year record – suggesting global warming will have stalled in the intervening two-decade period.

However, it is thought that factors such as ocean current patterns may be behind the slowdown and scientists say the “variability” in climate change does not alter the long-term trend of rising temperatures.

The new annual forecast, published on December 24, is the first to make use of the Met Office’s latest climate model, HadGEM3, which it said “includes a comprehensive set of improvements based on the latest scientific understanding”.

It suggests that global average temperature will remain between 0.28C and 0.59C above the long-term average “with values most likely to be about 0.43C higher than average”.

The Met Office said: “This is an extremely challenging area of research not least because long-term comprehensive observations of the ocean do not exist to help us understand how the global oceans behave over decadal and longer timescales.

“As with all areas of science, our knowledge is continually increasing and it is therefore not surprising that our models and predictive skill will continue to improve.

“The fact that the new model predicts less warming, globally, for the coming five years does not necessarily tell us anything about long-term predictions of climate change for the coming century.”

Labour MP Graham Stringer accused the Met Office of “burying bad news” by releasing the data on Christmas Eve and said it should give up climate change forecasts as well as long-term predictions.

He said: “They failed completely with their models to predict the flattening out of global warming. I think that they are just trying to bury bad news that their predictions in the medium and long-term have been pretty poor.”

Figures from last November, showing that 2012 would be cooler than average for the past decade, had already indicated that global warming was slowing down.

Dr Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office, said at the time that the past decade had been the warmest on record.

But he pointed out that warming has slowed down since 2000, in comparison to the rapid warming of the world since the 1970s.

“Although the first decade of the 21st century was the warmest on record, warming has not been as rapid since 2000 as over the longer period since the 1970s,” he said. “This variability in global temperatures is not unusual, with several periods lasting a decade or more with little or no warming since the instrumental record began.

“We are investigating why the temperature rise at the surface has slowed in recent years, including how ocean heat content changes and the effects of aerosols from atmospheric pollution may have influenced global climate.”

Dr Stott warned that global warming could speed up again at any time, and insisted that the general pattern of warming was not in doubt.

SOURCE





Leading German Daily Announces: “Global Warming Has Stopped”, Questions IPCC Models

It took them 15 years to notice it: CO2 is not driving the climate.

German online daily Hamburger Abendblatt here has a story titled: Global Warming Takes A Break, citing the leaked copy of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, which is due to be released in September, 2013. The Hamburger Abendblatt writes:

    "The preliminary text is very clear that the global temperature increase does not follow the continuous rise of CO2 emissions. That’s water on the water-wheel of climate skeptics, who argue that it is more the impacts of the sun that warm the Earth, and greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, less so.”

The Hamburger Abendblatt asks:

    "Just how reliable are computer simulations that, although they correctly predicted the CO2 increase of the last 15 years, were completely off with the temperature development?”

Global temperatures have stagnated since the new millennium began. To answer that question, the German daily asks (alarmist) professor Jochem Marotzke, Director of the Max Planck Institute für Meteorology in Hamburg. He told the Abendblatt: “Such plateaus also show up in our models. In such periods heat is absorbed more by the depths of the oceans. We can’t explain why this is so.”

Maybe plateaus do show up in the models here and there. But none of the models showed a plateau for the last 15 years.

Marotzke then insists that the record low Arctic sea ice extent measured last summer shows that things are heating up. Yet, strangely, he develops amnesia when it come to the Antarctic record high sea ice extent recorded last fall.

SOURCE






EPA rejects Arizona haze plan

Arizona consumers can expect higher electricity costs as a result of new EPA restrictions on three Eastern Arizona power plants. Arizona state environmental officials say the EPA restrictions are too costly and will provide no perceptible environmental benefits.

EPA Rejects Arizona Plan

The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) in 2011 submitted a new, comprehensive regional haze plan to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. EPA, however, said the state’s plan did not go far enough to protect air quality.

“As required by the Clean Air Act, ADEQ balanced cost, the energy and non-air quality environmental impacts, existing air pollution controls, the remaining life of the facilities, and the potential visibility improvement of controls,” ADEQ said in a press release. “Based on these factors, ADEQ’s plan called for less stringent air pollution controls than those imposed by EPA’s decision.

“EPA’s action requires the installation of more than $500 million in air pollution controls that will likely result in no perceptible improvements in visibility,” ADEQ added.

Energy analysts say the power plants may have to shut down because of the high costs.

“The Clean Air Act gives each state the responsibility and right to develop a plan to improve visibility within its own borders. It also obligates EPA to determine whether the state’s plan complies with the Act, not to substitute its judgment for the state’s,” said ADEQ Director Henry Darwin in a press statement.

“We are disappointed that EPA would choose to unilaterally decide what’s best for Arizona rather than work with ADEQ as a partner to address its concerns.”

High Compliance Costs

All three power plants face expensive retrofits. The Navajo Generating Facility, at 2,250 megawatts, will likely require over $1 billion in retrofits.

Arizona Electric Power Company estimates its Apache Generating Station, which serves 150,000 customers near Benson, will require $160 million in additional equipment to implement the EPA-mandated nitrogen oxide technology.

The 730 megawatt Coronado facility invested $420 million in sulfur dioxide scrubbers during the 1990s and an additional $45 million in recent years to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions. EPA’s new restrictions will require another $200 million in emissions reduction equipment.

Costly Back-to-Nature Standard

Tomczak said EPA’s goal of achieving “natural conditions” will be exceedingly costly and difficult to achieve.

“The EPA program is designed to mitigate all anthropogenic sources of haze and achieve natural conditions by 2064,” ADEQ spokesperson Lisa Tomczak said. “The regional haze decisions that are being finalized are just the first of many state implementation plans that are to be used to achieve the goal.”

Tomczak said Arizona air quality continues to improve, and the new EPA restrictions are unnecessary.

“We have seen improvements in visibility in most Class I areas in Arizona over the course of the last five years and have some expectation that the trend will continue," said Tomczak.

SOURCE





French socialists doubling down on failed  solar power plan

They're already deeply in debt but when did that worry a Leftist?

 France has doubled its capacity target for photovoltaic power generation and offered more financial support to small solar power farms that use European-made panels in a bid to rescue the country's ailing solar industry.

Energy Minister Delphine Batho announced the measures, which are expected to spur investments worth more than 2 billion euros ($2.6 billion), during a visit to a solar panel factory in Western France.

The Socialist government is seeking to rescue an industry which has lost about 15,000 jobs in the last two years, after the previous conservative government tried to dampen a speculative bubble in new solar power installations. In 2012 the industry employed 18,000 people, down from 32,500 in 2010.

The production capacity growth target will double to 1,000 megawatts (MW) per year, the equivalent of a small nuclear power reactor, Batho said.

France will also add a bonus of up to 10 percent on the subsidy for feed-in-tariffs paid to generators of solar power through consumers' power bills for small solar farms using panels made in the 30 countries of the European Economic Area (EEA).

These emergency measures, which are due to take effect when a decree is published later this year, are being sought to support the solar industry until a wider energy law is drawn up after the government's so-called "energy transition debate".

The government estimated the annual cost at between 90 and 170 million euros, to be levied on consumers through the existing CSPE tax on power bills.

SOURCE





Hobbit-sized humans, able to exist on less nourishing food, will have the best chance of survival in a warmer world (?)

This is all theory  -- and theory that glides over a lot of facts.  In the geological past, hot wet climates have supported HUGE animals such as the dinosaurs  -- exactly the opposite of what the galoots below claim

Animals, including humans, will shrink in size to survive in a warming world, according to scientists studying the last time the planet’s temperature rose rapidly by 6°C. What scientists call dwarfism was the successful strategy to avoid starvation for a large range of species including horses, many insects and even earthworms. The widespread response was partly to do with the heat but mostly because many plants became less nutritious, forcing mammals and insects to eat far more to survive.

In the next 100 years the combination of more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and increased temperature could be “catastrophic” for an overpopulated world, according to one of the scientists involved. With food supply drastically reduced, evolutionary forces suggest hobbit-sized humans who needed to eat less would have the greatest chance of survival. These findings are the work of an international group of 30 scientists looking at the vast fossil deposits in rock strata in Wyoming in the US, charting the period 55 million years ago when the Earth’s temperature rose suddenly – as it is expected to do this century.

On that occasion it took 10,000 years for the temperature to rise by 6°C. There were mass extinctions, but the timescale gave some plants and animals time to adapt and move north and south to survive. Many species evolved quickly – dwarfism being one of the most widespread and successful strategies.

The project, entitled the Bighorn Basin Coring Project, involves scientists from the US, the UK, Germany and the Netherlands. It is a United States National Science Foundation-funded project, aimed at understanding what happened the last time the Earth warmed and the consequences for the planet this century. The scientists leading the project are Will Clyde (University of New Hampshire), Philip Gingerich (University of Michigan) and Scott Wing (Smithsonian Institution).

What worries the scientists is that this current warming period will take as little as 200 years, if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  is correct. This gives many long-lived species, for example trees, no time to evolve and migrate. Even mammals will struggle to move to new areas, because man has placed farmland and cities in the way.

Rapid warming leaves few choices

The result will be mass extinction, and for the survivors, humans, animals and insects, there will be a scramble to eat a diminishing and less nutritious food supply. Lower plant nutrition is caused by higher atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, rather than temperature itself. Plant growth experiments have shown that concentrations of both nitrogen and the protein Rubisco, which regulates carbon dioxide fixation, decrease under higher CO2 conditions, making many plant tissues less nutritious.

To get the same calories herbivores would have to eat more plant matter.  Humans would be forced to grow more crops to get the same nutrition from food and spend more time eating it. Farm animals would also get smaller in response, making meat more difficult to obtain. Competition from insects eating food crops would be fierce.

Dwarfism is again expected to be a successful strategy for the survivors, enabling humans, animals and insects to mature earlier with less food and so reproduce before they starve. The researchers’ findings show that earlier optimism that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would have a fertilization effect, allowing food plants to grow quicker in a warmer world, is more than countered by a loss in nutrition. For an overcrowded world this could be disastrous.

SOURCE

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