And the cooling continues

The Recent 12 Months for the year of 2013 U.S. Temperature trend/decade: - 0.8 F COOLER in 100 years

So to sum it all up, here is the recent 12 months (year to date, January- December) US temperature from a “historic” perspective. To see how the decade trends have evolved during the last 113 years.

Especially to see how the decade trends have evolved during the last 43 years. The period that according to the Global Warming Hysterics and computer models they worship should show a steady and accelerated increase in temperature.

I don’t know about you, but I consider a 12 month, a year by year consecutive trend 113 years long to be a “quite good” indicator.

And as I always point out:

Remember, these are the official figures. With the poor placement of stations (91 % of the stations are CRN 3 to 5 = bad to very poor); where they have purposely taken away the urban heat island effect, use huge smoothing radius, the historical “adjustment and tweaking” to cool the past etc.

Not to mention the great slaughter of GHCN stations 1990-1993 – roughly 63 % of all stations were “dropped”. Oddly enough many of them in cold places – Hmmm? Now the number of GHCN stations is back at the same numbers as in 1890.

Also remember that the US stations are now nearly a third of the all GHCN world stations.

So here are the trends:

US temperature recent 12 months (Jan- Dec) 1900-2013.  The trend for 1900 to 2013 is 0.12 F / Decade


Slight warming over the last 113 years  -- but only in  20th century periods

US temperature recent 12 months (Jan- Dec) 1970-2013

The trend for 1970 to 2013 is 0.48 F / Decade

US temperature recent 12 months (Jan- Dec) 1980-2013

The trend for 1980 to 2013 is 0.42 F / Decade

US temperature recent 12 months (Jan- Dec) 1990-2013

The trend for 1990 to 2013 is  0.33 F / Decade

US temperature recent 12 months (Jan- Dec) 2000-2013

The trend for 2000 to 2013 is - 0.08 F / Decade


Cooling

And as I said in the beginning – always remember that these figures are based on the official data that has been tweaked, “adjusted” and manipulated to fit their agenda (cool the past, ignore UHI and land use change factors, huge smoothing radius – 1200km etc.)..

So the “warming trend” 2000-2013 for January - December is exactly - 0.08 F degrees a decade.  That is - 0.8 F COOLER in 100 years. That’s what I call “warming”!

And this is also the decade that the Global Warming Hysterics have been screaming at the top of their lungs, trying to scare us to death, about the catastrophic treat that the “extreme increase” in temperature is to mankind and earth.

This is a perfect example of what I have been saying all along, it has always been a political agenda – anti human, anti freedom, anti development and anti capitalism. And this Global Warming Hysteria is part of that agenda. It has nothing to do with science, facts or saving the environment or the Earth.

All of this, as always, paid by us, the common people, in the form of taxes, high energy costs and reducing our living standard back to the Stone Age.

And all of this to “save” the Earth from a “catastrophic warming” when it is actually cooling.

And we are supposed to be very worried about a predicted rise of 3-4 F?  But not this ACTUAL trend?

Much more HERE  (See the original for links, graphics etc.)






The Inventor of the Global Warming Hockey Stick Doubles Down

Some skeptics were annoyed that the NYT gave the secretive Michael Mann a platform but, since the article consisted only of the usual Warmist boilerplate relying heavily on hokey claims of consensus and authority, I thought "What else would you expect of the NYT?  They are just feeding their flock".  I am pleased however to present below  a systematic reply from Siegfried Fred  -- JR



by S. Fred Singer

Professor Michael Mann, the inventor of the Hockeystick temperature graph, had a contentious editorial essay in the January 17 issue of the New York Times.  [The Hockeystick graph purports to show that temperatures of the last thousand years declined steadily — until the 20th century, when there was a sudden large rise.]

I am using the word “inventor” on purpose, since the Hockeystick is a manufactured item and does not correspond to well-established historic reality.  It does not show the generally beneficial Medieval Warm Period (MWP) at around 1000 AD, or the calamitous Little Ice Age (LIA) between about 1400 and 1800.  In the absence of any thermometers during most of this period, the Hockeystick is based on an analysis of so-called proxy data, mostly tree rings, from before 1000 AD to 1980, where the proxy temperature  suddenly stops and a rapidly rising thermometer record is joined on.



Since its publication in 1998 and 1999, the hockeystick graph has had a turbulent history.  It was adopted by the IPCC (UN-Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in its 3rd Assessment Report (2001) to support the claim of a major anthropogenic global warming (AGW) during the 20th century.  Since then, the IPCC has distanced itself from the graph, which has been completely discredited.  It not disagrees not only with much historic evidence that shows a MWP and LIA, but also with other analyses  of proxy data.  Most of the criticism has come from the work of two Canadian statisticians, Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, who have uncovered a misuse of data, a biased calibration procedure, and fundamental errors in the statistical methods.

McKitrick, an econometrician at Guelph University in Canada, has a pungent comment on Mann’s op-ed, which was titled “If you see something, say something.”

    “OK, I see a second-rate scientist carrying on like a jackass and making a public nuisance of himself.”

I have added my own comment as follows:  “OK, I want to say something too: I see an ideologue, desperately trying to support a hypothesis that’s been falsified by observations.  While the majority of climate alarmists are trying to discover a physical reason that might just save the AGW hypothesis, Mann simply ignores the ‘inconvenient truth’ that the global climate has not warmed significantly for at least the past 15 years — while emissions of greenhouse gases have surged globally.”

Of course, this is not the first time that “hide the decline” Mike has done this.  Remember his “Nature trick” — so much admired by his ‘Climategate team’ mates?  [For those who don't remember the 2009 Climategate scandal: It consisted of a leak of some thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia, involving mainly Michael Mann and several of his English colleagues, documenting their completely unethical attempts to suppress any contrary opinions and publications from climate skeptics by misusing the peer-review process and by pressuring editors of scientific journals -- unfortunately, with some success.]

We don’t quite know yet what the “Nature trick” refers to — until we get Michael Mann to tell us why he has refused to reveal his never-published post-1980 proxy data.  We may have to wait until we have him on the witness stand and under oath.  But I strongly suspect that it has to do with absence of any temperature increase after 1980; its publication would have created a conflict with the reported (and problematic) thermometer data and with the assertion by the IPCC that humans are responsible for such a temperature rise.

In actuality, we now have adequate proxy data from other sources, most particularly from Fredrick Ljungqvist and David Anderson.  Their separate publications agree that there has been little if any temperature rise since about 1940!  However, there was a real temperature increase between 1920 and 1940, which can be seen also in the various proxy as well as thermometer data.

Anti-Science

Michael Mann saw something he didn’t like in the Senate testimony (Jan 16, 2014) of fiercely independent climate scientist and blogger, Georgia Tech professor Judith Curry; so he decided to say something in his NYT op-ed.  He forgot that often it is better to say nothing than to accuse Curry of peddling anti-science.

Curry has lost no time in taking Mann’s challenge and turning the tables on him:

    “Since you have publicly accused my Congressional testimony of being ‘anti-science,’ I expect you to (publicly) document and rebut any statement in my testimony that is factually inaccurate or where my conclusions are not supported by the evidence that I provide.

    During the Hearing, Senator Whitehouse asked me a question about why people refer to me as a ‘contrarian.’  I said something like the following: Skepticism is one of the norms of science.  We build confidence in our theories as they are able to withstand skeptical challenges.  If instead, scientists defend their theories by calling their opponents names, well that is a sign that their theories are in trouble.

Curry’s final message to Mann:

    “If you want to avoid yourself being labeled as ‘anti-science’, I suggest that you are obligated to respond to my challenge.”

War on Coal

It is interesting that Mann now plays the role of the victim in purported persecution by powerful interests, darkly identified as the fossil-fuel industry.  Actually, the reverse may be the case.  Mann has become a strong proponent of emission controls on carbon dioxide, which fits in very nicely with the ongoing War on Coal conducted by the EPA and the White House — and with the editorial policies of the New York Times — coal being the most prolific source of CO2.

It is ironic that while coal use is increasing rapidly in China and India, it is also increasing in Europe where governments have been anti-CO2 fanatics in the past but have decided to stop nuclear power, which emits no CO2 whatsoever.

In the United States, requirements are being set up to capture CO2 from smoke stacks of power plants and store it underground.  Carbon Capture and Sequestration is a difficult and costly undertaking, and has never been demonstrated on a commercial scale.  There have even been calls for sucking CO2 out of the global atmosphere, which sounds like an impossible task — and in any case, would be very, very expensive.

And to what purpose?  As pointed out many times, CO2 is beneficial for agriculture.  As a natural fertilizer, it accelerates the growth of crops.  Czech physicist Lubos Motl has calculated that if it were indeed possible to reduce CO2 levels to their pre-industrial value, global agriculture would suffer a strong decline and billions of people would starve to death.

But perhaps this level of population control is what the climate fanatics are really after.  They have always maintained that the Earth suffers from over-population and that the number of people needs to be reduced to protect natural values — a truly misanthropic scheme.  In 1974, the Club of Rome group published a detailed study, predicting that a billion people would die of starvation, beginning in the 1980s and peaking in 2010.  One of the proponents of this thesis is now the White House science adviser.

SOURCE





"Climate scientists" suddenly become "passengers"

Australian public broadcaster, the ABC, could teach Dr. Goebbels lessons in propaganda

Three weeks after being rescued from a ship beset by ice, Chris Turney and his band of 51 warmists are finally dropped off on dry land. And still Turney is protesting it’s warm:



The ABC once promoted Turney’s Ship of Fools as a serious scientific expedition to investigate global warming and missing ice. When Turney’s ship got stuck in ice that’s actually at near-record levels, the ABC’s reports suddenly stopped mentioning “climate change” and “global warming”. So I with some eagerness wait for the ABC to make good this promise, made in November as Turney sailed off to Antarctica:

"MARGOT O’NEILL: The expedition sails south tomorrow on a mission to revive the spirit of one of Australia’s greatest scientific explorations for a new generation grappling with climate change.  Lateline will broadcast an update early next year."

What’s your tip? Will Lateline ...

1. Forget the whole sorry embarrassment?

2. Report on the expedition but not explore the irony of warmist scientists being trapped by ice?

3. Report on the expedition but point out that sea ice around Antarctica is actually historically very high, warming has stalled for 16 years, and Turney’s team seemed ill-prepared, ill-advised and not terribly serious, leaving other Antarctic researchers spitting chips at the damage done to their own work by having to rescue them.

UPDATE

The ABC is already up to its usual tricks to protect the warmist cause from embarrassment.

Before Turney’s crew got stuck in ice they were climate scientists investigating climate change:

"EMMA ALBERICI, PRESENTER: A modern-day scientist adventurer is about to undertake one of the largest Australian science expeditions to the Antarctic. Professor Chris Turney from the University of New South Wales and an 85-person team will spend two months trying to answer questions about how climate change in the frozen continent might already be shifting weather patterns in Australia…

MARGOT O’NEILL [reporter]: The research stakes are high. Antarctica is one of the great engines driving the world’s oceans, winds and weather, especially in Australia. But there’s ominous signs of climate change…

CHRIS TURNEY, CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCH CENTRE, UNSW: So we’ve got a really good team and hopefully they won’t go psycho on us. (laughs)…

MARGOT O’NEILL: Professor Turney and his co-leader Dr Chris Fogwell are selecting PhD students for the expedition to help record thousands of measurements, assessing signs of climate change on the frozen continent… The expedition sails south tomorrow on a mission to revive the spirit of one of Australia’s greatest scientific explorations for a new generation grappling with climate change."

Today, though, the ABC insists they are just passengers and no mention at all is made of “climate change” or “global warming”:

"Passengers from a Russian research ship stuck in thick sea ice in Antarctica for more than a week have arrived in Hobart.

Australia’s supply ship Aurora Australis has docked with 52 passengers from the Akademik Shokalskiy which became stuck on Christmas Eve.

The passengers will spend the next few hours clearing quarantine".

Quite shameful. What else does the ABC hide?

SOURCE






Three out of four anti-fracking protesters in Britain are not local and are just there to 'disrupt and intimidate' communities and the police, top officer says

Most people arriving at a long-running anti-fracking protest are there to 'disrupt and intimidate' locals and antagonise police, a police chief said today.

More than 80 people have been arrested at a drilling site in Barton Moss on the outskirts of Salford, Greater Manchester.

Of the 82 people held, 62 are from outside the Greater Manchester area and many are from the south of England, according to Greater Manchester Police.

A number of those detained have been arrested before at Barton Moss or other protest sites, the force said.

Chief Superintendent Mark Roberts said: 'At the start of this protest the majority of protesters were peaceful and law-abiding, but over the past couple of weeks local residents and officers have seen a distinct change to this.

'It now seems that the majority of people who are arriving at the site are not there to protest against fracking, but are there to disrupt and intimidate the local community and to antagonise police.'

Mr Roberts said the force had recorded offences of assault, damage, harassment of residents and workers, a flare fired at the police helicopter and threats to kill.

'I attended a residents’ meeting last week and people there were close to tears and have had enough of this daily disruption to their lives,' he continued.

'Locals, who initially supported the protesters, out walking their dogs and driving down Barton Moss Road have been approached by protesters in balaclavas and have been questioned by them, which has been extremely intimidating.

'Officers are verbally abused on a daily basis, one has even been spat at and another officer required stitches to his hand after trying to get a protester down from a fence.'

Since November around 60 tents and caravans have sprung up along the farm track leading to the site, between Barton Aerodrome and the M62.

Environmentalists claim there is indisputable evidence that fracking causes air and water pollution and leads to earth tremors. The Government and industry say it is safe, and will create jobs.

Meanwhile no fracking will take place at a site in West Sussex which was at the centre of large-scale protests last year, energy company Cuadrilla told residents.

Hundreds of anti-fracking activists set up camp last summer after Cuadrilla started exploratory drilling on the outskirts of Balcombe.

In a letter to Balcombe residents from Cuadrilla chief executive Francis Egan, he said the rock underneath the drill site, at Lower Stumble, was already naturally fractured, and the company had no intention of fracking there.

However, although Mr Egan ruled out fracking at the site, Cuadrilla’s association with Balcombe is by no means at an end.

In his letter, published by Balcombe Parish Council, Mr Egan said Cuadrilla had submitted a new planning application to West Sussex County Council to complete flow testing of oil from the exploration well.

Over the summer, the firm drilled horizontally for some 1,700ft through Micrite formation, a type of limestone, at a depth of around 2,350ft below ground level.

Mr Egan wrote: 'We were expecting to - and did indeed find - oil in the Micrite. However, without testing we cannot be sure at what rate the oil may flow to the surface.'

This week it was revealed that the cost to taxpayers of policing the lengthy anti-fracking protests at Balcombe was nearly £4 million.

SOURCE



The EPA's Agenda: Undermine Capitalism and America

By Alan Caruba

The Environmental Protection Agency has been in a full assault on the U.S. economy since the 1980s when the global warming hoax was initiated. It has been assisted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.

To put it in other terms, our own government has engaged in lying to Americans and the result has been the expenditure of billions of taxpayer dollars on something that was not happening and is not happening.

On January 22, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released the deposition transcript of former senior EPA official John Beale. After defrauding the agency of nearly $900,000 and spending weeks and months away from his office by claiming he was on assignment for the CIA, the transcript contained a bombshell.

Discussing his job, at the time as a close associate of Gina McCarthy, the new EPA administrator, Beale revealed that he was there to come up with “specific proposals that could have been proposed either legislatively or things which could have been done administratively to kind of modify the capitalist system…”

Dan Kish, senior vice president of the Institute for Energy Research, responded to the revelation saying “In his testimony under oath, Beale, perhaps unwittingly, has laid bare the administration’s end goal. The President’s policies are not about carbon, they are not about coal, and they are not even about energy and the environment. They are about fundamentally altering the DNA of the capitalist system. These policies are not about energy, but power.”

When the new EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy, in testimony before a congressional committee in mid-January was asked by Sen. Jeff Sessions (AL-R) to confirm a statement made by President Obama last year that global temperatures were increasing faster in the last five or ten years than climate scientists had predicted.

She said, “I can’t answer that question.”

“You’re asking us to impose billions of dollars of cost on this economy and you won’t answer the simple question of whether (temperature around the world is increasing faster than predicted) is accurate or not?” Sessions responded.

“I just look at what the climate scientists tell me,” said McCarthy.

The Earth is in a cooling cycle that has lasted seventeen years at this point, but the EPA administrator was not inclined to accept this fact, nor question the climate scientists who provided the data based on computer models that have been consistently wrong now for decades.

We owe the Heartland Institute, a free market think tank a debt of gratitude for the eight international conferences it has held to debunk global warming. Joseph Bast, its president and CEO, has said, “The toll our EPA is taking on the country is staggering, putting hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work at a time when millions of people are unemployed and our reliance on foreign sources of energy threatens to compromise our nation’s security.” Heartland’s science director points out that “EPA’s budget could safely be cut by 80 percent or more without endangering the environment or human health, Most of what EPA does today could be done better by state government agencies…” I serve as an advisor to Heartland.

This is the same EPA that proposed restrictions for new wood stoves in early January. The reason given was to reduce the maximum amount of fine particulate emissions (soot) allowed for new stoves sold in 2015 and 2019. The soot is made up of solid particles and liquid droplets that measure 2.5 micrometers or less. The EPA claims, as it does for virtually all its regulations, that it is linked to heart attacks, decreased lung function, and premature death in people with heart and lung disease. This is worse than junk science. It represents no science whatever, being an invention of EPA employees who specialize in such nonsense. The Earth produces soot every day and circulates it globally.

The only way Americans will be protected against the EPA’s attack on our economy will be a Congress controlled by the Republican Party and a Republican President that will support the oversight that is needed and the reversal of its vast output of regulations. It will have to do this as well for NOAA, NASA, and other governmental departments and agencies that, until recently, spewed forth all manner of “data” supporting the global warming hoax.

At the heart of the global warming hoax, now called climate change, is the assertion that carbon dioxide (CO2) and other “greenhouse gases” have been dangerously warming the Earth by trapping heat, but you don’t have to be a scientist to know that the current cold spell, comparable to the 1500-1850 mini-ice age, is the result of lower solar emissions by a sun. CO2 is a minor (0.038) element of the Earth’s atmosphere, but the second most vital gas for all life on Earth because it is the “food” that maintains all vegetation.

Little wonder, during the government shutdown, more than 93% of EPA employees were furloughed when designated as “non-essential.” That was more than nine out of every ten employees!

In September 2013, the Republican members of the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee issued a report that EPA officials had, from the beginning of President Obama’s tenure had “pursued a path of obfuscation, operating in the shadows, and out of the sunlight.” It detailed violations of the Freedom of Information Act and other federal laws and regulations intended to encourage transparency and accountability in the government.

In mid-January, the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute revealed that emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act revealed that the EPA used official events to help environmental groups gather signatures for petitions on agency rulemaking. “The level of coordination in these documents is shocking” said an EELI spokesman. The EPA has a long history of this, including a policy of “sue and settle” working with environmental groups to bring a suit to advance regulations and settling the suit to enable it to implement those regulations.

In an April 2013 article in Investor’s Business Daily, John Merline reported that “Overall air pollution levels dropped 62% from 1990 to 2012, while GDP grew 69% and population climbed 26%.” The pollution the EPA keeps claiming is rising includes carbon monoxide, soot, sulfur dioxide, ozone, and others, all well below the EPA’s safety threshold. Water quality, too, has also improved over several decades.

In May 2013, Paul Driessen, a senior policy advisor for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) noted that the EPA, since Obama’s inauguration in 2009, had generated 1,920 new regulations. “The EPA’s actions are forcing us to expend vast financial, human and technological resources to achieve minimal or even zero health benefits.”

This is the same EPA leading the effort to shut down coal-fired plants that produce electricity. It is the same EPA seeking to stop the Pebble Mine, described as “a natural resource project in Alaska that could yield more copper than has ever been found in one place anywhere in the world.”

The EPA is the instrument of those who want to undermine capitalism in any way it can. Only that can explain why entire books have been written about its impact on the economy of the nation and the deceptive way it has imposed regulations responsible for it.

President Obama called for “hope and change” when he first ran for office. We can only hope that a new Congress and President will bring about the change we need to shut down the EPA and return control over the nation’s environment to its 50 sovereign states.

SOURCE




Slideshow: Over two thirds of U.S. energy generation threatened by the EPA

Power industries in the United States are under attack by the radical left, now empowered by dominant federal agencies and government officials.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has—especially since the beginning of the Obama administration—been taken over by environmental alarmists and given a seemingly open license to promote the environmentalist agenda by any means necessary.

The strategy is no secret: Kill any and all power generation methods not deemed appropriate by all corners of the environmentalist community, regardless of the well-being of American families, the economy, and the nation’s ability to power future innovation.

The following slides outline the industries being hit the hardest by the EPA and why Americans should be concerned:

Go HERE to view the slides.

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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