NEW BOOK "To Kill an Error" - A novel approach to Global Warming Scepticism

by Jed B van de Poll

Kindle Price: US$6.68

"To Kill an Error" is a fictional account of the furore surrounding the 2010 accusations of data manipulation associated with the world's temperature record.

While Al Gore's book 'An Inconvenient Truth' was a factual book based on fiction, 'To Kill an Error' is a fictional book based on fact.

The story is a fast-paced thriller of corporate greed and intrigue on an international scale that will keep you on the edge of your seat as you learn some uncomfortable truths about climate change, the environmental industry and the real cost of being 'green'.

Amazon.




Chills Down My Spine Caused by Global Warming

If you’re like me this will send chills down your spine.

Nature Climate Change recently published a paper that contends that temperate zones will see reduced crop yields by 2030, presumably plunging the world into a man-caused famine not seen since the last time communists were in charge.

From Blue and Green Tomorrow:

“As more data have become available, we’ve seen a shift in consensus, telling us that the impacts of climate change in temperate regions will happen sooner rather than later,” said Professor Andy Challinor, lead author of the study.

Yes, any time I see the word “consensus” in the context of the "settled science" of global something I break out into a cold sweat, I hyperventilate and my sight grows dim.

And that should happen to you too.

Because I next wonder: “How much is this going to cost me exactly?”

But then I remember, upon studied reflection, that every time the WeatherNazis come to a consensus about anything they’re as wrong Hitler was in invading Russia without winter clothing.

“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “It’s gonna be a lot warmer than people think.”

Certainly, it’s a lot warmer for him now.

For the estimated $100 billion annually that we will be spending on “climate change” programs by 2020, I’m thinking that there might be a better way to spend that money, like terraforming Mars for human population or throwing a really big Fourth of July Parade.

These are certainly better ideas than the rationing of electricity, wearing clothes made exclusively of hemp and dating chicks with hairy armpits.

Or driving a Chevy Volt.

But the news gets worse for liberals.

The indoor hemp industry apparently produces the same amount of carbon in the atmosphere as 3 million cars.

“'[I]ndoor Cannabis production uses 1% of the nation’s entire electricity consumption,' reports Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researcher Evan Mills in the Huffington Post. 'This comes to energy expenditures of $5 billion per year.' While 1% may not seem like a lot, the report claims that smoking one single Cannabis joint is equivalent to running a 100-watt light bulb for 17 hours. That Cannabis cigarette carries two pounds of CO2 emissions."

I don't know what a gram of dope costs these days, but that's a lot of carbon for a gram.

While the doomsday date for the final destruction of mankind due to global warming gets pushed back farther and farther, I’m wondering if any of these WeatherNazis actually understand human history.

It would be wonderful if human activity could warm the planet.

The danger to civilization isn’t a warm planet, but a cold one.

It was only with the retreat of the last Ice Age that the ascendancy of modern man took hold. Without that, we’d all be living in caves, each of us ineligible to be president of the United States because we’d all still live in Kenya.

Instead we live in the house of cards that the president of the United States built—who by the way was born in Hawaii, a place much warmer than most of the globe; and presumably what Montana will be a lot like in the global something future.

Weather does influence culture, but not in the ways the alarmists would have you believe.

A new study by Matthew Ranson—no relation (my relatives know how to spell)—made possible by a fellowship from Harvard, predicts that because of global warming crime will spike, with your daughters unsafe to roam the streets day or night.

“The results show that temperature has a strong positive effect on criminal behavior,” writes Ranson, “with little evidence of lagged impacts. Between 2010 and 2099, climate change will cause an additional 22,000 murders, 180,000 cases of rape, 1.2 million aggravated assaults, 2.3 million simple assaults, 260,000 robberies, 1.3 million burglaries, 2.2 million cases of larceny, and 580,000 cases of vehicle theft in the United States.”

See and all this time I thought that dinosaurs failed to adapt and thus became extinct.

I never knew it was dino-on-dino crime caused by high global temperatures.

And so reports like these send chills down my spine.  Because believe me: It’ll cost us. One way or another, it’ll cost us.

That’s the liberal way.

SOURCE




New paper finds no effect of "acidification" on plankton from CO2 levels 8 times higher than today

A paper published today in Biogeosciences finds that prior claims about the effects of ocean "acidification" on calcifying plankton are highly exaggerated because the artificial laboratory conditions utilized do not correctly simulate the effects in natural seawater. The authors find exposure of the plankton to "acidification" from elevated CO2 concentrations of up to 3247 ppm [over 8 times higher than the present] had no effect on the life cycle (population density, growth and reproduction) of calcifying plankton when natural buffering sediment was present in the experiment.

The paper adds to several others invalidating the vast prior literature on the effects of "acidification" as overblown due to biased, artificial laboratory conditions [often just putting sulfuric acid in an aquarium] that don't correctly simulate the buffering effects of a natural environment.

Needless to say, the effects of increased CO2 on non-calcifying plankton are 100% positive due to CO2 fertilization.

Biogeosciences, 11, 1581-1597, 2014

Response of benthic foraminifera to ocean acidification in their natural sediment environment: a long-term culturing experiment

by K. Haynert et al.

Abstract.

Calcifying foraminifera are expected to be endangered by ocean acidification; however, the response of a complete community kept in natural sediment and over multiple generations under controlled laboratory conditions has not been constrained to date. During 6 months of incubation, foraminiferal assemblages were kept and treated in natural sediment with pCO2-enriched seawater of 430, 907, 1865 and 3247 μatm pCO2. The fauna was dominated by Ammonia aomoriensis and Elphidium species, whereas agglutinated species were rare. After 6 months of incubation, pore water alkalinity was much higher in comparison to the overlying seawater. Consequently, the saturation state of Ωcalc was much higher in the sediment than in the water column in nearly all pCO2 treatments and remained close to saturation. As a result, the life cycle (population density, growth and reproduction) of living assemblages varied markedly during the experimental period, but was largely unaffected by the pCO2 treatments applied. According to the size–frequency distribution, we conclude that foraminifera start reproduction at a diameter of 250 μm. Mortality of living Ammonia aomoriensis was unaffected, whereas size of large and dead tests decreased with elevated pCO2 from 285 μm (pCO2 from 430 to 1865 μatm) to 258 μm (pCO2 3247 μatm). The total organic content of living Ammonia aomoriensis has been determined to be 4.3% of CaCO3 weight. Living individuals had a calcium carbonate production rate of 0.47 g m−2 a−1, whereas dead empty tests accumulated a rate of 0.27 g m−2 a−1. Although Ωcalc was close to 1, approximately 30% of the empty tests of Ammonia aomoriensis showed dissolution features at high pCO2 of 3247 μatm during the last 2 months of incubation. In contrast, tests of the subdominant species, Elphidium incertum, stayed intact. Our results emphasize that the sensitivity to ocean acidification of the endobenthic foraminifera Ammonia aomoriensis in their natural sediment habitat is much lower compared to the experimental response of specimens isolated from the sediment.

SOURCE




New paper finds global sea level rise has decelerated 31% since 2002 along with the 'pause' of global warming

New paper attempts to explain the 'pause' in sea level rise

A paper published today in Nature Climate Change finds that global sea level rise has greatly decelerated 31% since 2002 from 3.5 mm/yr to 2.4 mm/yr. According to the authors, "This decreasing Global Mean Sea Level [GMSL] rate coincides with the pause observed over the last decade in the rate of Earth’s global mean surface temperature increase, an observation exploited [very unscientific choice of words] by climate sceptics to refute global warming and its attribution to a steadily rising rate of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere." [Apparently, the authors think that any skeptical scientist who points out an obvious inconsistency between datasets is exploiting the observational data.]

This observation, of course, is a crisis for CAGW alarmism and therefore must be solved by a computer model. The authors simply create a hydrological model programmed to say that the reason why sea levels have decelerated is because it must be raining more over land due to ENSO and therefore the land ate the 31% decrease in sea level rise [No mention why ENSO also didn't cause more rain over the oceans]. The authors admit there is no data to support land water stores prior to GRACE since ~2003, therefore they just fabricate estimate the comparison data for the period 1994-2002 of how much sea level rise was ameliorated by land precipitation. Abracadabra, the land must have more than eaten the sea level rise from AGW, allowing it to decelerate, and the AGW "missing heat" is still very much alive somewhere in the ocean.

The authors also find that even with this huge adjustment to sea level rise, there is no evidence of acceleration over the past 20 years, which means there is no evidence of a human influence on sea levels.

The authors redeem themselves a bit in the conclusion and appear to contradict their earlier statements in the paper: "Although progress has been achieved and inconsistencies reduced, the puzzle of the missing energy remains, raising the question of where the extra heat absorbed by the Earth is going. The results presented here will further encourage this debate as they underline the enigma between the observed plateau in Earth’s mean surface temperature and continued rise in the Global Mean Sea Level [GMSL]."

Climate science has sunk just like the 'missing heat' to the depths of the ocean trying to explain away the "pause" of both global warming and global sea level rise, using synthetic data generated by climate models that can be programmed to obtain any result one desires.

SOURCE





New paper finds Arctic sea ice was much less than present-day during the Holocene Climate Optimum ~6,000 years ago

A new paper published in Quaternary Science Reviews finds Arctic sea ice extent and thickness was much less than present-day conditions during the Holocene Climate Optimum from ~10,000-6,000 years ago. According to the authors, "Arctic Ocean sea ice proxies generally suggest a reduction in sea ice during parts of the early and middle Holocene (∼6000–10,000 years Before the Present) compared to present day conditions."

The authors show 8 different proxy studies reveal extended periods lasting hundreds of years without perennial sea ice in the Arctic [ice-free conditions], and find solar insolation explains these changes.

Arctic Ocean perennial sea ice breakdown during the Early Holocene Insolation Maximum

By Christian Strannea et al.

Abstract

Arctic Ocean sea ice proxies generally suggest a reduction in sea ice during parts of the early and middle Holocene (∼6000–10,000 years Before the Present) compared to present day conditions. This sea ice minimum has been attributed to the northern hemisphere Early Holocene Insolation Maximum (EHIM) associated with Earth's orbital cycles. Here we investigate the transient effect of insolation variations during the final part of the last glaciation and the Holocene by means of continuous climate simulations with the coupled atmosphere–sea ice–ocean column model CCAM. We show that the increased insolation during EHIM has the potential to push the Arctic Ocean sea ice cover into a regime dominated by seasonal ice, i.e. ice free summers. The strong sea ice thickness response is caused by the positive sea ice albedo feedback. Studies of the GRIP ice cores and high latitude North Atlantic sediment cores show that the Bølling–Allerød period (c. 12,700–14,700 years BP) was a climatically unstable period in the northern high latitudes and we speculate that this instability may be linked to dual stability modes of the Arctic sea ice cover characterized by e.g. transitions between periods with and without perennial sea ice cover.

SOURCE




Australian Environmentalists take government to court over Barrier Reef plans

They haven't got a leg to stand on but may inflict costly delays

Environmentalists will launch court action against the Abbott government and its decision to allow dredging and spoil dumping in Great Barrier Reef waters for the expansion of coal export terminals.

The Mackay Conservation Group, backed by $150,000 raised by activist group GetUp!, will file documents in the Federal Court on Monday challenging the decision on the grounds the government failed its legal obligations to protect a world heritage site by approving the project.

It is the second legal challenge to the proposed Abbot Point development. Last month the North Queensland Conservation Group launched an appeal against a separate decision to allow the dumping of dredge spoil in reef waters by the authority which oversees the marine park protecting the site.

Environment Minister Greg Hunt approved the Abbot Point project in December under strict conditions, including the dredging and dumping of three million tonnes of sludge in the reef's waters to expand coal export terminals.

The Abbot Point development is one of many resource projects proposed for the coast along the Great Barrier Reef. Industrial development and other threats have raised the concern of the World Heritage Committee, which has asked the Australian and Queensland governments to install several measure to better protect the reef or else risk it being considered world heritage "in danger".

The Mackay Conservation Group is challenging the Abbot Point decision through a provision in the national environment laws that allow for a judicial review by the Federal Court of any decision.

Group campaigner Ellen Roberts said the review would be the first test of national environment laws protecting world heritage sites.

"If we are successful then potentially the decision could have implications for other world heritage areas as well," Ms Roberts said.

Brad Fish, chief executive of the North Queensland Bulk Ports Corporation, said the focus on dredging had taken the debate about the reef's future away from the real issues threatening its survival.

He pointed to an article by University of Central Queensland coral ecologist Alison Jones and marine scientist and consultant Brett Kettle posted on The Conversation that said green groups had wrongly argued dredging and dumping were major threats to the reef.

SOURCE

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