Laughing Stock Met Office…2007 “Peer-Reviewed” Global Temperature Forecast A Staggering Failure

Frank Bosse at Die kalte Sonne here puts the spotlight on a global warming forecast published by some British MetOffice scientists in 2007. It appeared in Science here.

The peer-reviewed paper was authored by Doug M. Smith and colleagues under the title: “Improved Surface Temperature Prediction for the Coming Decade from a Global Climate Model“.

Using sophisticated methods, the target of the paper was to forecast the temperature development from 2004 to 2014 while taking the internal variability into account.

The claims made in Smith’s study are loud and clear

    "…predict further warming during the coming decade, with the year 2014 predicted to be 0.30° ± 0.21°C [5 to 95% confidence interval (CI)] warmer than the observed value for 2004.

Furthermore, at least half of the years after 2009 are predicted to be warmer than 1998, the warmest year currently on record.“

Now that it’s 2014 and the observed data are in, we can compare to see how Smith et al did with their forecast. Boy, did they fail!

The following chart shows the actual result of the Smith et al forecast, showing the real observations since 1998:


Figure 2: Observed temperature development as to the MetOffice’s own data HadCRUT4 compared to the claims made in the Smith et al paper. The lower black line shows the linear trend of the observed results. The blue-gray lines show the confidence range of the forecast. The red line shows the linear trend of Smith et al. Chart modified from DkS.

Clearly we see that the Met Office observations show a cooling of 0.014°C over the 2004-2014 decade and is below even the forecast lower confidence limit. Moreover not a single year was warmer than 1998, despite having predicted at least three would be warmer.

According to Bosse, when the 2007 chart was published it was supposed to act as another nail in the coffin for global warming skeptics. The chart was even adopted by a German report titled: “Future information for the government.” Bosse writes:

    "Here one reads that ‘good decadal forecasts for policymaking and economy are very useful’ (page 6) … as long as they are ignored, one might add.”

Bosse calls the chart a fiasco because it falsely advised policymaking. Bosse adds:

    "Until today, since the first IPCC report of 1990, they have not made any progress when it comes to the central theme of climate prognoses: How many degrees Celsius of warming results from a doubling of Co2 concentration?”

Bosse writes that the 2007 Smith et al forecast failed neither to take known ocean cycles nor natural factors sufficiently into account and writes that the climate sensitivity value assumed by the IPCC must be reduced.

Now that 2007 is some years behind us, even Smith et al have realized their forecast was overinflated and so they produced a new paper which appeared last year. The latest by Smith has taken natural variability more into account and he is much more careful with prophecy-making. Still, the range of uncertainty the new paper offers makes it “more or less useless”, Bosse writes.


Figure 3: Latest forecast by Smith et al for global temperature until 2022 (Figure 8 of the aforementioned paper)

 Bosse concludes:

    "As long as man is unable to determine with the needed precision the role natural variability plays in our observed climate, calculating the impact of greenhouse gases will remain prophecy. Do you feel guilty that you are still using incandescent light bulbs? Don’t fret over it!"

We’ll be revisiting Smith’s newest forecast in about 5 years time. In the meantime we have to ask ourselves if these people will ever learn. Science can take only so much damage.

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"War on mercury":  Update

by Dr Klaus L.E. Kaiser

Shortly after my recent post on the War on Mercury, the SETAC journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry published a series of articles on mercury in the environment. Most prescient among these is a paper by K. Vijayaraghavan and coworkers with the title “Response of fish tissue mercury in a freshwater lake to local, regional, and global changes in mercury emissions.“ epa logo

That paper concludes that fish mercury reductions may take 50 years to respond to any reduction in deposition such as from coal burning power plants in the U.S. It further states that recovery (I am not sure from what really) “could potentially be partially or completely offset by growth in non-U.S. mercury emissions.”

There you have it: The recently embarked upon “War on Mercury” by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is not likely to result in any reduction of mercury levels in fish any time soon – if ever. Mercury is a Common Element in Nature Mercury is a common element in nature and is found in every rock, soil, and water sample; its abundance is similar to that of silver.

Naturally, mercury is also present in most organisms. Worldwide, annual “emissions” are estimated to be around 4,000 tons per year of which only 2% are from the U.S. and 60+% from natural sources (leachates of rocks and from volcanos). The accompanying picture from the SETAC paper demonstrates this clearly. It shows one of the worldwide mercury emission scenarios for the year 2050.

Even with the most stringent new “Mercury and Air Toxics Standards” (MATS) rules by EPA, the proportion of worldwide mercury emissions by the U.S. will not materially change nor will any reduction in fish mercury levels be measurable for years to come – if ever. As mentioned previously, EPA’s “War on Mercury” is a ruse. In reality it is a “War on Coal” which equates to a “War on Electric Power.”

The War on Electric Power

The war on electric power generation from fossil fuels, especially coal, is in full swing. You may have noticed it already when looking at your hydro bill but expect worse to come. Many of the existing power plants will not be able to accommodate additional demands placed upon them by MATS. Instead, they’ll simply plan to shut down entirely.

New coal-fired power plants are not being built for the same reasons. According to the same journal report, the total contribution of U.S. coal-fired power plants is only about 10% of all the mercury emissions in the country. If that is true then EPA is obviously giving coal a bad name and forgetting all other emissions. Therefore, it is clearly a political move not based on rational science.

The result can only be that electric power costs will continue to go up, more likely way up. Other Countries Other countries don’t care about mercury emissions and they are certainly not in the process of shutting down coal power plants. In fact, China and India are building new ones at a rate of one per week. Or, they are going full steam ahead with new nuclear power plants, like France and also China and India.

In other countries, like South Africa abundant coal is used to create both cheap electric power and automotive fuel via the Fischer-Tropsch process. No wonder, the world’s coal consumption is still rising steadily. EPA’s MATS rules are a costly exercise in futility.

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Media Hype ‘Risky Business’ Climate Campaign, Forget Their Past Attacks on Former Treasury Secretary

When a bad guy becomes a good guy

Apparently journalists are happy to forgive when they agree with their former opponents.

Henry M. Paulson, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury under President George W. Bush, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times on June 22, warning of the financial risks of climate change. Soon afterward, Paulson was publicly joined by billionaire liberal donors Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg in the “Risky Business” campaign to highlight the alleged “economic risks of climate change in the United States.”

As media outlets clamored to promote the trio’s work, they failed to mention Paulson had long been demonized for his role in the financial crisis. The media also turned a blind eye to the campaign’s funding by liberal billionaires.

The Times, The Washington Post, Time Magazine and other publications touted this new “bipartisan report” and praised Paulson for promoting climate alarmism. But those reports ignored millions of dollars from liberal donors and their own previous criticism of Paulson as “blameworthy” and one of the “villains of the financial crisis.”

In the Times, Paulson predicted a coming “climate crash” which he compared to the “devastating” financial crisis of 2008. “This is a crisis we can’t afford to ignore. I feel as if I’m watching as we fly in slow motion on a collision course toward a giant mountain,” he wrote. Ironically, Paulson called upon his past experience with financial crises, saying “I was secretary of the Treasury when the credit bubble burst, so I think it’s fair to say that I know a little bit about risk, assessing outcomes and problem-solving.”

Serving as the Treasury secretary from 2006 to 2009, Paulson developed and orchestrated the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), bailing out major banks after the 2008 crisis. He also served as CEO of Goldman Sachs for seven years before working in the Bush administration.

Just two days after his op-ed, Paulson and a group of former government officials and billionaires released an economic report, forecasting climate change’s economic damage. This new project was chaired by Paulson, as well as billionaire climate alarmist Steyer and former New York City mayor and billionaire Bloomberg.

Major media outlets seized on this report and promoted its conclusions without questioning the report or its authors. Time Magazine’s Dan Kedmey claimed “rising seas and extreme weather could lead to billions of dollars in economic losses,” and Reuters’ Sharon Begley predicted “the price tag could soar to hundreds of billions by 2100.” Meanwhile the Post’s Steven Mufson warned of “extreme heat and rising sea levels linked to climate change.”

Other outlets praised the report’s authors as prestigious or knowledgeable. The Huffington Post’s Kate Sheppard referred to them as “a group of people who know a thing or two about making and losing money.” The Times’ Justin Gillis described the authors as “a coalition of senior political and economic figures from left, right and center, including three Treasury secretaries stretching back to the Nixon administration.”

But many of these same outlets were highly critical of Paulson during the 2008 financial crisis, but didn’t mention past criticism.

The Times’ Gretchen Morgenson and Don Van Natta Jr., in August 2009, wrote that “Paulson’s Calls to Goldman Tested Ethics” and described suspicious correspondence between Paulson as Treasury secretary and his former employer Goldman Sachs.

Similarly, Time Magazine listed Paulson as one of “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis” and said “he was late to the party in battling the financial crisis” was wrong in “letting Lehman Brothers fail” and called the bank bailout he advocated “a wasteful mess.” Finally, a Daily Finance article described Paulson as one of “Seven Villains of the Financial Crisis.”

Few media outlets even called attention to the massive amount of liberal money behind “Risky Business” with Steyer and Bloomberg as co-chairs. Steyer, who’s worth $1.6 billion according to Forbes, pledged $100 million to push climate alarmism in 2014. His wealth pales in comparison to Bloomberg’s $34.2 billion, according to Forbes. Bloomberg has also spent heavily on climate-related causes. In 2011, he pledged $50 million to the liberal Sierra Club in order to “shut down coal-fired power plants,” according to the Times.

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New Paper: Ground Thermometers Prove H2O, N2 and O2 control Climate – NOT CO2

by Dr Darko Butina

The theory of dangerous anthropogenic (man-made) global warming was invented in the early 1980s and describes Earth as some virtual planet where temperatures have oscillated +/- 0.6C around the mean of 14.0C since the 1880s. thermometer All temperatures below 14.0C (13.4C to 14.0C) were declared ‘normal’ by a clique of climate scientists, while temperatures between 14.0C to 14.6C were deemed ‘abnormal’.

In effect, all life on this virtual planet exists at a total range of 1.2C. However, all the ‘evidence’ for global warming is based on a purely theoretical number called ‘global average temperature,’ which is yet another proxy thermometer used by all climate scientists and related papers published since 1980.

However, the temperatures of air actually measured by real thermometers vary between -70.0C and +50.0C, with a total range of 120.0C! The travesty of it all is that the notion of a global average temperature has been used by the climate community in the last 30 years without showing any scepticism in the validity of its use, and despite the fact all other sciences and the general public use thermometers as a measure of temperature.

In my first paper on the subject of air temperature, Butina 2012, I showed that it is impossible to differentiate annual temperature patterns of the 1800s from those in the 1900s and 2000s. Furthermore, it was clearly shown that the ‘hockey stick’ graph scenario published by Mann et al., in 1998, cannot be found in daily tmax/tmin data and that the ‘hockey stick’ scenario is a simple artefact of this non-existent global average temperature applied as if it was a ‘thermometer’. It must follow that any model that per se uses global average temperature as an input has to be wrong.

My second and latest paper entitled “Quantifying the effect that N2, O2 and H2O have on night-to-day warming trends at ground level” is demonstrating the power of instrumental-based data, specifically calibrated thermometers, and the importance of knowing and understanding the functioning of the thermometer and the physicochemical properties of molecules.

So let us first go back to basics and start with the thermometer and the information that is embedded in the thermometer’s readings. The operation of a calibrated thermometer is based on the thermal equilibrium between two sets of molecules – the molecules inside the thermometer, mercury (Hg) for example, and the molecules surrounding the thermometer (air or water):

More HERE




Sneaky Penguins

 by Dr Klaus L.E. Kaiser

Who would have thought it: The Emperor penguin colony located near Pointe Géologie in Antarctica has been observed for more than 60 years. In the 1970s, the number of penguins in the colony declined by 50 percent. Researcher groups had earlier expressed fear that the penguins are not able to survive the (supposedly) warming temperatures in the region. emperor penguins

Now a research team lead by the University of Minnesota has found evidence that the penguins are simply shifting their place. Sort of like you hiding in the shade of a tree or house when the sun is shining too hot or hiding behind a wind break when the breeze is too cold. In other words, they just moved to a more hospitable area.

The scientists concluded that “the penguins are more adaptable and smarter than previously thought.” Given the recent record advance of ice cover in the Antarctic, it is more likely than not that the penguins were actually trying to get better shelter from the biting cold than any torching heat. Well, at 50 F below I would be inclined to seek better shelter too and would tell the global warming believers to go to the nearest expletive.

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Another Wind Farm horror story from Denmark

Evidence from Denmark of mass farming livestock deaths due to wind turbine low frequency noise pollution is now growing alarmingly.  We recently reported mass deaths at the mink farm of Kaj Bank Olesen. In a latest update he now complains that, when the wind blows from the South West (where the nearby wind turbines are), mother minks attack their own puppies – those that were born healthy after the 1,600 miscarriages of last month (1). mink farm

As a result of their wounds, over twenty puppies had to be put down, and 40 put in observation.

Online news agency BREITBART reported on this new mishap, the third one since the wind turbines started to operate in September 2013: More-Deaths-Linked-to-Wind-Turbines-near-Danish-Mink-Farm The news last fall of the first incident – minks attacking each other – was published by two Danish newspapers (1). That of the second tragedy, last month – the 1,600 miscarriages – was only covered outside Denmark (2). It’s not surprising: the wind industry is arguably the little kingdom’s first employer and exporter, and its influence is felt everywhere in Denmark, e.g. in the media, in government, and in scientific circles such as universities (3). Thus, by not publishing the shocking story, editors effectively protected the giant multinational company VESTAS, which manufactures wind turbines.

But this changed last Saturday, when local media AOH.Dk published online an article about the Olesen fur farm: “It happened two weeks ago. Minks began to bite their puppies and each other” writes the author Jesper Wind (4). He then makes reference to the earlier tragedy: “… since they [the wind turbines] began to spin last fall, the number of stillbirths and deformed puppies increased fivefold, says Kaj Olesen Bank.” And the article continues: “The proportion of females that refused to mate has quadrupled as compared to last year, when there were no wind turbines behind his mink farm.”

The AOH article ends by an invitation to read more on the story in the printed newspaperHerning Folkeblad, which covers news from central Jutland (5). So the news is well out of the bag now: it can no longer be ignored, published as it is by Danish media and going viral on the Net. Actually, mainstream editors from the rest of the world may still decide to hush it up, in spite of the deleterious implications such a decision would have on public health. But WCFN doesn’t think they would do something so unethical.

Scientific evidence has been accumulating since the eighties, proving that low-frequency vibrations emitted by wind turbines are harmful. Vested interests still react by asserting that the Wind Turbine Syndrome is “all in the head” – i.e. a nocebo effect. But this dubious argument no longer gets any traction when we see animals being affected, becoming aggressive, developing deformities, or even dying en masse (6) when exposed 24h a day to heavy doses of these vibrations.

The wind industry and their friends in government are highly embarrassed by the news WCFN broke to the world earlier this month: 1,600 miscarriages at fur farm near wind turbines/

Hence the efforts to hide it, just as "they"covered up the true extent of the massacres of raptors, swallows, swifts and bats. Sadly, the mainstream media have often helped industrial and political interests to hush up inconvenient news. But this is a different kettle of fish: if wind turbines can cause deformities in minks, sheep, cattle and horses (7), they can obviously cause similar effects in human populations living near them. It would be downright criminal to hide this from the public.

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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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No denying climate change deniers

The article below accepts "Steve Goddard's" claims that Warmists have fudged the temperature data.  Some readers however may be aware that prominent skeptic Anthony Watts has criticized Goddard's claims.  Reading Watts in detail is however a little amusing.  He agrees that the Warmists have misrepresented the data but says that was by accident and not deliberate.  I smell Koolaid.  I have previously suspected that Watts wants to be loved by the Warmist experts (e.g. when he warned Warmists that outsiders could get into their computer files)  and I think that this confirms it.  Otherwise he would have written his article to say:  "Yes.  Goddard's analyses were unsophisticated but his conclusions stand up nevertheless"

People who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid known as global warming-climate change are not just “deniers”; we are guilty of a “nihilistic refusal” to address the issue. So says a Washington Post editorial commenting favorably on Monday’s Supreme Court ruling that allows the Environmental Protection Agency, under certain limits, to proceed under the Clean Air Act to regulate major sources of greenhouse-gas emissions.

The actual nihilists are those who refuse to accept any scientific information that undermines their claim that the globe is warming and humans are responsible for it. Cults are like that. Regardless of evidence contradicting their beliefs, cultists persist in blind faith.

Sometimes one must look to sources outside the U.S. to get a better perspective on what is happening.

The London Daily Telegraph’s Christopher Booker, author of “The Real Global Warming Disaster,” writes of climate change denier Steve Goddard’s U.S. blog Real Science, which he says shows “...how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of U.S. surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).” Goddard, Booker adds, illustrates “...how, in recent years, NOAA’s U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been ‘adjusting’ its record by replacing real temperatures with data ‘fabricated’ by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data.”

Goddard compared the most recently published graphs with “those based only on temperatures measured at the time.” He concludes: “The U.S. has actually been cooling since the ‘30s, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on ‘fabricated’ data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.”

If that isn’t a smoking gun, what is?

Last month, President Obama issued a proclamation for “National Hurricane Preparedness Week.” He said, “As the climate continues to warm, hurricane intensity and rainfall are projected to increase.”

Except many believe the climate is not continuing to warm (see above) and that there has been no significant warming for 17 years (see more at climatedepot.com). As for hurricanes, USA Today reported last month: “...the nation is enjoying two record streaks for a lack of hurricanes: It’s been nine years since the last hit from a ‘major’ hurricane and also nine years since a hurricane of any sort hit Florida, traditionally the most hurricane-prone state in the nation. ... A ‘major’ hurricane is a Category 3, 4, or 5 on the Saffir-Simpson Scale of Hurricane Intensity; the minimum wind speed for a major hurricane is 111 mph.” (Despite its fury and the high death toll, Hurricane Sandy’s wind speeds did not fall under the official category of a “major” hurricane when it touched down.)

The global warmers are the ones refusing to discuss, debate or even mention the growing body of science questioning and in increasing instances disproving their theories. They also mostly ignore news of manipulated climate models and the serious concerns of scientists who no longer believe the climate is changing significantly.

Many in the media, including some newspaper editorial pages, refuse to broadcast or print information that challenges and in some cases refutes arguments about global warming, claiming it is “settled science.” It is nothing of the kind, as any open-minded person can see by a simple Google search.

This is about government gaining more control over the lives of its citizens. Already they are in our bathrooms, our cars, our light bulbs and so many other areas that have the cumulative effect of encroaching on our freedoms. Government is not the final arbiter of truth, yet the global-warming cultists worship at its shrine.

Polls show the public has far greater concerns. An April Gallup Poll affirms previous findings: “...warming has generally ranked last among Americans’ environmental worries each time Gallup has measured them with this question over the years.”

So exactly who are the real nihilists and deniers?

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The Three Faces of Sustainability

Paul Driessen

Pressure from the United Nations, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and environmental activists to promote “sustainable” development has led to “economically harmful and environmentally counterproductive” policies that have resulted in completely unsustainable practices, writes environmental expert Paul Driessen in a new report for The Heartland Institute.

The failure to define exactly what true sustainability is “gives unelected regulators increasing control over energy use, economic growth, and all other aspects of life,” writes Driessen. Both wealthy and economically depressed regions of the world are pressured to avoid developing coal, oil, natural gas, hydroelectric power, and nuclear power despite evidence showing them to be “the only abundant, reliable, and affordable sources of energy.” Such anti-energy policies “perpetuate poverty for developing countries and reduce living standards in wealthier countries.”

In “The Three Faces of Sustainability,” Driessen calls for “true sustainable development” that “improves living standards instead of paying mere lip service to them.” This requires “allowing people the freedom to develop and use new technologies and best practices that conserve resources, reduce waste and pollution, and give people incentives to choose the most efficient energy and mineral sources and to abandon them once better ones are found.”

He concludes,

    Wise resource use is consistent with sustainable development because the creative human mind – what economist Julian Simon called the ultimate resource – will continue to devise new technologies and new ways of finding and extracting important natural resources. We will never lack the resources needed to continue improving lives, unless misguided activists, politicians, and regulators succeed in placing those resources off-limits. Our most valuable natural resources are not endangered or approaching exhaustion under any reasonable analysis. ... In sharp contrast, political sustainability impedes efforts to improve lives, protect the planet, and prolong resource availability for current and future generations.

Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow and a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute. His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Investor’s Business Daily, and numerous other newspapers and magazines, and on websites around the world.

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Plastic Bag Bans Will Cost You

When municipal officials started to impose bans on lightweight plastic shopping bags, it seemed like the latest attempt to inflict a little pain on consumers — a mostly symbolic effort to make us feel like we were "doing something" to save the planet.

But as a statewide plastic bag bill advances in the assembly, it's clear it also largely is about money — about protecting some industries and trying to shift around the costs of waste disposal and clean up.

S.B. 270 "prohibits retail stores from providing single-use carryout bags to customers, and requires retail stores to provide only reusable grocery bags for no less than 10 cents per bag," according to the state assembly's analysis. It also provides $2 million in grants and loans to help manufacturers convert their facilities and to pay for recycling efforts.

In his fact sheet, the bill's sponsor, Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Los Angeles, argues that 88 percent of the 13 billion high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic bags retailers hand out each year are not recycled, that it costs the state more than $25 million a year to dispose of the waste and that such bags kill birds, turtles and other species.

Yet we all need to get groceries home from the store, so we must place them into some sort of bag. The American Progressive Bag Alliance, representing manufacturers of HDPE bags, sent around a different, heavier kind of plastic bag allowed under the bill. The group claims that it takes five times as much energy to produce these thicker bags that are similar to the kind used in department stores.

"S.B. 270 is not about the environment," the alliance argues. "It's a scam … to enrich the California Grocers Association to the tune of billions of dollars in bag fees at the expense of 2,000 hard-working Californians." Grocers could pocket as much as $189 million a year from the new bag fees, according to a bag manufacturer's study, although grocers dispute that and may face additional costs to revamp their checkout stands and to store and transport these bigger bags.

If S.B. 270 becomes law, Californians also will rely more heavily on those heavy non-woven polypropylene bags (NWPP) that stores often decorate with logos and sell for about a dollar. These are made from oil rather than natural gas, so critics note that a ban of lighter bags could harm efforts to address global warming.

This can get pretty confusing, but the main goal of S.B. 270's supporters is to force consumers to shift to something reusable, so that they toss away fewer bags. I take issue with the term "single use" plastic bags, given that most of us reuse these light, cheap bags we now get — to dispose of cat litter, to curb the dog during walks, to line our wastebaskets. It's hard to believe that the new reusable bags or paper bags will be reused a lot more than these supposedly non-reusable ones.

A new study from the libertarian Reason Foundation notes that S.B. 270's supporters do not account for the energy use needed to clean the heavier types of bags and that consumers are unlikely to reuse them enough to pay for their additional costs.

The California Department of Public Health, Reason notes, warns consumers to clean and sanitize these bags frequently to avoid the outbreaks of food-borne illness caused by, say, reusing a bag that had been used to bring home meats, but has since sat in the hot car trunk. This means additional water, detergent and electricity use (not to mention time).

Reason wonders whether this effort is worthwhile. "Contrary to some claims made by advocates of plastic bag bans, plastic bags constitute a minuscule proportion of all litter," the report explains. Miniscule means about 0.6 percent of the nation's "visible" litter.

In an interview Friday, Sen. Padilla told me that this isn't just a new idea, but it's something that has noticeably reduced the waste stream in cities that have implemented it. He calls concerns about health risks "overblown."

If so, that's good news. But if S.B. 270 passes, Californians will face many new annoyances and costs, with Reason pegging the cost of California bag-bans on consumers at more than $1 billion a year. So at least no one can call this "cheap" feel-good legislation.

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Endangered Bird Forces Duxbury To Cancel 4th Of July Celebration

The town of Duxbury has cancelled what was an annual 4th of July beach bonfire celebration.

The endangered piping plover bird has moved-in and there are at least 24 nests on Duxbury Beach. There are large areas of the beach that are restricted. The town’s July 4th committee said usually a couple thousand people attend the celebration and there is no way to ensure the nests will not get trampled, so the bonfire is cancelled.

“The plovers are federally protected. We have to follow the law,” said Margaret Kearney, Duxbury 4th of July activities committee
This is the 2nd year the plover’s presence cancelled the party.

Last year, 17 nests were on the beach.  “They tend to come back to the siame area and every year they hope to grow or maintain the population,” said Missy Battista, co-manager of Duxbury Beach.

In 2013, the committee moved the bonfire to another location, but there was little interest.

Most Duxbury residents said they understand the need to cancel the bonfire for the bird. Since the birds return every year, the committee said next year they’ll consider a new tradition of having the beach bonfire at another time.

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EPA Chief: Costly 'Clean Power Plan' Gives Americans 'More Opportunities to Reduce Waste'

 Sure, the EPA's new pollution rules will raise the cost of electricity, forcing many Americans to use less of it. But don't think of it as a price hike.

"It's actually about providing (Americans) more opportunities to reduce waste," EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy told Congress on Wednesday. Under the EPA's demand-reduction scenario, Americans can retrofit their homes and buy more energy-efficient appliances, she said.

This, in turn, will create jobs in government-approved industries.

The sweeping EPA plan announced earlier this month sets carbon-reduction targets for each state, then allows states to decide how to meet those targets, either on their own or in partnership with other states.

McCarthy said many states will choose the most "cost-effective strategy," which is to reduce consumer demand for electricity:

But that means raising the cost of electricity, Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) told McCarthy: "EPA has said the rule will not increase the cost of electricity, but under this proposed rule, the cost of electricity per kilowatt hour will actually increase. Isn't that correct?"

"Well, we have indicated that the monthly cost of electricity at its peak will be somewhere around a gallon-of-milk cost," McCarthy said. "But we also recognize that when demand-side reduction is used -- which is the easiest, quickest and usually the preferred approach of states -- that it actually reduces the bill itself."

"But it reduces it based upon Americans using less electricity, not the fact that the cost of electricity goes down, but making it impossible for Americans to use electricity as they ought to be allowed to use electricity," Walberg said.

"Actually, the amount of increase in the rates is well within the range of fluctuation that we have been seeing," McCarthy replied. "And so we are quite convinced that--"

"Through Scarcity! Through Scarcity!," Walberg interrupted. "That's happening in my district. That's through scarcity. The push is to reduce electricity by saying to the consumer, don't use electricity. It's not by reducing the cost of production of it."

"It's actually about providing them more opportunities to reduce waste," McCarthy said.

Walberg also pressed McCarthy on whether the Clean Air Act gives EPA the authority to regulate American electricity consumption.

"We're not suggesting that we do regulate that. We are regulating pollution at the source," she said.

The Clean Air Plan requires states to meet certain pollution reduction goals by 2030. The EPA says that will result in 30 percent less pollution from the fossil fuel sector -- mainly coal -- across the U.S. when compared with 2005 levels.

EPA says the plan improves the health of the planet and the people who inhabit it.

"The first year that these standards go into effect, we’ll avoid up to 100,000 asthma attacks and 2,100 heart attacks -- and those numbers go up from there," McCarthy said in a speech on June 2. "That means lower medical bills and fewer trips to the emergency room, especially for those most vulnerable like our children, our elderly, and our infirm. This is about environmental justice, too, because lower income families, and communities of color are hardest hit."

But it's also about creating jobs in industries that liberals like:

"Well, we know that this will actually create thousand of jobs, and those jobs are going to be created in the clean energy economy," McCarthy said at Wednesday's hearing. "We are talking about jobs both related to renewable energy as well as the wealth of energy-efficiency programs. If you're heavily reliant on coal, it also can be expenditures that you make at those facilities to deliver that energy more efficiently. So there's a lot of choices that states can make here."

McCarthy said every state should be able to reach the goals the EPA has set for them. "This is not a stretch goal for any state -- it's an opportunity to turn climate risk into business opportunity, job growth and economic growth."

Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.) applauded the government's effort to remake the nation's energy landscape:

"It seems pretty clear that you're giving an incentive for states to put in more solar panels, erect more wind turbines, weatherize more homes, install more energy-efficient appliances and machinery. I mean, this is the direction we're heading -- these are jobs that pay well, they can't be exported, they're here to stay, is that right?" he asked.

"That's exactly right," McCarthy agreed.

SOURCE





Britain's green energy cost hits record high as expensive turbines built at sea

The cost of generating green electricity has hit a record high as subsidies are handed to expensive offshore wind farms and household solar panels, new figures show.

The annual bill for consumers to subsidise renewable technologies has soared to more than £2.5bn as more turbines are built and households install panels on their roofs.

But new figures show that the average cost for each unit of green electricity has also increased, hitting a record high of £66.97 per MWh in 2012-13, the most recent period for which figures are available.

The figure was a rise from £54.26 the year before, despite pledges from ministers to bear down on the costs of green energy.

The increase reflects the drive to build wind turbines at sea, which receive roughly twice as much subsidy as those built onshore, where wind farms have proved increasingly controversial.

Subsidies paid to energy companies for this kind of large-scale project reached £2bn, from £1.5bn a year before.

The new figures also reflect the rush by tens of thousands of households to install solar panels on their roofs at generous subsidy levels before ministers cut support in March 2012. The bill for this kind of small-scale subsidy leapt to £500m in 2012-13, from £150m the year before.

Dr John Constable, director of Renewable Energy Foundation, a UK charity that has long been critical of the costs of the renewables targets, said: “DECC is subsidising renewables to meet arbitrary and over-ambitious EU targets, so it was inevitable that we would move rapidly up the cost curve once the ‘cheaper' opportunities had either been fully developed like landfill gas or exceeded the limits of public acceptability like onshore wind.”

He added: “Subsidy costs are now spiralling out of control - the annual burn is about £3bn a year and rising fast. There still is a good case for experimenting with renewables, but building so much capacity when the whole sector is still fundamentally uneconomic is bound to end in tears.”

A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: “As we move closer to achieving the government’s renewables target it is inevitable we will start using more expensive forms of renewable energy such as offshore wind, which can be deployed at far greater scale than other renewable technologies. By supporting these technologies now we are driving down their costs.

“Nonetheless the support levels for each technology are coming down over time and our analysis suggests household electricity bills will be on average £41 lower per year between 2014-30 compared to meeting the our targets using current measures.”

SOURCE

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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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Sea level only creeping up

There are considerable difficulties in measuring sea level  -- particularly when changes are small.  A big issue is whether land itself is also rising or falling.  Swedish sea-level Nils Axel Morner has been working on the problems involved for many years.  In his latest paper he has found a geologically very stable area that includes 3 tide gauges. Using these gauges, he shows that sea levels have risen only about half an inch over the last 125 years

Deriving the Eustatic Sea Level Component in the Kattaegatt Sea

Author: Nils-Axel Mörner

Abstract:

Changes in global sea level is an issue of much controversy. In the Kattegatt Sea, the glacial isostatic component factor is well established and the axis of tilting has remained stable for the last 8000 years. At the point of zero regional crustal movements, there are three tide gauges indicating a present rise in sea level of 0.8 to 0.9 mm/yr for the last 125 years. This value provides a firm record of the regional eustatic rise in sea level in this part of the globe.

SOURCE





Never-Ending Green Disasters

    by Viv Forbes
   
Newton’s 3rd law of motion, if applied to bureaucracy, would state: “Whenever politicians attempt to force change on a market, the long-big-govt-term results will be equal and opposite to those intended”.

This law explains the never-ending Green energy policy disasters.

Greens have long pretended to be guardians of wild natural places, but their legislative promotion of ethanol biofuel has resulted in massive clearance of tropical forests for palm oil, sugar cane and soy beans.  Their policies have also managed to covert cheap food into expensive motor fuel and degraded land devoted to bush, pastures or crops into mono-cultures of corn for bio-fuel. This has wasted water, increased world hunger and corrupted the political process for zero climate benefits.

Greens also pretend to be protectors of wildlife and habitat but their force-feeding of wind power has uglified wild places and disturbed peaceful neighbourhoods with noisy windmills and networks of access roads and transmission lines. These whirling bird-choppers kill thousands of raptors and bats without attracting the penalties that would be applied heavily to any other energy producers – all this damage to produce trivial amounts of intermittent, expensive and blackout-prone electricity supplies.

Greens have long waged a vicious war on coal, but their parallel war on nuclear power and the predictably intermittent performance of wind/solar energy has forced power generators to turn to hydro-carbon gases to backup green power. But Greens have also made war on shale-gas fracking – this has left countries like Germany with no option but to return to reliable economical coal, or increase their usage of Russian gas and French nuclear power. Their war on coal has lifted world coal usage to a 44 year high.

Greens also say they support renewable energy, but they oppose any expansion of hydro-power, the best renewable energy option. For example, they scuppered the Gordon-below-Franklin hydro-electric project, which would have given Tasmania everlasting cheap green electricity. But they never mention their awkward secret – the Basslink under-sea cable goes to Loy Yang power station in Victoria and allows Tasmania to import coal-powered electricity from the mainland.

Robbie Burns warned us over 200 years ago:

“The best laid schemes of Mice and Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!”

SOURCE





No Denying Climate Change Deniers

People who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid known as global warming-climate change are not just "deniers"; we are guilty of a "nihilistic refusal" to address the issue. So says a Washington Post editorial commenting favorably on Monday's Supreme Court ruling that allows the Environmental Protection Agency, under certain limits, to proceed under the Clean Air Act to regulate major sources of greenhouse-gas emissions.

The actual nihilists are those who refuse to accept any scientific information that undermines their claim that the globe is warming and humans are responsible for it. Cults are like that. Regardless of evidence contradicting their beliefs, cultists persist in blind faith.

Sometimes one must look to sources outside the U.S. to get a better perspective on what is happening.

The London Daily Telegraph’s Christopher Booker, author of "The Real Global Warming Disaster," writes of climate change denier Steve Goddard's U.S. blog Real Science, which he says shows "...how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world's most influential climate records, the graph of U.S. surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)." Goddard, Booker adds, illustrates "...how, in recent years, NOAA's U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been 'adjusting' its record by replacing real temperatures with data 'fabricated' by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data."

Goddard compared the most recently published graphs with "those based only on temperatures measured at the time." He concludes: "The U.S. has actually been cooling since the '30s, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on 'fabricated' data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century."

If that isn't a smoking gun, what is?

Last month, President Obama issued a proclamation for “National Hurricane Preparedness Week." He said, "As the climate continues to warm, hurricane intensity and rainfall are projected to increase."

Except many believe the climate is not continuing to warm (see above) and that there has been no significant warming for 17 years (see more at climatedepot.com). As for hurricanes, USA Today reported last month: "...the nation is enjoying two record streaks for a lack of hurricanes: It's been nine years since the last hit from a 'major' hurricane and also nine years since a hurricane of any sort hit Florida, traditionally the most hurricane-prone state in the nation. ... A 'major' hurricane is a Category 3, 4, or 5 on the Saffir-Simpson Scale of Hurricane Intensity; the minimum wind speed for a major hurricane is 111 mph." (Despite its fury and the high death toll, Hurricane Sandy's wind speeds did not fall under the official category of a "major" hurricane when it touched down.)

The global warmers are the ones refusing to discuss, debate or even mention the growing body of science questioning and in increasing instances disproving their theories. They also mostly ignore news of manipulated climate models and the serious concerns of scientists who no longer believe the climate is changing significantly.

Many in the media, including some newspaper editorial pages, refuse to broadcast or print information that challenges and in some cases refutes arguments about global warming, claiming it is "settled science." It is nothing of the kind, as any open-minded person can see by a simple Google search.

This is about government gaining more control over the lives of its citizens. Already they are in our bathrooms, our cars, our light bulbs and so many other areas that have the cumulative effect of encroaching on our freedoms. Government is not the final arbiter of truth, yet the global-warming cultists worship at its shrine.

Polls show the public has far greater concerns. An April Gallup Poll affirms previous findings: "...warming has generally ranked last among Americans' environmental worries each time Gallup has measured them with this question over the years.

So exactly who are the real nihilists and deniers?

SOURCE




Global Warming (Snowstorms) Killed Obamanomics?

Wow. Remember when everyone was predicting 3 percent GDP growth for 2014? Apparently the “experts” were a little off. (Seriously… Economists, meteorologists, and global warming scientists must have pretty awesome job security.) It turns out that the first quarter of 2014 actually contracted 2.9 percent. Yeah, we just saw the largest revision between second and third estimates of GDP since 1976.

So what caused this (apparently) unpredictable drop in economic activity? Well… According to CNBC, it can all be chalked up to snowstorms in January and February (which are clearly freak occurrences due to global warming). Maybe we can just have Obama sign an executive order that bans winter weather?

Um… Right. Several inches of global warming snow killed the economy in early 2014. I mean, it was no hurricane, or earthquake, or apocalyptic zombie virus outbreak, but it was still “extreme” weather, right? After all, there weren’t any broken levies, flooded New York City boroughs, or state-wide wildfires… But, yeah: snow caused the economy to shrink by nearly three percent. (Well, Bill de Blasio did keep all those rich Manhattan residents snowed in for a few weeks; but I don’t think the postponement of their Neiman Marcus shopping trips caused a massive contraction in GDP for the first quarter.)

Heck, with the way the Administration is trying to shift blame for poor economic performance, I’m almost expecting them to somehow blame Q1 GDP on a computer crash… Assuming that winter weather is the reason (which I’m kinda inclined to doubt), then we must have a pretty fragile “recovery” going on. The idea that GDP could be dampened by some heavy seasonal snowstorms is plausible; but if Father Winter is responsible for the single largest decline in economic output in five years, then our “recovery” is about as fragile as Hillary Clinton’s sense of reality.

But, wait a minute! I thought the Obamacare premium hikes were going to save us from this awful trend of disappointing GDP growth. Remember? Because that’s what the official White House Spin Doctor had to say when the first round of disappointing estimates were released:

So, let me get this straight: We were pinning our hopes of an economic expansion on skyrocketing healthcare inflation? “I know you can’t afford your rent, clothing or food… But look at your massive insurance premium. Aren’t we a prosperous bunch?”

But even with the burden blessing of Obamacare-induced increases in healthcare spending, we managed to see economic activity grind to a halt in January and February of 2014. (Apparently, the Obamacare price hikes hadn’t yet had their impact on the recovery-weary public.) So, again, we ask why did the Q1 GDP disappoint in the midst of our great Obamanomics comeback? Because people don’t buy things when it snows? (I mean, aside from snow shovels, winter clothing, hot water heaters, space heaters, scarves, insulated windows, de-icer, alcohol, dinners, movie rentals, books, health insurance, etc.)

Oh… But those people that originally told us we would expand by three percent in 2014, are now telling us that things are getting better. And who wouldn’t believe the group of experts who were surprised by the initial report of 0.1 percent growth? Especially when they were equally shocked by the subsequent revisions to that number, which ultimately showed a contraction of 2.9 percent…

So things are better, right? I mean, we just saw higher inflation than anticipated, with negative GDP, stagnant wages, and record-low labor force participation; but sure… Obamanomics is a big success.

Now, if we could just hike gas prices up a little, maybe we can make the 1970s jealous.

SOURCE





EPA employees warned to stop defecating in the hallways

I hope this is a spoof but I fear it is not

Employees ith the Environmental Protection Agency were recently warned to keep their bathroom habits in the bathroom.

According to communications obtained by Government Executive, employees of a Denver, Colorado office of the EPA were admonished for what the publication described as “inappropriate bathroom behavior.”

* In the email, obtained by Government Executive, Deputy Regional Administrator Howard Cantor mentioned “several incidents” in the building, including clogging the toilets with paper towels and “an individual placing feces in the hallway” outside the restroom.

Apparently, this EPA office needed to “consult” with a workplace violence expert on the matter in order to ascertain that leaving human feces in office hallways was “very dangerous.”

When asked for a statement, EPA spokesman Richard Mylott refused to comment on what he called “ongoing personnel matters” at the Denver office.

SOURCE




Now EPA says it can't find emails requested by Congress because of hard drive crash

How thin can an excuse get?

Does the federal government have any systems at all to back its email archives? Maybe not, because the Environmental Protection Agency is now using the same excuse as the IRS is using in response to a Congressional subpoena: the computer ate our homework.

In a hearing Wednesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said the agency was still trying to recover the emails from a now-retired employee who was involved in a controversial EPA evaluation of a proposed mine project in Alaska's Bristol Bay.

Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., asked McCarthy: "Were all of his emails preserved according to the Federal Records Act or was a law violated?"

McCarthy responded: "I think we have notified the appropriate authorities that we may have some emails that we cannot produce that we should have kept. I do not know yet whether we can recover all of these or not." She added that later: "We are not sure where the failure came from and what it is attributed to."

A committee aide told the National Journal that an apparent hard drive crash in 2010 is preventing the recovery. The crash reportedly happened right around the same time that the committee first started expressing an interest in the emails.

The former EPA employee in question was Philip North, a fish biologist. North contributed to an agency study released in January that said a proposed mining project in the Bristol Bay area could hurt the salmon population. The agency has not been able to recovery any emails from him from 2002 through 2010.

The EPA's Inspector General is probing some possible "collusion" between people inside the agency and environmental groups opposed to mining regarding the report's recommendations. "I look forward to his report," McCarthy said.

McCarthy said the agency was still trying to recover some of the emails, but that this has been complicated by the fact that they have lost contact with North, who is reportedly on an extended trip to New Zealand. The agency first told the National Archives of the problem on Tuesday, but had not told the committee until Wednesday.

Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., was incredulous: "Two different government agencies tried to convince Congress and the American people this week that emails disappear into thin air. We didn’t believe it when we heard it from the IRS and I’m not inclined to believe the EPA’s excuses. The Federal Records Act is very clear. This is either willful ignorance on the part of the EPA or gross incompetence. I hope the EPA will follow through and turn over the relevant information it promised to the Oversight Committee months ago."

SOURCE

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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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Don't laugh:  A prophecy from the 1980s.  It could have been written yesterday

We sure had a hard time in the year 2000

PICKING up where a high-school chemistry class might end, "Nova," the public-broadcasting science series, offers the nonmatriculating viewer an advanced course in worrying. The cause of the concern is all the carbon dioxide that's being pumped into the industrialized and motorized air. The hourlong broadcast is called "The Climate Crisis: The Greenhouse Effect," at 9 tonight on Channel 13.

The conclusion, conveyed with great authority by several big-league climatologists from government and private research organizations, is terrible: by the year 2000, the atmosphere and weather will grow warmer by several degrees and life - animal, plant, human - will be threatened. The experts say that melting ice caps, flooded cities, droughts in the corn belt and famine in the third world could result if the earth's mean temperature rises by a mere two or three degrees.

The documentary swings between pictures of green lands and smokestack skies. This, of course, is familiar to readers and documentary viewers, going back at least to Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring." The pleasant educational lesson on "Nova" illustrates planetary ecology. In an interesting analogy, we learn from the writer-producer Richard Broad, of Boston's public-television station WGBH, that a single trans-Atlantic flight consumes all the energy that an acre of forest produces in 100 years. The oceans and forests absorb carbon dioxide; that's the good news. The bad news is that these natural safeguards could be imperiled if tropical forests are cut down for agricultural use.

Millions of tons of coal are burned annually around the world. In small amounts, carbon dioxide is necessary, but with the ever-growing consumption of fossil fuels (mainly coal), the air becomes polluted at an intolerable level. The scientists explain that the carbon dioxide released into the air acts like the glass in a greenhouse, sealing the earth in its own warmth - creating the "greenhouse effect."

Looking at the clouds of industrial smoke, and then at the crowded highways, a scientist from the National Center for Climate Research says: "The industrialized West keeps the furnaces burning. This is the high price we pay for prosperity." It is a grim prognosis. The scientists on the program issue warnings but they cannot quite tell the world to stop the clock of industrialization. The advances made on antipollution devices on automobiles might be applied to cutting down industrial smoke, too.

"The Climate Crisis" was originally produced by WGBH in 1983.

SOURCE





Study: Man-Made Aerosol Emissions Have Helped Cool Planet

Researchers with Israel’s Weizmann Institute have found that man-made aerosol emissions have had a net cooling effect on the planet since the Industrial Revolution.

The idea is that few clouds may have populated the skies before the Industrial Revolution, but the increased aerosol emissions from man-made industrial sources may have actually increased cloud cover on the planet and caused a cooling effect.

“A transition from pristine to slightly polluted atmosphere yields estimated negative forcing of ~15 watts per square meter (cooling),” write scientists with the Weizmann Institute, “suggesting that a substantial part of this anthropogenic forcing over the oceans occurred at the beginning of the industrial era, when the marine atmosphere experienced such transformation.”

The study came to the conclusion that aerosols were cooling the planet based on observations of the Southern Hemisphere’s Horse Latitudes, which is a region of the ocean with little and is less likely to see aerosols carried there from the continents.

E&E News reported the researchers “used data from four different satellites to observe the clouds, the aerosol content, temperature, meteorology and rainfall over 92 days in the winter of 2007.” As the aerosol levels in the clouds increased naturally, the more overcast the region became, and the more it cooled.

The authors also found that “there was no point of saturation beyond which aerosols stopped affecting the clouds. As the cloud cover doubled, they reflected more incoming solar rays back to space. Thus, the clouds had a cooling effect,” reports E&E News.

The authors of the study, however, have warned that their findings are preliminary but based on widely accepted theories about cloud cover and climate. Aerosols, natural or man-made, are key to creating cloud cover, without them there would be no clouds.

Natural aerosols are created, for example, when the sun’s rays hit the ocean and cause water to evaporate. Water vapor clings to aerosol particles floating in the atmosphere and eventually forms a water and dust seed that becomes a cloud.

“Ultimately, it [aerosols] affects the amount of clouds that are out there, and also the properties of the clouds — the area, for example, they cover over the globe. And all that affects the radiation that can actually hit the [Earth's] surface,” Andreas Muhlbauer, a research scientist at the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington, told E&E News — he was not involved in the study.

This study could also have a major impact on global temperature predictions made by climate scientists. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that global temperatures could rise between 1.5 degrees Celsius and 4.5 degrees Celsius by the end of this century.

But fully adding the effects of cloud cover into their climate models could force scientists to reconsider temperature impacts from greenhouse gas emissions.

“The more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the stronger the climate warming that results. Likewise, the more aerosol particles suspended in the atmosphere, the greater the ability of these particles either to scatter sunlight back to space and cool the planet or to absorb sunlight in the atmosphere, thereby warming the atmosphere while cooling Earth’s surface,” wrote Lorraine Rerner with the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology at the University of Maryland Baltimore County in response to the Weizmann Institute study.

“However, not all such climate forcing processes depend linearly on the concentrations of their forcing agent. The climatic effects of aerosols are complicated by their interactions with clouds,” Rerner wrote, adding that the Weizmann study showed “that even small additions of aerosol particles to clouds in the cleanest regions of Earth’s atmosphere will have a large effect on those clouds and their contribution to climate forcing.”

SOURCE




Former EPA Heads Mum When Asked If Global Warming Is Accelerating

All four former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrators appointed by Republican presidents who testified in favor of the agency’s proposed power plant regulations at a Senate subcommittee hearing last week did not respond when asked if they agreed with President Obama that global warming was accelerating.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) asked former EPA heads William Ruckelshaus, Christine Todd Whitman, William Reilly and Lee Thomas whether they agreed with Obama’s previous statements that the Earth is warming faster than previous predictions.

“The president, on Nov. 14, 2012, said, ‘The temperature around the globe is increasing faster than was predicted even 10 years ago’,” Sessions said at a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee’s “Climate Change: The Need to Act Now” hearing held on Capitol Hill last Wednesday.

“And then on May 29th last year, he said, ‘We also know that the climate is warming faster than anybody anticipated five or ten years ago’,” Sessions said. “So I would ask each of our former administrators if any of you agree that that’s an accurate statement on the climate. So if you do, raise your hand.”

None of the former EPA heads did so.

“Well, thank you,” Sessions said. “The record will reflect no one raised their hands.”

Not only is global warming not accelerating, “if current trends continue for just a few more years, then the mean change for the 2000s will shift to negative; in other words, the warming would really stop,” wrote Capital Weather Gang meteorologist Matt Rogers.

But three Democratic senators at the hearing – Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) –  ignored the widely acknowledged “pause” in global warming that has lasted 17 and a half years.

Instead, all three repeated Boxer's assertion that “97 percent of scientists agree that [carbon dioxide] is leading to dangerous climate change that is affecting our families.”

“We really don’t have to get into a debate with the other 3 percent,” Cardin stated.

However, according to a study released in February by the Calgary, Canada-based Friends of Science Society, the origins of the 97 percent claim are “faulty” and “a psychological ploy that plays on our primal emotions, ‘herd mentality,’ and fear of being the odd man out.”

“The idea that 97% of scientists hold a consensus view on human-caused global warming/climate change has become part of the climate change mythology, reaching the highest echelons of science, such as NASA, and the highest political office – that of President Barack Obama….The persistent effort to make the public believe 97% of all scientists agree can only be understood as an intentional manipulation of data and public opinion for commercial gain,” the report concluded. (See Friends of Science report.pdf)

During the hearing, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) charged that the administration’s “unilateral actions will increase Americas’ electricity bill, decrease families’ disposable income, and result in real job losses for little or no measurable impact on our every-changing climate.”

“Unfortunately, anyone who’s actually read the 645-page rule finds it has no material effect on average global temperature or sea level rise,” Vitter said, calling the EPA’s proposed new regulations of power plants under the Clean Air Act “essentially a federal takeover of the American electricity system.”

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) agreed, calling the proposed rules the “first round of global warming regulations which will nationalize the electricity market and force Americans to live out the president’s green dream” even though “countless bills [were] introduced that do the very same thing through legislation. Each time they’re introduced, they’re defeated by a larger margin.”

SOURCE





Warmists: Blind religious adherents or power-starved tyrants?

Over a few decades modern climate science has evolved, or devolved, from scientific observation to dogma—or “Climate Change-ism.”

Not unlike the roots of various other worldwide religious beliefs, this new faith sprouted from the alarmist cries that “The End is Neigh.” “Global Warming” (already a quaint, antiquated phrase) was trumpeted by Climate Change-ism’s founding prophet, former United States Vice President Al Gore, as the final travesty that would usher forth the planet’s demise.

Gore enticed the public with the award-winning hit docu-drama “An Inconvenient Truth,” featuring a fatalistic determination that the planet is inevitably racing toward an impending doom brought upon by Climate Chage-ism’s primary antagonist: the homo sapien.

In a 2007 speech, in which he sagely predicted that earth’s ice caps would be completely eliminated in seven year’s time, Gore stated grimly that “something basic is wrong” with the planet. He concluded, “We are what is wrong.”

Thus began The Church of Climate Change-ism: an apocalyptic faith of people, by people, against people.

At the early stages of Climate Change-ism those aboard the global warming bandwagon thought themselves intellectual elites, purely following nothing but the latest string of scientific evidence and expert analysis. But new, contradicting evidence has forced the faithful to adapt.

In 2013, the Antarctic ice caps grew to a 35-year record high, achieving record growth in less time than Al Gore predicted it would take for them to melt away entirely—an inconvenient truth indeed.

But, like any false dogma, Climate Change-ism’s reigning the faith must persist unhindered by reality.

At perhaps the height of the nation’s agnosticism toward the faith since its Hollywood inception, pontiff Barack Obama stood before the American people and pompously claimed that “the debate is over” regarding climate change, forever severing all ties between the movement and the scientific process.

After all, Obama’s ideologically-driven administration had spent years and billions of dollars implementing regulations that would kill people’s access to inexpensive energy and therefore their quality of life, all in the name of planetary survival—citizens be damned. No more debate would be heard by the nation’s self-loathing leader, enthralled with the anti-human faith he leads.

His ideological regulations on coal plants spell doom for an energy source capable of powering the United States for over 500 years. Further policy restrictions on natural gas, nuclear power, and oil refinement in favor of presently unviable “alternatives” like solar and wind power could disastrously impact poor and middle-income families while permanently shackling any opportunities for dynamic economic development in the future.  The faithful have even attempted to stop the oldest energy heating source known to man – wood burning – in their jihad against humanity.

Now, here’s what is scientific: Man’s observational abilities are still limited and flawed. Because our observational capabilities are limited and flawed, the charts and models necessary to calculate and predict climatologic occurrences are necessarily just as limited and flawed, because people made them.

Could it be detrimental to pump the very carbon dioxide molecule that mammals exhale into the atmosphere? It possibly could be. But the fact of the matter is that we just don’t know how much impact, if any, economically essential activities like American energy development has on the global climate. What we do know is that people will necessarily suffer if societal elites succeed in sacrificing the American way of life on the altar of Climate Change-ism, by eliminating common access to inexpensive, reliable energy.

The humility required to admit what we simply don’t know, admitting that more research ought to be conducted before dramatic, people-harming action is taken, is antithetical to the radical Climate Change-ist doctrine for one major reason: at their core, the leaders of Climate Change-ism aren’t blind religious adherents at all; they’re power-starved tyrants seeking control where they can take it.

Aside from food and water, absolute control over energy is the most powerful weapon one can wield over the populace in a place like the United States. Control the energy, control the future.

It is about time the American people seize control of their future and reject the false deity of Climate Change-ism, before it is too late.

SOURCE





A Carbon Tax Is a Terrible Idea. Reply to Paulson

Former treasury secretary Henry Paulson is calling for a “fundamentally conservative” carbon tax to address the risks of a climate bubble.

Writing in the New York Times, Paulson relates his time in office to today’s climate, writing that “I was secretary of the Treasury when the credit bubble burst, so I think it’s fair to say that I know a little bit about risk, assessing outcomes and problem-solving.”

“Looking back at the dark days of the financial crisis in 2008,” he adds, “it is easy to see the similarities between the financial crisis and the climate challenge we now face.”

But it’s laughable to say that the future state of the global climate should be a concern akin to the financial crisis in 2008. Paulson argues the burning of fossil fuels is the driver of irreversible global warming and climate observations are ahead of what climate models predicted, such as melting Arctic and West Antarctic ice could lead to 14-foot level sea increases.

Let’s set the record straight on Paulson’s climate assertions. First, sea level is increasing, but accelerating sea-level rises is not what the data tell us.

Second, all sea ice around the world is actually above average and, for this time of year, it is at its highest level in 30 years, which is the third-highest on record.

Third, climate models haven’t been so great at projecting what a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will actually do to global temperatures. The models didn’t get the past 17 years right, who’s to think they can accurately project 100 years out?

Fourth, even if the purported sea level rise Paulson speaks of is accurate, it will occur over centuries, leaving ample time to adjust as necessary.

A carbon tax is not going to mitigate warming and won’t make a lick of difference when it comes to natural disasters.

Paulson’s other climate arguments fall short, too, as he points to “a future with more severe storms, deeper droughts, longer fire seasons and rising seas that imperil coastal cities.” The problem with that argument is largely twofold. As indicated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there haven’t been significant trends for hurricanes, droughts, floods or tornadoes. The case that manmade emissions are driving more frequent and intense weather events is bogus.

But let’s pretend Paulson isn’t wrong on the problem. His purported solution of a carbon tax would be an enormously high, regressive energy tax that would needlessly destroy jobs and economic growth for no noticeable impact on global temperatures. A carbon tax is not going to mitigate warming and won’t make a lick of difference when it comes to natural disasters. Further, an assumption exists that if the United States takes the lead, other developing nations will follow suit. But if we play follow the leader, we’re going to turn around and find no one there.

Paulson claims that without a carbon tax, we’ll all be paying for the damage of climate change “many times over” and that we’re going to leave the world in a worse state for our grandchildren. But in fact, a carbon tax would hurt our grandchildren. More than 80 percent of America’s energy needs are met through carbon-emitting conventional fuels. If we have less access to those fuels, our economy will suffer.

As my colleague David Kreutzer writes,

“With or without the carbon policy, future generations will be considerably wealthier than the current generation, but future generations will suffer disproportionately larger losses. In either absolute dollars or fraction of income lost, a carbon policy would impose greater hardship on future generations.”

Paulson is correct in saying there’s uncertainty in the risk and magnitude of climate change:The climate is always changing and there’s uncertainty with regard to the drivers and magnitude of climate change. But the reality remains that the planet is not heading toward catastrophic warming. And even if it were, an exorbitant, un-conservative carbon tax would cripple us economically without impacting climate whatsoever.

SOURCE





Carbon tax repeal now assured in Australia

Clive Palmer has revealed his party will vote to stop the Abbott Government axing key climate change bodies and will only back the repeal of the carbon tax if lower power prices for consumers are guaranteed.

Flanked by climate change campaigner and former US vice-president Al Gore, Mr Palmer announced his Palmer United Party would vote against the Government's bid to abolish the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the Renewable Energy Target and the Climate Change Authority.

The Queensland MP says he is standing by an election promise to support efforts to get rid of the carbon tax but with a significant caveat.

"True to our promises to the Australian people at the last election, Palmer United senators will vote in the Senate to abolish the carbon tax," he said.

"In doing so, Palmer United senators will move an amendment that all producers of energy are required by law, not by choice, to pass on to all consumers of energy the savings from the repeal of the carbon tax."

It is not clear how such a condition could be imposed on companies by the Parliament.

Axing the carbon tax was the major campaign platform and election promise for Tony Abbott during last year's election.

Environment Minister Greg Hunt called a press conference shortly after Mr Palmer's announcement, to hail the "signature" decision to back the carbon tax repeal bill.

He said he was "relaxed" about the PUP leader's plans and appeared willing to meet Mr Palmer's demands on power prices.

"In terms of the question as to whether or not the full cost savings will be passed through to families, there are already guarantees in the legislation, however, we are willing to provide additional guarantees and to work with Mr Palmer and the Palmer United Party on any further legislative amendments," he said.

As the largest voting bloc on the new micro-party cross bench, PUP will hold the balance of power when the Senate changes over next Tuesday.

SOURCE

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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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New paper claims the 'pause' is 'not so unusual' & 'no more than natural variability'

He's baack!...  Shaun Lovejoy has published a new paper which cites his prior claim of 99.9% confidence that one of the two temperature graphs below is your fault, and the other due to natural variability.

Both graphs are half-century plots of HADCRUT4 global temperatures. Both use exactly the same time and temperature scales.  Can you tell with 99.9% confidence which one is 1895-1945 (Nature’s fault), and which is 1963-2013 (Your fault)?





[graphs from Not A Lot Of People Know That, not Lovejoy's paper]

FYI according to Lovejoy's dodgy statistics the top graph is man-made, the bottom graph is due to natural variability.

In Lovejoy's new paper, he acknowledges a 'pause' in global warming since 1998, says it's "not so unusual" and concludes "the pause is no more than natural variability." Indeed, the pause is due to natural variability that has not been accounted for by climate models, and thus invalidates attribution claims that the past 50 years of temperature variations are necessarily due to man-made CO2. Furthermore, prior work by NOAA and others has found 'pauses' of 15 or more years are indeed unusual and would suggest the climate models are overly sensitive to CO2. According to RSS satellite data, the 'pause' has lasted almost 18 years.

The paper:

Return periods of global climate fluctuations and the pause

S. Lovejoy

An approach complementary to General Circulation Models (GCM's), using the anthropogenic CO2 radiative forcing as a linear surrogate for all anthropogenic forcings [Lovejoy, 2014], was recently developed for quantifying human impacts. Using pre-industrial multiproxy series and scaling arguments, the probabilities of natural fluctuations at time lags up to 125 years were determined. The hypothesis that the industrial epoch warming was a giant natural fluctuation was rejected with 99.9% confidence. In this paper, this method is extended to the determination of event return times. Over the period 1880-2013, the largest 32 year event is expected to be 0.47 K, effectively explaining the postwar cooling (amplitude 0.42 - 0.47 K). Similarly, the “pause” since 1998 (0.28 - 0.37 K) has a return period of 20-50 years (not so unusual). It is nearly cancelled by the pre-pause warming event (1992-1998, return period 30-40 years); the pause is no more than natural variability.

SOURCE




New EPA Regs Issued Under Obama Are 38 Times as Long as Bible

Since President Barack Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued 2,827 new final regulations, equaling 24,915 pages in the Federal Register, totaling approximately 24,915,000 words.

The Gutenberg Bible is only 1,282 pages and 646,128 words. Thus, the new EPA regulations issued by the Obama Administration contain 19 times as many pages as the Bible and 38 times as many words.

The Obama EPA regulations have 22 times as many words as the entire Harry Potter series, which includes seven books with 1,084,170 words. They have 5,484 times as many words as the U.S. Constitution, which has 4,543 words, including the signatures; and 17,088 times as many words as the Declaration of Independence, which has 1,458 words including signatures.

Using the Regulations.gov website and the Federal Register itself, CNSNews.com found 2,827 distinct rules published by the EPA since January 2009 covering, among other things,  greenhouse gases, air quality, emissions and hazardous substances.

The Federal Register publishes documents, including proposed rules, notices, interim rules, corrections, drafts of final rules and final rules. The CNSNews.com tabulation included only final rules from the EPA.

To get an approximate word count for each EPA rule in the Federal Register, CNSNews.com evaluated a few random rules from the 2,827 EPA regulations published since Obama took office, and calculated an approximate average of 1,000 words per page. From this, CNSNews.com calculated that the 2,827 final EPA rules that have been published in the Federal Register so far take up 24,915,000 words.

This is only an approximation because some pages in the Federal Register carry more words than others, and some regulations end in the beginning or middle of a page. For example,  one of the regulations was five-pages long and totaled 5,586 words, an average of 1,117 words per page.

Another regulation was three-pages long and 3,150 words, which averaged to 1,050 words per page. another rule was four-pages long and 4,426 words, or an average 1,106 words per page.

“The broader question of whether the Obama Administration’s EPA is “overreaching” in its regulatory effects has not gone away. Critics both in Congress and outside of it regularly accuse the agency of overkill,” states  a Congressional Research Service report, EPA Regulations: Too Much, Too Little, or On Track?

“EPA’s actions, both individually and in sum, have generated controversy,” the CRS report states. “Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have expressed concerns, through bipartisan letters commenting on proposed regulations and through introduced legislation that would delay, limit, or prevent certain EPA actions.”

Yet, EPA proponents are fighting for more rules. “Environmental groups and other supporters of the agency disagree that EPA has overreached. Many of them believe that the agency is, in fact, moving in the right direction, including taking action on significant issues that had been long delayed or ignored in the past. In several cases, environmental advocates would like the regulatory actions to be stronger,” said the CRS report.

SOURCE





Climate change: Less of a scientific agenda and more of a political agenda

By Marita Noon

Those who don’t believe in climate change are “a threat to the future,” says the Washington Post in a June 14 article on President Obama’s commencement address for the University of California-Irvine. Regarding the speech, the Associated Press reported: “President Obama said denying climate change is like arguing the moon is made of cheese.” He declared: “Scientists have long established that the world needs to fight climate change.”

The emphasis on a single government policy strays far from the flowery rhetoric found at the traditional graduation ceremony—especially in light of the timing. While the president was speaking, all of the progress made by America’s investment of blood and treasure in Iraq was under immediate threat. And, as I pointed out last week, what is taking place right now in Iraq has the potential of an imminent impact to our economic security. Instead of addressing the threat now, why is he talking about “a threat to the future” that might happen in the next 100 years?

The answer, I believe, is found later in his comments.

In his speech, Obama accused “some in Congress” of knowing that climate change is real, but refusing to admit it because they’ll “be run out of town by a radical fringe that thinks climate science is a liberal plot.”

Perhaps he’s read a new book by a climatologist with more than forty years of experience in the discipline: The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science by Tim Ball, PhD —which convincingly lays out the case for believing that the current climate change narrative is “a liberal plot.” (Read a review from Principia Scientific International.) In the preface, Ball states: “I’ve watched my chosen profession—climatology—get hijacked and exploited in service of a political agenda.” He indirectly calls the actions of the president and his environmental allies: “the greatest deception in history” and claims: “the extent of the damage has yet to be exposed and measured.”

It is not that Ball doesn’t believe in climate change. In fact, he does. He posits: “Climate change has happened, is happening and will always happen.” Being literal, Obama’s cheese comment is accurate. No scientist, and no one is Congress, denies natural climate change. However, what is in question is the global warming agenda that has been pushed for the past several decades that claims that the globe is warming because of human-caused escalation of CO2. When global warming alarmists use “climate change,” they mean human-caused. Due to lack of “warming,” they’ve changed the term to climate change.

Nor is he against the environment, or even environmentalism. He says: “Environmentalism was a necessary paradigm shift that took shape and gained acceptance in western society in the 1960s. The idea that we shouldn’t despoil our nest and must live within the limits of global resources is fundamental and self-evident. Every rational person embraces those concepts, but some took different approaches that brought us to where we are now.”

Ball continues: “Environmentalism made us aware we had to live within the limits of our home and its resources: we had a responsibility for good stewardship.” But, “the shift to environmentalism was hijacked for a political agenda.” He points out: “extremists demand a complete and unsustainable restructuring of world economies in the guise of environmentalism” and claims: “the world has never before suffered from deception on such a grand scale.”

Though it is difficult to comprehend that a deception on such a grand scale, as Ball projects, could occur, he cites history to explain how the scientific method was bypassed and perverted. “We don’t just suddenly arrive at situations unless it is pure catastrophe. There is always a history, and the current situation can be understood when it is placed in context.”

In The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science, Ball takes the reader through history and paints a picture based on the work of thought leaders in their day such as Thomas Malthus, The Club of Rome, Paul Erlich, Maurice Strong, and John Holdren. Their collective ideas lead to an anti-development mindset. As a result, Ball says: “Politics and emotion overtook science and logic.”

Having only been in this line of work for the past seven-and-a-half years, I was unfamiliar with the aforementioned. But Ball outlines their works. Two quotes, one from Erlich, author of, the now fully discredited, The Population Bomb, and the other from Strong, who established the United Nations Environment Program (the precursor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), resulted in an epiphany for me. I now know that the two sides of the energy debate are fighting apples and oranges.

I’ve been fighting for cost-effective energy, jobs, and economic growth. I point out, as I do in a video clip on the home page of my website, that the countries with the best human health and the most physical wealth are those with the highest energy consumption. I state that abundant, available, and affordable energy is essential to a growing economy. I see that only economically strong countries can afford to care about the environment.

While the other side has an entirely different goal—and it’s not just about energy.

Ehrlich: “Actually, the problem in the world is there are too many rich people.” And: “We’ve already had too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease not the cure.”

Strong: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized nations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

When the other side of the energy debate claims that wind turbines and solar panels will create jobs and lower energy costs—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I’d mistakenly assumed that we had similar goals but different paths toward achieving them. But it isn’t really about renewable energy, which explains why climate alarmists don’t cheer when China produces cheap solar panels that make solar energy more affordable for the average person, and instead demand tariffs that increase the cost of Chinese solar panels in the U.S.

Ball states: “In the political climate engendered by environmentalism and its exploitation, some demand a new world order and they believe this can be achieved by shutting down the industrialized nations.”

He cites Strong, a senior member of The Club of Rome, who in 1990 asked: “What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of rich countries?” A year later, The Club of Rome released a report, The First Global Revolution, in which the authors state: “In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. …The real enemy then is humanity itself.”

Throughout the pages of The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science, Ball goes on to show how in attempting to meet the challenge of collapsing an industrialized civilization, CO2 becomes the focus. “Foolishly we’ve developed global energy policies based on incorrect science promulgated by extremists.”

Ball concludes: “Because they applied politics to science they perverted the scientific method by proving their hypothesis to predetermine the result.” The results? “The sad truth is none of the energy and economic policies triggered by the demonization of CO2 were necessary.”

Obama said: “Scientists have long established that the world needs to fight climate change.” Yes, some have—many for reasons outlined in Ball’s easy-to-read new book. But, surely not all. Next month, hundreds of scientists, policy analysts, and thought leaders, who don’t agree with the president’s statement (including Ball and myself), will gather together for the Ninth International Conference on Climate Change. There, they won’t all agree on the reasons, but they’ll discuss and debate why each believes climate change is not a man-caused crisis. In real science, debate is welcome.

The computer models used to produce the scientific evidence and to provide legitimacy in support of the political agenda have a record of failed projections that would have doomed any other area of research and policy. Ball points out: “The error of their predictions didn’t stop extremists seeing the need for total control.”

The claim of consensus is continually touted and those who disagree are accused of thinking the moon is made of cheese. According to Ball: “Consensus is neither a scientific fact nor important in science, but it is very important in politics.”

Do you want to live in a world with “the best human health” or in one where “the real enemy is humanity itself?” Energy is at the center of this battle.

“It is time to expose their failures [and true motives] to the public before their work does too much more damage.”

SOURCE





New Report: Alarm Over Climate Turns People Off

Alarmist claims about the impact of global warming are contributing to a loss of trust in climate scientists, an inquiry has found.

Apocalyptic language has been used about greenhouse gas emissions as “a deliberate strategy by some to engage public interest”.

However, trying to make people reduce emissions by frightening them has “harmful consequences” because they often respond suspiciously or decide the issue is “too scary to think about”.

The inquiry, by a team of senior scientists from a range of disciplines, was commissioned by University College London to find better ways of informing the public about climate science.

Public interest in climate change has fallen sharply in the past few years, according to a survey last month which found the number of Google searches for the phrase “global warming” had fallen by 84 per cent since the peak in 2007.

Confidence in climate science was undermined in 2010 by the revelation that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN scientific body which advises governments, had falsely claimed that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.

Scientists have also been accused of exaggerating the rate of loss of Arctic sea ice by claiming the North Pole could be ice-free in summer by 2020. Other scientists say this is unlikely before 2050.

Claims were made a decade ago, and later retracted, that the snows of Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain, could disappear by 2015.

The inquiry, led by Professor Chris Rapley, former director of the Science Museum, concludes: “Alarmist messages that fail to materialise contribute to the loss of trust in the science community.”

The report says climate scientists have difficulty “delivering messages that are alarming without slipping into alarmism”.

It says the media is partly to blame for seeking “a striking headline”.

However, the report says there was also a “preconception that communicating threatening information is a necessary and effective catalyst for individual behaviour change”.

It says the “climate science community” is quick to challenge those who downplay climate change but less willing to question “alarmist misrepresentations” of climate research.

Doom-laden reports may make people feel anxious but their concern does not last.  “Over time this worry changes to numbness, desensitisation and disengagement from the issue altogether.

“The failure of specific predictions of climate change to materialise creates the impression that the climate science community as a whole resorts to raising false alarms. When apparent failures are not adequately explained, future threats become less believable.”

The report says the 30,000 climate scientists worldwide are at the centre of an intense public debate about key questions, such as how we should obtain our energy, but are “ill-prepared” to engage in it.

It adds that this difficulty in communicating their work is “proving unhelpful to evidence-based policy formulation, and is damaging their public standing”.

SOURCE





German Solar Sector Collapses As Government Plans "Sun tax"

Germany’s solar industry association, BSW Solar, has condemned the German government for its stance on PV, claiming that in the first five months of this year the country only installed 818MW of new PV generation capacity.

Compared to the same period last year, the amount of newly installed capacity has apparently dropped by 45%. BSW Solar says that at that rate, Germany will miss even the lower limit of the ‘target bandwidth’ the nation has set itself. Recently altered renewable energy targets allowed for the country to stay on track if it managed to install between 2.5GW and 3.5GW of PV in the year.

Since the beginning of 2012, BSW Solar claims system prices have fallen in Germany by 25%. Yet between 2012 and 2013 it says, demand for PV dropped by 60%, followed by the similarly poor showing recently between January and May.

The ‘bandwidth’ targets have been roundly condemned by industry groups including BSW Solar and renewable energy association BEE when they were proposed late last year. The targets extend to 2035 and allow for Germany to aim to be generating between 55% and 60% of its energy from renewable sources.

Also condemned were plans to levy charges for self-consumption [Sonnensteur; Sun tax] onto residential PV system owners, while some heavy industries will seek exemption from those same charges for economic reasons.

SOURCE




Solar getting shafted in Italy too

Italy's plans to cut subsidies for solar power producers risk alienating investors and triggering costly legal battles, undermining Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's drive to attract foreign capital to bolster a fledgling economic recovery.

Renzi's centre-left government has pledged to cut power bills by 10 percent to help struggling households and small firms, and has tabled a set of measures that include spreading incentives for solar power producers over a longer timeframe.

Draft legislation seen by Reuters - which is set to be signed into law soon but which could still be subject to change - says larger solar power operators will have to extend the term of their subsidised tariffs from 20 to 24 years, effectively thinning them out, or accept a straight 8 percent cut.

The government says the solar industry has already profited from one of Europe's most generous incentive schemes, paid for by consumers through their bills, and should now do its part in bringing end-user prices down.

But solar firms and investors say the move changes the rules on which they based their decisions and so could scare off long-term foreign capital and trigger costly legal action, while generating only minimal savings.

"You can't penalize operators halfway through their investments; they won't come back," said Pietro Colucci, CEO of Italian-based renewable energy company Kinexia.

Renzi, nicknamed Mr Demolition Man, has committed to clean up and streamline Italy's ways of doing business and has introduced a raft of laws to try to make the country more competitive. But critics say the government is too rushed and has not thought things through.

The new rules will apply to solar plants of over 200 kilowatts, affecting around 8,600 operators that receive about 60 percent of subsidies.

In a newspaper editorial on Friday, Michael Bonte-Friedheim, the CEO of Nextenergy Capital Group, a merchant bank to the renewable energy sector, said Renzi probably believed his proposal was easier than tackling inefficiencies in the Italian energy sector and cutting high taxes on energy users.

"Maybe he's right, but good luck in attracting foreign investors in the future. Don't come knocking on my door," he said.

Italy's solar power market - which has drawn private equity firms such as Terra Firma and First Reserve as well as bank-owned investment firms and pension funds - took off at the end of 2010 when new rules sent production subsidies skyrocketing: from 750 million euros in 2010 to 3.8 billion euros in 2011 and 6.7 billion euros in 2013.

In the last five years, investors have poured more than 50 billion euros into Italian renewable energy, building around 17 gigawatts of solar capacity.

In an attempt to curb costs and stop power bills rising, Rome capped incentives, but they will still cost Italians more than 200 billion euros over the next 20 years.

"That's a lot of money for consumers to pay. Retroactive cuts have happened in Spain, Greece and Bulgaria. The operators can't not have seen this coming," said a manager at a top energy trading association.

SOURCE

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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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