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.  

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