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.

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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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