Dana Nuccitelli and The Guardian are at it again

Nuca is always the same. He gives lots of links in support of his assertions but if you follow those links back they always lead to dubious claims by fellow Warmists.

Below is the first part of a hit-piece that he has just done in The Guardian on some prominent skeptics.  I have not reproduced his links but you can get them from the original.  Follow them through and you never get to any proof of anything -- just theories, models and speculation.  Warmists have nothing else.

I have by the way seen an email from Fred Singer saying that most of what Nuca says about him is false

Nuca accuses a skeptic of a "Gish gallop".  There could be few better examples of one of those than the 50+ "explanations" offered by Warmists for the non-heating over the past 18 years. That there are so many of them indicates that they are all insubstantial and that nothing in fact has been established by them

The old "fossil fuels" accusation is an amusing one.  Big oil actually gives a lot more to environmental groups than to skeptics. So are Greenies "in the pay" of fossil fuel interests?  It would seem so by Nuca's logic

DeSmog UK has found that libertarian banker Lord Leach is a likely funder of the anti-climate political advocacy group Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). In May of 2009, Lord Leach gave a long speech in Parliament detailing his beliefs about global warming.

The speech was full of inaccuracies, myths, and misinformation. Known as a Gish Gallop, the sheer number of false claims in the speech would require tremendous effort to debunk. Most telling were the sources that Lord Leach relied upon to support his statements. For example,

Probably the best climatologist in the world is Professor Lindzen and another good one is Professor Singer.

While Richard Lindzen is a climate scientist, he’s also the climate scientist who’s been the wrongest, longest. Throughout his climate science career, Lindzen consistently took positions that were contrary to the climate science mainstream. For example, Lindzen claimed that global warming over the 20th century was minimal, that humans have an insignificant impact on global temperatures, and that water vapor will act to dampen global warming. All of these claims and many more have proven to be completely wrong. In another contrarian position, Lindzen has disputed the link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer.

So has the other source Lord Leach cited in the above quote, Fred Singer. Unlike Lindzen, Singer doesn’t conduct climate science research. Instead, Singer is essentially a professional contrarian. On behalf of various industries, Singer has disputed the links between ultraviolet radiation and skin cancer, between chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and ozone depletion, between passive smoking and lung cancer, and of course between human activity and global warming. As with Lindzen, Singer has been proven wrong on every point.

Political advocacy are another commonality between the two. Fred Singer is affiliated with numerous fossil fuel-funded political think tanks, including the Heartland Institute and Cato Institute. When he retired from academia last year, Richard Lindzen likewise joined the Cato Institute. Their lifelong contrarianism, history of being consistently wrong, and affiliation with political organizations should make anyone question their climate credibility, let alone relying on them exclusively or claiming they’re the world’s best climatologists.

More HERE




Happy To Oblige Australia's BOM



Neville Nichols says:

An independent inquiry into the Bureau of Meteorology? Bring it on

Maurice Newman, chair of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council, has called for an independent review of the Bureau of Meteorology’s climate data, following a stream of recent articles in The Australian newspaper attacking the Bureau’s methods.

I support his call for an open and public inquiry into the Bureau’s climate data and the techniques that the Bureau’s scientists have used to reduce the influence of changes in instrumentation, exposure, and weather station location on its climate records.

I support it because I don’t think the Bureau gets enough opportunities to demonstrate to the public its scientific integrity, hard work, and valuable results.

An independent inquiry into the Bureau of Meteorology? Bring it on

I’m happy to bring it on.

Nicholls used the graph below, purporting to show that BOM surface data closely matches UAH satellite data. But he did a little nature trick – he expanded the scale of the satellite data (right side) to make it appear to match,the surface data! A realistic adjustment would be to do the opposite and shrink the satellite scale, because the troposphere should warm faster than the surface



Next, let’s compare the BOM data from Nicholls graph above to all 1,655 GHCN (Global Climatology Historical Network) stations in Australia. The GHCN data shows no net warming since 1880, but the BOM (Bureau of Meteorology) data shows a hockey stick since 1950, and hides all temperatures before 1910.


NOTE: 1880 temperature higher than 2014

This is not a perfect comparison, because the GHCN data skews towards temperatures in the populated areas near the coasts, and under counts temperatures in the interior. But at a  minimum, it shows that there has been little or no net warming over a large swath of Australia, and a strong disagreement with the BOM data.

The BOM anomalies were calculated relative to a 1940-1980 baseline, and the GHCN anomalies were calculated as the differences of each monthly average from the 1940-1980 baseline for that month.

SOURCE

What Nichols really means is that he thinks any enquiry can be nobbled.  And he has just shown one way how -- JR




Keystone Be Darned: Canada Finds Oil Route Around Obama

So you’re the Canadian oil industry and you do what you think is a great thing by developing a mother lode of heavy crude beneath the forests and muskeg of northern Alberta. The plan is to send it clear to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast via a pipeline called Keystone XL. Just a few years back, America desperately wanted that oil.

Then one day the politics get sticky. In Nebraska, farmers don’t want the pipeline running through their fields or over their water source. U.S. environmentalists invoke global warming in protesting the project. President Barack Obama keeps siding with them, delaying and delaying approval. From the Canadian perspective, Keystone has become a tractor mired in an interminably muddy field.

In this period of national gloom comes an idea -- a crazy-sounding notion, or maybe, actually, an epiphany. How about an all-Canadian route to liberate that oil sands crude from Alberta’s isolation and America’s fickleness? Canada’s own environmental and aboriginal politics are holding up a shorter and cheaper pipeline to the Pacific that would supply a shipping portal to oil-thirsty Asia.

Instead, go east, all the way to the Atlantic.

Thus was born Energy East, an improbable pipeline that its backers say has a high probability of being built. It will cost C$12 billion ($10.7 billion) and could be up and running by 2018. Its 4,600-kilometer (2,858-mile) path, taking advantage of a vast length of existing and underused natural gas pipeline, would wend through six provinces and four time zones. It would be Keystone on steroids, more than twice as long and carrying a third more crude.

Its end point, a refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick, operated by a reclusive Canadian billionaire family, would give Canada’s oil-sands crude supertanker access to the same Louisiana and Texas refineries Keystone was meant to supply.

As well, Vladimir Putin’s provocations in Ukraine are spurring interest in that oil from Europe and, strange as it seems, Saint John provides among the fastest shipping times to India of any oil port in North America. Indian companies, having already sampled this crude, are interested in more. That means oil-sands production for the first time would trade in more than dribs and drabs on the international markets. With the U.S. virtually its only buyer, the captive Canadians are subject to price discounts of as much as $43 a barrel that cost Canada $20 billion a year.

And if you’re a fed-up Canadian, like Prime Minister Stephen Harper, there’s a bonus: Obama can’t do a single thing about it.

“The best way to get Keystone XL built is to make it irrelevant,” said Frank McKenna, who served three terms as premier of New Brunswick and was ambassador to the U.S. before becoming a banker.

So confident is TransCanada Corp., the chief backer of both Keystone and Energy East, of success that Alex Pourbaix, the executive in charge, spoke of the cross-Canada line as virtually a done deal.

“With one project,” Energy East will give Alberta’s oil sands not only an outlet to “eastern Canadian markets but to global markets,” said Pourbaix. “And we’ve done so at scale, with a 1.1 million barrel per day pipeline, which will go a long way to removing the specter of those big differentials for many years to come.”

The project still faces political hurdles. U.S. and international greens who hate Keystone may not like this any better. In Quebec, where most new construction will occur, a homegrown environmental movement is already asking tough questions.

Still, if this end run around the Keystone holdup comes to fruition, it would give a lift to Canadian oil and government interests who feel they’re being played by Obama as he sweeps aside a long understood “special relationship” between the world’s two biggest trading partners to score political points with environmental supporters at home.

This Canada-only idea surfaced in the days after Obama’s surprise Nov. 10, 2011, phone call informing Prime Minister Harper that Keystone was on hold. Harper, who had vowed to turn his nation into an energy superpower, responded with a two-track strategy: Get in Obama’s face on Keystone and identify other ways out for Canada’s land-locked oil sands, which, at 168 billion proven barrels, contain the third-largest reserves in the world.

Keystone remains bogged down, awaiting the outcome of litigation in Nebraska. Last year, Obama gave a speech at Georgetown University and said he wouldn’t approve Keystone if it would significantly exacerbate carbon dioxide emissions.

The pipeline to the Pacific, known as Northern Gateway, looks increasingly iffy due to opposition from aboriginal groups.

TransCanada is thus expected to file an application to build Energy East with Canada’s National Energy Board in the coming days, according to people familiar with the plan. Approval may come in early 2016. “This is almost certainly the most important project TransCanada has right now in our portfolio,” said Pourbaix.

While Republicans continue to make Keystone approval an issue of the mid-term congressional elections, its fate has become less fraught for Canadians. Make no mistake –- they still want it approved under the theory that oil sands reserves are so vast that it will require multiple large pipelines to develop them properly. In the interim, they have already begun to deploy alternatives to get Alberta oil to market, moving 160,000 barrels a day to the U.S. by rail.

Reflecting this new post-Keystone mood, Harper told a British business audience in September that the U.S. “is unlikely to be a fast-growing economy for many years to come” and after a hundred years of trying to maximize exports south, it’s time for “a real shift in the mindset of Canadian business culture.”

Which is what Energy East represents. Yet before it emerged as a standard bearer of this shift, it had to survive a rough gestation. Harper himself was slow to warm to it. Others declared it “stranger than science fiction.”

And then there were the mutual suspicions of the oil producers of the west and the refiners of the east to overcome. The inside story of how this developed into an unusually broad political consensus was put together after interviews with more than 50 industry and government executives who have been in and around the often tense negotiations.

SOURCE





Lost Electricity Generation Capacity 7X Higher Than EPA Estimates

 Power plants generating 72 gigawatts (GW) of electricity in 37 states have either closed or are scheduled to shut their doors to comply with Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations, according to the Institute for Energy Research (IER).
The loss of generating capacity is “over seven times the amount originally predicted by EPA modeling,” IER’s updated report, released October 7, noted.

“Originally, EPA calculated that only 9.5 GW of electrical generating capacity would close as a result of its MATS (Mercury and Air Toxics Standard) and CSAPR (Cross State Air Pollution Rule) rules,” the report stated.

“Before President Obama’s newly proposed [carbon dioxide] regulations on existing power plants even begin to take effect, however, it is clear that actual number will now be much higher,” the report continued, adding that the closures will take “enough electrical generation capacity to reliably power 44.7 million homes – or every home in every state west of the Mississippi, excluding Texas” off the grid.

Over 94 percent of the closures involve coal-fired power plants, which currently provide one-fifth of the nation’s electricity, even though coal was the only fuel that was able to keep up with the higher demand during last January's polar vortex.

The result will be higher utility prices and lower reliability, IER warned.

“This past winter demonstrated in real time the value of the existing coal fleet. During the winter of 2014, coal was the only fuel with the ability to meet demand increases for electricity, providing 92 percent of incremental electricity in January/February, 2014 versus the same months in 2013,” the IER report stated.

“Americans were harmed as the relentless cold indicated that prudent utility practices require large, baseload coal plants to stabilize the grid, keep society functioning, and maintain electricity availability.”

“An unprecedented amount of planned generation retirements driven largely by environmental regulations... places upward pressure on prices,” according to PJM’s 2015/16 power auction report, which noted that the wholesale cost of electricity will go up next year for its 61 million customers living in 13 Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states and the District of Columbia.

PJM Interconnection manages 62,566 miles of high-voltage transmission lines in “all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia.”

Coal accounts for the majority (41 percent) of the fuel generated for PJM's section of the grid, followed by nuclear (18 percent), natural gas (16 percent), and oil (6 percent).

Last Tuesday, members of the United Mine Workers of America protested the EPA regulations at the agency’s headquarters in Washington because they said closure of the coal-powered power plants will decimate coalfield communities.

SOURCE




Kerry: 'Life as You Know It on Earth Ends' If Climate Skeptics Are Wrong

What a blowhard!

"Life as you know it on Earth ends" if climate change skeptics are wrong, Sec. of State John Kerry declared Thursday.

But, even if climate alarmists are wrong, nothing bad can come of enacting their taxes, restrictions and regulations, Kerry said in a speech at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center:

"I'd just say to all of you here that people need to feel the pressure from you. You all know what politics is about. I'm not in it now, but I'm dependent on it to help make the right decisions so that we move in the right direction. A clean energy future is not a fantasy. Changing course and avoiding the worst impacts of climate change is not a fantasy. And supporting healthier communities and ecosystems and driving economic growth and job creation - none of that is a fantasy.

"And for those people who still stand in the way, for those people who even still today want to try to question whether or not their science is effective or not, I'd just ask you - ask a simple question: If we're wrong about this future, what's the worst that could happen to us for making these choices?

"The worst that could happen to us is we create a whole lot of new jobs, we kick our economies into gear, we have healthier people, healthier children because we have cleaner air, we live up to our environmental responsibility, we become truly energy independent, and our security is stronger and greater and sustainable as a result. That's the worst that happens to us."

But, if skeptics are wrong and the temperature rises even seven degrees, life on Earth will end, Kerry claimed:

"What happens if they're wrong? If they're wrong - catastrophe. Life as you know it on Earth ends. Seven degrees increase Fahrenheit, and we can't sustain crops, water, life under those circumstances."

Editor's Add-On: Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) disputes Kerry's claim that only good can come from enacting environmentalists' climate agenda, telling MRCTV that it'll destroy millions of jobs and drive up energy costs.

SOURCE




Antarctic ice hits ALL TIME RECORD HIGH: We have more to learn, says boffin

Four standard deviations above average!

Climate scientists have confessed they are baffled – yet again – by another all-time record area of sea covered by ice around the Antarctic coasts.

"What we're learning is, we have more to learn," said Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, announcing the latest annual sea ice maximum for the austral continent. According to the NSIDC:

"Sea ice surrounding the Antarctic continent reached its maximum extent on September 22 at 20.11 million square kilometers (7.76 million square miles). This is 1.54 million square kilometers (595,000 square miles) above the 1981 to 2010 average extent, which is nearly four standard deviations above average. Antarctic sea ice averaged 20.0 million square kilometers (7.72 million square miles) for the month of September. This new record extent follows consecutive record winter maximum extents in 2012 and 2013. The reasons for this recent rapid growth are not clear. Sea ice in Antarctica has remained at satellite-era record high daily levels for most of 2014."

Climate scientists have been puzzled by the behaviour of the southern ice for many years now. The most commonly used models say that its steady growth should not be happening in a warming world (though the warming of the world is also in doubt, as air temperatures have been steady for the last fifteen years or more - and it turns out that deep ocean temperatures are not increasing either, leaving the "mystery" of the apparent end of global warming "unsolved").

This failure of reality to match up with climate modelling has, as some eminent climate scientists have noted, had the effect of "limiting confidence in the predictions" of severe warming and associated disasters this century.

Meanwhile at the other end of the planet the Arctic sea ice has covered lesser areas in recent times. The lowest Arctic area seen in the era of satellite measurements was in 2012, but the three consecutive record-high Antarctic maxima of 2012, 2013 and now 2014 have resulted in global sea ice levels this year and last year coming out pretty much normal. ®

SOURCE

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