Tuesday, February 10, 2015


NCDC Breaks Their Own Record For Data Tampering In 2014

The National Climatic Data Center has broken last year’s record for misleading the public about US temperatures. The thermometer data they use shows no warming over the past 90 years, and that 2013/2014 were two of the coldest years on record in the US. But after data tampering, they report a sharp US warming trend. The animation below flashes between the average measured and final temperature at all stations.

USHCNTampering2014


The total amount of tampering reached record levels in 2014, at almost 1.8 degrees F. They create the appearance of warming by cooling all years prior to 2003, and warming all years since that date.

ScreenHunter_5802 Jan. 05 11.57

Another spectacular milestone is that the now fabricate 30% of their monthly data. Almost one third of their reported monthly station data has no actual thermometer data from that station. This allows them to contaminate missing rural data, with UHI affected thermometers tens or hundreds of miles away.

ScreenHunter_5803 Jan. 05 12.00


The physical basis of their tampering appears to be the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The correlation between tampering and atmospheric CO2 is almost perfect.

ScreenHunter_5808 Jan. 05 13.14


It appears that they have a tampering algorithm designed to force reported temperatures to match hopelessly broken global warming theory. NCDC says that the algorithm is "working as designed".

SOURCE





Just another dumb actor

Former California governor and Hollywood star Arnold Schwarzenegger is calling for more to be done to combat climate change, saying it is 'the issue of our time.'

Speaking Sunday to a small group at the Munich security conference, where he introduced a new policy paper 'The Future of Energy,' Schwarzenegger said his experience in California was that the adoption of green energy creates jobs and leads to energy independence.

He applauded formal efforts to come to new agreements to reduce carbon emissions and fight global warming, but says there is no need for governments to wait for summits.

Schwarzenegger says the issue shouldn't be politicized and people should work together for solutions.

He says 'we all breathe the same air.'  [So do cockroaches.  What does that prove?  Should we all check in and not check out?]

SOURCE





3 Reasons to Dismiss EPA’s Latest Excuse on Keystone XL

One would think you can beat a dead horse only so many times. Using low oil prices this time, the Environmental Protection Agency is urging President Obama and the State Department to reconsider Keystone XL’s climate impact.

The State Department’s environmental assessment concludes that Keystone XL’s contribution to climate change would be insignificant because the oil will come out of the ground regardless of whether the pipeline is built. Indeed, it already is. The analysis included a scenario with sustained low oil prices where tar sands oil production would decline without Keystone XL because the higher costs of rail could make it too expensive to ship. EPA is urging the State Department to give that scenario more weight in light of low prices.

Here are three reasons to ignore the administration’s latest excuse:

Even with low oil prices, still no impact on climate. Markets respond better than scenarios outlined in a report. Therefore it’s difficult to project how much Canadian oil would come out of the ground if pipeline capacity were unavailable because when such a valuable resource is available, innovators find ways to extract and develop it at lower costs.

But even if the scenario were Keystone XL or nothing, the climate impact still would be minimal. Although tar sands oil is more greenhouse gas-intense than other oil on the world market, Keystone XL is still one pipeline in a world that relies heavily on carbon-emitting conventional fuels. Even if one assumes we are facing catastrophic warming, the carbon emissions from Keystone XL would be 0.2 percent of the “carbon budget” allowable to prevent such warming. But that’s not the case, which leads to the second point.

Look at recent climate science, not recent oil prices. The administration should be more concerned with recent climate science that shows climate realities are far less threatening than the doomsday scenarios projected by climate models. Several peer-reviewed studies over the past few years have found the Earth is significantly less sensitive to carbon dioxide than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assumes in the climate models it builds to estimate warming. Thus, Keystone XL’s impact on climate change will be even less than any scenarios projected by the State Department or EPA, which already are minimal.

Oil prices are long-term. Industry makes investment decisions looking decades into the future, not simply based on short-term projections. Although it certainly is possible low oil prices could postpone Canadian tar sands production and prohibit Keystone XL from reaching its peak volume in the near future, oil prices could rise as quickly as they fell. Businesses are much better equipped and flexible to deal with changing economic circumstances than short-sighted politicians in Washington.

In fact, the EPA even acknowledges this in its letter to the State Department, writing, “The overall effect of the project on oil sands production will be driven by long-term movements in the price of oil and not short-term volatility.” American Petroleum Institute vice president Louis Finkel noted that oil prices were $40 per barrel when TransCanada was initially moving through the application process.

Keystone XL is environmentally responsible and a victory for the economy. Let’s quit delaying and let Americans start building.

SOURCE





THE ATMOSPHERE DOES NOT “PILE HEAT”

by Joseph E Postma

What is Insulation, And what Does it Do? People (well, the climate alarmists) don’t seem to understand what “insulation” is. They think that it means that it makes heat “pile up” inside the source of heat, or in the medium between the insulation and source of heat, so that the source of heat and/or the medium will get hotter than the source of heat and power input.

There is no such thing as “heat pile up”. This is a non-existent concept. You can think of it, like you can think of a unicorn, but it doesn’t exist.  Heat does not pile up, it readily and freely flows into whatever is around it.

Insulation is something that only works in a gaseous environment – it is all about a gaseous environment. Insulation, a blanket, a greenhouse, all work the same way, and that way is preventing convective cooling and air circulation.  Insulation in the form of a blanket, a sweater, a greenhouse enclosure, home insulation, etc., is about reducing and eliminating convective cooling, i.e. the loss of warm air.  A blanket, or insulation, etc., is about doing the opposite of what the atmosphere does!

In your house, insulation helps prevent the furnace-heated air from escaping your house and being replaced with cold air from outside. It doesn’t make the furnace burn hotter.  In your water heater, it helps the water retain its temperature after it has been heated.  It doesn’t make the water hotter than the heater.

You can wrap a heat source with as much insulation as you want.  All that will happen is that the insulation will reach the temperature of the heat source, and the heat source will not rise in temperature.  Insulation is just matter, just material like anything else.  When exposed to heat, it will warm, and will conduct that heat outward via diffusion.

Free Energy

People have claimed that if you have a heating element inside a mug of coffee, that if you then wrap the mug in insulation, the coffee and heating element will get hotter and hotter and hotter, because of “heat pile up”.

Rather, the insulation would simply help keep the mug from cooling once the power is removed from the heating element, otherwise, the insulation will simply attain the temperature of the heating element, if left long enough.

Imagine if we could heat coffee, i.e. water, this way? You just wrap enough insulation, and then a heating element at 60C inside the water can cause the water to boil because of “heat pile up” in the water due to the insulation around it!

This violates all of thermodynamics.  We’ve been trying to do stuff like that for hundreds of years. The discovery of the laws of thermodynamics are the result of those attempts.

Same with the steel greenhouse. The claim is that if you keep on adding shells, the inner sphere will get hotter and hotter by a multiple of the number of shells.

If the steel greenhouse worked that way, then you could power a steam engine and get more work out than you put it. You could layer a few shells around the inner source, make the inner source multiple times hotter than the tiny input at the centre, then flood it with water and have instant explosive steam generation. Then repeat over and over. They found back in the 1700’s and 1800’s that reality didn’t work this way.

Diffusive & Radiative Transfer are not Opposite Thermodynamics
If you add a new layer of steel physically directly touching an internally heated sphere, this new layer will simply heat to the temperature supplied from the interior sphere.  In fact, the new layer will be a little cooler because it will have a larger surface area than the original sphere.

The interior won’t get hotter because it heats a new layer of steel on top of it.  In this case you have the diffusion transfer equation, which similarly has a differential of hot and cold terms describing the heat flow, as does the radiation transfer equation, and we all understand that heat does not physically diffuse from cold to hot and that physical contact between a cold object and warm object does not make the warmer object warmer still.

More HERE





Ocean warming?

Dr Klaus L.E. Kaiser

The latest news, as per the Canada Journal: Oceans are warming so fast that readings are now off the chart, Report. There you have it: from now on it’s gonna be fried or steamed fish only.

To make the point, the article has a convincing graph

That ought to get your attention: 15x10^22 Joules or more of additional ocean heat energy, all in the last 30 years or so. The fish must just about be jumping out of the water and into the (presumably cooler) frying pan.

Perhaps though, some sobering thoughts may be appropriate. Let’s start with small freshwater lakes. The kind you have all over the Ontario, Quebec, and some States in the U.S., a vast area of rather impermeable granite. Snow melt and rain water there collects in every dimple. If those dimples are large and deep enough not to have their contents evaporate in the summer’s heat, they are called LAKES.

A good part of the year these lakes are covered by a layer of ice, one meter (approx. 3 ft.) deep. In the spring, when it finally gets warmer, that ice slowly starts to melt. Only 100 miles north of the metropolis Toronto (Ontario), that time arrives between mid-April and mid-May. However, even when the ice is gone, it’s not time to go frolicking in the water. For that, you have to wait another month or two, or three, like to the end of July. Then the surface water temperature gets to be pleasant, like 20-25 °C (70+ °F); however that’s very close to the surface only.

When I went to take my NAUI (National Association of Underwater Instructors) open water checkout dive, in the middle of June in Georgian Bay at Tobermory, my quarter inch wet suit with hood, gloves and boots left me with an inch of forehead directly exposed to the water. That was enough to cause excruciating pain upon entering the water, at least until the skin became so numb not to feel it anymore.

Since then, I have snorkeled in various lakes in mid-summer, i.e. the months of July or August, without a wet suit. At that time of year, the surface temperature is quite pleasant but already when treading water you can feel your toes to be in a cooler environment. Diving down to a depth of 15-20 ft., you’ll be surprised how drastically the temperature changes. It’s like stepping naked into a deep freezer. Once you hit the thermocline, perhaps 10-15 ft. below the surface, the water temperature drops right down to 38 °F (4 °C) and it’s pitch dark as well so that in many of the smaller lakes you cannot even see your own hands anymore. In larger freshwater bodies and the oceans things are a bit better.

Oceans

To begin with, oceans have much less humic materials (from decaying plants) that cause the dark color of the water in most of the shield lakes. Therefore, you can see quite well down to a few hundred feet of depth. Also, with the prevailing large currents there is a constant exchange of tropical warm with colder polar water. Still, at mid-range latitude, the oceans’ surface water is nowhere really warm.

The seminal work by Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838), the American Practical Navigator and its later editions shows that approximately 50% of the ocean’s surface water never gets any warmer than 70 °F (21 °C). Of course, in the tropical areas of the oceans, the thermocline (see graph below) is much deeper than in the thousands of small lakes in the Canadian Shield or even in the Great Lakes. For example, in Lake Erie (26,000 km^2) it typically is at a depth of 25 ft., even in mid-summer, while in the tropics in the oceans it is around 1500 ft. (500 m). Still, as Bowditch states, even there in deep bottom waters of the tropics, the temperature can be close to 28 °F (-1.5 °C) as the salinity lowers the freezing point to that temperature.

In order to visualize the thermocline, let’s look at a mid-Pacific temperature profile, as shown in the graph below from the ARGO float project (http://www.argo.ucsd.edu). The black line in the graph shows the temperature vs. depth. At this particular station and time (20.25N 121.4W, May 15 2004), you can see the temperature declining slightly from around 23 °C (74 °F) at the surface to 20 °C (at approximately 100 m) and rapidly declining down to 10 °C or 45 °F at 200 m. The zone with the sharp temperature gradient is called the thermocline.

Ocean Heat Content

Let’s get back now to the true meaning of the multi-magnitude increase of the ocean heat content as given at the top. In order to put that into perspective one needs to calculate the amount of additional heat energy in a liter or gallon of ocean water in terms of temperature, ocean salinity.

That is easy to do: The earth’s oceans contain approximately 1,335,000,000 cubic kilometer or 1.3x10^21 liter of water. Assuming the claim of an additional 150 J/liter heat content in ocean water over the last few decades is correct, how does that translate into degrees of temperature?

As one liter of water gets warmer by 1 °C for every 4,200 J of energy, we are talking about hundredths of one degree (150/4200) = 0.03 °C or 0.05 °F, not exactly something to get excited about. Even if most of that additional heat energy were to be found in the photic zone, i.e. above the thermocline, it would likely extend the thermocline to a slightly deeper depth. As most of the oceans organisms live in that photic zone, it could only help to increase their habitat. If there is any drawback to be found at all, perhaps I can summarize it as follows:

Your fresh in-the ocean-steamed-fish will take a few more billion years to arrive.

SOURCE





Australia's oldest university goes green

Divest from Israel; divest from carbon producers.  What's left?  Will feminism cause them to divest from firms led by men?  This could get amusing

In a first for Australian universities, the University of Sydney has announced it will substantially reduce the carbon footprint of its listed share portfolio over the next three years. By setting a reduction target of 20 percent relative to the footprint of its current listed equity composite benchmark, the University is visibly demonstrating its commitment to addressing climate change.

The decision follows a comprehensive review taking into account leading practice on sensitive investments, and the current global views and actions surrounding fossil fuel investments.

The review considered a number of options, including whether to divest entirely from the fossil fuels industry. It also highlighted the complexities of reducing an investment portfolio's carbon footprint. For example, divesting entirely from all companies with an interest in fossil fuels could result in divesting from companies that are also committed to building renewable energy sources. In addition, there are many companies that do not produce fossil fuels who are nonetheless heavy emitters.

Based on the review's findings, the University of Sydney believes a whole of portfolio approach to reducing its carbon footprint is an effective and meaningful way to address climate change.

In an innovative step, the University will ask its listed equity fund managers to build a portfolio of investments that enables the University to reduce its carbon footprint by 20 percent - in just three years. The University will measure and publicly report progress towards this goal annually.

The University's Vice-Principal (Operations) Sara Watts said, "The new strategy balances the University's obligation to manage funds wisely on behalf of our students, staff, donors and alumni with its desire to address climate change and protect Australia's heritage.

"This strategy will give the University a legitimate voice in the conversation on how organisations can best address climate change risks. The University's strategy signals to the entire market that investors are concerned about the impact of climate change and expect contributing sectors to respond with plans to reduce their emissions."

In addition, the University:

* Has become a signatory to the CDP (formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project), the world's largest source of company-reported emissions data, and a global movement urging companies to disclose carbon emissions and set targets to reduce them;

* Has joined the UN-led Portfolio Decarbonisation Coalition, a coalition of investors who collectively are committed to decarbonising $US100 billion of its investment assets;

* Will incorporate carbon footprint reporting capability into the selection and review of listed equity investment managers; and

* Will further expand its Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) framework to put in place ethical investment standards that support the economic and social rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

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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