Some more climate wisdom

An undated bulletin below which appears to have been issuied last February --from Gary McManus, Associate State Climatologist, Oklahoma Climatological Survey  -- relying at least in part on the National Weather Service.  Continuing drought was predicted but we all know about climate predictions, don't we?  This one was no different.  Last month Oklahoma had 6-24 inches of rain, with flooding in parts.



Despite moisture from recent wintry weather, drought conditions continue to persist and intensify across Oklahoma. The latest U.S. Drought Monitor report released on January 20 indicates severe drought is now present in central Oklahoma, centered on Oklahoma City and surrounding areas. Moderate drought extends through much of the central one-third of the state through the southwest, with other moderate drought areas in the Panhandle and far southeastern Oklahoma.

The prospects for relief over much of the state are not great according to scientists at the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center, thanks in large part to the continuing moderate-to-strong La Nina occurring in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Their latest drought outlook has the drought persisting, with possible further development, through April in the northwestern two-thirds of the state. Some improvement is possible in the southeast, however.  In addition, they expect an increased chance of above normal temperatures through the entire state during that period as well, especially in western Oklahoma.

This La Nina event is expected to last through spring, but scientists are seeing some indications it might begin to wane over the next several months. Drought extending into the spring months would have significant impacts on Oklahoma’s agricultural producers, especially the Oklahoma wheat crop.

More HERE





NASA discovers LUCK NOT GLOBAL WARMING causes landfalling hurricanes.

See below where climate prostitute Seth Borenstein tries to make good news frightening

 For millions of Americans living in hurricane zones on the Gulf and East coasts, recent decades have been quiet — maybe too quiet.

Cities like Tampa, Houston, Jacksonville and Daytona Beach historically get hit with major hurricanes every 20 to 40 years, according to meteorologists. But those same places have now gone at least 70 years — sometimes more than a century — without getting smacked by those monster storms, according to data analyses by an MIT hurricane professor and The Associated Press...

"We've been kind of lucky," said MIT meteorology professor Kerry Emanuel, who along with the AP crunched numbers on how often hurricanes have hit metro regions and compared them to when the last time they were hit. "It's ripe for disaster. ... Everyone's forgotten what it's like."

"It's just the laws of statistics," said Emanuel. "Luck will run out. It's just a question of when."

This hurricane season, beginning Monday, doesn't look to be as busy as past ones. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasts a 70 percent chance of fewer than normal hurricanes, mostly because of an El Nino weather oscillation.

But even a quiet season can have one devastating storm hit. That's what happened when Andrew smashed parts of Miami in 1992; it was the second costliest hurricane on record, in a below average year for overall hurricane activity.

Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is preparing for the worst and worrying that other people aren't.  Inexperienced people "generally underestimate how bad it will be and made decisions about staying when they should be evacuating," Fugate said. "You have to accept the fact that every time a major storm threatens it's a new experience for 99 percent of the people involved."

Experts are especially worried about the Tampa region. Emanuel calculates using past storm data and computer simulations that a major hurricane in general should hit Tampa every quarter century or so. The National Hurricane Center, calculating on past storms a bit differently, says a major hurricane should hit every 30 years or so. But it's been decades upon decades since the big one hit.

"It's a real big concern," said Christopher Landsea, science operations officer at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. "My worry is that we'll have hundreds or even thousands dead the next major hurricane that hits the Tampa Bay area."

It has been more than nine years since the U.S. was struck by a major hurricane — Superstorm Sandy did major damage but didn't qualify meteorologically as a major hurricane. That's a streak that is so unprecedented that NASA climate scientist Timothy Hall went looking to see if it could be explained by something that has happening with the weather or climate. He found that big storms formed, they just didn't hit America, coming close and hitting islands in the Caribbean and Mexico. The lack of hurricanes hitting the U.S. "is a matter of luck," Hall concluded in a peer-reviewed study.....

More HERE





The NYT is still quoting a false prophet

The second half of the 1960s was a boom time for nightmarish visions of what lay ahead for humankind....

No one was more influential — or more terrifying, some would say — than Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist. His 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” sold in the millions with a jeremiad that humankind stood on the brink of apocalypse because there were simply too many of us. Dr. Ehrlich’s opening statement was the verbal equivalent of a punch to the gut: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” He later went on to forecast that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s, that 65 million of them would be Americans, that crowded India was essentially doomed, that odds were fair “England will not exist in the year 2000.” Dr. Ehrlich was so sure of himself that he warned in 1970 that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come.” By “the end,” he meant “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”

As you may have noticed, England is still with us. So is India. Hundreds of millions did not die of starvation in the ’70s. Humanity has managed to hang on, even though the planet’s population now exceeds seven billion, double what it was when “The Population Bomb” became a best-seller and its author a frequent guest of Johnny Carson’s on “The Tonight Show.”

After the passage of 47 years, Dr. Ehrlich offers little in the way of a mea culpa. Quite the contrary. Timetables for disaster like those he once offered have no significance, he told Retro Report, because to someone in his field they mean something “very, very different” from what they do to the average person. The end is still nigh, he asserted, and he stood unflinchingly by his 1960s insistence that population control was required, preferably through voluntary methods. But if need be, he said, he would endorse “various forms of coercion” like eliminating “tax benefits for having additional children.” Allowing women to have as many babies as they wanted, he said, is akin to letting everyone “throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.”

Dr. Ehrlich’s ominous declarations cause head-shaking among some who were once his allies, people who four decades ago shared his fears about overpopulation. One of them is Stewart Brand, founding editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. On this topic, Mr. Brand may be deemed a Keynesian, in the sense of an observation often attributed to John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind, sir. What do you do?” Mr. Brand’s formulation for Retro Report was to ask, “How many years do you have to not have the world end” to reach a conclusion that “maybe it didn’t end because that reason was wrong?”

To some extent, worrying about an overcrowded planet has fallen off the international agenda. It is overshadowed, as Mr. Pearce suggests, by climate change and related concerns. The phrase “zero population growth,” once a movement battle cry, is not frequently heard these days; it has, for instance, appeared in only three articles in this newspaper over the last seven years.

But Dr. Ehrlich, now 83, is not retreating from his bleak prophesies. He would not echo everything that he once wrote, he says. But his intention back then was to raise awareness of a menacing situation, he says, and he accomplished that. He remains convinced that doom lurks around the corner, not some distant prospect for the year 2525 and beyond. What he wrote in the 1960s was comparatively mild, he suggested, telling Retro Report: “My language would be even more apocalyptic today.”

More HERE





UK: Wind farm subsidies facing the axe

Amber Rudd should really be called Lettuce-green Rudd -- but at least she is not deep Green

Generous taxpayer subsidies will be cut off earlier than expected, effectively preventing thousands of turbines from being built, under plans being considered by Amber Rudd, the energy secretary

Subsidies that have fuelled the spread of onshore wind farms are to be dramatically curtailed, under Government plans to be unveiled within days.

The Telegraph has learnt that a generous subsidy scheme will be shut down earlier than expected, effectively preventing thousands of turbines from getting built, under plans being considered by Amber Rudd, the new energy secretary.

The proposals, which could be announced as soon as this week, will set out for the first time how the Conservatives will implement their manifesto pledge to end any new public subsidy for onshore wind farms - amid concerns that turbines are unpopular with local communities.

Under current policy, any big onshore wind turbines built before the end of March 2017 would automatically be able to qualify for generous payments through a scheme called the Renewables Obligation (RO), which is funded through green levies on consumer energy bills.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change has now confirmed it plans to “reform” the RO scheme. It is understood to be looking at ending the free-for-all by shutting the scheme down early – effectively preventing thousands of turbines getting built. The action follows similar moves taken to curb subsidies for solar farms last year.

After the RO shuts, the only possible subsidies for wind farms will be through a new scheme that is less generous and also much more strictly rationed, with ministers deciding how many projects – if any - are awarded subsidy contracts, enabling them to block further onshore wind if desired.

As well as big wind farms, subsidies for small individual wind turbines such as those popular with farmers – funded through a separate scheme called the Feed in Tariff - are expected to be limited under the plans.

A spokesman for the DECC said: “We are driving forward plans to end new public subsidy for onshore wind farms.  “We will shortly be publishing our plans to reform the Renewables Obligation and Feed in Tariff scheme to implement this commitment. With the cost of supplying onshore wind falling, government subsidy is no longer appropriate.

“We have supported new technologies when they’ve been a good deal for the consumer – providing start-up funding and certainty about future payments to help them become competitive. However, those subsidies won’t continue when costs come down – that’s not value for money for billpayers in the long run.”

Ms Rudd said: “We promised people clean, affordable and secure energy supplies and that’s what I’m going to deliver. We’ll focus support on renewables when they’re starting up - getting a good deal for billpayers is the top priority.”

SOURCE





Should We Decarbonize As U.N. Demands? The Science Says No

Hysteria: The United Nations climate chief says that the world has no choice but to "decarbonize." That's her opinion. But it shouldn't be mistaken for unimpeachable advice.

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, told the attendees of a carbon market conference in Barcelona on Tuesday just what they wanted to hear.

She said, "A decarbonized world is now irreversible, irrefutable," and "We are going to do it, because frankly we don't have any other option."

This is the same woman who wants to use the global warming scare to destroy capitalism , so we know what she's motivated by, and it's not the pursuit of pure, truth-seeking science.

Meanwhile, an astrophysicist who studies the sun will present a lecture Monday that outlines how solar activity affects our climate. He makes more sense.

Nir Shaviv from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is a scientist, and he believes that the sun is the primary driver of the slight warming across the 20th century that some have observed.

"What is the evidence supporting the claim that most of the warming is anthropogenic?" Shaviv asks in the ScienceBits blog.

"It turns out that there is no direct evidence supporting this link! There is no fingerprint which proves that the warming is caused primarily by CO2 or other anthropogenic greenhouse gases."

Shaviv insists, "The culprit responsible for the warming" is not a mystery but "is as clear as the light of day." "It is the sun," he says.

Shaviv will advance his theory on Monday when he speaks about "solar forcings and climate change past and present" at the Friends of Science Society climate change event in Calgary, Alberta.

He is no over-the-edge academic but a true scholar who has published dozens of peer-reviewed papers and whose work was placed in Discover magazine's top 100 science stories of 2002.

Nor is he a lone fanatic. Other distinguished scientists believe that the sun is the primary driver of any warming we've experienced.

Friends of Science itself is made up of "Earth, atmospheric, astrophysical scientists and engineers" who "spent a decade reviewing a broad spectrum of literature on climate change and have concluded the sun is the main driver of climate change, not carbon dioxide."

Perhaps most interesting is that Shaviv was at one time a believer in the man-made global warming story.

"But a closer look revealed this was not so," Michelle Stirling-Anosh reports on Troy Media in Canada. "Further astrophysical work demonstrated to him that the sun is the main driver of climate change."

Figueres' demand that the world decarbonize — really a call for deindustrialization — is also hurt by a study just published online that projects there will be a "brief respite from the persistent rise of global temperatures."

The blog Watts Up With That reports that University of Southampton researchers also imply that "the natural variability of the North Atlantic contributed to the global warming we have seen since the mid-1970s."

Blogger Bob Tisdale notes, "As could be expected, the alarmist mainstream media have so far chosen to ignore a paper that discusses an upcoming multidecadal natural suppression of global warming ... probably because it indicates the slowdown in global surface warming should continue." The same goes for the U.N., which will continue its programs, as usual.

Even so, there is so much science contradicting its claims that it's clear that its climate-change agenda is a sham, a ruse to cover its real agenda: crippling a liberty-based economic system and replacing it with one run from the hard left.

SOURCE





Germany getting steadily colder

Despite official lies

Spring in Germany arriving later and later every year. Also forsythia blossoms in Hamburg arriving later and later

In our previous article we showed that mean temperatures for the months of January, February and March have been cooling for almost the past three decades, this according to the German DWD National Weather Service. And this is the result without applying any urban heat island adjustments to the measured temperatures.

As a result we are seeing increasingly delayed spring starts – especially spring blossoms in open areas where the cooling is even more pronounced. We confirmed this with our own vegetation observations in the article, e.g. the blossoming of winter aconites out in the open.

Some readers from the over 100 comments left cast doubt on our observations, and pointed out that the official authorities such as the State Office for Environmental Protection in Karlsruhe or the DWD claimed the opposite was in fact occurring, i.e. spring was arriving earlier and earlier. However these readers failed to provide any measured data from these officials.

We took the time to look more deeply into the matter and found something astonishing. The State Environment Office in Karlsruhe itself does not even keep any such long-term observations. Instead it gets the results from the DWD. And the DWD appears to have the habit of regularly citing forsythia blossoms in the City of Hamburg as an example of spring arriving earlier. The blossoms are earlier and earlier, the DWD claims, at least those that the DWD always likes to invoke. This claimed early blossoming indeed must be evidence of climate warming, a few of the readers believed.

Well, a former DWD employee recently provided us with the following diagram of the forsythia blossoming data for the Hamburg Lombard Bridge from the DWD itself. The surprise is great:


Fig. 1 The left side vertical axis depicts the number of days after the start of the year. The higher the number, the later the start of forsythia blossoms. The chart shows they are arriving almost 20 days later than 25 years earlier.

Although the observation series were recorded right in the middle of heat island Hamburg, and thus did not even fulfill the conditions for an objective observation, the start of blossoms turns out to be precisely as those in the completely open exposed areas that we looked at in our previous article: Since 1988 spring has been arriving later and later. The start of springtime forsythia blossoms is also arriving later and later in the large urban heat island of Hamburg.

The constant claims that forsythia blossoms are coming earlier and earlier are false.

Result: Spring in Germany is beginning later and later. All March blossoms are delayed. We trace this back to the months of January, February and March becoming colder and colder over the past 28 years.

More HERE

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