Climate non-change: Global carbon dioxide emissions stall for second year in a row

This is a horror story for the Warmists.  What if CO2 levels stabilize naturally?  What would be left for Warmists to do? What if nature stabilizes CO2 levels without any sacrifice from people?  How then could Warmists justify all their calls for economic upheaval?  So they are frantically trying to blame China and anything else they can think of to create the impression that this "pause" is temporary too.

Blaming China is an act of desperation.  China is just one part of the world and the world as a whole has been undergoing steady if slow economic growth in recent years.  And eonomic growth means increased enegy demands, which are still almost entirely met by burning hydrocarbons -- coal, oil and gas.  And burning hydrocarbons gives off CO2.  So the GLOBAL output of CO2 from human activity has to have been going up.

So what is going on?  How come mankind has been at least as naughty as ever but CO2 has stopped rising?  What it clearly shows is that human emissions are totally trivial in the overall CO2 budget. The big influences on CO2 levels are natural -- NON-anthropogenic.

So why have CO2 levels stopped rising?  Probably because the oceans have stopped outgassing.  And why is that happening?  Probably because the stasis in surface temperatures over the last 18 years has now worked its way through to the ocean deeps. They had been warmed by the increased surface temperatures of the '80s and '90s but have now gradually released the gas that was incompatible with those temperatures. And with no new warming in the 21st century, they have reached an equilibrium between their temperature and their gas content

Time will tell if that is so

The underlying journal article appears to be this one -- an article written by Uncle Tom Cobley and All.  It seems to be a compilation of "national" CO2 emissions but I note this sentence "The global atmospheric CO2 concentration is measured directly".  In other words measurement from observatories like Mauna Loa and Cape Grim were used to get the overall CO2 numbers that are stirring the pot.  So all the talk about national emissions is just persiflage, a largely irrelevant distraction. 

National emissions are of course very rubbery numbers.  As the same authors say:  "CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry (EFF) are based on energy statistics and cement production data, while emissions from land-use change (ELUC), mainly deforestation, are based on combined evidence from land-cover-change data, fire activity associated with deforestation, and models"


Global emissions of carbon dioxide this year have stalled for the second year in a row, but scientists have warned that this does not mean the world has reached “peak carbon” with greenhouse gases set to fall year on year.

Latest figures on fossil-fuel emissions for 2015 show for the first time during a period of global economic growth that the amount of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere has remained stable for two consecutive years.

Scientists believe however that the unprecedented decline is almost entirely due to the economic slowdown in China, now the world’s single biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, which is likely to see a rapid return to growth in carbon emissions as its energy-hungry economy picks up again.

India and other developing nations are also expected to increase the amount of coal they burn in the coming years. This is likely to feed in to an overall increase in the growth in global carbon emissions globally, making the current slowdown a transitory “blip”, the scientists said.

“With two years of untypical emissions growth, it looks like the trajectory of global emissions might have changed temporarily,” said Professor Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre at the University of East Anglia, a lead author of the study presented at the Paris conference on climate change.

“It is unlikely that emissions have peaked for good. This is because energy needs for growing economies still rely primarily on coal, and emissions decreases in some industrial countries are still modest at best,” Professor Le Quéré said.

“Global emissions need to decrease to near zero to achieve climate stabilisation. We are still emitting massive amounts of CO2 annually, around 35 billion tonnes from fossil fuels and industry alone. There is still a long way to near zero emissions,” she said.

Carbon emissions for 2014 grew by just 0.6 per cent compared to an average annual increase of between 2 and 3 per cent since 2000, apart from a brief period of decline in 2009, explained by the worldwide economic recession leading to a fall in energy demand.

The latest figures for 2015 indicate that decline in emissions has continued with the amount of carbon being pumped into the atmosphere this year compared to the previous year ranging from a slight rise of 0.5 per cent to a decline of 1.6 per cent.

“It’s encouraging in a way. It’s a bit of fresh air, but I don’t think this is the peak in terms of carbon emissions. We may see a lot of flat growth, depending on China, but India has incredible energy needs and they are growing rapidly,” Professor Le Quéré told The Independent.

“It will be a real possibility that we will see Indian growth picking up and so allowing emissions globally to grow rapidly. India now is where China was in the 1990s. This is why Paris is so critical,” she said.

The emissions figures, published simultaneously in the journals Nature Climate Change and Earth System Science Data, show that China was the biggest CO2 emitter in 2014, releasing some 9.7 billion tonnes. Last year China experienced an increase in emissions growth of 1.2 per cent, compared to an annual growth rate of 6.7 per cent for the previous decade.

The US was the second biggest emitter in 2014, releasing 5.6 billion tonnes, followed by the EU and India with 3.4 billion tonnes and 2.6 billion tonnes respectively.

The UK released 0.43 tonnes of CO2 in 2014, which was 1.2 per cent of the world total, a decrease of 9 per cent on the previous year, and 28 per cent below 1990 levels.

Professor Myles Allen of Oxford University said that global temperatures respond to the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – not the rate of emissions in any given year – nevertheless, the latest figures are encouraging.

“Is this the beginning of the end of global warming? Probably not. But let’s hope it is the end of the beginning,” he said.

Professor David Reay of the University of Edinburgh, said: “There is a long, long way still to go. To stay within the 2C global warming target emissions can't just stall, they need to fall. Whether 2015 is the year we truly turn the corner on global emissions or is just a blip in the upward march towards dangerous climate change now depends on Paris.”

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"The climate hustle": The Perfect Antidote To Al Gore’s "An Inconvenient Truth"

Cinema du Pantheon, Sorbonne, Paris, France – World Premiere of Climate Hustle

By James Delingpole

“Ooh look, it’s James Delingpole, the most hateful man in Britain. No I WON’T pose for a photograph with you, you piece of filth.

Go away don’t touch me,” snarled an unhappy crusty-looking fellow, as I squeezed through the throng of protestors at entrance. I was dressed in black tie; they were dressed for the revolution.

“Join us! We’re your friends,” cooed three girls in blonde wigs and sparkly coal miners’ outfits handing out lumps of coal. (They weren’t really my friends. They were green activists too. But, like most of the renta-mob crowd, perfectly amiable)

“Howl! Howl!” bayed two men dressed as giant spoons.

Then the police turned up and in characteristic no-nonsense French style forced the protestors to disperse before the stars – including 92-year old rocket scientist Fred Singer and Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore – in black tie arrived in their stretch limos and walked up the red carpet.

It was the perfect launch for Marc Morano’s climate skeptical movie Climate Hustle – the skeptics’ long-awaited answer to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth – which staged its triumphant world premiere in Paris last night.

The protestors had come fresh from the COP21 climate conference, alerted by Wanted posters plastered by activists over the streets of central Paris warning them that seven of the world’s most evil fossil fuel lobbyists were in town to disrupt their holy mission to bomb the global economy back to the dark ages with carbon reductions, regulations and wealth redistribution.

In fact though – an irony lost on the protestors: they really don’t do irony, these people – it was the greenies who were doing all the disrupting.

Earlier in the day they’d tried to sabotage a conference of climate skeptics being hosted in central Paris by the Heartland Institute. (You can see the footage of the presentation – Examining The Data – here).

Now they’d come to jeer outside a film they’ll never watch made by people they won’t listen to presenting a message they’re ideologically incapable of comprehending.

If they ever did see Climate Hustle it would be totally lost on them.

Climate Hustle is the Anti Inconvenient Truth. It’s for people with an open mind who want to know what’s really going on with the world’s climate – as opposed to what hucksters like Al Gore want to persuade them is going on with the world’s climate – all backed up with hard data and evidence presented by scientists who know and understand, among them the Nobel-prize-winning Norwegian physicist Ivar Giaever.

Its message ought not to be dynamite, for it is no more than basic science and established fact.

But Climate Hustle is dynamite – at least it will be to most viewers, especially younger ones – because what it says is so totally at odds with almost every documentary, TV programme and film that has ever been made on the subject of global warming. (Apart from Martin Durkin’s The Great Global Warming Swindle, climate skeptical documentaries are pretty much non-existent).

Man-made climate change – most especially the notion that global temperatures can be turned on and off by tiny alterations in the quantities of the trace gas carbon dioxide – is nothing more than a green fantasy being used as an excuse for a money making scam by corporate shysters, a wealth redistribution scheme by the Third World, and as a power grab by one world government freaks.

One of the key myths it demolishes is the one established by Al Gore in his pimped-up power point lecture, An Inconvenient Truth, where he climbs onto a scissor lift to show how dramatically – and apparently unprecedentedly – CO2 levels have risen in the late Twentieth Century with inevitably disastrous consequences for the planet.

This scaremongering claim by Gore is a perfect example of what presenter Marc Morano means by the “Climate Hustle”: just like in a card game where tricksters use sleight-of-hand, distraction techniques, and dirty tricks in order to con the mark (the mug punter) out of his money, so the alarmist establishment is withholding key details and presenting false or distorted information in order to extract vast sums from the gullible public.

In this case, the details that Gore isn’t giving us are

1. Almost invariably throughout geological history, CO2 increases have lagged rises in temperature not preceded them. In other words, it’s more likely that global warming causes increased CO2 rather than that increased CO2 causes global warming.

2. Current carbon dioxide levels are minuscule compared to what they were in our deep geological past. As several earth scientists testify in the movie, our planet is – in terms relative to the past – “CO2-starved”.

Also, in historical terms, we are living through a cold period not a warm one. This is true of both the long term geological record and also of more recent history. Until green activists like Michael Mann started cooking the books with dodgy artefacts like the “Hockey Stick” it was a widely accepted fact among climate scientists that the earth was warmer during the Medieval Warming Period (when there were no passenger jets or 4x4s or Chinese building coal-fired power stations every five days) than it is today.

One of the most powerful sections of the documentary is the one where various scientists and academics who have dared speak the truth about global warming describe how they have suddenly found themselves ostracised by their peers.

Among them is Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who describes CVqdkm2U4AE3QbDhow she lost her faith in the alarmist establishment at the time of the Climategate emails, when climate scientists were caught red-handed in emails conspiring to withhold scientific information from their peers. She was subsequently branded a heretic.

Another one is Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. She was viciously traduced and ostracised by her peers for questioning so-called “consensus” climate science. In the film she draws parallels with witchcraft trials in 13th century France where witchcraft was declared the most urgent threat to mankind of all and where anyone who dared CVsVn0JWsAAzuSLdisagree ran the risk of being declared a sorcerer and rejected – or worse – by mainstream society.

Another is Caleb Rossiter, a left-leaning statistician at American University, who spoke out against the alarmists when he discovered that their statistics were junk and that the measures being introduced to “combat” climate change were harming the world’s poorest. For his troubles, Rossiter had his fellowship at the US Institute for Policy Studies terminated.

By the end of this jaunty, likeable, fact-rich journey through the history of the “global warming” the viewer will be left in no doubt that climate change is one of the most egregious political and scientific hoaxes in history.

Morano – even if he does look and dress a bit like a junior Mafiosi – makes a funny, engaging, no-nonsense presenter.

The science is unimpeachable.

I only spotted two mistakes: no Canute did not think he could stop the waves (quite the opposite actually) and no he is not, as unfortunately billed in the closing credits,  “Prince Charles of Wales.”

But I’m being pernickety here. Climate skeptics operate on a fraction of the budget available to Big Green (which, it has been calculated, has 3,500 times more money than skeptics and is an industry worth in excess of $1 trillion a year). So if it’s clunky in places, that’s just part of its rough-hewn charm.

Every person who has ever been exposed to the lies of An Inconvenient Truth should watch Climate Hustle immediately afterwards an antidote.

Finally a prediction: Climate Hustle is not going to win a prize at Sundance (where it won’t be screened if greenie Robert Redford has anything to do with it), nor will it win an Oscar from a Hollywood swarming with green activists like Leonardo di Caprio and Mark Ruffalo.

But the prizes it is not going to win should be considered a point in its favour, not as a sign of weakness. As George Orwell said: “In a time of universal deceit, truth-telling is a revolutionary act.”

SOURCE





97% Climbs to 99.5%: Obama Increases Percentage of Scientists Who Agree on Climate Change

President Obama said Tuesday that he's confident his successor will honor any climate change agreement negotiated in Paris becasue "99.5 percent of scientists and 99 percent of world leaders" think that climate change "is really important."

Obama’s claim that there is a 99.5 percent consensus among scientists on climate change represents a 2.5 percent increase since May 16, 2013, when the president tweeted: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.”

“Everybody else is taking climate change really seriously. They think it's a really big problem. It spans political parties,” Obama said during his press conference in Paris, where the United Nations’ COP 21 climate change summit is being held.

Responding to a question about whether foreign leaders can believe the U.S. will keep any commitments it makes in Paris if a Republican succeeds him in the White House, Obama said:

“Whoever is the next president of the United States, if they come in and they suggest somehow that that global consensus — not just 99.5% of scientists and experts, but 99% of world leaders — think this is really important, I think the president of the United States is going to need to think this is really important.”

The origin of the “97 percent” statistic has been traced back to a 2009 study by University of Illinois/Chicago graduate student Kendall Zimmerman, who sent a survey to 10,257 earth scientists asking them two questions:

 “When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?” and

 “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”

Eighty-two percent of the 3,146 scientists who completed the survey (a 30.7% response rate) answered “yes” to question 2. That figure included 75 of the 79 individuals (97.4%) who self-identified themselves as climate scientists.

In a 2013 paper published by the Institute of Physic’s IOPScience and cited by NASA, University of Queensland climate communication fellow John Cook also stated that 97 percent of scientists who took a position on global warming agreed that humans were the primary cause.

“Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW [anthropogenic global warming], 97.1% endorsed the consensus that humans are causing global warming,” Cook and his co-authors stated.

However, a peer review of Cook’s paper by David Legates, a former state climatologist and professor at the University of Delaware, that was published in the April 2015 issue of Science and Education debunked the 97 percent consensus figure.

Legates pointed out that only 41 of the 11,944 academic papers Cook examined in his meta-analysis (0.3%) explicitly stated that most of the global warming since 1950 was caused by human activity.

 “It is astonishing that any journal could have published a paper claiming a 97% climate consensus when in the authors’ own analysis the true consensus was well below 1%,” Legates wrote.

Cook’s paper was also criticized by other scientists for what they said was a number of methodological errors.

“Probably the most widely repeated claim in the debate over global warming is that ‘97% of scientists agree’ that climate change is man-made and dangerous,” the three authors of Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming wrote in a just-released book published by the Heartland Institute.

“This claim is not only false, but its presence in the debate is an insult to science.”

SOURCE





Why Obama's obsession with climate?

KRAUTHAMMER comments

BREAM: "Well, and you mentioned how much people do or don’t care about this. In polling, our most recent Fox News polling on the important issues facing the country, and this is from mid-November, terrorism is at the top of the list with 24 percent. You have to go a lot further down to find climate change and it’s 3 percent. Why this continued campaign by the administration and hundreds of leaders around the world gathering in Paris?"

KRAUTHAMMER: "Because this president lives in a world of his -- idealistic, if you want to be favorable to it -- and benign about idealistic and deluded, undergraduate imaginations. This is as if the League of Nations and the U.N. and everything in between hadn’t happened. Remember, Obama had a summit in Washington a few years ago to end nuclear proliferation. He thought it was a great event. I remember the one announcement of a success was that Canada had given away some extra surplus stuff, as if the threat of the world is from Canada.

He lives in a world where people get together -- reasonable, educated, Harvard law school educated people from all over the world, and agree on futuristic designs that mean nothing, like the League of Nations, like the U.N., but we have learned something since then, he has learned nothing. This global warming is the same thing.

Nothing will come of it because it’s not a treaty, it would never get through the Senate, it’s not going to be binding on anybody. And the great announcement he made when he was in China, is that we would radically reduce our emissions by 2025 and China would begin its reductions in 2030. And he thought that was a triumph. Look, this is wonderful, he said, What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than lead it? How about a serious air campaign over Syria? How about destroying their oil infrastructure for a start? But that doesn’t occur to him."

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An elitist people hater

Sir David Attenborough has travelled to places most of us can only dream of.

But his favourite holiday destination of all is one that is reasonably attainable - although you may have to save for years to follow in his footsteps - North Queensland in Australia, which is home to the Great Barrier Reef.

But Sir David has warned that future generations of holidaymakers could soon be unable to enjoy the same experience because of the damage global warming is doing to the reef.

Speaking at a screening of his new documentary on the reef at Australia House in London last week, he said: 'The real danger is the rising temperatures and acidity and the effect that has - if the acidity grows to a certain limit it will damage the coral itself.

'The issue at the moment is those changes in the ocean and the speed with which the planet is warming.

'In 20 years, those changes will be imminent and present and unless we control those changes, there will be severe bleaching of the coral.

'The great thing is that it does recover if the conditions improve.

Sir David lays the blame solely at the door of the increasing human population and says that there are now too many of us.

He said: 'The greatest concern at the moment is the warming of the planet and the speed with which the human species are spreading.

'There were 2.5 billion people on the planet when I first went to the Great Barrier Reef and there are now three times that. We're overrunning the Planet.'

But rising temperatures are having a destructive effect on the ecosystem  [Since they are not rising, that must be difficult]

In fact, he claims to have seen no damage with his own eyes from visitors to the reef and says that the people he encountered there were very respectful of the famous ecosystem.

He said: 'That the change is only something that an expert can see, to my eye it was a ravishing appearance.

'The obvious [change from] when we sailed there 60 years ago is then we hardly saw anyone at all - it's not like that now, the population has increased.'

'[But] people are usually very well behaved because they are so stunned by what they see, so they see it with great respect.'

Sir David was talking about the reef ahead of the launch of his new three-part documentary on the world's largest living organism

Last year, he spent three weeks exploring the reef as part of the TV series for the BBC called The Great Barrier Reef with David Attenborough, which will air on BBC1 later this month.

The show will look at the animals that live on the reef as well as the effects of global warming and the people who are working to protect the reef and its inhabitants from this danger.

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Green/Left governments are bad for roads

California’s roads are an obstacle course of potholes and as Foon Rhee of the Sacramento Bee notes “the repair backlog is estimated at $78 billion for local roads and another $59 billion for state highways.” The rough roads are also highly congested but the massive California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) is not eager to build new roads and claims to have “solid science” on their side in the form of Increasing Highway Capacity Unlikely to Relieve Traffic Congestion, a National Center for Sustainable Transportation Brief.

According to author Susan Handy of the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at UC Davis, “adding capacity to roadways fails to alleviate congestion for long because it actually increases vehicle miles traveled (VMT).” Handy, who is in fact the director of the federal National Center for Sustainable Transportation, further explains, “capacity expansion does not increase employment or other economic activity.” So building new roads and highways is a lose-lose proposition for the workers, and refusing to build new roads is a winner for ruling-class bureaucrats and politicians.

As Foon Rhee observes, endorsement of the induced travel theory “does keep Caltrans in tune with Gov. Jerry Brown’s crusade to put California at the forefront of adapting to climate change.” So climate change dogma gets right down to where the rubber meets the road, as the tire commercial used to say. “By being part of the climate change team with the governor,” Rhee writes, “Caltrans could eventually have fewer projects to oversee and less work to do. A government agency not expanding its empire – now that would be a new one.” That would indeed be a new one, but it won’t happen with Caltrans.

As we noted, Caltrans maintains 3,500 full-time engineers who do little more than show up at their desks, and the state recently gave them a raise. So Caltrans will hardly hesitate to maintain full-time employees who don’t build new roads. California taxpayers might also note that neither induced travel theory or climate change dogma stopped Caltrans from building the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge, which came in 10 years late, $5 billion over budget, and which remains unsafe. No Caltrans boss lost his job, and nobody has been held accountable.

SOURCE

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