Arctic ice area: safely higher in 2016 than in 2007

Lubos Motl

The ongoing El Niño is rapidly weakening and may be replaced by a La Niña in the second half of the year. However, it's been the strongest El Niño on the record – slightly beating the 1997-1998 El Niño that used to be known as the "El Niño of the century".

This fact has some correlation with the temperatures that were elevated. Although it's always about hundredths of a Celsius degree, January, February, and March were the warmest months with those names on the RSS AMSU satellite record. However, April 2016 was already cooler than April 1998 again.

What about the Arctic ice? Left-wing "science" media such as The Guardian and The Pig were impressing us with the claim that the Arctic ice has been at record lows for several months.

However, this isn't the case at all. Take The Pig's favorite Arctic graph page. You will see several graphs where 2016 looks like the "lowest sea ice" year. However, it's only the lowest one in comparison with several recent years.

If you look at any of the graphs that goes back at least to 2007, you will see that 2007 – the year when Al Gore's global warming influence could be peaking – saw a significantly lower Arctic sea ice area than 2016 so far. The difference is not "significant" to the extent that a sane person would care about it – the differences are tiny in any "absolute" sense. But these 2007-2016 differences are larger than the differences between 2016 and many recent years.

Up to the early April, you may simply see very clearly that 2007 saw less ice than 2016. There is at least one other graph on the Pig's page where you can go back at least a decade and see that 2007 had less ice than 2016. 2007 was really about "3 standard deviations" below the the average; 2016 is only about "2 standard deviations" below the average. It's a different league. You may also find a not really famous Japanese JAXA where a different definition of the sea ice area is used and 2015, 2016 are record holders – but the difference from years such as 2007 is much smaller than in the datasets where 2007 had the record low sea ice area.

You may remember that there were pretty cool years such as 2008 and 2009 when many climate skeptics loved to talk about the weather. ;-) So they were logically following after some warmer years. 2005 was warm and 2006, 2007 were cooler but the ice tends (and ice losses tend) to accumulate which is why the minima in 2007 were natural.

So the claims about the new records of Arctic sea ice in early 2016 are simply falsehoods. Incidentally, the Antarctic sea ice is near the normal levels – the values are a very good approximation of the average – so the alarmists don't talk about the Antarctica at all. You could have predicted it – they don't have the integrity to talk about any data fairly. But in the case of the Arctic ice, they were simply lying to our face.

The Pig has also talked about the insufferable heat in the Arctic and the polar bears that are melting away. The Inuit tribes live there, know what's going on, and they say that the polar bears are doing very well – which is why the Inuit feel really good when they hunt for them.

But can you appreciate the incredible absurdity of this guy's talking about the insufferable heat in the Arctic? This guy lives in New Mexico, basically a desert. Look at the climate data for Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he lives (the second largest town in NM). The record highs for the 12 months of the year are 26, 30, 32, 36, 40 (May), 43, 43, 41, 39, 35, 31, and 26 degrees Celsius. He not only lives in that hot hell but happily floods the Internet with garbage. And he has the guts to say that the Arctic has become insufferably hot. What doesn't this piece of pork evaporate if he lives in conditions that are some 30 °C warmer than the "insufferable heat"?

The idiocy of this global warming propaganda is just absolutely incredible.

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Crook Cook's Identity Fraud

This is from last year but is relevant to my recent posts about the crook Cook

Cartoonist and professional scrawler UNSkeptical UNScience - SS's John Cook has been fraudulently using Luboš Motl's identity.

Luboš Motl is a Czech theoretical physicist by training who was an assistant Professor at Harvard University from 2004 to 2007. His scientific publications are focused on string theory.
Luboš writes a blog called The Reference Frame (TRF).

On TRF, Luboš writes of John Cook:

"John Cook is the founder of one of the world's most famous "Sky Is Falling" websites about global warming, SkepticalScience.COM. The name of the web wants to express the point that the climate skeptics shouldn't even be allowed to use the term "skeptics".

They only deserve expletives while the "true skeptics" are the champions of panic such as Cook himself. He is a typical example of the alarmist "grassroots movement" who has no relevant education (his top academic achievement is to have been a "former student" – in other words, a dropout) and no significant intelligence but whose persistent activism – in combination with the pathologically corrupt atmosphere in many institutions that favor "a certain kind of views" – has allowed him to become something like an "honorary scientist" and to have earned a huge amount of money, too"

Anthony Watts writes:

"If it wasn’t enough that John Cook dresses himself up as a Nazi in his SkS uniform on his forum, now we have him caught in what looks to be identity theft of a well known scientist.

This isn’t a brush away issue that he can ignore, as Dr. Lubos Motl found out yesterday, John Cook has been using the name of Dr. Lubos Motl to post comments that Dr. Motl has NOT written"

Even some of his partners in crime object to his use of Luboš' identity:

Tim Curtis: would you please stop posting as Lubos Motl. There is reason to doubt his sanity, so I don’t like seeing his name. Further, it is his name, and therefore one you are not entitled to use. …

Rob Honeycutt: John… You freak me out every time Lubos Motl’s name pops up! …

John Cook: Sorry about the Lubos thing. Was posting some Lubos comments for the UWA experiment and forgot to log back in as John Cook.

Cook admits that he has used another scientist's identity commenting on the University of Western Australia. (UWA)

Anthony Watts continues:

What sort of “experiment” was John Cook running by stealing the identity of Dr. Lubos Motl, and writing comments under his name?
Cook is a man who has co-authored two papers about how climate skeptics are not to be trusted because in essence, “they are crazy conspiracy theorists”. Yet, John Cook, now of the University of Queensland after leaving his connections at UWA, has so little moral integrity that he’ll post comments on his own website (the SkS forum, see below) as a skeptical scientist, such as Dr. Lubos Motl?

Who else has John Cook impersonated? Has he encouraged his team to do this? These are valid questions that need answers.
How long can the University of Queensland (UQ) continue to employ this sham scientist?

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Ontario serves as a good lesson for penalties of forsaking coal

I would like to offer my American friends a cautionary tale of what will happen if environmentalists succeed in shutting down your coal-fired power plants.

Ontario was once an industrial powerhouse and the home of thousands upon thousands of well-paid manufacturing jobs. But the province lost at least 300,000 manufacturing jobs in the last 15 years when companies either went bankrupt or left Ontario.

This happened largely because our electricity prices have increased 318 percent since 2002, now giving us the highest rates in North America. A major reason for this staggering rise is that, in the name of “stopping climate change,” we shut down all of our inexpensive coal plants, which, in 2002, provided about 25 percent of our electricity.

Things will be even worse for the U.S. if Hillary Clinton becomes president and continues President Obama’s climate policies. After all, the U.S. gets 37 percent of its power from coal (69 percent in Ohio).

Were it known to be true that our carbon dioxide emissions are causing serious climate problems, then perhaps it could be argued that such a sacrifice would be worthwhile. But the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change lists thousands of peer-reviewed science papers that show that much of what we thought we knew about climate is wrong or highly debatable.

University of Western Ontario applied mathematician Dr. Chris Essex, an expert in the mathematical models that are the basis of the climate scare, explains, “Climate is one of the most challenging open problems in modern science. Some knowledgeable scientists believe that the climate problem can never be solved.”

Ontarians were too frightened of climate activists to oppose the plan to end coal-fired power generation. As a consequence, we are now dependent on the charity of more wealthy Canadian provinces to survive. Who will bail out the U.S. if you follow our tragic example?

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Al Gore: TV News on Extreme Weather ‘Like a Nature Hike Through Book of Revelation’

Or like a hike through his imagination.  EVERYTHING is caused by Global Warming, it appears

Former Vice President Al Gore said on Thursday that the news reports of extreme weather, which he believes is caused by climate change, is like the end days described in the Bible’s New Testament’s Book of Revelation.

“The climate-related extreme weather events – and I won’t go through all of them – but every night on the television news now is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation,” Gore said at the Climate Action 2016 summit in Washington, D.C.

Gore was interviewed by Audrey Choi, CEO of the Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing, who also worked with Gore in the Clinton administration and now works with the Obama administration as a member of the U.S. Community Development Advisory Board.

Choi said that the people evacuated in the Houston, Texas, area recently because of flood waters were the “first climate refugees domestically.”

“We just relocated our first climate refugees, yes, in Houston, Texas two weeks ago,” Gore said, adding that the rainfall in that state equaled “3 ½ days of full flow of Niagara Falls.

Whether the people in Texas were the first of what environmental activists call “climate refugees” may be debatable based on news reports.

In an article posted on Friday on the RT Network website, a Native American tribe living on an island off the coast of Louisiana are the nation’s “first climate refugees.”

The L.A. Times reported in January that Alaskans living in the remote village of Newtok “are among our country’s first climate refugees.”

Gore also referenced the evacuation of people in Alberta, Canada, because of wildfires as victims of extreme weather and then credited something other than climate change for causing this and other similar events.

‘Mother Nature turns out to be more persuasive than any of us,” Gore said. “The laws of physics are a little bit hard to deny.”

In the summit’s program, Gore’s slot was entitled: “Climate Change; A Convenient Truth.”

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OMB Director on Climate Change: ‘When Surging Seas Storm Onto Wall Street That Stifles Commerce'

Should a fantasist be in charge of the OMB?

Shaun Donovan, the director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Barack Obama, said on Friday that the world’s commerce will be harmed when climate change causes the nation’s financial center to be flooded and transportation to come to a halt.

“When the surging seas storm onto Wall Street that stifles commerce globally,” Donovan said at the Climate Action 2016 summit in Washington, D.C.

“When infrastructure buckles, U.S. airports or seaports shut down, we all get stuck,” Donovan said.

Donovan also said that crop damage from a heat wave in Russia in 2010 threatened global “food security” and that climate change is responsible for “political unrest,” including in Syria.

“In Syria, drought contributed to mass migration and urban unrest,” he said.

Donovan said he is “proud” the Obama administration has committed $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund, which is part of the United Nation’s framework.

According to its website, the fund “was established with a mission to advance the goal of keeping the temperature increase on our home planet below 2 degrees Celsius.”

As CNSNews.com reported earlier, Republican lawmakers are strongly opposed to using taxpayer funds to pay for climate change programs abroad.  Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) called the fund a “handout to foreign bureaucrats” that has not been approved by Congress.

“It appears to be the latest example of the administration going around Congress because the American people don’t really support what the president is doing with this initiative,” Barrasso said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting in March.

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Navy, Air Force share concerns about wind turbines

The Naval Air Station at Corpus Christi, Texas, is faced with the same dilemma that the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station (NFARS) confronts: What impact will at least 70 proposed 620-foot-high industrial wind turbines have on military flight operations?

“I do feel like one day we’re going to wake up surrounded by wind farms in South Texas significantly impacting the mission [of the Naval Air Station] in a negative way,” Capt. Christopher Misner, commanding officer of Naval Air Station Kingsville, said during a Texas Senate Committee on Veteran Affairs and Military Installations hearing in April.

Rear Admiral Dell D. Bull, chief of naval air training, is quoted as saying he’s unsure if naval air operations can safely coexist with industrial wind turbines, “and I don’t know how anyone can say otherwise.”

Similar concerns have been raised about plans by Apex Clean Energy to construct massive industrial wind turbines in the Town of Somerset in Niagara County and the Town of Yates in Orleans County.

Three former high-ranking Air Force officers who served at NFARS recently wrote to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other state officials. They said that the presence of the massive structures “will inject a major encroachment into the military operating area around the air base, resulting in a major threat to NFARS when the next Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) recommendations are made, possibly as soon as 2017.”

The Cuomo administration is no doubt examining this “green energy” project very closely. The last thing we need to do is to give the next BRAC any reason to consider base closure in Niagara Falls, putting 3,200 jobs at risk. Apex says its project will lead to only 10 permanent jobs.

In Texas, the Navy is now preparing a study to determine the impact industrial wind turbines will have on flight training. With so many towering structures located in Navy operational areas, pilots will have few options for emergency landings and experts said the turbines will negatively impact radar to the point that air traffic controllers will lose the location of aircraft.

Sen. Donna Campbell, a Texas state senator and the committee’s chairwoman, said she won’t hesitate to take action if military flight training is jeopardized by the wind turbines.

We certainly don’t want that in Somerset and Yates, either.

New York State can’t allow the installation of these wind turbines to threaten Air Force pilot safety, and Cuomo can’t run the risk of giving the base closing commission any reason to shut down NFARS. Lives are at risk; jobs are at risk; the future of the air base is at risk.

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