Global warming is causing a 'fundamental change' in the world's weather UN warns

The article below is founded on a lie.  It is true that the world has experienced unusually warm weather lately but how much of it was caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions and how much was caused by El Nino?  The authors below pooh pooh El Nino and assert that it was mostly caused by CO2.  But how much?  Real scientists use numbers.  But we note with great surprise that no number is given for the percentage of the warming that was due to CO2.  How come?  Because NONE of it was caused by CO2.

The Mauna Loa CO2 record seems to be the one most referred to by Warmists so I have for some time been greatly amused by what it shows for 2015, that "record" year for warming, according to Warmists.  So I have decided to take a screen capture of it.  See below.



The 4th column is the actual average CO2 level in ppm.  As you can see, the actual CO2 levels just bobbed up and down around 400ppm, showing that CO2 levels plateaued during that year.  There was no overall change.  There were slight increases but also slight decreases.

So it is perfectly clear that this "warmest" year was NOT caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions rising -- because total CO2 levels did not rise.  ALL the warming was due to natural factors, principally El Nino.

Instead of crowing that it proved their theory, Warmists should be in deep despond that this "warmest" year was TOTALLY natural.  CO2 levels did nothing.  Once again, there was no linkage between temperature and CO2 levels.  The facts are totally at odds with Warmism

But what about 2016, the tail end of the El Nino event?  It was just as amusing, though in an opposite sort of way

The NOAA figures from Mauna Loa, showed  a LEAP in CO2 levels this year.  Where December 2015 ended up on an average of 401.85 ppm, April averaged 407.42.  That's twice as big as most annual increases.

So, on Warmist theory, temperatures should have leaped too over that same period.  In fact they remained absolutely flat. GISS shows a January temperature anomaly of 1.11 degrees Celsius and April shows an anomaly of exactly the same!  You couldn't make it up! When the temperature rose in 2015, CO2  levels did not.  And when CO2 levels did rise in 2016, temperature did not.  There was a complete disconnect between CO2 and temperature in both records


The U.N. weather agency is warning of 'fundamental change' afoot in the global climate and continued warming, accompanied recently by unusually high rainfall in parts of the US and Europe.

The World Meteorological Organization cited data released by Nasa showing that this May was the hottest on record, and the Northern Hemisphere spring has been the hottest spring ever.

WMO global climate director Dr. David Carlson said the new data showed 370 straight months of warm or warmer-than-average temperatures worldwide.

'The state of the climate so far this year gives us much cause for alarm,' said Carlson. The first four months of 2016 were the warmest globally in 136 years.

'Exceptionally high temperatures. Ice melt rates in March and May that we don't normally see until July. Once-in-a-generation rainfall events. The super El Niño is only partly to blame. Abnormal is the new normal.'

Now dissipated, the El Nino weather pattern factored into 2016's record-setting heat, but meteorologists say greenhouse gases emitted from human activities remain the underlying cause.

The Arctic in particular experienced abnormal heat, causing Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice sheet to start melting unusually early, said Nasa.

Alaska recorded its warmest spring on record by a wide margin, and in Finland the average May temperature was between three and five degrees warmer than usual in most regions, according to data from the Finnish Meteorological Institute.

'The rapid changes in the Arctic are of particular concern.

May's exceptional warmth was accompanied by extreme weather events including abnormally heavy rains throughout Europe and the southern United States.

From 28 to 31 May, France witnessed exceptional rainfall. For instance, the department of Loiret saw 92.9 mm in 3 days which is without precedent in the past 30 years. Such amounts are only seen once every 10-50 years according to Météo-France. Paris received 3 months worth of rainfall in a month and May was the wettest month since 1960.

Southeast Texas had record flooding. An additional 2-5 inches of rain in the last 24 hours in Southeast Texas where intense storms in the previous 24 hours had totals exceeding 10 inches is causing record floods.

Australia had its warmest autumn on record at 1.86 °C above average, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.

More than 53% of the country experienced highest on record mean temperatures, because of strong El Niño Water temperatures to the north and northwest of Australia.

Strong El Nino temperatures did cause more than 53 percent of Australia to experience its warmest autumn on record.

May's exceptional warmth was accompanied by extreme weather events including abnormally heavy rains throughout Europe and the southern United States, as well as 'widespread and severe' coral reef bleaching.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is expected to announce complete global May temperature records in the coming days.

Recent predictions by US scientists anticipate that 2016 will go down as Earth's hottest year on record—on the heels of record-setting years in 2014 and 2015.

SOURCE  





Could $200 Billion Tobacco-Type Settlement Be Coming Over ‘Climate Change?’

The Left hate disagreement with their fads so much that they cannot admit that opposing arguments have any merit.  From that comes their regular habit of saying that those who disagree with them are either evil or conspirators or both. Proving that is hard, however.  In their desperation they seize on old boogeymen time and time again.  And there are no greater boogeymen than oil companies.  So it follows that oil companies must be responsible for opposition to their climate panic.

And another great boogeyman is BIG TOBACCO!  And the fact that they have an actual court success against the tobacco companies makes them think they can have a similar success against big oil.

They overlook a big difference.  There was scientific evidence that tobacco was harmful so tobacco customers were selling a harmful product, which does create some liability. The companies were successfully prosecuted because they were held to be part responsible for tobacco-related disease.  But oil companies did NOT cause global warming.  The whole Warmist claim is that industrial civilization as a whole did.

It is nonetheless possible that a lawsuit will be brought.  But its prospect of success is so slight that it will just be a big financial loss to those who bring it


At the Big Law Business Summit last week, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman ripped into Exxon Mobil for its stance on climate change.

Schneiderman accused Exxon of glossing over the risks that climate change poses to its core businesses in its public securities statements, and then couching its disclosure as first amendment protected.

“The first amendment doesn’t protect fraud – it doesn’t protect fraudulent speech,” he said.

This weekend, the Houston Chronicle published its investigation of the brewing legal threats that energy companies face as a result of their disclosures on climate change, comparing it to the situation tobacco companies faced in the late 1990s over their disclosures about the dangers of smoking.

In 1998, attorneys general from 46 states struck a $200 billion settlement with tobacco companies, ending years of litigation about whether they mislead smokers about the health risks of their products.

Now, there are 17 state attorneys general including Schneiderman investigating whether fossil fuel companies mislead investors in public disclosures about the risks associated with climate change.

Big law firms have been sending client alerts to energy companies, warning that a storm is brewing, according to the Chron, which quoted an email sent by lawyers at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman: “There is escalating effort to bring pressure to bear on companies with respect to their public securities statements on the effects of climate change.”

It noted the alerts picked up in April after a federal judge in Oregon allowed the environmental advocacy group Our Children’s Trust to proceed with a case against the U.S. government, arguing future generations are at risk as long as burning fossil fuels is permitted. It is but one of a handful of legal strategies that environmentalists are pursuing: Other suits have targeted energy firms for ignoring the potential effects on climate change in developing company policy.

The article quotes Bracewell’s Kevin Ewing as a skeptic about such lawsuits, saying it’s impossible to connect an individual company’s conduct with specific harm. Exxon was not immediately available to provide comment.

SOURCE





Science is on the verge of a nervous breakdown

In The Guardian last week, Jerome Ravetz, considered one of the world’s leading philosophers of science, reviewed what he and many others describe as “the crisis in science.” Ravetz, who has been warning of the emerging internal conflicts in science for decades, sees the crisis is spreading to the general public. “Given the public awareness that science can be low-quality or corrupted, that whole fields can be misdirected for decades (see nutrition, on cholesterol and sugar), and that some basic fields must progress in the absence of any prospect of empirical testing (string theory), the naïve realism of previous generations becomes quite Medieval in its irrelevance to present realities.”

Present reality is that science is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. That’s the not-so-tongue-in-cheek message in Science on the Verge, a new book by European scientist Andrea Saltelli and seven other contributors. Science on the Verge is a 200-page indictment of what to the lay reader appears to be a monumental deterioration across all fields, from climate science to health research to economics.

The mere idea that “most published research results are false” should be cause for alarm. But it is worse than that. The crisis runs through just about everything we take for granted in modern science, from the use of big data to computer models of major parts of our social, economic and natural environment and on to the often absurd uses of statistical methods to fish for predetermined conclusions.

Examples from the book help prove the point. In a chapter titled “Numbers Running Wild,” one of the book’s authors, Jeroen P. van der Sluijs of the University of Bergen, asks how is it possible for a paper in Science magazine to claim that precisely 7.9 per cent (not eight per cent or seven per cent) of the world’s species would become extinct as a result of climate change — when the total number of species is unknown?

Even odder, the species study concluded that the 7.9 per cent demonstrates “the importance of rapid implementation of technologies to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and strategies for carbon sequestration.” How, asks van de Sluijs, do the researchers jump from species extinction to carbon sequestration? “This sounds like an opinion for which the underlying arguments are not even given.”

Others examples come from economics, a science filled with unwarranted claims to certainty and predictability. Science on the Verge recalls Nobel economist Robert Lucas’s 2003 declaration that the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved.” Also noted is the 2004 claim by former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke that the volatility of business cycles had been tamed. These and other economic blunders lead critics to suspect the discipline of economics “had reverted to (or never developed beyond) a state of immaturity.”

Few fields and practices are exempt from scrutiny in Science on the Verge. In a chapter on evidence-based science, Andrea Saltelli — also at the University of Bergen — spreads the net wide: “It is futile to expect, for example, that modelling approaches which have failed to predict a purely financial and economic crisis will be able to inform us accurately about the behaviour of a system involving institutions, societies, economies and ecologies. Yet this is what we do when we apply the technique of cost– benefit analysis (CBA) to dimensions of climate change” This kind of quantitative approach to complex systems, says Saltelli, “can only foster abuse and corruption.”

It would be wrong to suspect that Science on the Verge is the work of right-wing activists, climate skeptics and hide-bound traditionalists. It is the work, rather, of scientists with a range of ideological views despairing over what appears to be a fundamental breakdown as science has become more and more enmeshed in the business of providing evidence for policy-making.

Science, in short, has already been corrupted.

SOURCE





NOAA: 75% chance of La Nina by September, cooler temps coming

NOAA announced this weekend that there is a 75 percent chance a La Niña will form in the equatorial Pacific Ocean by fall, a phenomenon that is the flip side of the now-deceased El Niño. Currently, sea surface temperatures (SSTs) have returned to normal and experts think a La Niña will develop from July through September, bringing cooler temps this winter. La Niña events occur when cooler-than-normal surface waters of the equatorial (tropical) Pacific Ocean are observed (see video).

Scientists use the Oceanic Niño Index to determine, measure, and predict any deviations from normal—or neutral—sea surface temps in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) first speculated in mid-May that a La Niña episode was likely to occur and has created a La Niña watch page.

La Niña events are designated when surface waters in the tropical Pacific decreases 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit) or more for at least five successive and overlapping three-month periods. An atmospheric response above the ocean waters is also associated with La Niña events. Right now, NOAA is reporting that the equatorial Pacific is neutral, meaning SSTs have returned to normal, though many forecasters don’t predict it will last very long.

When the strong, naturally occurring El Niño of 2015-2016 occurred, temperatures across the planet spiked higher than normal, caused widespread “nuisance flooding,” above-normal heat, and hottest-year-ever claims (under investigation by the House Science Committee). It also brought much-needed rain to the upper half of California, where reservoirs and lakes have reached capacity or surpassed previous levels.

So if the 2015-2016 El Niño was the powerful “king” behind our recent warm weather and so-called hottest-year-ever claims, La Niña is the “queen” who plans to take back the throne. This flipping back and forth is part of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle, and it occurs every 5 to 7 years. As Emily Becker writes on NOAA’s official blog, “Both human forecasters and computers are reasonably confident (75% chance) that sea surface temperatures will cross the La Niña threshold by the winter.”

That’s because the amount of cooler water just beneath the ocean’s surface of the equatorial Pacific is considerable, and “it’s been rising up to the surface.” She also makes clear there’s a reasonable amount of uncertainty about how a 2016 La Niña would progress, and “forecasters are currently favoring a weak or borderline moderate event.”

Computer simulations and marine experts are mostly convinced we will pass the La Niña threshold soon, but they don’t expect a “continuous steep cooling.” That’s what happened after the 1998 El Niño event, which was followed by an equally strong, naturally occurring La Niña. Both events are part of the ENSO cycle.

Becker notes that just as it did with the now-dethroned El Niño, “the atmospheric response to the changed sea surface temperatures should reinforce La Niña.” The stronger the La Niña the stronger the response to the atmosphere. And climate. For those in the Northern Hemisphere, that can mean cooler-than-normal winter temperatures, higher energy bills, and little precipitation across the Midwest. La Niñas do influence hurricane strength and activity, and NOAA is predicting a somewhat normal hurricane season in the Atlantic and Pacific.

Considered the ugly step-sister of El Niño, previous La Niñas have caused reduced crop and grain yields worldwide, including sugar, soy, and wheat. La Niñas are also notable for lowering global temperatures, increased atmospheric disturbances, altering the climate and Jet Stream, and shifting rainfall patterns.

SOURCE





Paul Homewood connects some dots

Ecowatch has a facility to "help Connect the Dots Between Extreme Weather Events and Climate Change".  Paul Homewood did it the courtesy of looking at it. He emails:

Interesting that they say:

"There is no explicit law for how much precipitation will increase, but most model simulations indicate that the increase is about 2% per degree centigrade of warming"

So, assuming say half a degree of warming since 1940s, that’s 1% extra rain.

On the example they give for Louisiana, where 26 inches fell, that’s an extra quarter inch!

Are we really supposed to panic over that?




Australian rodent the first mammal driven to extinction by climate change, researchers say

This is just speculation from beginning to end.  If people used to shoot them for sport, how do we know that someone did not do that recently?  It's an isolated area with no record of comings and goings

And if inundations were the cause, how do we know that global warming caused them?  Sea levels have been rising steadily ever since the Little Ice Age.

And if the factor was more extreme weather events in the area concerned there is no way global warming can be responsible because extreme weather events have in fact be declining on average world wide.  And even the IPCC declined to make a link between warming and extreme weather

And there have been many instances of species being declared extinct only for specimens suddenly to pop up again.  This is just opportunistic propaganda


CLIMATE change is believed to have caused the extinction of a rodent found on a small island in the Great Barrier Reef.

According to Queensland researchers, the species is the first mammal declared extinct due to the worrying global phenomenon.

Extensive searches for the Bramble Cay melomys, a small rat-like animal, have failed to find a single specimen from its only known habitat on a small coral cay, just 340m long and 150m wide in the northern end of the Great Barrier Reef and the edge of the Torres Strait Islands.

In a newly published report, scientists at the University of Queensland detailed how a comprehensive survey in 2014 failed to find any trace of the rodent.

Researchers said the key factor behind the extinction was “almost certainly” ocean inundation of the low-lying cay, likely on several occasions, over the last decade which resulted in dramatic habitat loss.

“Because a limited survey in March 2014 failed to detect the species, Bramble Cay was revisited from August to September 2014, with the explicit aims of establishing whether the Bramble Cay melomys still persisted on the island and to enact emergency measures to conserve any remaining individuals,” researcher Luke Leung said.

Dr Leung is from the University of Queensland’s School of Agriculture and Food Sciences and said the team went to great lengths in hopes of recovering signs of the species.

“A thorough survey effort involving 900 small animal trap-nights, 60 camera trap-nights and two hours of active daytime searches produced no records of the species, confirming that the only known population of this rodent is now extinct,” he said.
This species of Melomys is related to one that scientists say has gone extinct in the Great Barrier Reef. Picture: Auscape/UIG via Getty Images

This species of Melomys is related to one that scientists say has gone extinct in the Great Barrier Reef. Picture: Auscape/UIG via Getty ImagesSource:Getty Images

Bramble Cay is the only known location of the rodent and the island sits just three metres above sea level.

Available data on sea-level rise and weather events in the Torres Strait region “point to human-induced climate change being the root cause of the loss of the Bramble Cay melomys”, added the study.

Anthony D. Barnosky, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who is a leading expert on climate change’s effects on the natural world said the claim seems “right on target to me.”

“I think this is significant because it illustrates how the human-caused extinction process works in real time,” he told the New York Times.

The Bramble Cay melomy, considered the Great Barrier Reef’s only endemic (found nowhere else) mammal species, was first discovered on the cay in 1845 by Europeans who shot them for sport. They considered them large rats at the time.

But the last known sighting, by a professional fisherman, was in 2009.

The 2015 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species implicated climate change in the extinction of another mammal, the Little Swan Island hutia (Geocapromys thoracatus), a rodent previously found on a coral atoll in Honduras. But it found the main driver of its demise was an introduced cat, the report said.

Dr Leung said in the case of the Bramble Cay melomy, all signs pointed to the culpability of climate change.

“Available information about sea-level rise and the increased frequency and intensity of weather events producing extreme high water levels and damaging storm surges in the Torres Strait region over this period point to human-induced climate change being the root cause of the loss of the Bramble Cay melomys,” he said.

The study added that the main hope for the species was that another population existed in neighbouring Papua New Guinea.

Environment group WWF-Australia said the fate of the species was a sad reminder of the nation’s extinction crisis.

“Australia officially has the worst rate of mammal extinction in the world,” WWF spokesman Darren Grover said.

Unless governments commit significant funding towards protecting Australia’s threatened species, “we can expect to see more native critters go extinct on our watch”, he added.

SOURCE

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