Warmists can't take a trick:  NOTHING happens the way they say it should

The lack of correlation between CO2 levels and global temperature is a standard comment from skeptics and it's just happened again

When I was looking just now at how recent were the NOAA figures from Mauna Loa, I found that they included April this year, which wasn't too bad, considering that it is public servants who put the figures up.  I can think of no good reason why the May figures are not yet up but I suppose not enough coffee and cake has so far been consumed for that to happen.

But back to the figures we have:  There was 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.  You know what I am going to say:  They in fact 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!

And you have to laugh at how futile have been the the vast efforts to reduce CO2 levels.  They just go up and up regardless.  Maybe we should all stop breathing.  Warmists would like that.  They are, after all, anthropophobes.





New paper finds climate models are unable to reproduce early twentieth century Arctic warming

Yet another demonstration that Warmist models have no  predictive skill.  And isn't it odd that Warmists never mention that there was a big Arctic melting long before the supposed period of man-caused climate change?  So the current decrease in Arctic ice is no evidence of man-caused climate change either

Tropospheric circulation during the early twentieth century Arctic warming

Martin Wegmann et al.

Abstract

The early twentieth century Arctic warming (ETCAW) between 1920 and 1940 is an exceptional feature of climate variability in the last century. Its warming rate was only recently matched by recent warming in the region. Unlike recent warming largely attributable to anthropogenic radiative forcing, atmospheric warming during the ETCAW was strongest in the mid-troposphere and is believed to be triggered by an exceptional case of natural climate variability. Nevertheless, ultimate mechanisms and causes for the ETCAW are still under discussion. Here we use state of the art multi-member global circulation models, reanalysis and reconstruction datasets to investigate the internal atmospheric dynamics of the ETCAW. We investigate the role of boreal winter mid-tropospheric heat transport and circulation in providing the energy for the large scale warming. Analyzing sensible heat flux components and regional differences, climate models are not able to reproduce the heat flux evolution found in reanalysis and reconstruction datasets. These datasets show an increase of stationary eddy heat flux and a decrease of transient eddy heat flux during the ETCAW. Moreover, tropospheric circulation analysis reveals the important role of both the Atlantic and the Pacific sectors in the convergence of southerly air masses into the Arctic during the warming event. Subsequently, it is suggested that the internal dynamics of the atmosphere played a major role in the formation in the ETCAW.

Climate Dynamics, pp 1-14.  First online: 03 June 2016





Another climate alarmist’s predictions don’t match real-world data

Warmist says that Lake Mead is drying up because of reduced streamflow into it caused by global warming.  Problem:  Streamflow has actually increased!  And the catchment area has not got any warmer, either!

Whenever there is a new record set, whether rain, hurricane, drought, etc., those in the climate change alarmist camp seem to be quick to point to global warming as the cause and make more dire predictions regarding the future — even when there are other documented reasons and even when hard data (not models) disputes the claim. Such is the case with Lake Mead. On May 20, the federal Bureau of Reclamation announced that the nation’s largest reservoir, located near Las Vegas, NV, reached an all-time low. The current level slipped below the previous record set in June 2015.

Despite reports of the mismanagement of the important water resource, USA Today responded to the news by proclaiming: “Due to a long drought and climate change, Lake Mead’s water levels continue to fall.”

Brad Udall, a senior water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University, and brother to former Colorado Senator Mark Udall and cousin to New Mexico Senator Tom Udall, declared: “This problem is not going away and it is likely to get worse, perhaps far worse, as climate change unfolds.” According to the Desert Sun, he added: “Unprecedented high temperatures in the basin are causing the flow of the river to decline.”

Udall previously stated: “Climate change is water change. The two go hand in hand. Heat drives the water cycle. …You have to invoke temperatures to explain the current drought.”

Back in 2010, the Smithsonian magazine, cites Udall when it says: “Climate change will likely decrease the river’s flow by 5 to 20 percent in the next 40 years. … Less precipitation in the Rocky Mountains will yield less water to begin with. Droughts will last longer. Higher overall air temperatures will mean more water lost to evaporation. Udall said: ‘You’re going to see earlier runoff and lower flows later in the year,’ so water will be more scarce during the growing season.”

While Udall’s statements are dramatic and coincide with the climate crisis narrative his better-known family members espouse, they do not, according New Mexico hydrologist Mike Wallace, reflect actual temperature and stream flow records in the Colorado River Basin. (I highlighted Wallace’s work on ocean acidification in December 2014.)

Both Wallace and Udall claim to be experts in the hydrology and climatology of the western U.S. Wallace has more than 30 years of experience in the field. He is currently working on his Ph.D. in nanosciences at the University of New Mexico. Under his advisor solar physicist Harjit Ahluwalia, Wallace researches solar connections to the earth’s climate with an emphasis on hydrology—the topic of his dissertation. Udall’s undergraduate degree is in engineering and he holds an MBA from Colorado State University.

However, Wallace told me: “I’m the only hydrologist who is publishing moisture and temperature forecasts in reaches of the Upper Colorado River, years in advance, with consistently high accuracy.”

Regarding Udall’s comments in the Smithsonian, Wallace, who looks at streamflow records going back to the early twentieth century, finds that streamflows have actually been going up in recent years — correlating to ocean and solar drivers.

Wallace, who counts the city of Santa Fe as one of his forecasting business clients, pioneered the discovery that moisture patterns in his area of study—which overlaps Udall’s—are deeply anchored to ocean indexes and sunspot numbers. He boldly asserts: “There is no correlation of CO2 emissions history to the moisture time series that I have evaluated. Also, for the same stations that I review there is little or no correlation of temperature to streamflow. Rather, ocean drivers can account for changes in temperature and moisture in this region, and those drivers appear to be driven themselves by solar cycles.”

While Udall believes temperatures are rising and causing reduced streamflow into Lake Mead, Wallace disputes the premise. Wallace says he has three years of successful forecast exercises to back up his claim that, in his study areas, “temperatures are hardly trending in any direction and, in any case, those temperatures are not correlating to streamflow.”

Wallace’s work focuses on streams charged by high mountains—above 9000 feet. His study regions include many of the tributaries of the Colorado River such as the San Juan River and the Green River—both of which are sourced in the Rocky Mountains. He says: “There haven’t been any unusually low streamflow rates or unusually high temperatures in my area of focus. In fact, flows are going up, not down, compared to two and three years ago and some temperatures are actually trending down over the same recent time frame.”

Using his proprietary method (patent pending) with more than 200 accurate forecasts, and applying to areas near the nexus of the Upper Rio Grande and the Upper Colorado Rivers, Wallace is projecting 3-4 years of generally increased water flows, followed by 3-4 years of generally decreasing moisture (drought). He posits that his innovations help municipalities, flood control authorities, irrigation districts, and resource management agencies better plan for future moisture and temperature conditions.

An example of real science at work without political interference, Wallace explains: “Research suggests that as the Sun’s radiant energy increases and decreases in sync with its sunspot cycles, the planet’s hydrosphere (all of the water) responds accordingly.  Others have suggested this, but I’ve taken that several steps further. First, I’ve discovered reproducible, high correlations between sun spot numbers and a few key features of Earth’s climate.  Second, I’ve developed a series of unique calculations, which additionally consider global hydroclimatological patterns, the site location and elevation, and latency effects, to produce my forecasts. A majority of those forecast exercises have turned out to be far more accurate than any competing method, including any or all of the global circulation models (GCMs) endorsed by the UN IPCC — which I believe is what Mr. Udall must be using for his assertions.”

Wallace has written and presented several papers on his discoveries. But he continues to experience resistance from major peer-reviewed journals to publish any of his findings. The troubles likely lie in his demonstrations that emissions are uncorrelated to climate in his study regions. In any case, scientific papers are often considered as precursors to actual applications, and Wallace already has a working, proven application. Even without peer journal-publication panache, Wallace is receiving steady and growing recognition from the hydroclimate community. In April, he was an invited presenter to the 30th Annual Rio Grande Basin Snowmelt Runoff Forecast Meeting, sponsored by the USDA SNOTEL network and attended by top regional hydroclimate scientists from agencies including the National Weather Service (NWS), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

If Wallace is correct, and he has a successful climate forecast record to back up his projections, Udall can’t also be right. Wallace believes most of Udall’s climate assertions, such as the claim that regional temperatures explain everything about the drought, are too simplistic.  He also expresses concern regarding Udall’s use of the term “drought.”   “To accept those Lake Mead statements as factual,” Wallace said, “anything short of an epic flooding event, must be an epic drought event.”

After all is said and done, the natural processes that Wallace has distilled down to a working forecast system, don’t, in any way, appear to fit the crisis narrative that the Udall and many climate “authorities” perpetuate. You should ask if we really need more funding, bigger departments, and greater public anxiety to fix something that, at least, in the western U.S., appears to wholly be explained by natural cycles.

SOURCE





Fraudulent hurricane scare

Speaking on hurricane preparedness at the FEMA National Response Coordination Center on Tuesday, Barack Obama said, “All of us have seen the heartbreak, the damage and, in some case, the loss of life that hurricanes can cause.” Indeed we have. But then he asserted a dubious claim: “And as climate continues to change, hurricanes are only going to become more powerful and more devastating.”

How then does he explain this? It’s now been a staggering “127 months since a major hurricane has made landfall in the continental United States,” CNS News calculates. “The last major hurricane (defined as a Category 3 or above) to hit the U.S. mainland was Hurricane Wilma … on Oct. 24, 2005.”

But Obama’s sheer ignorance goes well beyond 21st century history. As meteorologist Joe Bastardi has chronicled, the mundane hurricane seasons of late are even more amazing when compared to the 1940s and 1950s. Then, according to Bastardi, the U.S. saw “22 major hits in 20 years.”

Yet Obama strangely remarked, “What we’re always worried about are the things we don’t know, things we can’t anticipate, things that we haven’t seen before.” Perhaps if he wasn’t wearing ideologically blinders he would know that virtually nothing the world experiences today is unprecedented. Sadly, when hurricane seasons eventually do ramp back up, you can bet America’s shorelines that it will only add spin to warmists' rhetorical whirlwind.

SOURCE





Why aren’t we using DDT to combat Zika-bearing mosquitoes?

The Zika virus is not a foreign problem anymore. U.S. territories are being exposed, U.S. citizens are being exposed and people around the world are traveling with the disease.

Currently, Congress is contemplating certain actions being taken, but new research and development is not needed because the answer has been around since the 1950s, but environmentalists don’t want to admit it. It is dichlorodiphenyltrichlororethane, or DDT.

As of May 2016 only 4 states do not have reported cases of the Zika virus, a virus which the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) claims is spread by infected mosquitoes and causes a serious birth defect called microcephaly, as well as severe fetal brain defects. The center notes that that “on February 1, 2016, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Zika virus a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Local transmission has been reported in many other countries and territories. Zika virus will likely continue to spread to new areas.”

We could be on the verge of an epidemic or worse which has already infected nearly 600 mainland Americans and over 900 Americans on US territories, but the most efficient way to stop the spread, DDT, has already been banned.

In 1972, Congress enacted the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act, a far-reaching amendment that gave the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) vast discretion to ban certain pesticides. The executive ban by the EPA on DDT from use completely was instituted that very year because the gas, primarily sprayed over livestock as a pesticide, was found to cause defects in the developments of animals exposed to the spray.

However, today DDT could be used differently in order to stop the spread of this deadly disease, if the EPA was only willingly to prioritize human life.

In a Jan 2016 National Review article aptly titled “Will the EPA Cause a Zika Pandemic?” author Robert Zubrin explains “a cure for Zika is not known, and it could take decades to find one. Zika is spread by mosquitoes, which can be exterminated by pesticides. The most effective pesticide is DDT.”

The science backs up this method as well, while DDT spread over our food supply risked harmful effects, evidence suggests using it in small quantities in homes and mosquito prone areas can both discontinue the spread of the disease while mitigating environmental damage.

The New York Times of Jan 2016 cites Dr. Lyle R. Petersen, director of the division of vector-borne diseases at the CDC, who explains “the concern about DDT gas [has] to be reconsidered in the public health context. The damage to fish and wildlife stemmed from the widespread outdoor use of DDT in agriculture, not the use of small amounts on walls inside homes to kill mosquitoes.”

By enforcing an absolute ban, the EPA prioritized the protection of few animals rather than hundreds of thousands of people. The global ban on DDT, even more so.

Researchers admit use of the pesticide can be done carefully and controlled, but environmentalists maintain that the negative effects of DDT on the environment and possible effects on humans make it an unrealistic option, and instead propose genetically modifying mosquitoes to never make it past the initial stages of birth. However, this would require both eliminating an entire species of mosquitoes, rather than just the diseased ones, and does nothing to eliminate the already infected mosquitoes.

This was true when DDT was proposed to end malaria as well, it was proved DDT worked as a repellant to over 80 percent of mosquitoes entering homes, but the EPA blocked its use then too. While the EPA plays with politics and perception, they are allowing humans to die, wasting time proposing new research ideas, while people in nearly every Latin American country are being infected at rapid rates.

In the U.S. territory Puerto Rico, the CDC predicts a quarter of the island’s 3.5 million people will get Zika within a year, and eventually 80 percent or more may be infected. As a Puerto Rican American this is not just terrifying, it is heart wrenching to know that a solution exists but is neglecting to be explored because of “environmental concerns”.

During a Public Health Emergency of International Concern is not the time to be focusing on birds. Malaria as a plague still infects and kills hundreds of thousands of people every year, according to the World Health Organization. Why don’t we just kill the mosquitoes?

It is convenient for faceless bureaucrats to prioritize the environment when the issue is in a foreign country, effecting a foreign population. But members of Congress must realize the Zika virus is here and affecting us now — and the solution is to overturn the EPA’s executive ban on DDT. The message is simple, DDT is a solution to save millions of lives, and ignoring it, ignores human life.

SOURCE





The EPA’s Green Parachutes: $25,000 Buyout Bonuses for Agents Retiring Early

The Environmental Protection Agency has been sending employees off into early retirement with buyout bonuses of up to $25,000. The practice is often used as a cost-saving measure, but because of the way the agency replaced the retirees, the bonuses may actually put a larger financial burden on taxpayers.

Pointing to a 2015 report by the EPA inspector general, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., charges that the agency may have inappropriately spent $1.4 million to pay about 60 employees for early retirement.

The agency paid nearly $12 million in buyout bonuses to encourage roughly 500 employees to retire that year, according to the EPA inspector general. But rather than modify or eliminate the jobs as required to cut costs, the agency simply refilled 12 percent of the positions.

But an EPA spokesman, Dan Abrams, told The Daily Signal that the “issue was quickly resolved,” the same month that the inspector general raised the issue. And he said that the buyouts “comported with the business cases, including budget neutrality, approved by the Office of Personnel Management.”

Paul’s office argues that even though the hires were budget neutral, their jobs only became available after the EPA paid old employees to leave.

Buyouts are not unusual in the public or private sector; they provide employers an alternative to layoffs. The measure allows the employer to clear the payroll of more senior and expensive employees by giving workers an incentive to retire early.

Known as Voluntary Separation Incentive Payments, according to the Office of Personnel Management, the buyouts are meant as a way to increase “voluntary attrition in agencies that are downsizing or restructuring.” But the Office of Personnel Management requires an executive agency to modify or eliminate the vacated position after the bonus is paid.

During an inspector general investigation, EPA officials said they were aware of the requirement. However, they disregarded the rule to keep “continuity” in one case and ignored it while under “time constraints” in another instance.

A rounding error on many federal balance sheets, the $1.4 million employee payout is indicative of an agency Paul’s office describes in a statement as “notorious for its job security.”

“Only 15 employees or one-tenth of 1 percent were terminated for performance; that is slightly more than the 13 EPA employees who died last year,” the Kentucky Republican said in a statement.

SOURCE
                               
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