Friday, June 17, 2016



Warmists have no shame

The May global temperature has just been released and the article below is headlined: "Month Of May 2016 Continues Trend Of Record Heat, Possibly Proves Global Warming Is Happening".  So warming is still going on alarmingly, you would conclude from that.

That word "possibly" is wise, though.  Because the writer has ignored the really BIG feature of the May average global temperature.  According to the latest (revised) figures from GISS, here are the temps for this year:

Jan  Feb  Mar  Apr  May
112  133  128  109   93

El Nino peaked in February, March dropped a bit and April and May  dropped like a stone.  You would never guess it from the article briefly excerpted below but COOLING has begun. So much for the deceitful claim that May "Continues Trend Of Record Heat".  It doesn't continue anything.

The May temperature was actually less than one degree above the 1951-1980 base period -- just about back to the C21 norm.  And with a La Nina in the wings, the cooling is likely to go on.

This May temperature is not a seasonal effect.  This  is a global figure so the Northern hemisphere summer will be balanced out by winter in the Southern hemisphere, and vice versa


The month of May 2016 is not only the beginning of Summer for many around the world. It is now officially the warmest May in recorded history. This may not seem like such bad news after such a chilly winter, but it could be an indication that former Vice President Al Gore was right.

SOURCE






Volcanoes and global warming

Scientists from San Diego and a dozen countries around the world are gathered at the University of San Diego this week to share their latest research. Among some of the major topics at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference are climate change, heat waves and ocean acidification.

Geophysicist Peter Ward, who worked for the U.S. Geological Survey for nearly three decades, discussed warming global temperatures during his Wednesday session.

“There’s a very interesting correlation between warming and volcanism at the end of the last ice age,” Ward said.

He said the past two years of record warmth can be attributed to more than greenhouse gases. Ward blames ozone depletion caused by the Bardarbunga volcano eruption in Iceland in September 2014.

“It was the biggest flow of basalt that’s been observed since 1783,” Ward said. “Now that’s good news, because if it’s Baroarbunga that’s causing the warming, next year we can expect it to be getting cooler again.”

SOURCE  





Massachusetts AG Investigating Conservative Groups With Ties to ExxonMobil

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey is now the latest state prosecutor to start investigating conservative groups with supposed ties to ExxonMobil, after she issued a subpoena for 40 years of internal company documents and communications with a handful of think tanks.

Healey’s office subpoenaed Exxon as part of a multi-state effort among liberal attorneys general to investigate Exxon for allegedly trying to cover up global warming science. Healey charges that the oil giant lied to shareholders and consumers about the risks of global warming in its communications and shareholder filings, according to a copy of the subpoena obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Healey demands decades worth of records from prominent conservative think tanks, including The Heritage Foundation and activist group Americans for Prosperity, and also from smaller, lesser known state-based right-leaning groups, such as Boston’s Beacon Hill Institute and the Acton Institute.

But there’s a huge problem with Healey’s subpoena that shows just how broad this investigation has become: At least two of the groups the subpoena demands records from have not received any money from Exxon.

Beacon Hill and Americans for Prosperity have not gotten any Exxon funding, but are still being targeted

Healey isn’t the first attorney general to target conservative groups that disagree with most Democratic politicians on global warming policy. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker subpoenaed Exxon for records regarding dozens of conservative think tanks, policy experts, and scientists in March.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman launched an investigation into Exxon’s global warming stance in November, based on reporting by liberal journalists at InsideClimate News and Columbia University that Exxon had been covering up climate science for decades while funding right-wing activist groups.

Schneiderman hosted a conference in March with other attorneys general, including Healey and Walker, where it was announced that more prosecutors would probe Exxon and fight back against Republican attacks on federal environmental regulations.

Former Vice President Al Gore attended the event, as did a group of environmental activists—though Schneiderman’s office tried to cover up eco-activists’ involvement. At the event, Schneiderman even suggested global warming skeptics should be put in jail.

“Financial damages alone may be insufficient,” Schneiderman said. “The First Amendment does not give you the right to commit fraud.”

But Exxon hasn’t taken these subpoenas lying down. The oil company has filed a complaint against Walker in Texas court, and two Republican attorneys general have even intervened in the case to squash Walker’s demands.

Exxon has also filed a complaint against Healey, alleging her investigation is nothing more than a predetermined political stunt.

Exxon’s complaint even notes how Healey basically announced the results of her investigation before she even sent her subpoena to the company.

“We can all see today the troubling disconnect between what Exxon knew, what industry folks knew, and what the company and industry chose to share with investors and with the American public,” Healey charged at the March event hosted by Schneiderman.

“Remarkably, she also announced, in advance, the findings of her investigation weeks before she even issued the [civil investigative demand],” Exxon’s lawyers wrote in their complaint, a copy of which was obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

SOURCE  





Global Warming Skeptic Responds To Massachusetts AG’s Subpoena: ‘F**k Off, Fascist’

Alex Epstein had a terse response to a subpoena sent by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey Wednesday.

Healey demanded the oil giant ExxonMobil hand over 40 years of documents, including information pertaining to the company’s dealings with about a dozen think tanks and trade associations, which have been targeted by environmental groups for opposing left-wing global warming policies.

Healey’s subpoena targeted the Center for Industrial Progress (CIP), a for-profit think tank founded by Epstein. Epstein wasn’t exactly happy about being targeted for disagreeing with Healey on global warming, so he sent the AG’s office the following response:



Healey subpoenaed Exxon as part of a multi-state effort among liberal prosecutors to investigate the company for allegedly trying to cover up global warming science. Healey alleges the oil giant lied to shareholders and consumers about the risks of global warming in its communications and shareholder filings, according to a copy of the subpoena obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

She’s targeting CIP and other prominent conservative groups, like the Heritage Foundation and Americans for Prosperity (AFP), because of their supposed ties to Exxon. The only problem is, neither CIP nor AFP are funded by Exxon.

Exxon has fought back against Healey’s subpoena, filing a complaint against the attorney general’s legal salvo.

Exxon’s lawyers said the subpoena “constitutes an abusive fishing expedition into ExxonMobil’s climate change research over the past 40 years, without any basis for believing that ExxonMobil violated Massachusetts law.”

SOURCE  





Global Warming Prediction 30 Years Later: How Is It Faring?

If you preach to choir, at least try to be fair in your sermon.

The skeptical folks over at Real Science are taking a stroll down memory lane to see how climatologist James Hansen's famous 1986 predictions about future global temperature trends have panned out 30 years later. As evidence, the Real Science shows a couple of quotations from a June 12 Associated Press story which cites Hansen as predicting in testimony before a U.S. Senate committee that global temperatures should be nearly 2 degrees higher in 20 years, "which is about the warmest the earth has been in the last 100,000 years." Real Science notes that Earth warmed by only about 0.2 degrees Celsius between June 1986 and June 2006. Off by a factor of ten!

But is that the whole story? I dove into the WABAC Machine known as Nexis and dredged up a couple of other news reports recounting Hansen's testimony. A longer June 1986 UPI story reported, "Unless steps are taken to control the problem, temperatures in the United States in the next decade will range from 0.5 degrees Celsius to 2 degrees higher than they were in 1958, said James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies." That's a much bigger range than between 1986 and 2006.

So how did the average U.S. temperature change in the 50 years after 1958? According to the U.S. Global Change Research Program report in 2009, "U.S. average temperature has risen more than 2ºF over the past 50 years." Two degrees Fahrenheit is just over 1.1 degrees Celsius, which is within the spread of increased temperatures predicted by Hansen. With regard to global average temperatures, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 noted that "the rate of warming averaged over the last 50 years (0.13°C ± 0.03°C per decade) is nearly twice that for the last 100 years." That implies an overall increase between 1958 and 2006 of 0.65 degree Celsius - at the low end of Hansen's predictions. The University of Alabama at Huntsville's satellite temperature data series (since 1979) is increasing at 0.12 degree Celsius per decade which, if run back backwards, implies a five decade global temperature increase of 0.6 degree Celsius; again, at the low end of Hansen's projections.

First, it does no good for the antagonists in the scientific debate over man-made climate change to mischaracterize the views of their opponents. On the other hand, the lower rate of temperature increase suggests that most computer climate models relied upon by Hansen are running far too hot, and future temperature increases may not portend catastrophic changes by the end of this century.

SOURCE  





Europe’s Ethanol Regs Are INCREASING Global Warming

Europe’s regulations intended to fight global warming with biofuels are likely making the problem worse, according to new research published Tuesday by Finland’s government research agency.

The new research found that European Union biofuel regulations “ignore uncertainties related to greenhouse gas calculation” and can even have their environmental benefits “counted as double” under certain circumstances.

Europe has been blending small percentages of biofuels into conventional gasoline and oil and diesel specifically to reduce CO2 emissions. The continent plans to require biofuels account for 10 percent of all fuel used by 2020. The EU’s CO2 emissions are estimated to have increased by 0.7 percent last year relative to 2014, even though the continent has spent an estimated $1.2 trillion financially supporting green and bio-energy with the goal of lowering CO2 emissions.

A study published in late April by an environmental group found that Europe’s biofuel regulations created 80 percent more carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions than the conventional oil they replaced. The report estimates the biofuels create new emissions equivalent to putting an extra 12 million cars on the road. The environmental group estimates that the European Union’s biofuel regulations will increase the continent’s CO2 emissions from transportation by almost four percent compared to conventional sources of oil.

SOURCE  

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