Meteorologist: ‘This Heat Wave Is Child’s Play Compared to 1930s'

The comments below concern the US but individual temperature records worldwide show the 1930s as very hot, and official global temperature records used to show that too.  Having the '30s hotter than the present was very embarrassing to the foxes in charge of the henhouse, however, so official global temperature figures for the '30s have now been systematically deflated.  Without that deflation, 2015 and 2016 would not look exceptional

Meteorologist Joe Bastardi says the current heat wave in most parts of the U.S. – which tied the 135-year-old record temperature in Washington, D.C. on Saturday – is “child’s play compared to the 1930s.”

The National Weather Service (NWS) issued an "excessive heat warning" for "a prolonged period of dangerously hot temperatures" for much of the East coast, which remains in effect until 8 pm on Tuesday.

According to the NWS, the temperature at Ronald Reagan International Airport hit 101 degrees on Saturday, tying the old record of 101 degrees set on Aug. 13, 1881.

But if global temperatures are getting warmer because of manmade activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels, why was it so hot 135 years ago? CNSNews.com asked Bastardi, who is currently the chief forecaster at Weather Bell Analytics and the former chief long-range forecaster at Accuweather.

“There is no question this weekend was hot, with temperatures challenging and breaking records across the northeast,” Bastardi replied. “But to offer some perspective, many of these records went back to the 1800s, which meant [that] even without urban buildup, it was just as hot then.”

Bastardi added that 101 degrees is nothing compared to the heat wave that struck the Washington region back in the 1930s.

Long before SUVs and the term “carbon footprint” were invented, Americans endured sweltering heat waves, such as the summer of 1930, he said.

 “Washington area farmers were certainly not spared in 1930, as intense, prolonged hot spells gripped the region during late July and early August,” according to a 2010 article in the Washington Post. “The official temperature recorded on July 20 was 106°F, which holds the record as the highest temperature ever recorded in Washington.

“Unofficially, 110°F was recorded that same day on Pennsylvania Avenue and 108°F at the National Cathedral,” the article continued. The summer of 1930 also set the record at 11 for number of days where temperatures reached or exceeded 100°F.

“By the end of the summer of 1930, approximately 30 deaths in Washington were blamed on the heat and thousands more had died nationwide,” the Post article said. “In Washington, there has never been another summer with a heat wave that has equaled the summer of 1930.”

“This shows you this heat wave is child’s play compared to the 1930s in D.C.,” Bastardi told CNSNews.com.

Another deadly heat wave happened in 1896, killing more than 1,500 people.

“One of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history was the 10-day heat wave of 1896, but it is largely forgotten to history,” according to an article archived by the New England Historical Society. “For 10 days starting on August 1, the temperature soared to 90 degrees and higher, while staying above 70 degrees at night.

“Humidity hovered at 90 percent, and here wasn’t a breath of wind,” the article continued. “From Boston to New York to Chicago, more than 1,500 people died from heat prostration or related illnesses.

“More people died in the stifling heat than in the Great Chicago Fire or the New York draft riots,” it said.

Bastardi told CNSNews that the cyclical El Nino ocean pattern, which is linked to a periodic warming of sea surface temperatures, is what's really noteworthy this year.

“What is spectacular this year is the warmth of the ocean off the mid-Atlantic coast and the Chesapeake Bay, which helps out with the overall hot pattern,” Bastardi explained. “The warmer the source regions for what would be some cooling, such as the ocean and the bay, the less influence it has on knocking down high temps.”

In fact, Bastardi pointed out that Weather Bell Analytics predicted back in February that this summer would be a hot one.

“The hottest June-August period nationwide since 2012 is on the way,” the Weather Bell team predicted.

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World will start COOLING DOWN in 2017, claims Australian climate change expert

ONE of the world's leading climate change experts claims to have discovered mathematical anomalies which effectively 'disprove' global warming

Dr David Evans, a former climate modeller for the Australian  Government’s  Greenhouse Office, says global warming predictions have been vastly exaggerated in error.

The academic, from Perth, Australia, who has passed six degrees in applied mathematics, has analysed complex mathematical assumptions widely used to predict climate change and is predicting world temperature will stagnate until 2017 before cooling, with a 'mini ice age' by 2030.

He says fundamental flaws in how future temperatures may rise have been included in the 'standard models' and this has led to inflated mathematical - and therefore temperature - predictions.

He said: "There is an intellectual stand-off in climate change. Skeptics point to empirical evidence that disagrees with the climate models.

"Yet the climate scientists insist that their calculations showing a high sensitivity to carbon dioxide are correct — because they use well-established physics, such as spectroscopy, radiation physics, and adiabatic lapse rates.

He said he "mapped out" the architecture of the climate models used and found, that while the physics was correct, it had been "applied wrongly".

He claims to have found two reasons for it being wrongly applied, the first being a vastly over estimated impact on our temperature from CO2.

He said: "There is no empirical evidence that rising levels of carbon dioxide will raise the temperature of the Earth’s surface as fast as the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts. "Yes, CO2 has an effect, but it’s about a fifth or tenth of what the IPCC says it is.  "CO2 is not driving the climate; it caused less than 20% of the global warming in the last few decades”.

He said the other problem was the predictions had no reflection on changes that have actually been recorded and never saw the current 18-year temperature stagnation we are now in.

“The model architecture was wrong,” he said. “Carbon dioxide causes only minor warming. The climate is largely driven by factors outside our control.

"As such, the wind farms and solar panels are not just bad at reducing carbon dioxide — even if they did succeed in reducing carbon dioxide they’d be useless at cooling the planet. It is only four billion dollars a day worldwide, wasted."

Although he is convinced he is right, he fears it will not be taken on board by world governments. “These findings here are unlikely to be popular with the establishment. The political obstacles are massive,” he said.

Dr Evans says historic global warming has been down to solar activity - a process called  “albedo modulation” - the waxing and waning of reflected radiation from the Sun.

Between 2017 and 2021 he estimates a cooling of about 0.3C before the mini ice age in the 2030s.

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Consumers Pay Because Regulators Allow Natural Gas Use at This Solar Plant

Ivanpah is just an expensive toy for a few rich people

An immensely wealthy consortium owns the plant. Government regulators approved a contract forcing consumers to pay four to five times the going rate for electricity produced by the plant.

And the energy, because of an inordinate use of gas, turns out to be nowhere as "green" as folks thought they'd get.

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is one of the largest solar projects in the country.

Ivanpah has an impressive pedigree: It is owned by NRG Energy, BrightSource Energy, and Google Inc. BrightSource itself is owned by a consortium including Google, General Electric Corp., Chevron Corp., BP Alternative Energy, and Morgan Stanley.

Together, these companies command market capitalization in excess of $1 trillion. One would think that with such enormous capital and financial sophistication, Ivanpah's owners could have undertaken this project without government support.

Unfortunately, that's not how today's green energy market works.

The owners of the Ivanpah solar power facility received a federal loan guarantee of $1.6 billion, a tax credit in excess of $500 million, and contracts to sell power at four to five times the market rate of electricity. All predicated on the production of solar power.

But Ivanpah is not just a solar power plant. Many solar plants use solar cells to convert the sunlight directly into electricity.

Ivanpah is different. It uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight for generating steam that then drives turbines. These turbines produce energy in a similar fashion to that of traditional coal, natural gas, or nuclear power plants.

However, Ivanpah has a problem those technologies don't: intermittency. Meaning the sun doesn't always shine.

For Ivanpah, this is an even bigger problem than it is for plants that use solar cells, because at night the temperature in the desert falls dramatically and the water cools down.

So, the water must be reheated the next morning before power production can resume. Instead of relying on the sun to reheat the water, the Ivanpah plant burns natural gas.

A true description of Ivanpah, then, is that it is a hybrid solar-natural gas power plant. The electricity is not entirely solar produced, yet it is sold at the higher prices regulators allow for solar power, a benefit worth millions of dollars per year to Ivanpah's owners.

Ivanpah is abetted in this mischaracterization by the California Energy Commission, whose strained interpretation of the rules allows Ivanpah to ignore gas used to heat the water, unless the "generator breaker is closed." This means that none of the gas burned at night to reheat the water is counted toward the caps placed by government on natural gas use in generating power.

Those caps require natural gas to be responsible for less than 5 percent of the overall generation of power, with 95 percent coming from solar. In reality, the California Energy Commission's own data show Ivanpah's gas use is responsible for closer to 30 percent of its output than it is to 5 percent.

That's how Ivanpah hits the "bad policy" trifecta that is all too common in today's heavily subsidized renewable energy markets:

Rich consortium gets huge subsidies from taxpayers to build a plant. Check.  Regulators OK a contract that forces consumers to pay four to five times the going rate for its product. Check. And the product actually is nowhere near as "green" as people thought it'd be. Check.

The inconvenient truth is that Ivanpah uses a lot of natural gas to generate "solar" electricity, and neither the California Energy Commission nor the U.S. Department of Energy seems to care enough to come clean about it.

SOURCE  





Abundant Scientific Evidence That `Global Warming' Is A Made-Up Concept

There's NOTHING global happening to temperature

The conceptualization of "global warming" has become so entrenched in the lexicon that few give much thought to its dubious derivation.

Many assume that "global warming" actually means that all or nearly all of the globe is warming as a consequence of the "well-mixed" greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (i.e., CO2 concentrations have indeed reached right about 400 parts per million from the Arctic to Antarctica, or all across the globe).  In reality, however, only parts of the globe have been warming.  Large regions of the Earth have seen stable or falling temperatures in recent decades, or even dating back to the mid-20th century, when anthropogenic emissions have been claimed to have caused most climate changes.

The only means by which it could be said that we have had global-scale warming is to presume that only the overall net temperature difference counts - for all the regions of the world added together.   The regions of the world where it has not been warming necessarily do not count in the "global warming" conceptualization.

Let's say that Greenland has warmed by 1.2ø C since 1979, but Antarctica has cooled by -0.9ø C since 1979. Would it be misleading to add these two regions together and claim that the poles have warmed by tenths of a degree in the last 37 years?   Yes, because one pole has not been warming, but cooling - even though both poles are subjected to the same atmospheric CO2 concentrations.   But this mischaracterization of temperature trends (effectively claiming that both poles have been warming when only one has) is precisely what is done in framing the "global warming" conceptualization.

As a prototypical example of "global warming" manufacture, consider  the recently published Riser et al. (2016) paper entitled, "Fifteen years of ocean observations with the global ARGO array" (below).  The 25 authors summarize the temperature changes in the 0-700 m near-surface layer for all the ocean regions combined since 1950.  They point out that the Pacific Ocean all the way "from Chile to Alaska" has cooled by -1ø C during the last 65 years. Other parts of the oceans have warmed by 1ø C to compensate.  And when all the cooling and warming regions of the oceans are added together, the warming regions barely win out, scoring a net gain of "nearly 0.2øC" since the mid-20th century.  So because the net temperature change has been slightly positive, it can technically (albeit misleadingly) be said that the global oceans have been warming.  This way, the large regions of the oceans that have been cooling can be buried and ignored, and the "global warming" conceptualization remains intact.

Riser et al., 2016

"Most regions of the world ocean are warmer in the near-surface [0-700 m] layer than in previous decades, by over 1ø C in some places.  A few areas, such as the eastern Pacific from Chile to Alaska, have cooled by as much as 1ø C, yet overall the upper ocean has warmed by nearly 0.2ø C globally since the mid-twentieth century."

Of course, when addressing periods of climate history, such as the Medieval Warm Period, the same advocates who now say modern warming has been global and synchronous insist that the evidence shows the Medieval Warm Period was only warmer than now in Europe, or in Greenland, but the rest of the world didn't warm. This is false - hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers have documented evidence of warmer temperatures during Medieval times throughout vast regions of the Earth, including in Antarctica.   But if the standard is that the warming must be ubiquitous to "count" as global warming, then the modern era fails that standard miserably.    Because the globe is not warming.  Only some regions are.  Other regions haven't warmed in decades, or have been, in fact, cooling.

Below is of highlighted summary of the scientific literature (over 30 peer-reviewed papers) documenting some of the regions of the world where there has been no detectable warming trend during the period of time that anthropogenic CO2 emissions have been claimed to have dominated climate changes (generally since the mid-20th century).  As the scientists indicate, large portions of the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and Southern Oceans have been cooling in recent decades.   There is also scientific documentation of recent (20th/21st century) cooling (or no long-term warming trend) in the southeastern U.S., Northern Europe, Antarctica, China, Canada/Canadian Arctic, Western South America (Chile), South Africa, Greenland, Iceland, Antarctica, and the Arctic.   One has to wonder how and from where a large net "global warming" signal could have been obtained when there has been so much regional cooling.

Perhaps it can be explained why temperature changes since the 20th century have been called "global warming" caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions when large regions of the globe have not been warming, but cooling, for the last several decades.  Do uniformly rising CO2 concentrations cause cooling in some places, and warming in others - or warming in some decades, and cooling in others?  If so, what is the scientific basis for this selectivity?

Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern Ocean Cooling

The "entirety" of the Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean, as well as the eastern Atlantic, have been cooling below depths of 2000 m ("about 52% of the ocean lies below 2000 m") since 1992.

Wunsch and Heimbach, 2014

Discussion: "Over the 20 yr of the present ECCO state estimate, changes in the deep ocean on multiyear time scales are dominated by the western Atlantic basin and Southern Oceans. . In those same regions, a longer-term general warming pattern occurs below 2000 m. A very weak long-term cooling is seen over the bulk of the rest of the ocean below that depth, including the entirety of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, along with the eastern Atlantic basin."

--

The eastern tropical Pacific Ocean has cooled since 1979.

Dong and Zhou, 2014

"[C]ooling trend in the eastern tropical Pacific sea surface temperature (SST) during 1979-2008"

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The North Atlantic Ocean has cooled by -0.45ø C since 2005.

Robson et al., 2016

"Here we show that since 2005 a large volume of the upper North Atlantic Ocean has cooled significantly by approximately 0.45?øC or 1.5 x 1022?J, reversing the previous warming trend. . The observed upper ocean cooling since 2005 is not consistent with the hypothesis that anthropogenic aerosols directly drive Atlantic temperatures."

--

The Southern Ocean has been cooling overall since 1979 (by about -1.0øC), which has led to an increasing sea ice coverage not simulated by models.

SOURCE  




UK WINDFARM operators have been paid a record-breaking £3.1million - simply for switching off their turbines for a single day

Windfarm operators have been paid a record-breaking £3.1million
Energy giants received the "constraint" payment because strong winds meant they produced more electricity than Scotland needed over a 24-hour period.

The controversial UK Government scheme sees the National Grid pay companies when surplus power is generated or when the network is overloaded.

Anti-windfarm campaigners last night said it was "disgusting" consumers would foot such a huge bill for the devices lying idle.

The record payment was made after windfarms produced the equivalent of 106 per cent of the nation's power on Sunday, August 7.

With winds of up to 115mph at the top of the Cairngorms, Scotland's turbines provided 39,545MWh of electricity, while just 37,202MWh was consumed.

The total payout for that one day will cost electricity customers £3,137,704 - up on the previous record of £3,030,977 on Sunday, October 26, 2014..

In a further insult to consumers, firms will also get an additional £1million for electricity they were prevented from generating because it was not needed.

The compensation scheme has operated since April 2011 and since then more than £235.3million has been paid out.

Industry expert Stuart Young said: "I was disgusted how people were crowing about how much electricity had been generated by wind when customers are going to be hit so hard in their pockets.

"The number of megawatt hours wasted - constrained off - was 46,150. That's equivalent to what the whole of the UK consumes in an hour in winter.

SOURCE



Australia: Brian Cox believes

The TV debate between climate skeptic Roberts and the credulous Prof. Cox

The key moment making headlines from the Q&A “Science Weak” episode — Brian Cox shows a temperature graph. Malcolm Roberts said the GISS temperature data has been “manipulated”. The Particle Physics Genius’ reply was argument from incredulity:  gushing, gratuitous astonishment spread over six attempts to form a complete sentence:

By who?    NASA?   The people the…  Hang on a minute.   No, no, see this is quite serious.    But can I just – just one thing. NASA, NASA…     The people that landed men on the moon?

In a blink of reductio ad absurbum, Cox sweeps aside a potentially useful discussion about thermometers near car-parks, airports, skyscrapers, and mysterious 1,200 km homogenized smoothing. In its place he gives cheap theatrical tricks. Follow his thought to its logical conclusion — everything that NASA does (or presumably will ever do) must be 100% correct. NASA becomes an apostle of the holy order. He treats the brand name as untouchable, but NASA is not just Neil Armstrong and a Big Step, it’s an agency with 17,000 employees. But hey, none of them have ever produced a manipulated graph.

Since experts matter (so Cox tells us) let’s ask the experts — like say, Buzz Aldrin, Charles Duke and Harrison Schmitt — three guys who actually walked on the moon, or another 47 scientists and astronauts that helped them get there.  They’re all skeptical. They wrote to NASA to protest at the lax standards of GISS:

“We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.”

Walter Cunningham circled the moon on Apollo 7,  and as one of the men who helped earn NASA it’s brand name, he now says trust in NASA and science has been abused.

Then there are a guys like Roy Spencer and John Christie who didn’t just work at NASA, they won prizes there — and in climate research. To this day, in an enduring mystery GISS (the Goddard Institute of Space Studies) doesn’t use satellites to measure temperatures, but Spencer and Christie do. Using Cox logic, these guys outrank him, he ought be rushing to copy their views… but they are skeptics. In the last 20 years the UAH graph looks quite different to the GISS graph — though it’s more true to say that even the GISS graphs look different to the GISS graphs, as they transform year after year. Amazing how the thermometer readings are still changing 30 years later. (BTW, even the pause is there in the UAH graph. Thanks Ken. Not that it matters whether it still is — the models were already proven wrong).

Things got so far from a science discussion Cox even asked Malcolm Roberts if he believed that “men landed on the moon”. Cox was either fishing for irrelevant ad hominem attack points or it suggests that Cox has read  more on climate psychology than on the climate. Being a particle physics guy perhaps he was fooled by studies with only ten anonymous internet responses. Psychology is a bit outside his expertise.

Cox takes on the role of conversation vandal (with Lily-the-future-PhD-in-eco-something as the backup “the debate is over”). He dumps logical fallacies in, trades on his own media gloss and does his best to stop an open-minded, rational discussion. The ABC fosters this sort of interaction, like a twitter conversation with cameras. Linda Burnley’s “proof” was that people shouldn’t go swimming at Maroubra in August. Like that’s meaningful. (Poms have been coming to Perth and swimming here in July since forever…) Neither Cox, Jones, Hunt or Lily scoff or laugh at that comment. They could’ve done the full Scoff-Scorn and Riotous-Laughs, but …meh… wrong target.

One day Cox will understand cause and effect:

Here’s the most important point in the whole last twenty years of debate — credit to Malcolm Roberts for hammering it home. We need empirical evidence, and we need “cause and effect” links.  So here is Cox finally pressed to give his Big Empirical Evidence declaring that climate models are useful:

“Let me just – all right, I’ll just give you one snapshot. So, I took a snapshot of the different bits of evidence for 2015. So global ocean heat content highest on record in 2015; global sea level highest on record in 2015, 70 millimetres higher than that observed in 1993; global surface temperature highest on record, El Nino something like 10 to 40% contribution to that; tropical cyclones well above average overall, as you said and even the anecdotal data. …

…. So the point is you go evidence, evidence, evidence, arctic continue warm, sea ice extent low, artic land surface temperature in 2015, 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit above 1981’s 210 average.

 All of that would happen no matter what caused the warming. Cox hasn’t even thought this one through at a baby basic level. If the solar wind changed clouds and warmed the world, the seas also rise, the ice also melts, blah blah blah. Same for magnetic fields changing cloud nucleation. Same for UV solar cycle changes shifting jet streams and altering cloud formation.

O’but it’s hot says Cox. It’s hot!  Yet correlation is not causation. It’s fallacy after fallacy.

And some people call this man a “renown” scientist. Embarrassing.

SOURCE

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