Another take on the September temperature figures

I don't have great issues with Seth Borenstein below.  He arrives at much the same conclusion I did, albeit via a different route

Earth's 16-month sizzling streak of record high temperatures is finally over, according to one group of federal meteorologists.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said last month's 60.6 degrees (15.9 Celsius) was merely the second hottest September on record for the globe. That's ever so slightly cooler — a few hundredths of a degree — than the record set in 2015. But it was quite a bit warmer — 1.6 degrees (0.9 Celsius) — than the 20th century average.

Global average temperatures include both land and sea surface readings. And while oceans were cooling off a tad, global land temperatures in September still set a record high, NOAA climate scientist Jessica Blunden said. It was an unusually hot month in much of Europe, Asia, Africa and North America.

NASA, which averages global temperature differently, considers last month as record hot . But the space agency didn't have a big consecutive hot streak because it didn't consider last June as record hot.

"It's kind of nice to see it cool down a little bit even though it will go back up again," Blunden said. "It may not be a record now because we have natural variations in weather and climate. There's always going to be ups and downs but that doesn't mean global warming isn't happening."

SOURCE




 More crooked ad hominem attacks from the Green Left

The message rattles them so they shoot the messenger

ThinkProgress Editor in Chief Judd Legum sent an email to a billionaire donor bragging how the liberal blog’s environmental writer targeted a climate researcher who challenged a major Democratic talking point on global warming, according to leaked emails.

The blog’s environmental arm, ClimateProgress, took issue with pollster Nate Silver’s 538 website, hiring Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr. to write about global warming issues. Pielke is no skeptic of man-made warming, but he challenged a Democratic talking point that global warming was making extreme weather more severe.

ClimateProgress immediately embarked on a crusade to discredit him “[p]rior to Pielke writing anything” for 538 — based solely on the fact they didn’t like his research on extreme weather.

“Pielke basically has made a career of ‘accepting’ climate change but disputing that we can really do anything about it or that it has much of an impact,” Legum wrote in a July 2014 email to hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer thanking him for his “support.”

Steyer is a major supporter of environmentalists and Democratic politicians. Steyer is a donor and bundler for the Clinton campaign, raising more than $100,000 for her campaign since 2015. He spent $73 million during the 2014 midterm elections.

ClimateProgress is part of the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAPAF), which was created by Clinton’s presidential campaign chair John Podesta. Podesta also created the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, which gave CAPAF at least $1 million in 2015.

Legum’s email to Steyer was release by WikiLeaks from Podesta’s hacked Gmail account. It’s one of several emails involving the ThinkProgress blog.

ClimateProgress put out two articles attacking Pielke the same day he published a post on 538 headlined “Disasters Cost More Than Ever — But Not Because of Climate Change.” Pielke’s point was that extreme weather only does more damage today because there’s more wealth to destroy when hitting shore.

When economic growth is taken into account, “the overall trend in disaster costs proportional to GDP since 1990 has stayed fairly level,” Pielke wrote.

“Within hours, ClimateProgress published a comprehensive debunk, with quotes from many prominent climate scientists,” Legum wrote, chronicling Pielke’s eventual being forced to leave 538.

“Pielke was so upset with our piece, he called the scientists we quoted and threatened to sue them. Silver was forced to apologize,” Legum wrote. “Embarrassed, Silver was forced to publish a rebuttal to Pielke piece by an actual climate scientist, which was also devastating.”

Silver asked climate scientist Kerry Emanuel to rebut Pielke’s article. Emanuel wrote that he’s “not comfortable with Pielke’s assertion that climate change has played no role in the observed increase in damages from natural hazards.”

Silver never let Pielke publish any piece on global warming on 538 again — a fact Legum bragged to Steyer about in his email.

“I think it’s fair say that, without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate change for 538,” Legum wrote.

“He would be providing important cover for climate deniers backed by Silver’s very respected brand,” he wrote. “But because of our work, he is not. I don’t think there is another site on the internet having this kind of impact on the climate debate.”

“Thanks for your support of this work. Looking forward to doing even more in the coming months,” Legum wrote to Steyer.

Update: Pielke told The Daily Caller News Foundation claims he threatened to sue his detractors was “a lie.” Reports that Pielke threatened legal action against two climate scientists came from The Huffington Post. Pielke says that’s false.

In fact, it was Legum who contacted 538 claiming Pielke had made legal threats against two scientists, according to HuffPo.

SOURCE




A skeptic fires back

Matt Ridley

RESPONSE TO BOB WARD'S LETTER, An attack that confirms the accuracy of my lecture

I have sent the following letter to the president of the Royal Society and the Chairman and director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in response to a highly misleading letter to me that was copied to them.

To Sir Venki Ramakrishnan FRS, Lord Lawson and Dr Benny Peiser

You have been sent a letter by Bob Ward of the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics complaining about what I said about Dr Ranga Myneni in my lecture at the Royal Sociey.

Dr Ranga Myneni has already responded to my lecture and does not make the same complaints about misrepresentation made by Mr Ward.

Dr Myneni does, however, in his response, make two entirely false accusations against me, saying that I go “on to ignore 30+ years of IPCC assessments!”, when in fact I discussed several such assessments and quoted verbatim from two, one in 1990 and one in 2014; and that I “argue that thousands and thousands of scientists are somehow in cahoots to push the global warming hoax on innocent people of the world …”, when I made no such argument and specifically detailed how my position was different from those who think global warming is a hoax.

Turning to Mr Ward’s own complaints, he correctly notes that I explained that I became aware of Dr Myneni’s work from a 2012 talk, but that I quote from one delivered in 2013. I may not have made this fact very clear in my spoken remarks, but everything I said was properly sourced (including on my slides) and correctly quoted, and in any case the use of the later talk is entirely appropriate since, as Mr Ward also notes, Dr Myneni’s estimates of the amount and attribution of greening changed between late 2012 and mid 2013. This is something I was well aware of, but the change in no way contradicts anything I said. Indeed, it reinforces it. The 2012 version of the talk was based on data suggesting a greening of 20.5% of the land, which Mr Ward quotes; while the equivalent slides in the 2013 version, one of which I reproduced, supports a greening of 30.87% of the land area, which was the estimate to which I referred.

Mr Ward’s letter specifically confirms the accuracy of my claim that at various times Dr Myneni said 31% of the land area has greened, the planet had greened by 14%, and that 70% of the greening can be attributed to carbon dioxide fertilization. Dr Myneni has not claimed he was misquoted on these points.

As I stated in my lecture, Dr Myneni stated in 2015 that “[Ridley] falsely claims that CO2 fertilisation is responsible for the greening of the earth”. Yet a few months later he himself published evidence that “CO2 fertilisation explains 70% of the greening trend”.

I used the word “might” in my suggestion that the publication of these results might have been delayed lest they give sceptics a field day, so there was no accusation, as Mr Ward claims. Dr Myneni says the delay was mainly due to the senior author on the paper returning to China. I remain doubtful that these data would have taken so long to publish if they had shown bad news.

As for Mr Ward’s complaint that I misrepresented Dr Richard Betts, he destroys his own case by quoting another part of the IPCC assessment report where greening is very briefly mentioned, and which I confess I missed because it was so brief and dismissive:

“Warming (and possibly the CO2 fertilisation effect) has also been correlated with global trends in satellite greenness observations, which resulted in an estimated 6% increase of global NPP, or the accumulation of 3.4 PgC on land over the period 1982–1999 (Nemani et al., 2003).”

Since published data (Donohue et al 2013) already pointed to a larger greening over a longer period, and my point was that the mentions of global greening were brief, doubtful and downplayed the effect, this extra quote beautifully illustrates my point. As I put it,

“If that’s a clear and prominent statement that carbon dioxide emissions have increased green vegetation on the planet by 14% and are significantly reducing the water requirements of agriculture, then I’m the Queen of Sheba.”

I will happily add this extra quotation to the written version of my lecture on line since it illustrates my point even better.

I stand by my lecture. Mr Ward is confirming the accuracy of my work while continuing to try to smear my name.

In my lecture I stated that “These days there is a legion of well paid climate spin doctors. Their job is to keep the debate binary: either you believe climate change is real and dangerous or you’re a denier who thinks it’s a hoax. But there’s a third possibility they refuse to acknowledge: that it’s real but not dangerous.”

SOURCE




The real reason a UN censor blacklisted Rebel reporters — and why we’re STILL going to Marrakech

EZRA LEVANT

As we reported earlier this week, a censor at the UN named Nick Nuttall has refused The Rebel's request for official media accreditation, so we can cover the climate summit in Marrakech, Morocco.

Three thousand other journalists have been approved, but we've been blacklisted.

WATCH as Nick Nuttall explains why -- not to us and our lawyers or Canada's professional journalist associations, all of whom have written him formal letters in protest.

No, Nuttall went on the CBC to make his case that The Rebel is a "one person" enterprise, and furthermore, we're "extremist."

Even the CBC host wasn't buying it!

I'll play you clips from his trainwreck interview, then talk to my guests Lorne Hunter and Sheila Gunn Reid about the UN's refusal to allow any dissent from its "global warming" talking points.



SOURCE





Journalists were assaulted, threatened and imprisoned in their  car by the "tolerant" and "peace loving" protesters at the Dakota Access Pipeline protest camp.

JOURNALISTS Phelim McAleer and Magdalena Segieda were subjected to a terrifying 30 minute ordeal after being attacked by Dakota Access Pipeline Protestors whilst conducting interviews at the Sacred Stone Camp.

It started with one protestor grabbing McAleer's microphone mid-question and physically assaulting him.

Others joined the attack forcing McAleer and his colleagues to flee to their car intending to leave the protest camp.

However the car quickly became surrounded by a mob with a pack of dogs and sticks who also used three vehicles to block in the journalists preventing them from leaving the camp.

The mob became increasingly violent ordering the journalists out of their car warning of the consequences of refusing to get out.

At one point protestors started to shake the car and punched the windows. They also stated they were going to destroy the film equipment and any footage gathered.

"It was a terrifying 30 minutes." McAleer.

"There is a lot of talk about love and peace at the camp but yesterday we got a look at the reality behind the talk and it was an ugly violent reality," he added.

Not being able to escape, the journalists feared for their lives and called the police.

The police deployed several police cars as well as air support and a SWAT team and only after their arrival did the protesters allow the journalist to drive out of the camp.

McAleer said the situation turned violent after he started asking difficult questions about how the protestors were against oil and pipelines but used oil based products (cars & plastic) in their campaign.

"This sends a chilling message to journalists covering the Dakota Access Pipeline story. The message is you can only ask softball questions if you ask difficult questions you will be met with violence and intimidation."

"My fellow journalists need to report this and call them out on this intimidation of journalists just trying to do their job."

Segieda said "We were just doing our job and met with incredible aggression. It was the scariest 30 minutes of my life. If the police didn't arrive I'm not sure if we would have make it out of there and certainly not with our footage".

McAleer, a veteran journalist who covered The Troubles in Northern Ireland said this was one of the most terrifying situations he's ever been in during his long career.

McAleer and Segieda will release footage shortly.

Via email

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