7 Ways Climate Change Is Impacting Your Life Right Now (Even If You Haven't Noticed Them)

Just the first part below of an intellectually impoverished article by  BECCA SCHUH, a materially impoverished artist.  Why are so many artists these days Leftist lamebrains?  Is it because most artists have to be lamebrains to do what they do?  Some pretty strange things pass as art these days

She references below the increasing frequency of hurricanes and storms but offers no statistics to back up her assertion that they are increasing.  Official statistics show that the frequency of hurricanes has  markedly DECLINED in recent years but what does that matter when you have got virtue on your side?

Typical Warmist crap.  I could fisk the rest of her article but that would be unkind to dumb animals


By this point, you probably know that climate change is a very real and persistent threat to our future quality of life — a 2016 Gallup poll found that 64 percent of Americans described themselves as "worried a great deal" or "fair amount" about global warming; it also found that 41 percent of us felt global warming will become a "serious threat" to our lives or way of life, and only 10 percent of Americans believing that the effects of global warming will never make an impact in our lives. Despite all this, it can be hard to connect the scientific facts, or the news from far regions of the world, to our daily lives — but as people with power continue to deny the impact of climate change (exemplified by the news that President-elect Trump has picked climate change skeptic Myron Ebell to lead his EPA transition team), being aware of the real impact of climate change has become more important than ever. And we don't have to wait to see what that impact is — with each passing month, climate change affects more things about how we operate, from the minutiae of daily living to our long-term plans.

1. Hurricanes Are Increasingly Severe

Recently, Hurricane Matthew joined the ranks of recent hurricanes like Sandy and Katrina that reached new highs of catastrophe. Destructive hurricanes are not a new phenomenon in the Southeastern United States, and no individual hurricane can be directly attributed to climate change, but the increasing frequency and severity of these storms is directly correlated to global warming — as temperatures rise from the surplus of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the ocean heats up, and warm tropical waters create more powerful hurricanes.

Scientists predict that global warming will also cause increased rainfall in the eye of hurricanes, which will increase flooding — which, in turn, creates some of the most drastic long term effects on daily life after a hurricane, from damaged roads to loss of property. For people who live in areas that are susceptible to hurricanes, this means a great deal of future planning for protecting assets and loved ones. However, Southern coastal states aren't the only ones that have to worry about the severe weather of climate change.

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Donald Trump expected to slash Nasa's climate change budget

US President-elect Donald Trump is set to slash Nasa's budget for monitoring climate change and instead set a goal of sending humans to the edge of the solar system by the end of the century, and possibly back to the moon.

Mr Trump, who has called climate change a "Chinese hoax", is believed to want to focus the agency on far-reaching, big banner goals in deep space rather than "Earth-centric climate change spending".

According to Bob Walker, who has advised Mr Trump on space policy, Nasa has been reduced to "a logistics agency concentrating on space station resupply and politically correct environmental monitoring".

Mr Walker, a former congressman who chaired President George W. Bush's Commission on the Future of the US Aerospace Industry, told The Telegraph: "We would start by having a stretch goal of exploring the entire solar system by the end of the century.

"You stretch your technology experts and create technologies that wouldn't otherwise be needed. I think aspirational goals are a good thing. Fifty years ago it was the ability to go to the moon."

This year Nasa's Earth Science Division received $1.92 billion in funding, up nearly 30 per cent from the previous year.

Its funding has gone up 50 per cent under President Barack Obama. At the same time Mr Obama proposed cutting support for deep space exploration by $840 million next year.

The money for earth sciences goes to projects like the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System, a constellation of eight satellites intended to monitor surface wind speed on the oceans.

Speaking hours after Mr Trump's election win Thomas Zurbuchen, Nasa's science administrator, defended the work. He said: “Nasa's work on Earth science is making a difference in people’s lives all around the world every day. Earth science helps save lives."

But Republicans have complained the agency that sent men to the moon should not be spending billions of dollars on "predicting the weather".

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An 850-Year hydroclimatic history of Northwestern China reveals no trend suggestive of a CO2 influence
 
Paper Reviewed: Gou, X., Gao, L., Deng, Y., Chen, F., Yang, M. and Still, C. 2015. An 850-year tree-ring-based reconstruction of drought history in the western Qilian Mountains of northwestern China. International Journal of Climatology 35: 3308-3319.

In explaining the rationale for their work, Gou et al. (2015) state that it is necessary to produce long-term drought reconstructions "for the purposes of accurately understanding current as well as predicting future hydroclimatic changes." This is because long-term records can provide historical context and shed critical light on important climate forcings, feedbacks and processes, as well as provide a means to test climate model projections that forecast changes due to anthropogenic increases in atmospheric CO2. Against this backdrop, and hoping to fill a regional data void, Gou et al. thus set out to reconstruct the hydroclimatic history of the western Qilian Mountains of northwestern China.

Their proxy record originated from juniper tree-ring cores, which after proper analysis and calibration, produced an 850-year (AD 1161-2010) reconstruction of drought (May-July self-calibrating Palmer Drought Severity Index). As shown in the figure below (and confirmed by spectral analysis), there are several interannual, inter-decadal and centennial cycles present in the record, but no trend in the data that would suggest an obvious recent influence from greenhouse gases. In contrast, however, the scientists report that three periods of mega-drought (AD 1260s-1340s, 1430s-1540s and 1640s-1740s) "corresponded to the Wolf, Spörer and Maunder solar activity minimum periods," while adding that "results of the multi-tape method analysis and wavelet analysis further confirmed the relationship between hydroclimate variability and solar activity forcing."

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Global Warming: Policy Hoax versus Dodgy Science

by Dr. Roy W. Spencer

In the early 1990s I was visiting the White House Science Advisor, Sir Prof. Dr. Robert Watson, who was pontificating on how we had successfully regulated Freon to solve the ozone depletion problem, and now the next goal was to regulate carbon dioxide, which at that time was believed to be the sole cause of global warming.

I was a little amazed at this cart-before-the-horse approach. It really seemed to me that the policy goal was being set in stone, and now the newly-formed United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had the rather shady task of generating the science that would support the policy.

Now, 25 years later, public concern over global warming (aka climate change) is at an all-time low remains at the bottom of the list of environmental concerns.

Why is that? Maybe because people don’t see its effects in their daily lives.

1) By all objective measures, severe weather hasn’t gotten worse.

2) Warming has been occurring at only half the rate that climate models and the IPCC say it should be.

3) CO2 is necessary for life on Earth. It has taken humanity 100 years of fossil fuel use to increase the atmospheric CO2 content from 3 parts to 4 parts per 10,000. (Please don’t compare our CO2 problem to Venus, which has 230,000 times as much CO2 as our atmosphere).

4) The extra CO2 is now being credited with causing global greening.

5) Despite handwringing over the agricultural impacts of climate change, current yields of corn, soybeans, and wheat are at record highs.

As an example of the disconnect between reality and the climate models which are being relied upon to guide energy policy, here are the yearly growing season average temperatures in the U.S 12-state corn belt (official NOAA data), compared to the average of the climate model projections used by the IPCC:



Yes, there has been some recent warming. But so what? What is its cause? Is it unusual compared to previous centuries? Is it necessarily a bad thing? And, most important from a policy perspective, What can we do about it anyway?

The Policy Hoax of Global Warming

Rush Limbaugh and I have had a good-natured mini-disagreement over his characterization of global warming as a “hoax”. President-elect Trump has also used the “hoax” term.

I would like to offer my perspective on the ways in which global warming is indeed a “hoax”, but also a legitimate subject of scientific study.

While it might sound cynical, global warming has been used politically in order for governments to gain control over the private sector. Bob Watson’s view was just one indication of this. As a former government employee, I can attest to the continuing angst civil servants have over remaining relevant to the taxpayers who pay their salaries, so there is a continuing desire to increase the role of government in our daily lives.

In 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was given a legitimate mandate to clean up our air and water. I remember the pollution crises we were experiencing in the 1960s. But as those problems were solved, the EPA found itself in the precarious position of possibly outliving its usefulness.

So, the EPA embarked on a mission of ever-increasing levels of regulation. Any manmade substance that had any evidence of being harmful in large concentrations was a target for regulation. I was at a Carolina Air Pollution Control Association (CAPCA) meeting years ago where an EPA employee stated to the group that “we must never stop making the environment cleaner” (or something to that effect).

There were gasps from the audience.

You see, there is a legitimate role of the EPA to regulate clearly dangerous or harmful levels of manmade pollutants.

But it is not physically possible to make our environment 100% clean.

As we try to make the environment ever cleaner, the cost goes up dramatically. You can make your house 90% cleaner relatively easily, but making it 99% cleaner will take much more effort.

As any economist will tell you, money you spend on one thing is not available for other things, like health care. So, the risk of over-regulating pollution is that you end up killing more people than you save, because if there is one thing we know kills millions of people every year, it is poverty.

Global warming has become a reason for government to institute policies, whether they be a carbon tax or whatever, using a regulatory mechanism which the public would never agree to if they knew (1) how much it will cost them in reduced prosperity, and (2) how little effect it will have on the climate system.

So, the policy prescription does indeed become a hoax, because the public is being misled into believing that their actions are going to somehow make the climate “better”.

Even using the IPCC’s (and thus the EPA’s) numbers, there is nothing we can do energy policy-wise that will have any measurable effect on global temperatures.

In this regard, politicians using global warming as a policy tool to solve a perceived problem is indeed a hoax. The energy needs of humanity are so large that Bjorn Lomborg has estimated that in the coming decades it is unlikely that more than about 20% of those needs can be met with renewable energy sources.

Whether you like it or not, we are stuck with fossil fuels as our primary energy source for decades to come. Deal with it. And to the extent that we eventually need more renewables, let the private sector figure it out. Energy companies are in the business of providing energy, and they really do not care where that energy comes from.

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Australia's Senator Roberts was right about "adjusted" temperature data in Greenland

Shifty Peter, official Greenie writer for the Fairfax press, has written below that Senator Roberts got it wrong in claiming that NASA/GISS concealed high temperatures in Iceland during the late 30's and early 40s.

But what is the proof Roberts got it wrong?  There is none.  All that has happened is that the head of NASA/GISS has asserted that the adjustments were reasonable and reflrected reality.  But he would say that, wouldn't he?  Is he going to admit to being a fraud? Given the chronic mendacity of the Green/Left, his word means nothing.

But the NASA head is given some support from the head of historic Icelandic meteorolgy, Trausti Jónsson.

Problem: A few years ago the same Trausti Jónsson energetically condemned the NASA/GISS adjustments.  Given the pressures put on climate scientists by the Warmist establishment, it seems clear that Trausti Jónsson has now been bullied into supporting the NASA/GISS fraud.

Additionally, news reports from the late '30s reported ferocious heating in the Arctic.  No wonder Warmists "adjusted" it to non-existence.



All of which tends to show that Senator Roberts was right and we are up against crooked scientists when we deal with Warmists


A senior NASA official has taken the extraordinary step of personally rejecting the claims of One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts that the agency had falsified key data to exaggerate warming in the Arctic.

Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told Senator Roberts he was "mistaken" in his assertion that the US agency had "removed" Arctic data to mask warming in the 1940s.

"You appear to hold a number of misconceptions which I am happy to clarify at this time," Dr Schmidt told Senator Roberts in letters and emails obtained by Fairfax Media. "The claim that GISS has 'removed the 1940s warmth' in the Arctic is not correct."

In his letter to NASA dated November 14, Senator Roberts explained his interest in the agency's temperature calculations, saying they had "influenced" the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's warnings on global warming that in turn had informed Australian government policy.

Iceland weighs in

"In Australia, we have considerable concern about temperature adjustments made by NASA over many years," Senator Roberts wrote, including charts from Icelandic stations at Vestmannaeyjar and Teigarhorn.

"In dropping the temperatures for the early period, the [Arctic] warmth for the 1930s and 1940s appears to have been removed," he said. "What is your specific reason for doing this?"

In an email, Truasti Jonsoon, senior meteorologist with a specialty in historical climatology at the Icelandic Meteorological Office, told Senator Roberts that the temperature "adjustments" are "quite sound".

"During this early period there was a large daytime bias in the temperature data from Iceland as presented in this publication," which accounted for much of the "discrepancy" at Teigarhorn and less so at Vestmannaeyjar, Mr Jonsoon said.

For the latter station, it was relocated in October 1921 to a higher elevation. "Comparative measurements at both sites have shown that the later location is about 0.7 degrees Celsius colder than the former – this relocation has to be 'adjusted' for," he said.

"I assure you that these adjustments are absolutely necessary and well founded although the finer details of the resulting series shown in your letter differ slightly from my own version," he told Senator Roberts.

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