More "corrections"

Warmists never stop "correcting" the raw temperature record.  Such corrections may be justifiable in theory but it is curious that all the corrections tend towards showing more warming.  And, with old diehard warmists like Kevin Trenberth and John Abraham involved, it is no surprise the way the corrections went in the study below.

Whether or not the corrections were done in a biased manner, however, it hardly matters.  The temperature changes they document on this occasion are given in THOUSANDTHS of one degree Celsius.  Everything they record is therefore mind-numbingly minute, trivial and of no importance for anything


Improved estimates of ocean heat content from 1960 to 2015

Lijing Cheng, Kevin E. Trenberth, John Fasullo, Tim Boyer, John Abraham and Jiang Zhu

Abstract

Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI) drives the ongoing global warming and can best be assessed across the historical record (that is, since 1960) from ocean heat content (OHC) changes. An accurate assessment of OHC is a challenge, mainly because of insufficient and irregular data coverage. We provide updated OHC estimates with the goal of minimizing associated sampling error. We performed a subsample test, in which subsets of data during the data-rich Argo era are colocated with locations of earlier ocean observations, to quantify this error. Our results provide a new OHC estimate with an unbiased mean sampling error and with variability on decadal and multidecadal time scales (signal) that can be reliably distinguished from sampling error (noise) with signal-to-noise ratios higher than 3. The inferred integrated EEI is greater than that reported in previous assessments and is consistent with a reconstruction of the radiative imbalance at the top of atmosphere starting in 1985. We found that changes in OHC are relatively small before about 1980; since then, OHC has increased fairly steadily and, since 1990, has increasingly involved deeper layers of the ocean. In addition, OHC changes in six major oceans are reliable on decadal time scales. All ocean basins examined have experienced significant warming since 1998, with the greatest warming in the southern oceans, the tropical/subtropical Pacific Ocean, and the tropical/subtropical Atlantic Ocean. This new look at OHC and EEI changes over time provides greater confidence than previously possible, and the data sets produced are a valuable resource for further study.
Keywords

Science Advances  10 Mar 2017: Vol. 3, no. 3, e1601545. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1601545





The dream has died. "Green" South Australia returns to "fossil fuels"

Natural gas is a "fossil fuel" (a hydroCARBON)

THE South Australian government has unveiled ambitious new plans to build a gas power station and battery storage facility to try and fix its power problems.

Premier Jay Weatherill announced the $550 million six-point plan during a press conference this morning.

He said the events of February 8 were a powerful indication of a broken national electricity market.

“On that occasion, we had a private national electricity market that chose to black-out South Australians rather than turn on a power station,” Mr Weatherill said. “This is a totally unacceptable state of affairs.”

Mr Weatherill’s plan involves the state government building Australia’s largest battery facility to store renewable energy and a new 250 megawatt gas-fired power plant.

According to The Advertiser, the new power plant is expected to cost $360 million and would deliver close to 10 per cent of the state’s peak demand.

Mr Weatherill said the government would own the plant but it had not just established who would run and maintain it.

The battery storage would be funded as part of a new $150 million renewable technology fund.

The government would also encourage the construction of a new privately-owned power station using a government bulk buy power contract.

Other elements of the strategy include legislation to give the Energy Minister direct power to intervene in the electricity market and force power stations to fire up in times of need.

The government will also set an “energy security target” to force electricity retailers to buy 36 per cent of their power from locally-generated baseload sources in SA.

Mr Weatherill said he wanted to put South Australian gas ahead of Victorian coal, and to ensure South Australian power was reserved for South Australians.

“We have expert advice that this will reduce the price of electricity when competitive pressures are returned to the market, which this plans to achieve,” he said.

Mr Weatherill said he couldn’t guarantee that South Australia would never be blacked out again but expert advice said the plan would help reduce the risk.

“I can’t guarantee what happens with the weather. If a tree falls on a power line it will black-out a suburb. I can’t guarantee that won’t happen,” he said.

“Without this, we are at risk of increased blackouts and load shedding. That is why this plan is essential.”

When asked whether it would have been cheaper to pay the Port Augusta coal-fired power station to fire up, Mr Weatherill said it didn’t offer what the state needed.

“What we have here is an ageing coal-fired power station that couldn’t guarantee its capacity to gain the fuel necessary at an economic price to secure its future,” he said. “That is the past. We are talking about the future.”

Mr Weatherill said he hadn’t told Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull yet about the state’s plan but hoped to do so soon.

He said that the government-owned gas power plant would be there provide for peak demand and emergency responses.

“In the long term it also sits there as an investment in new generation capacity here in SA,” he said.

“The private sector is not building new generation. That is why government is stepping up and taking control of our energy future by investing in new generation.”

SOURCE




US shale surge overwhelms oil market as Opec splits deepen

Another blow to the "shortages" that Greenies predict

Oil prices have plunged to the lowest level this year as US shale producers boost output at an astonishing pace and crude inventories keep rising, triggering a wave of selling by hedge funds with record speculative positions.

The US surge threatens to neutralise cuts agreed by the Opec cartel and a Russia-led group of producers last November, potentially delaying a full recovery of the market until 2018 or even later.

Texas light crude fell to  $48.90 a barrel on Thursday after yet another surprise jump in US stocks. Prices have slid 8pc in three days and have broken through key levels of technical support, dousing enthusiasm for commodities across the board.

America's shale frackers have slashed cost so far that they can now produce large volumes at a break-even price of $35 or lower in the prolific Permian Basin, the twelve-layered 'crown jewel' of West Texas.

SOURCE




Pruitt's Right: The Science Isn't Settled

New EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is being lampooned for downplaying the extent of carbon dioxide’s alleged effects on the climate. According to Pruitt, “I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that [CO2 is] a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.” You can imagine the uproar that ensued.

Critics responded with a slew of scientific "information" on the greenhouse gas effect and how scientists collectively agree that human-induced fossil fuels are most assuredly to blame for our warming climate. On the EPA’s own website it stipulates that “the primary human activity affecting the amount and rate of climate change is greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.” And Forbes’s Alex Knapp says, “We can get one thing clear — climate change is complicated,” but he goes on to confidently argue “the amount of carbon dioxide being emitted every year by humans is … happening faster than nature can take care of it.”

This ridicule, of course, is an effort to smear Pruitt and portray him as an anti-science rube. But pay close attention to what Pruitt also said in the same interview: “But we don’t know that yet. We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.” What he’s trying to say is that the climate debate is not etched in stone, which is what the ecofascist lobby so desperately asserts. Yes, we know that the greenhouse effect is real, but scientists are gravely mistaken if they think they’ve discovered all there is to know about how the climate operates. (For example, how consequential is water vapor, a much more potent GHG?) The same ones who told us that the California and Texas droughts were permanent and that the Arctic sea ice would be gone by now want to lecture us on “what the science says.” Pruitt has a different approach: Let’s see what the facts say, which takes time. And that’s exactly why he’s the right man to lead the EPA.

SOURCE




Richard Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT, recently retired.

Professor Lindzen recently wrote a letter to President Donald Trump explaining, briefly and cogently, why he and many other scientists are skeptical of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory–which, despite tens of billions of dollars in government subsidies, has failed to generate significant empirical support. The letter was reproduced by the Science and Environmental Policy Project. It has the virtue of being easily read and understood:

For far too long, one body of men, establishment climate scientists, has been permitted to be judges and parties on what the “risks to the Earth system associated with increasing levels of carbon dioxide” really are.

Let me explain in somewhat greater detail why we call for withdrawal from the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change].

The UNFCCC was established twenty-five years ago, to find scientific support for dangers from increasing carbon dioxide. While this has led to generous and rapidly increased support for the field, the purported dangers remain hypothetical, model-based projections. By contrast, the benefits of increasing CO2 and modest warming are clearer than ever, and they are supported by dramatic satellite images of a greening Earth.

 *  The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) no longer claims a greater likelihood of significant as opposed to negligible future warming,

 *  It has long been acknowledged by the IPCC that climate change prior to the 1960’s could not have been due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Yet, pre-1960 instrumentally observed temperatures show many warming episodes, similar to the one since 1960, for example, from 1915 to 1950, and from 1850 to 1890. None of these could have been caused by an increase in atmospheric CO2,

 *  Model projections of warming during recent decades have greatly exceeded what has been observed,

 *  The modelling community has openly acknowledged that the ability of existing models to simulate past climates is due to numerous arbitrary tuning adjustments,

 *  Observations show no statistically valid trends in flooding or drought, and no meaningful acceleration whatsoever of pre-existing long term sea level rise (about 6 inches per century) worldwide,

 *  Current carbon dioxide levels, around 400 parts per million are still very small compared to the averages over geological history, when thousands of parts per million prevailed, and when life flourished on land and in the oceans.

Calls to limit carbon dioxide emissions are even less persuasive today than 25 years ago. Future research should focus on dispassionate, high-quality climate science, not on efforts to prop up an increasingly frayed narrative of “carbon pollution.” Until scientific research is unfettered from the constraints of the policy-driven UNFCCC, the research community will fail in its obligation to the public that pays the bills.

SOURCE

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