The "adjustments" to the temperature record never cease

And they are ALWAYS in the direction of showing more warming, funnily enough

The fact that the global temperature record was showing a "hiatus" (was not showing any rise) was first pointed out some years ago by the late Bob Carter.  Scorn and contempt was heaped on him for his pains.  Warmists said it was just a "blip".  Not unreasonably, they pointed to previous hiatuses -- such as the long hiatus of 1945 to 1975 (30 years!) -- and noted that temperature rises re-started after that.

A 30 year temperature hiatus while CO2 levels were rising strongly did not seem to embarrass them, despite it being totally contrary to their theory.  They just explained it away as due to "special" factors.

But as the current hiatus got longer and skeptics got increasingly irritating about it, they had to do something.  And in the best Green/Left tradition, their first response was to lie.  They started to declare that various years were warmest, warmer etc.  We got such declarations annually.  The fact of the matter is that the fluctuations in the 21st century were tiny,  differences in hundredths of one degree only -- so were statistically non-significant and hence non-existent from a scientific point of view.  But who cares about science when an ideology is at risk?

Riding differences so tiny must have got irritating however, at least to the scientists among Warmists.  They knew about statistical significance so ignoring it was undoubtedly embarrassing.

Then Tom Karl of NOAA rode to the rescue.  He made large "corrections" to the ocean temperature record and thus erased the hiatus.  That attracted such a lot of criticism, including Congressional criticism,  that even the Warmist establishment in the Fyfe paper eventually disowned it and reaffirmed that there was a 21st century temperature slowdown, which they again explained as due to "special" factors.

The next attack on the hiatus was by  crowing about the unusually large temperature rise in 2015.  It actually amounted to 13 hundredths of one degree.  Exciting! That it was just the expected effect of the El Nino weather phenomenon was pooh-poohed.  But it was ENTIRELY due to El Nino and other natural causes because CO2 levels did not rise in 2015

All the fun so far had been with the surface temperature record, always a slender reed to lean on.  In the background was the pesky satellite record showing no warming trend at all.

So to the 2016 erasure attempt: by Carl Mears, proprietor of RSS, one of the satellite records.  As he himself admits, he has been mightily irritated by people accusing his temperature record of supporting the climate skeptics.  He has in fact been expressing irritation with that for quite some years.  He has declared several times that he still supports Warmism despite what his own data show.

So he finally devised a solution to his embarrassment.  He "adjusted" his data.  He said his old data had errors in it and he has now corrected the errors, to show some warming  -- a warming of 18 hundredths of one degree over nearly 20 years, no less!  One hundredth of a degree per annum! If there had been errors in it, one wonders why he rode with the "erroneous" data for so long but let that be by the by.

And the explanation he gives for his adjustments is reasonable in principle, but, as always, the devil is in the details.  And the details do contain devilry, as Roy Spencer has pointed out.  Carl's adjustments were so bad in fact that the paper in which he described them was rejected as unpublishable by a major climate journal, eventually being accepted by a meteorological one.

But I think that everyone can see that Mears had not done much to further his cause by talking of only a one degree rise over the next century so he has now done another adjustment. Roy Spencer in fact predicted that Mears (under pressure from the climate mafia) would corrupt his TLT data to bring it in line with the global warming prophecy. Viscount Monckton also predicted it. As Steve Goddard notes, climate is impossible to forecast, but climate fraud is extremely predictable.

So we now have news headlines saying "Major correction to satellite data shows 140% faster warming since 1998". I reproduce the journal abstract below.  It's not for me to dissect it.  The experts will do that.  I simply note that what they have produced is not data.  Data is what you feed in.  And the data they feed in shows no systematic rise.  What they report is an opinion about the data:


A satellite-derived lower tropospheric atmospheric temperature dataset using an optimized adjustment for diurnal effects

Carl A. Mears and Frank J. Wentz

Abstract

Temperature sounding microwave radiometers flown on polar-orbiting weather satellites provide a long-term, global-scale record of upper-atmosphere temperatures, beginning in late 1978 and continuing to the present. The focus of this paper is a lower-tropospheric temperature product constructed using measurements made by the Microwave Sounding Unit channel 2, and the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit channel 5. The temperature weighting functions for these channels peak in the mid to upper troposphere. By using a weighted average of measurements made at different Earth incidence angles, the effective weighting function can be lowered so that it peaks in the lower troposphere. Previous versions of this dataset used general circulation model output to remove the effects of drifting local measurement time on the measured temperatures. In this paper, we present a method to optimize these adjustments using information from the satellite measurements themselves. The new method finds a global-mean land diurnal cycle that peaks later in the afternoon, leading to improved agreement between measurements made by co-orbiting satellites. The changes result in global-scale warming (global trend (70S-80N, 1979-2016) = 0.174 C/decade), ~30% larger than our previous version of the dataset (global trend, (70S-80N, 1979-2016) = 0.134C/decade). This change is primarily due to the changes in the adjustment for drifting local measurement time. The new dataset shows more warming than most similar datasets constructed from satellites or radiosonde data. However, comparisons with total column water vapor over the oceans suggest that the new dataset may not show enough warming in the tropics.

SOURCE





Schwarzenegger and Macron Unite In Paris to ‘Save The Planet,’ Take Selfie

Visiting Paris for an environmental meeting last week, former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made a brief selfie video with French President Emmanuel Macron, who in an indirect dig at President Trump spoke about a push to “make the planet great again.”

“I’m here with President Macron,” the former governor and Hollywood actor said in the clip filmed at the Elysees Palace. “We’re talking about environmental issues and a green future.”

Then he moved the phone onto Macron, who added, “And now we will deliver together, to make the planet great again.”

Early this month Trump, known for the campaign slogan “Make America great again,” announced the U.S. was withdrawing from the Paris climate change agreement. The move drew criticism from Macron and Schwarzenegger during and after their talks in the French capital.

“Everyone has to come together and it is absolutely imperative that we do not make it a political issue,” Schwarzenegger told reporters at the Elysees Palace, in reference to clean energy and combating climate change.

Schwarzenegger hailed Macron as “a formidable leader” for France “and for the world,” especially on environmental issues.

“I was truly honored to meet with President Emmanuel Macron about how we can work together for a clean energy future,” he tweeted afterwards. “He's a great leader.”

In response, Macron posted, “The let’s #MakeOurPlanetGreatAgain project takes form. Glad to work on it with Schwarzenegger.”

Macron told the American that he will stop granting oil and gas licenses, in a bid to safeguard the environment.

Schwarzenegger attended a meeting at the Sorbonne University which drew around 800 politicians, lawyers and experts from around the world.

The participants officially launched the “Global Pact for the environment,” a project which Macron said he hopes will become a major international treaty affirming environmental norms, such as the “polluter pays” principle.

Macron said the pact should be presented to the United Nations as early as this September, hoping it would underpin the Paris accord.

That agreement, signed at a U.N. megaconference in December 2015, has since been ratified by 150 members. Its aim is to prevent average global temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, through carbon emission reduction and other measures.

Schwarzenegger is an ardent environmentalist, and in 2010 launched a non-profit organization called R20 - Regions of Climate Action, with the support of the U.N.

Months before the Paris conference, he took part in a gathering of religious and cultural leaders in France to discuss climate change “from a spiritual perspective.”

“I’ve starred of course in a lot of science-fiction movies as you know, and let me tell you something, climate change is not science-fiction,” he told that meeting. “This is bigger than any movie. This is the challenge of our time.”

Despite his advice at the Elysees Palace about not making climate change “a political issue,” Schwarzenegger posted a video earlier this month in which he directly attacked Trump over the Paris accord decision.

“One man cannot destroy our progress. One man cannot stop our energy revolution,” he said.

“One man can’t go back in time,” Schwarzenegger continued, then added, “Only I can do that” – a reference to his role in the blockbuster movie Terminator.

He went on to inform Trump that “as a public servant, especially as a president, your first and most important responsibility is to protect the people,” before going on to talk about air and river pollution, cancer and emphysema.

SOURCE




EPA Rolling Back Obama's 'Clean Water Act'

On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency began acting on Donald Trump’s campaign promise to repeal the 2015 “Waters of the United States” regulation. The controversial and onerous regulation created by Barack Obama’s EPA commissars essentially stretched the definition of “water way” to encompass almost any and every source of surface water, no matter how small. The draconian regulation enacted one of the largest governmental power grabs in the nation’s history, severely infringing the private property rights of Americans all across the country.

The first step in what the EPA says will be a two-step processes will be a rollback of the Obama regulations and a return to 2008 standards. The second step will be to create new waterway regulations designed to preserve the property rights of Americans, as well as protect business interests and the environment. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt stated, “We are taking significant action to return power to the states and provide regulatory certainty to our nation’s farmers and businesses.” He continued, “This is the first step in the two-step process to redefine ‘waters of the U.S.’ and we are committed to moving through this re-evaluation to quickly provide regulatory certainty, in a way that is thoughtful, transparent and collaborative with other agencies and the public.”

Predictably, ecofascist groups shouted their outrage at the EPA’s announcement, suggesting that Trump was primarily interested in promoting business at the expense of the environment. “It goes without saying that the Trump administration doesn’t care about the environment, public health, or its duty to protect our most precious natural resources — and that is why it’s up to us, the American people, to hold them accountable,” pontificated Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune. “We will fight this and every other attempt by polluters and the Trump administration to destroy our water resources.”

Supporters, however, praised the news. Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) said, “Today marks the beginning of restoring private property rights while protecting our environment. Out-of-state DC bureaucrats shouldn’t impose regulations that hurt Montana farmers, ranchers and landowners.” The EPA plans to publish the new regulation proposals within days. Finally, a government agency is concerned primarily about preserving Americans’ rights, not simply engaging in its own acquisition of power.

SOURCE




Nearly doomed by too little CO2

During the last ice age, too little atmospheric carbon dioxide almost eradicated mankind

Dennis T. Avery (Agricultural and environmental economist )

Aside from protests by Al Gore, Leonardo Di Caprio and friends, the public didn’t seem to raise its CO2 anguish much above the Russians-election frenzy when Trump exited the Paris Climate Accords.

Statistician Bjorn Lomborg had already pointed out that the Paris CO2 emission promises would cost $100 trillion dollars that no one has, and make only a 0.05 degree difference in Earth’s 2100 AD temperature. Others say perhaps a 0.2 degree C (0.3 degrees F) difference, and even that would hold only in the highly unlikely event that all parties actually kept their voluntary pledges.

What few realize, however, is that during the last Ice Age too little CO2 in the air almost eradicated mankind. That’s when much-colder water in oceans (that were 400 feet shallower than today) sucked most of the carbon dioxide from the air; half of North America, Europe and Asia were buried under mile-high glaciers that obliterated everything in their paths; and bitterly cold temperatures further retarded plant growth.

In fact, Earth’s atmosphere had only about 180 parts per million CO2, compared to today’s 400 ppm: 0.018% then versus 0.040% today.

The Ice Age’s combined horrors – intense cold, permanent drought and CO2 starvation – killed most of the plants on Earth. Only a few trees survived, in the mildest climates. Much of the planet’s grass turned to tundra, which is much less nourishing to the herbivores prehistoric humans depended on for food and fur. Recent Cambridge University studies conclude that only about 100,000 humans were left alive worldwide when the current interglacial warming mercifully began.

The few surviving prey animals had to keep migrating to get enough food. That forced our ancestors to migrate with them, in temperatures that routinely fell to 40 degrees below zero (both Fahrenheit and Celsius). The Neanderthals had been living in relatively warm caves protected from predators by fires at the cave mouths. They had hunted their prey by sneaking through the trees – which no longer existed. They apparently couldn’t adapt, and starved. Cambridge found no evidence of genocidal warfare.

The most successful human survivors – who provided most of the DNA for modern Europeans – were nomads from the Black Sea region. The Gravettians had never had trees, so they invented mammoth-skin tents, held up by salvaged mammoth ribs. They also developed spear-throwers, to kill the huge beasts from a safe distance.

Equally important, Gravettians domesticated and bred wolves, to protect their tents from marauders, locate game animals on the broad tundra, and harry the prey into defensive clusters for easier killing. The scarcity of food in that Glacial Maximum intensified the dogs’ appreciation for the bones and bone marrow at the human camps.

When that Ice Age ended, moreover, CO2 changes didn’t lead the warming. The atmospheric CO2 only began to recover about 800 years after the warming started.

Carbon dioxide truly is “the gas of life.” The plants that feed us and wildlife can’t live without inhaling CO2, and then they exhale the oxygen that lets humans and animals keep breathing.

Our crop plants evolved about 400 million years ago, when CO2 in the atmosphere was about 5000 parts per million! Our evergreen trees and shrubs evolved about 360 million years ago, with CO2 levels at about 4,000 ppm. When our deciduous trees evolved about 160 million years ago, the CO2 level was about 2,200 ppm – still five times the current level.

There’s little danger to humans of too much CO2 in the air they breathe. Even the Environmental Protection Agency says 1000 ppm is the safe limit for lifetime human exposure. Space shuttle CO2 alarms are set at 5,000 ppm, and the alarm in nuclear submarines is set at 8,000 ppm!

If there’s little danger of humans having too much CO2 in their air, and a real danger to civilization from having too little, what’s the ideal level of atmospheric CO2? The answer? There’s a broad safe range – with far more risk of too little than too much. At low levels, with few or no plants, there’d be no people or animals, let alone civilization.

Human numbers, moreover, expanded strongly during the Holocene Optimum, with temperatures 4 degrees C higher than today!  Even now, residents of the tropics keep demonstrating that humans can tolerate much higher temperatures than most of us experience. (As we utilize the new malaria vaccine, the tropics will prosper even more.) And far more people die from “too cold” than from “too warm.”

The crops continue to produce record yields in our “unprecedented” warming – and the extra CO2 in our air is credited with as much as 15% of that yield gain!

It’s not whether more CO2 in the air raises Earth’s temperatures. We know it does, by some small but still hotly debated amount. Both sides agree that a redoubling of CO2 in the air – by itself – would raise earth’s temperature by only about 1 degree C.

That’s hardly noticeable or measurable in the midst of all the local temperature variations, with the myriad of natural forces that govern planetary climate, with all the discrepancies among the various measuring systems, and amid all the errors, biases and missing or revised data that have crept in.

Moreover, 1 degree C of warming was obviously not enough to frighten the public.

So, the computerized models cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made another assumption: that a hotter world would hold more moisture in its atmosphere. Since water vapor is the most effective greenhouse gas, the climate modelers claimed Earth might heat by 5 or even 10 degrees C. One scientist (who supposedly advises Pope Francis) recently claimed 12 degrees C (21 degrees F) of overheating!

The awkward truth, however, is that NASA has monitored moisture in the atmosphere since 1980 – and water vapor has not increased despite the higher levels of CO2 in the air. Is that why the IPCC models have predicted more than twice as much warming as we’ve actually seen?

The year 1936 recorded the hottest thermometer readings of any year in the last 5,000. However, these days NOAA reports only its “adjusted” temperatures, which always seem to go only higher. In fact, the first surge of human-emitted carbon dioxide after World War II should have produced the biggest surge of warming – if CO2 is the control factor. Instead temperatures went down from 1940 to 1975.

Why did the computer models fail to predict (or even factor in) either the Pacific Oscillation’s current 20-year non-warming or the coming solar sunspot minimum?

Only one model has verified itself by back-casting the temperatures and weather we’ve had over the past century. That model is from Nicola Scafetta at Duke University, and it’s based on solar, lunar and planetary cycles. The latest data from the CERN particle physics lab have also produced a model based on cycling – and it foresees no runaway warming. Instead, it sees an impending cold solar minimum.

Is the long, wrong-headed war against carbon dioxide finally fading? Science certainly says it should. But perhaps there is still too much money, prestige and power in climate alarmism for that to happen.

Via email




President Donald Trump is at his best when he's pushing for American greatness. Thursday, it was on energy policy

While the Leftmedia was distracted by his Twitter account, Trump was making a big speech announcing big energy initiatives. "My administration will seek not only American energy independence that we've been looking for so long," he promised, "but American energy dominance." How? With a six-pronged approach.

Trump listed the steps: "First, we will begin to revive and expand our nuclear energy sector. ... Second, the Department of the Treasury will address barriers to the financing of highly efficient, overseas coal energy plants. ... Third, my administration has just approved the construction of a new petroleum pipeline to Mexico. ... Fourth, just today, a major U.S. company, Sempra Energy, signed an agreement to begin negotiations for the sale of more American natural gas to South Korea. ... Fifth, the United States Department of Energy is announcing today that it will approve two long-term applications to export additional natural gas from the Lake Charles [liquefied natural gas] terminal in Louisiana. ... Finally, in order to unlock more energy from the 94% of offshore [area] closed to development ... we're creating a new offshore oil and gas leasing program."

After eight years of obstruction and regulation of energy production, these changes are welcome indeed. It's not that solar and wind energy aren't worth pursuing, but they haven't lived up to the hype and shouldn't be chased to the exclusion of proven energy sources. And Trump's attitude is especially welcome: "This vast energy wealth does not belong to the government," he said. "It belongs to the people of the United States of America."

Now there's something you'd never hear from the previous "You Didn't Build That" administration.

Earlier this week, Trump's EPA rolled back Obama's clean water power grab. At the beginning of June, he withdrew from the Paris climate accords. And in March, he approved the long-obstructed Keystone pipeline. America is already experiencing an oil boom, and Trump's market-driven energy policies are only going to expand it.

SOURCE

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