An amusing bit of Warmist "research"

Warmists regularly attribute any flood or any drought to global warming.  But you can't have it both ways.  Does global warming produce more or less precipitation? The scientific answer, of course, is that it would produce more rain, as warmer oceans evaporated off more.  So are we having more rain these days?  No. A recent paper which seems to have all the world's hydrologists as co-authors tells us that.  We did NOT have any increase in floods across the last 50 years.  Here is the abstract below.  I will resume my comments once you have had a look at it. The first sentence is all you need to know.  Another prophecy has failed!

Changing climate shifts timing of European floods

Günter Blöschl et al.

Abstract

A warming climate is expected to have an impact on the magnitude and timing of river floods; however, no consistent large-scale climate change signal in observed flood magnitudes has been identified so far. We analyzed the timing of river floods in Europe over the past five decades, using a pan-European database from 4262 observational hydrometric stations, and found clear patterns of change in flood timing. Warmer temperatures have led to earlier spring snowmelt floods throughout northeastern Europe; delayed winter storms associated with polar warming have led to later winter floods around the North Sea and some sectors of the Mediterranean coast; and earlier soil moisture maxima have led to earlier winter floods in western Europe. Our results highlight the existence of a clear climate signal in flood observations at the continental scale.

Science,  11 Aug 2017: Vol. 357, Issue 6351, pp. 588-590

As we know, however, Warmism cannot be allowed to die.  So the authors have made a last desperate attempt to save something from the wreckage of their theory.  They now say that global warming is making floods come SOONER.  Not a big comfort, one would think but beggars can't be choosers.  But is the claim right?  It is the product of some torturous statistics and there's many a slip between cup and lip in that sort of thing.  And it does not look good.  Climate bulldog Paul Homewood has pulled out the official British flood statistics and shows that there is no trend anywhere in Britain.  There are changes from year to year but they are random, not pointing in any particular direction.  If I believed in God I would think he had a sense of humor.  He certainly seems to enjoy upsetting Warmist applecarts.





You've got to read the small print

Did anybody doubt that the usual suspects would tie Hurricane Harvey to global warming?  They did.  At length.  Below is an excerpt from one such article.  The last 4 paragraphs are from the end of the article. They are an admission that Harvey CANNOT be tied to global warming.  Putting something at the very end of an article is the journalistic version of small print

As the Earth’s climate warms because of human burning of fossil fuels, scientists have seen tropical cyclones become more intense and predict they will continue doing so.

Since the 1980s when high-quality satellite observations became available, scientists have seen an increase in the “intensity, frequency, and duration” of Atlantic hurricanes, along with the number of Category 4 and 5 storms, according to the 2014 National Climate Assessment..........

What scientists can’t say for sure is whether hurricanes and tropical storms are happening more frequently.

Unlike some other extreme weather events like heat waves, blizzards and rainstorms, hurricanes are relatively rare. In Texas, two named storms make landfall every three years, on average, Nielsen-Gammon said. For Category 3 storms and above, the average rate is one per decade, he said.

That means there’s not enough data to say with certainty that the frequency of these storms is going up, Cook said.

“When you try to look at observations, it takes a long time to build up enough numbers of hurricanes so that you can say with statistical significance that you have observed an (increase),” she said, adding it might take another 20 years for a pattern to emerge.

SOURCE




Nothing like a bit of "building awareness"

Apparently it's the latest tricky way of saying "maybe". An interview below with Berkeley Obamabot Dan Kammen

AMY GOODMAN: So, if we can talk to you, you are the now resigned science envoy of the State Department, but if we can talk to you about what is happening right now in Texas. Tens of thousands of residents began evacuating coastal communities as forecasters predict that Hurricane Harvey could make landfall late Friday as a major category 3 storm, delivering a life-threatening 35 inches of rain to some parts of the Gulf Coast. Can you talk about this hurricane, what we are seeing, and whether you think it is related to climate change and global warming?

DAN KAMMEN: This is an area where the science is still building. We certainly have seen a number of climatologists — I’m a physicist who works on clean energy solutions. But, on the detection of climate change side, there is a building awareness of the degree to which climate change makes these types of tropical storms more severe, whether that’s more frequent or whether that’s stronger as an area that’s still under research, but it’s clear that events like this increased wildfires, droughts, these are all what we expect to see in a globally warmed climate changed world.

And from my perspective, these are all economic and human, agricultural, and environmental costs. And when we talk about not stepping up to the plate and acting based on a scientific knowledge to reduce our global warming footprint, to reduce the amount of pollution so that we can limit the effects of climate change, these are all huge economic cost for us, the rest of the planet, that we are paying, and we are paying them already. And that’s really the sad part of the story, to me.

SOURCE




EPA will no longer sponsor the annual climate leadership awards

The agency spokesperson said that it really shouldn't come as a surprise

It's no secret that Scott Pruitt is a climate change skeptic, and the Environmental Protection Agency has been undoing Obama-era policies ever since he took office. The agency's latest move follows that trend: the EPA has announced that it's no longer sponsoring the 2018 Climate Leadership Awards program, which recognizes companies that take steps to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and publicly report their progress. As a result, the awards program itself and the Climate Leadership Conference that usually goes with it have both been canceled for next year.

EPA spokesperson Jahan Wilcox apologized but didn't explain why the EPA withdrew its support. As he told Reuters in an email "It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that [the EPA doesn't] plan to fund an awards ceremony on climate change." To start with, the administration's proposed budget for 2018 will see its funding cut by 31 percent, which will specifically affect its climate change and pollution initiatives. Even without the budget cut, though, it's hard to imagine the EPA supporting a climate change award in its current state.

Earlier this year, the agency pulled down its climate science pages to reflect the views of the White House. The president also signed an executive order rolling back climate policies approved by the previous administration. And let's not forget that the United States withdrew from the Paris Accord, an agreement between 142 countries to make an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

While the awards program for 2018 was canceled, the EPA's former co-sponsors, non-government organizations C2ES and the Climate Registry, intend to continue the tradition. They're now looking for a new co-sponsor willing to fund and host the program in the future.

SOURCE





Obama EPA caught faking data to promote globalist scheme

Judicial Watch announced Wednesday it received documents from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that show the agency’s claim that the Obama administration’s 2015 Clean Power Plan would prevent thousands of premature deaths by 2030 was, at best, misleading.

The documents were produced in accordance with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed in June 2017 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the EPA failed to respond to a May 3, 2017 FOIA request (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (No. 1:17-cv-01217)). Judicial Watch requested:

"All internal emails or other records explaining, or requesting an explanation of, the EPA’s decision to claim that the Clean Power Plan would prevent between 2,700 to 6,600 premature deaths by 2030"

The documents forced out by Judicial Watch reveal that carbon dioxide reduction itself would not prevent any deaths. In a June 2, 2014, email from Bloomberg news reporter Mike Dorning to EPA officials Matt Lehrich and Thomas Reynolds, Dorning asks if particulate matter and ozone are the real concern:

"So far, what I have found on my own is Table 4-18 on page 4-36 of the Regulatory Impact Analysis report. And, am I reading the table correctly in concluding that all of those reductions come not from the impact on global warming or carbon emissions but entirely from anticipated reductions in emissions of fine particulate matter and ozone that you forecast will come from changes made to reach the carbon reduction goals?"

Neither Lehrich nor Reynolds answered Dorning’s question directly, however, Liz Purchia, an Obama-era communications staffer at the agency, characterized the premature-deaths figure as “co-benefits” of carbon reductions and revealed that none of the premature deaths would be prevented by CO2 emission reductions:

"This [premature-deaths figure] is a calculation based on the NOX, S02 and PM co-benefits."

It is the soot and ozone that the EPA estimates to cause the deaths, not the carbon dioxide. The Obama EPA sought to force industry to reduce carbon output, therefore, electricity producers would have no choice but to redesign factories in a way that also produces less fine particulate matter (soot) and ozone emissions into the atmosphere.

The EPA did not explain its theory of indirect, “co-benefits” in its press statement, nor did the EPA explain that it is possible to save just as many lives by passing a law requiring less soot and ozone emissions without also requiring a reduction in carbon output.

“Judicial Watch has caught the Obama EPA red handed issuing a series of half-truths and deliberately misleading information – pure propaganda – designed to deceive the American public into accepting its radical environmental agenda,” said Judicial Watch President, Tom Fitton. “The documents show the Obama EPA could not demonstrate that carbon dioxide reductions would in fact reduce the number of premature deaths. It is no surprise it took a federal lawsuit to uncover this Obama deceit. We appreciate that the Trump EPA did not drag this litigation out – we hope other Trump officials start finally paying attention to the FOIA law.”

The controversial Clean Power Plan was promoted as combating “anthropogenic climate change” and was designed to mandate the shifting of electricity generation away from coal-powered plants. On March 28, President Trump signed an executive order directing the EPA to begin the legal process of withdrawing and rewriting the Clean Power Plan, which would have closed hundreds of coal-fired power plants, halted construction of new plants, increased reliance on natural-gas-fired plants and shifted power generation to huge new wind and solar farms. On June 1, President Trump also announced the United States would cease participation in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation.

The EPA omitted the claim that the plan would reduce “2,700 to 6,600 premature deaths” in its final rule.

SOURCE

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