Green Tyranny

John Stossel

Environmental activists and politicians would like you to think that we must love their regulations -- or hate trees and animals.

I love trees and animals. But you can love nature and still hate the tyranny that environmental regulations bring.

The Environmental Protection Agency just announced it will boost gas prices ("only" a penny, although industry says 6 to 9 cents) to make another minuscule improvement to air quality.

In New York City, my mayor wants to ban Styrofoam cups, saying, "I think it's something we can do without."

Congress already dictates the design of our cars, toilets and light bulbs.

Originally, environmental rules were a good thing. I love the free market, but it doesn't offer a practical remedy to pollution. I could sue polluters for violating my property rights, but under our legal system, that's not even close to practical.

So in the '70s, government passed rules that demanded we stop polluting the air and water. Industry put scrubbers in smokestacks. Towns installed sewage treatment. Now the air is quite clean, and I can swim in the rivers around Manhattan.

But government didn't stop there. Government never stops. Now that the air is cleaner, government spends even more than it spent to clean the air to subsidize feeble methods of energy production, like windmills and solar panels. Activists want even more spending. A few years back, the Center for American Progress announced they were upset that "Germany, Spain and China Are Seizing the Energy Opportunity ... the United States Risks Getting Left Behind."

In this case, we're better off "left behind." After spending billions, those European governments made no breakthroughs, and now they're cutting back.

The Endangered Species Act was another noble idea. We all want to save polar bears. But now the bureaucrats make it almost impossible for some people to improve their own property.

Louisiana landowner Edward Poitevent wants to build homes and offices north of Lake Pontchartrain. He could provide safe high-ground housing to people eager to move away from areas that were flooded during Hurricane Katrina. But he is not allowed to build because the government decided 1,500 acres of his land should become a preservation area for a threatened species called the dusky gopher frog. None of these frogs currently live on his property. Poitevent told me, "The Fish and Wildlife Service has certified that the frog has not been seen in the state of Louisiana since 1967."

Fish and Wildlife Service officials said they were "not available" to talk with me about this. Instead, they posted a video on YouTube that says they work "with" landowners: "The Service has many voluntary partnership-based programs that can provide technical and financial assistance to manage species."

That sounds nice, but the government's handbook on how to work with them is an onerous 315 pages long.

The environmentalists so torment those who resist their schemes that some landowners tell each other, "If you find an endangered species, shoot, shovel and shut up!" That's mostly a joke. But it does happen, and it's one more way government regulations backfire.

Throughout the world, most reductions in pollution have been achieved because of capitalism, not government control.

Fracking for natural gas reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

Even much-hated coal and oil provide benefits. Science writer Matt Ridley says, "Burning of fossil fuels is helping the rainforest in the Amazon to grow."

Ridley also points out modern industrial farming allows people to grow more food on less land, and so people cut down fewer trees. "New England used to be 70 percent farmland -- it's now 70 percent forest."

You can even see the difference between areas that get greener and ones that don't from space: The Dominican Republic is noticeably greener than its immediate neighbor, Haiti, mainly because the Dominican Republic uses fossil fuel instead of burning wood from its forests for fuel, as Haiti does.

Industry and technology, not regulations, are humanity's greatest contribution to the environment. Leave people their freedom, and they come up with new, smarter, more efficient and thus cleaner ways of doing things. Stifling that process with regulation isn't "progressive."

SOURCE





IMF calls on U.S. to institute $500 billion carbon tax

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has called upon the U.S., its largest contributor, to levy a $500 billion a year carbon tax on consumers to offset what it calls “underpriced” oil, coal, and other energy products.

This “mispricing” is supposedly leading to “excessive energy consumption,” which is “accelerating the depletion of natural resources” and contributing to climate change.

“The IMF is lobbying on behalf of environmentalist radicals, arguing that not implementing a half-trillion dollar a year carbon tax is a de facto energy subsidy,” Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson wrote in a letter to members of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Monetary Policy and Trade.

The IMF study, published on Jan. 28, states, “Consumer subsidies include two components: a pre-tax subsidy (if the price paid by firms and households is below supply and distribution costs) and a tax subsidy (if taxes are below their efficient level).”

In a statement, Wilson called the IMF’s view “warped.” He added, “not taxing being construed as a subsidy that economically crowds out anything is as Orwellian as it gets. There is no level of deception these people will not stoop to in order to hide their true ends.”

The study justifies these taxes as preventing climate change: “The efficient taxation of energy further requires corrective taxes to capture negative environmental and other externalities due to energy use (such as global warming and local pollution).”

In a March 27 interview, the IMF’s head of fiscal affairs, Carlo Cottarelli said, “Even where countries impose taxes on energy, they’re rarely high enough to account for all of the adverse effects of excessive energy consumption, including on the environment.”

Cottarelli claimed that not taxing carbon emissions in the U.S. by $500 billion a year “crowd[s] out public spending that can boost growth, including on infrastructure, education, and health care. Cheap energy can also lead to overconsumption of energy, which aggravates environmental problems, such as pollution and climate change.”

“Just think about what Cottarelli said. It’s a completely distorted view of reality. It is higher energy costs and increased taxes are what would actually dampen consumer spending in other areas,” Wilson explained.

Therefore, Wilson said, the IMF-proposed carbon tax is “just a means to an end by increasing governmental power over other these other areas of the economy, like health care and education, for one by raising $500 billion a year in additional revenue.”

“By strangling the economy for money and restricting energy consumption, people will naturally turn to governments for sustenance since producing value in the private sector will come at a much higher premium. What good is a job in the U.S. economy if a person cannot afford to drive there?” Wilson asked.

He also criticized the IMF for bailing out Greece, Portugal, and Ireland with $86.6 billion of bailouts, which the U.S. has contributed about $17 billion to, and the IMF’s role in levying a €5.8 billion savings deposit tax in Cyprus.

Wilson said the U.S. “should have nothing more to do with this radical outfit,” and called on Congress to reject the Obama Administration’s budget request to double the nation’s quota subscription in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to $130 billion from its current $65 billion level, converting part of the nation’s current $100 billion line of credit to the IMF.

If the Obama request was fulfilled, it would keep the nation’s total stake in the IMF at $165 billion.

“Not only should that request be rejected, but Congress ought to withdraw our quota subscription altogether, along with the $100 billion line of credit,” Wilson added in his letter to the House subcommittee, concluding, “Taxpayers should not be propping up bankrupt socialist states and the banks that fund them, let alone financing the lobbying efforts of radical environmentalists.”

SOURCE





"Frankenol" – End the Madness

The word “gasoline” no longer characterizes the stuff we put into our cars. Due to regulations forced on the refining industry, “Frankenol” might be more accurate.

This government-engineered, market-distorting fuel is a blend of 90 percent gasoline and 10 percent ethanol (E10). Originally conceived to breathe life into the fledgling U.S. ethanol industry and reduce our dependence on foreign oil, continued tinkering with the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) has turned the program into a nightmare.

The RFS requires refiners to blend increasing amounts of ethanol into the nation’s fuel pool annually. Last year they were responsible for blending a minimum of 13.2 billion gallons. This year the figure is higher at 13.8 billion gallons. By 2022, the RFS mandate will require 36 billion gallons.

To document compliance, refiners track the RINs (Renewable Identification Numbers) applied to every gallon of ethanol purchased, or they buy paper RINs which are credits paid to ethanol producers. In either case, refiners have to spend real money to comply with the law.

In creating the RSF program, the government assumed that gasoline demand would continue to rise.  It was wrong. With more fuel-efficient vehicles, a lackluster economy, and higher prices at the pump, gasoline demand has declined to the lowest level in 18 years.

As a result, refiners are stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place: They have had to reduce fuel production because demand is down; yet they have to comply with the increasing ethanol mandate.  This means they are buying more ethanol credits in the form of RINs but purchasing fewer gallons of ethanol. As a result, millions of gallons of corn-based ethanol are sitting in storage tanks, while the price of RINs has climbed 20-fold in the last 90 days. Industry analyst Byron King says the RIN credit gimmick has "added a dime, or more, per gallon to the national fuel bill in the first quarter of 2013 – in the face of stagnant or declining oil prices."

But that’s just part of the RFS’s market distorting impact. Ethanol contains less energy than crude oil-based gasoline, so motorists have to fill-up more often and needlessly spend more money. Furthermore, an estimated 42 percent of the nation’s 2012 corn crop will be consumed to make ethanol.  Artificially driving up corn prices – particularly when much of the farm belt was drought stricken - has resulted in more expensive meat, poultry, and countless food products leaving consumers to bear the burden.

Research by the Heritage Foundation conducted last year indicated that U.S. ethanol production was responsible for increasing the price of corn by up to 68 percent. Stanford University’s Center for Food Security and the Environment  warned, “Poor households in the developing world, where 70-80% of the budget is spent on food, [are] hurt the most.”

And there’s more. Ethanol producers looking to create a larger market for their fuel have convinced the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to allow the sale of E15, a fuel blend containing up to 15 percent ethanol. However, as AAA warns, E15 could "void car manufacturers warranties" since 95% of the nation's 240 million light duty vehicles can't handle the concoction.  E15 "could result in significant problems such as accelerated engine wear and failure (and) fuel-system damage," according to AAA.

If that’s not bad enough, Son of RFS (RFS2) contains volumetric mandates for other biofuels, including cellulosic ethanol – although no commercial quantities of the advanced fuel are even available.  For failing to use this fantasy fuel that can't be found, the EPA fined energy companies $6.8 million. Thankfully, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against the EPA and overturned the imposition of the phantom fuel fines.

One would think the judges’ ruling would stop this regulatory insanity. It didn’t. A few days after losing in court, the EPA mandated that 62 percent more cellulosic ethanol be blended into motor fuel in 2013.

However well intended way back when, the RFS is another example of government market intervention that has turned out badly. The RFS is casting a large, menacing and costly shadow over the production and marketing of motor fuels. Rather than making fuels better, it is making them worse. Rather than helping American consumers, it is siphoning money from their pockets.

Frankenol and its ugly Frankenfuel stepchildren should be abandoned on the scrap heap of failed policy prescriptions before they can cause more harm. Congress should repeal the RFS.

SOURCE





States show folly of energy mandates

With the Keystone XL pipeline on its way to final approval and President Obama’s picks to head the Departments of Energy and Interior announced, deep-pocketed environmental lobbying groups and activists that are a key part of the Democratic base are formulating their goals and agenda for Obama’s second term.

While Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) has introduced carbon tax legislation, it is unlikely to pass the GOP-controlled House; and rather than make another attempt at cap and trade, which the Democrats couldn’t pass when they controlled all of Washington during Obama’s first two years in office, many think the next play will be for a national renewable energy portfolio standard (RPS) that would mandate that a certain percentage of the nation’s electricity be produced from renewable sources.

Fortunately there are the states, those fifty laboratories of democracy as former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis referred to them, to show us the negative impact that a national renewable energy standard would have. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia already have a renewable energy mandate on the books. These mandates inject government into the business decisions of utility companies, requiring them to procure energy from more costly and less reliable sources than they otherwise would.

The increased energy costs produced by renewable mandates are passed along to consumers in the form of higher utility bills. According to the Institute for Energy Research, utility bills in states with a renewable energy portfolio standard (RPS) are 40 percent higher on average than in states without one.

While the Sierra Club and many Congressional Democrats dream of enacting a national RPS, over a dozen bills have been introduced this year to repeal a number of them at the state level. In fact, a bill that would repeal North Carolina’s RPS will be heard in committee later this week.

In 2007, North Carolina became the first state in the South to impose a renewable energy portfolio standard. Since then, two things have occurred: 1) Enough time has passed that the economic harm wrought by the state’s energy mandate has become evident and 2) The composition of the state legislature has become more amenable to repealing misguided regulations like the state’s RPS.

Republicans won majorities in the state legislature in 2010 and took total control of state government for the first time in over 100 years with the election of former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory as governor last November.

Last month, Representative Mike Hager (R) introduced HB 298, legislation that would repeal North Carolina’s energy mandate. A companion bill was introduced in the state senate shortly thereafter. While an RPS repeal effort stalled in Kansas earlier this year due in large part to the political clout of the wind industry in that state, the North Carolina legislation has a shot of passing. And it’s not hard to see why, given the strong case had by proponents of RPS repeal.

North Carolina residents are all too aware of the way in which energy mandates drive up consumer costs. During the decade immediately preceding enactment of the state’s renewable energy mandate, utility bills in North Carolina grew by an average of 1.7 percent per year. Since the mandate’s imposition in 2009, utility bills have increase by an average of 2.29 percent — a 33 percent jump compared to the annual rate of growth prior to passage of the state’s RPS.

A John Locke Foundation study found that North Carolina’s renewable energy mandate, if it remains in place, would increase electricity costs for consumers by $1.8 billion and result in the loss of 3,500 jobs by 2021, the year in which the law is fully phased in and requires North Carolina utilities to generate 7.5 percent of their electricity from renewable sources. The report also found that the state RPS will depress economic growth and reduce in-state investment.

Repeal of the North Carolina’s RPS would stimulate the state economy by increasing disposable income for individuals and families, while raising the job-creating capacity of employers. The necessity of RPS repeal is all the more urgent in light of the state’s 9.4 percent unemployment rate, the fourth highest in the nation, and the fact that North Carolina taxpayers and businesses contend with the highest personal and corporate income tax rates in the Southeast.

By driving up utility bills, state renewable energy mandates act as a hidden tax. Additionally, this is a surreptitious tax that disproportionately hurts lower income households. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, households with an annual income of $50,000 or less really take a hit from expensive energy mandates. Approximately half of U.S. households earn less than $50,000 per year and these households spend the greatest share of their income on energy, spending significantly more on energy than they do on either food or health care. It is these households who bear the brunt of the state’s expensive energy mandate.

The hypocrisy of many on the Left is on full display in North Carolina this year. Many of the same lawmakers and organizations who have criticized proposals to eliminate the state income tax and shift to a consumption tax base as regressive policy that disproportionately hurts the poor are the very same people who vehemently support the state’s expensive energy mandate that hits the least among us the hardest.

It would be a huge loss for the coercive utopian lobbyists on Capitol Hill if North Carolina, a state that is home to the nation’s fastest growing city in Raleigh and largest banking center outside of Manhattan in Charlotte, were to get rid of its expensive energy mandate. Lawmakers in the Tar Heel State can certainly boost their constituents’ pocketbooks and bottom lines by repealing the state’s RPS. And in doing so they would also do a great service to the nation by taking wind out of the sails of efforts to impose this misguided policy on the rest of the country.

SOURCE




Carbon footprints

Okay, here’s the bombshell. The volcanic eruption in Iceland, since its first spewing of volcanic ash has, in just FOUR DAYS, NEGATED EVERY SINGLE EFFORT you have made in the past five years to control CO2 emissions on our planet – all of you.

Of course you know about this evil carbon dioxide that we are trying to suppress – it’s that vital chemical compound that every plant requires to live and grow and to synthesize into oxygen for us humans and all animal life. I know, it’s very disheartening to realize that all of the carbon emission savings you have accomplished while suffering the inconvenience and expense of: driving Prius hybrids, buying fabric grocery bags, sitting up till midnight to finish your kid’s “The Green Revolution” science project, throwing out all of your non-green cleaning supplies, using only two squares of toilet paper, putting a brick in your toilet tank reservoir, selling your SUV and speedboat, vacationing at home instead of abroad, nearly getting hit every day on your bicycle, replacing all of your 50 cents light bulbs with $10.00 light bulbs …well, all of those things you have done have all gone down the tubes in just four days.

The volcanic ash emitted into the Earth’s atmosphere in just four days – yes – FOUR DAYS ONLY by that volcano in Iceland, has totally erased every single effort you have made to reduce the evil beast, carbon. And there are around 200 active volcanoes on the planet spewing out this crud at any on time – EVERY DAY.

I don’t really want to rain on your parade too much, but I should mention that when the volcano Mt Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, it spewed out more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire human race had emitted in all its years on earth. Yes folks, Mt Pinatubo was active for over one year – think about it.

Of course I shouldn’t spoil this touchy-feely tree-hugging moment and mention the effect of solar and cosmic activity and the well-recognized 800-year global heating and cooling cycle, which keep happening, despite our completely insignificant efforts to
affect climate change.

And I do wish I had a silver lining to this volcanic ash cloud but the fact of the matter is that the bush fire season across the western USA and Australia this year alone will negate your efforts to reduce carbon in our world for the next two to three years. And it happens every year.

Just remember that your government just tried to impose a whopping carbon tax on you on the basis of the bogus “human-caused” climate change scenario.

Hey, isn’t it interesting how they don’t mention “Global Warming” any more, but just“Climate Change” – you know why? It’s because the planet has COOLED by 0.7 degrees in the past century and these global warming bull artists got caught with their pants down.

And just keep in mind that you might yet have an Emissions Trading Scheme – that whopping new tax – imposed on you, that will achieve absolutely nothing except make you poorer. It won’t stop any volcanoes from erupting, that’s for sure.

But hey, relax, give the world a hug and have a nice day!

SOURCE




Australian conservative leader forecasts job loss for prominent Warmist if the Coalition wins power at Federal Election

TONY Abbott has signalled he will sack Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery if he is elected as prime minister in September.

The Opposition Leader, who has vowed to dismantle the Climate Change department and merge it with the Environment Department in government, said he did not see the point of paying Professor Flannery around $180,000 a year for his views which were already public knowledge.

He said if elected as prime minister on September 14 and given the opportunity to revoke the carbon tax a whole range of climate change bureaucracies would also be axed.

"I suspect we might find the particular position you refer to might go with them," Mr Abbott told 2GB’s Ray Hadley when asked about Professor Flannery.

"It does sound like an unnecessary position given the gentlemen in question gives us the benefit of his views without needing taxpayer funding."

Professor Flannery, who penned the popular climate change book The Weather Makers, was appointed as Climate Commissioner in February 2011.

The 2007 Australian of The Year gets a salary of $180,000 for the three-day-a-week role.

Establishing the independent climate commission was a 2010 election commitment by Labor. It was originally slated to cost $5.6 million over four years.

Mr Abbott's comments come as Climate Change Minister Greg Combet says a new report warning Australia will soon face more extreme weather should serve as a warning to those who think action on cutting greenhouse gases can wait.

The report from the Climate Commission says climate change is already increasing the intensity and frequency of extreme weather like heatwaves, fires, cyclones, heavy rainfall and drought.

The report entitled Critical Decade: Extreme Weather, released on Wednesday, says the global climate system is warmer and moister than 50 years ago, with the extra heat making extreme weather events more frequent and severe.

[Note the carefully cherry-picked period.  Had they chosen 15 years ago or 80 years ago there would have been no change.  Warmists are SUCH frauds]

In response to the report, the Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council warned that while they had experience combating extreme weather events, people cannot expect emergency crews to protect their communities from increasingly intense fires and floods.

Mr Combet said climate change was no longer a problem for future generations to solve, as the impacts were already being felt.

He said the scientific advice was that this was the critical decade to act, and effective policies now would determine the severity of climate change experience for years to come.

"Increasing greenhouse gas emissions is like loading the dice for more extreme weather events in the future," he said in a statement.

The past summer was Australia's hottest, capped by the longest and most extreme heatwave on record.

The southern part of the country - including key food-growing regions - is becoming more drought-prone while the northwest is getting wetter.

Chief climate commissioner Tim Flannery has warned that while one-off events do occur, record-breaking weather was becoming more common as the climate shifts.

The independent commission's report draws on the latest research and observations from bodies including the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and Australian and international universities.

Mr Combet said it was time for Opposition Leader Tony Abbott to "pull his head out of the sand" and listen to the advice of the experts.

It was time he was held accountable for his "reckless views" on climate change, and called on to explain how he'd propose tackling global warming.

"Australia needs responsible leadership and sound policies on climate change, not opportunistic scare campaigns and negative politicking," Mr Combet said, adding the coalition's Direct Action policy had been criticised by scientists, economists and business experts.

A survey released on Wednesday by the World Wildlife Foundation of nearly 1300 people nationwide showed 72 per cent believed humans were contributing to climate change.

SOURCE

***************************************

For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN.   My Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Graphics hotlinked to this site sometimes have only a short life and if I host graphics with blogspot, the graphics sometimes get shrunk down to illegibility.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here and here

*****************************************

Kiwi scientists rally against climate change sceptic

But it's all abuse and appeals to authority.  They mention not one scientific fact

New Zealand's top climate change scientists have rallied together to slam a visiting sceptic who is touring the country to proclaim global warming as a myth that should be ignored.

Lord Christopher Monckton, a former advisor to Margaret Thatcher, says human-induced climate change is not happening.

The British aristocrat, the 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, is on a 16-venue nationwide speaking tour telling New Zealanders they shouldn't be worried about rising temperatures or sea levels.

Carbon taxes and emissions-trading schemes should also be scrapped because they are too expensive, he believes.

But government scientists and academics have warned that Lord Monckton's views are not based on science, and go against all the research they have done and read.

Dr James Renwick, associate professor of physical geography at Victoria University, dismissed Lord Monckton's views as "rubbish".

"He's a great showman and speaker, and climate change is a vehicle to self-publicise.

"But he has no training and has studiously avoided learning anything about science, I would say."

Niwa principal scientist Brett Mullan said Lord Monckton's views were "very damaging" for public perception.

Professor Dave Frame, director of the Climate Change Research Institute at Victoria University, described him as a "vaudeville act" to be ignored.

"Someone who goes around saying things we know are not true can actually be quite harmful."

More HERE



Monckton replies

"Kiwi scientists rally against climate change sceptic" (April 2) twice describes me as a climate change “denier”. That hate speech is inaccurate. I do not deny we can change the climate: I question how much we do.

The statement that “New Zealand’s top climate change scientists have rallied together to slam” me is inaccurate. A news agency reporter incited several scientists to comment. He did not let me reply.

The statement that I say “New Zealanders … shouldn’t be worried about rising temperatures or sea levels” inaccurately implies they are rising worryingly. Yet the IPCC’s climate-science head says warming has paused for 17 years. Sea level has risen for eight years at just 3.2 cm/century.

The statement that I oppose emissions trading because it is “too expensive” is inaccurate. I oppose it because it is cost-ineffective.

The statements that I have “no training” and “no scientific training” and have “studiously avoided learning anything about science” are inaccurate. I studied mathematics during my Cambridge degree course, have published several scientific and economic papers on climate change in learned journals, have lectured on climate at faculty level, and was last year’s Nerenberg Lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Western Ontario.

The unevidenced statements that I say things scientists “know are not true” and “pick data and statistics to suit [my] argument” are inaccurate.

The statement that I once argued for the quarantine of AIDS patients “in internment camp-like facilities” is inaccurate. I argued that, though quarantine (with no mention of internment camps) is the standard public-health response to a new, incurable and fatal infection, Western sensibilities would make it impossible. Tens of millions would die. Sadly, they did.

The statement that “the world’s leading scientists” predict the world will “heat up by 3% this century” is inaccurate. They predict 3 Cº warming, up 1%. Their predictions in all four IPCC Assessment Reports have proven exaggerated.

The implication that I deny any increase in greenhouse gases is inaccurate. I do not deny it: I question whether it matters.

The statement that I “promote [my]self as an ‘expert reviewer’ for the IPCC’s forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report”, implying I am not one, is inaccurate. I satisfied the IPCC that my publication record justified my appointment.

Via email



Arctic to experience explosive “greening” while Antarctic sea ice grows to record levels – both due to global warming

Both assertions in the SAME article! Talk about having it both ways!

Land within the Arctic circle is likely to experience explosive “greening” in the next few decades due to global warming, says a new study.

“Wooded areas in the Arctic could increase by as much as 52 per cent by the 2050s as the so-called tree line– the maximum latitude at which trees can grow – shifts hundreds of kilometres north, according to computer simulations published in the journal Nature Climate Change.”

[Note that this is a computer “simulation.”]

Meanwhile, a separate study by Dutch scientists says that ice shelves in Antarctica have in fact been growing thanks to global warming.

[Note that it is a fact that the ice shelves have been growing, not a simulation]

Meltwater from the Antarctic mainland provides a cold, protective “cap” for ice shelves because it comes from freshwater, which is denser than seawater, the team from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute said.

This would explain why sea ice around Antarctica has been growing, reaching the greatest-ever recorded extent in 2010, it suggested.

“This is a major, new piece of work with wide implications for assessing Antarctica’s ice mass in the coming decades,” said palaeo-climatologist Valerie Masson-Delmotte of France’s Laboratory for Climate and Environmental Science (LCSE).

She pointed to a worrying rise in sea levels in 2011 and 2012 … coming from mountains and also from Greenland and Antarctica, the two biggest sources of land ice on the planet."

[Really? Valerie thinks sea levels rose in 2011?  Then why do Envisat satellite measurements show a decline?]

SOURCE

 The above refers to an article in "The Australian".  There is a similar article in The Daily Mail --  and no doubt elsewhere as well.




Combat Global Warming: Be Gay for a Day

A long last, scientists have revealed the single most important document ever.  It’s a crayon-colored map showing how “trees” could grow in the arctic.

If finally, mercifully, any one of the so-called “climate models” that so far have failed to “model” climate accurately, suddenly and then accurately begin to “model” climate in real time, then, well, WOW!

“Experts say the wooded areas in the region could increase by 50% over the coming decades,” writes the UK’s Daily Mail, “and accelerate global warming in the process. Researchers have unveiled the most accurate map ever (!) of how vegetation could change in the region.”

THE MOST ACCURATE MAP EVER* is detailed in the latest issue of Nature Climate Change, a trade rag that panders to the climate racket.

Oh and you just wait until the United Nations gets a hold of this.

Maybe next year The Nature Group can start Nature Arctic Real Estate.  With the housing bubble reflating thanks to more government money-that-never-has-to-be-paid, think of the fortunes government scientists, economists and well-connected social policy guys like ALGORE, Inc. can make selling icehouses to us Eskimos, er Inuits.

“It shows the potential for massive redistribution of vegetation across the Arctic,” continues the Mail, “with about half of all vegetation switching to a different class and a massive increase in tree cover. Experts say in Siberia, for instance, trees could grow hundreds of miles north of the present tree line.”

See? If redistribution of ANYTHING is involved, you know ALGORE, Inc. will find a way to cash in.

The new MOST ACCURATE MAP EVER (!) is one of those wonderful occurrences that demonstrates that the most frightening words in the English language have gone from “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” to “I’m a government-funded scientist, and I’m here to lecture.”

In the meantime, ThinkProgress has published a remarkable paper called Arctic Sea Ice Death Spiral And Cold Weather that proves, or at least, says - same thing if you are a liberal - that global warming is to blame for …cold weather in Germany.

Stumped by the fact that temperatures are not accurately reflecting current climate “models”- in fact temperatures have remained stable for 15 years- scientists on the government gravy train are trying to tie any weather event to so-called climate change.

Hurricanes? Global warming. Tornadoes? Global warming? Drought? Global warming? Blizzards, dropping temperatures, meteorites, Big Gulps? Global warming.

Even homosexuality has been tied to global warming via population control.

“With the natural world on the brink of demise largely because of overpopulation,” G. Roger Denson, a self-appointed social theoretician wrote on the Huffington Post,   “unrestrained homosexuality, as one of a variety of ethical and democratic measures available to us today, offers perhaps the most natural option to be enjoined.”

Carbon credits for being gay? Anyone? We could funds it with a tax on NOT being gay.

If only everyone would be gay for a few days per year, or a few years per lifetime, it seems G. Roger is saying, we could be more ethical, unrestrained, under-populated, democratic and - most importantly - a lot colder.  Or warmer if you live in one of those places that is unfortunate enough to be colder as a result of global “warming.”

But I do agree with the Democrat part if you capitalize the “d”.

As to the rest, please read fine print* carefully.

*Claims to accuracy, changes in maps, vegetation, flooding, gender attraction and increases or decreases in flora or fauna in any scenario are made for entertainment purposes only and are not to be relied on in any true and scientific sense, except as it applies to government funding.  Please see the terms and conditions of all climate models before planting small shrubs, grasses, cereals or kisses on same sex, heterosexual friends.

SOURCE




Ernest Moniz and Fracking Drive Environmentalists crazy

Many environmentalists are unhappy about President Barack Obama’s nomination of Ernest Moniz, a professor of physics and engineering at MIT, to be Secretary of Energy.

As Director of the MIT Energy Initiative, Moniz assembled an all-star cast of MIT physical and social scientists to produce a June 2011 report that pointed to natural gas as an abundant, low-cost energy source that could sustain much of the world’s energy needs over the next several decades while we transition to wind, solar, tidal, geothermal and other carbon-free energy sources. It would also offer large environmental benefits because gas emits few conventional pollutants, and only about half as much carbon dioxide as the main transitional alternative: continued coal burning.

Implicit in the MIT vision was an understanding that shale gas development, using the technology known as “fracking,” should and will occur on a global scale. While a few groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund have been supportive, this is unacceptable to many others in the environmental movement. So they are striking out to discredit Professor Moniz, his views, and the additional large body of academic research and practical experience proving the efficacy and safety of fracking.

In the environmentalist blogosphere, for example, the discussions of natural gas and fracking take on a decidedly hostile tone. “Fracking is madness, a sign of a society gone completely insane and bent on self-destruction,” one blogger wrote recently. Said another: “The more we learn about a gas-drilling practice called hydraulic fracturing—or ‘fracking’—the more we see it as a zenith of violence and disconnect” in our world.

Although not nearly as extreme, related sentiments also are being expressed by many “mainstream” environmentalists. At a July 2012 “Stop the Frack Attack” rally, Sierra Club president Allison Chin described the thinking behind her organization’s new “Beyond Gas” campaign, warning against the “out-of-control rush to drill [that] has put oil and gas industry profits ahead of our health, our families, our property, our communities, and our futures. If drillers can’t extract natural gas without destroying landscapes and endangering the health of families, then we should not drill for natural gas.”

The movie Gasland put the skills of Hollywood to work in spreading a similar dire message.

The result of such environmental fear mongering—often covered uncritically in the media—has been to convince a surprisingly large number of people that fracking is dangerous, to people and the environment alike. As a result, New York State and Maryland have thus far refused to allow fracking within their borders; a Maryland legislative committee recently defeated a proposal for a legal ban, but just narrowly.

One agency missing in action has been the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2009 the U.S House of Representatives asked EPA to study the impact of fracking on drinking water. EPA agreed, but took two years to begin the research. Then, in December 2012 EPA issued a progress report that managed not to answer any of the key questions, promising continued research.

EPA seems paralyzed, recognizing the significant environmental benefits of natural gas, but fearful of challenging the fracking orthodoxies of its longtime environmental “movement” supporters.

Despite their strong opposition to fracking, few environmentalists seem to understand very well how the process actually works.

First, what is essentially a conventional oil and gas well is drilled vertically, typically to several thousand feet or more below the surface. When this is completed the more novel part of the fracking extraction process comes into play, applying techniques innovated in Texas in the 1990s. The well shaft previously drilled vertically is redirected to become horizontal, with the drilling continuing until the shaft stretches out horizontally about half a mile to a mile. When the drilling is finished, water, combined with chemicals designed to reduce friction and serve other purposes, is injected from the surface into the well shaft at very high pressures, thereby fracturing the shale rock formations far below, and making it possible to extract economically the natural gas embedded in the shale.

Occurring far underground (often 5,000 feet below the surface, for example, in the Marcellus formation in Pennsylvania), it is implausible that the shale fracturing—the “fracking”—could have any direct impacts on the land surface above or on the water aquifers that are typically located much closer to the surface. Indeed, some geologists think it is physically impossible.

There is, however, one new element to the fracking process that is not encountered in traditional oil and gas drilling. When the high water pressure is released after the fracturing of the shale, some 10 percent to 30 percent of the water comes back to the surface. This “flowback water” contains both natural contaminants picked up underground during the fracturing process and the chemicals used by the driller to facilitate the fracturing. The water must therefore be disposed of safely or—as is increasingly the case—be cleaned up and recycled for use in the next well.

This has proved to be the most environmentally challenging part of the fracking process. And abuses, such as dumping flowback water into rivers and streams, have occurred. As a result of increasing regulation, however, and growing recognition within the gas industry that its future depends on public acceptance, the treatment of flowback water has improved greatly. As the 2011 MIT report concluded, “the environmental impacts of shale development are challenging but manageable.”

The environmental movement is of course entirely correct to insist that natural gas be extracted from shale in an environmentally responsible way, and that local socio-economic disruptions be minimized so far as possible. With substantial progress already having been made and continuing in these areas, and with further delays having large environmental and economic costs of their own, the fracking controversy has become a very expensive distraction for our nation and the world.

SOURCE





Al Gore's Irish sparring partners

Seven years after Al Gore won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, the former US presidential candidate is back on the media trail, this time with a book of doomsday environmental predictions called The Future. And, as sure as oceans rising follows glaciers melting, his foils – a redoubtable Irish husband-and-wife team called Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer – are hot on his heels.

"For a man who believes that fossil fuels will mean an end of all life on earth, it's odd that he chose to sell his Current TV (network) to oil funded Al Jazeera," Ann tells me. "It's odd too that he says that a large carbon-footprint, large homes and large cars will hasten that apocalypse, but he has all of them."

As producers of anti-environmentalism films such as Not Evil Just Wrong – made as a challenge to An Inconvenient Truth – and Mine Your Own Business, McAleer and McElhinney have long been sparring partners of Gore. In 2009, Phelim challenged the losing presidential candidate at a public meeting of environmental journalists and was shouted down and escorted out of the room by fellow hacks. Since then he and his Donegal-born wife Ann have continued to build their profile in the US, regularly appearing on networks such as CNN and Fox News. This year saw the release of Fracknation, a documentary about "the truth behind the search for natural gas", which has again raised the hackles of film critics and environmentalists stateside.

Following its release, The New York Post called McAleer "an expert practitioner of cinematic jujitsu." Others have been less charitable and the couple have been physically threatened by opponents of their work and have been called "Hitler's henchmen" by another irate viewer. "Although to be fair," Ann pipes up, "a comment we also hear a lot from Americans is 'aw, your accents are lovely'."

The first story they worked on together concerned Mihaela Porumbaru – the Romanian child, paralysed from the waist down, who was handed back to her Romanian foster parents, despite every effort on the part of her Irish carers to keep her here.

They subsequently worked on a documentary about foreign adoptions for the BBC.

"It concerned two children who had been adopted by evangelical Christians in Northern Ireland," Ann tells me. Over the following years they would research a number of adoption stories, and the work would take them to Indonesia, Vietnam, Romania and Bulgaria.

They would eventually move to America, where they would take an axe to the global warming hysteria, which had swept much of the country. Not Evil Just Wrong, their Michael Moore-esque riposte to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, caused a huge splash upon its release in 2009 and saw them become in-demand public speakers. Over the following years, they were featured on virtually every mainstream US television network and featured in publications like Variety and The New York Times.

The film broadly argues that the global warming measures that have been implemented by many governments are not justified by science and will in fact impoverish many Third World countries.

Their latest film, Fracknation, has been just as controversial and Ann has some choice words on the natural gas-tapping situation back home: "It's astounding to me that Leitrim, one of the most economically depressed counties in Ireland, has this amazing opportunity and that is being squandered based on inaccurate information. It's a real shame in Ireland that the coverage of the fracking story, from what I've seen at least, is very anti-fracking."

Learn more about Fracknation at www.fracknation.com

SOURCE

***************************************

For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN.   My Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Graphics hotlinked to this site sometimes have only a short life and if I host graphics with blogspot, the graphics sometimes get shrunk down to illegibility.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here and here

*****************************************

WWU faculty find overwhelming scientific evidence to support global warming

By WWU GEOLOGY FACULTY — COURTESY TO THE BELLINGHAM HERALD

On March 26, 2013, a long-retired faculty member of our department, Don Easterbrook, presented his opinions on human-caused global climate change to the Washington State Senate Energy, Environment and Telecommunications Committee at the invitation of the committee chair Sen. Doug Ericksen, R.-Ferndale.

We, the active faculty of the Geology Department at Western Washington University, express our unanimous and significant concerns regarding the views espoused by Easterbrook, who holds a doctorate in geology; they are neither scientifically valid nor supported by the overwhelming preponderance of evidence on the topic. We also decry the injection of such poor quality science into the public discourse regarding important policy decisions for our state's future; the chair of the committee was presented with numerous options and opportunities to invite current experts to present the best-available science on this subject, and chose instead to, apparently, appeal to a narrow partisan element with his choice of speaker.

We concur with the vast consensus of the science community that recent global warming is very real, human greenhouse-gas emissions are the primary cause, and their environmental and economic impacts on our society will likely be severe if we don't make significant efforts to address the problem. Claims to the contrary fly in the face of an overwhelming body of rigorous scientific literature.

We intend no disrespect to Easterbrook personally. We appreciate his previous service to our department and to Western. His present appointment as emeritus professor was made in light of his long-standing history at WWU. But people of the state of Washington need to understand that Easterbrook's ideas on anthropogenic global warming have not passed through rigorous peer review in the scientific literature. Additionally, Easterbrook's claims in this forum and elsewhere require the existence of a broad, decades-long conspiracy amongst literally thousands of scientists to falsify climate data and to prevent publication of opposing research. This opinion demonstrates a profound rejection of the scientific process and the fundamental value of rigorous peer review, and is also simply wrong.

Science thrives on controversies; it rewards innovative, unexpected findings, but only when they are backed by rigorous, painstaking evidence and rea soning. Without such standards, science would be ineffective as a tool to improve our society. It is worth acknowledging that nearly every technological advance in modern society is a direct result of that same scientific method (think the Internet, airplanes, antibiotics, and even your smartphone).

Easterbrook's views, as exemplified by his Senate presentation, are a stark contrast to that standard; they are filled with misrepresentations, misuse of data and repeated mixing of local vs. global records. Nearly every graphic in the hours-long presentation to the Senate was flawed, as was Easterbrook's discussion of them.

For example, more than 100 years of research in physics, chemistry, atmospheric science and oceanography has, via experiments, numerous physical observations and theoretic calculations, clearly demonstrated - and have communicated via the scientific literature - that carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas; its presence and variations in Earth's atmosphe re have significant and measureable impacts on the surface temperature of our planet. Alternatively, you can take Easterbrook's word - not supported by any published science - that the concentration and effects of carbon dioxide are so small as to not matter a bit.

In a specific example, Easterbrook referred to a graph of temperatures from an ice core of the Greenland ice sheet to claim that global temperatures were warmer than present over most of the last 10,000 years. First, this record is of temperature from a single spot on Earth, central Greenland (thus it is not a "global record"). Second, and perhaps more importantly, Easterbrook's definition of "present temperature" in the graph is based on the most recent data point in that record, which is actually 1855, more than 150 years ago when the world was still in the depths of the Little Ice Age, and well before any hint of human-caused climate change.

As the active faculty of the Western Washington Universit y Geology Department that he lists as his affiliation, we conclude that Easterbrook's presentation clearly does not represent the best-available science on this subject, and urge the Senate, our state government, and the citizens of Washington State to rely on rigorous peer-reviewed science rather than conspiracy-based ideas to steer their decisions on matters concerning our environment and economic future.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Western Washington University WWU Geology Department faculty members who authored this column are Douglas H. Clark, who holds a doctorate in geology; Bernard A. Housen, who is the department chair and holds a doctorate in geophysics; Susan Debari, who holds a doctorate in geology; Colin B. Amos, who holds a doctorate in geology; Scott R. Linneman, who holds a doctorate in geology; Robert J. Mitchell, who holds doctorates in engineering and geology; David M. Hirsch, who holds a doctorate in geology; Jaqueline Caplan-Auerbach, who holds a doctorate in geophysics; Pete Stelling, who holds a doctorate in geology; Elizabeth R. Schermer, who holds a doctorate in geology; Christopher Suczek, who holds a doctorate in geology; and Scott Babcock, who holds a doctorate in geology.

SOURCE




Monckton replies to the above appeal to authority

They refer to only one bit of scientific data and Monckton demolishes that

Dr. Easterbrook, to whose excellent book of scientific papers on global warming I had the honour to contribute a couple of years ago, has been libeled. It is the rent-seeking global-warming profiteers of the WWU faculty, not Dr. Easterbrook, who are guilty of misrepresentation.

To take one of many examples of misrepresentation on their part, they attempt to challenge his statement to the effect that the GISP2 ice-core temperature record from Greenland shows that the temperature of air trapped in ice that formed on the summit plateau 8000 years ago was 2.5 Celsius degrees warmer than in the mid-19th century and, therefore, 1.8 Celsius degrees warmer than the present.

They attempt to tamper with the truth by suggesting that the air temperature in Greenland is not global; that the record stops in 1850, not the somewhat warmer present; and that, therefore, we cannot say the Holocene climate optimum from 10,000-6000 years ago was globally warmer than the present.

The racketeers of the WWU faculty either know they are wrong or are ignorant and pretending to know they are right. Either way, they are guilty of deliberate misrepresentation of the objective scientific truth. For it is well understood that temperatures in Greenland and Antarctica change by approximately twice the global average, by what is called "polar amplification".

This phenomenon occurs because the tropics cannot warm significantly. Advection takes any additional heat poleward. Therefore, if Greenland was 1.8 degrees warmer than the present 8000 years ago, the world was almost a degree warmer than the present at that time.

In fact, there has been no global warming for 17 years. This is one of many facts the WWU faculty chose not to mention. For the past eight years, according to the ENVISAT sea-level monitoring satellite, sea level has been rising at a rate equivalent to just 1.3 inches per century.

As an expert reviewer for the IPCC's forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report, I can also report that the IPCC itself plans to publish a graph showing that the predictions of global warming in all four of its previous multi-thousand-page quinquennial Assessment Reports have proven to be enormous exaggerations. The computer models it uses have failed.

Dr. Easterbrook, therefore, is a great deal closer to the current state of climate science than the money-grubbing gangsters of WWU, who ought to be thoroughly ashamed of themselves but are too politicized on the far Left to have the grace to blush.

And the Bellingham Herald should have known better than to publish their poisonously pietistic libel of Dr. Easterbrook, who deserves a handsome apology both from these grasping leeches and from the Herald. Shame on the lot of you.

Via email




New Climate Scandal Exposed

 Roger Pielke Jr      

Roger Pielke Jr documents the gross misrepresentation of the findings of a recent scientific paper via press release which appears to skirt awfully close to crossing the line into research misconduct.

Spot the difference

In 1991 the National Research Council proposed what has come to be a widely accepted definition of misconduct in science:

Misconduct in science is defined as fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism, in proposing, performing, or reporting research. Misconduct in science does not include errors of judgment; errors in the recording, selection, or analysis of data; differences in opinions involving the interpretation of data; or misconduct unrelated to the research process.

Arguments over data and methods are the lifeblood of science, and are not instances of misconduct.

However, here I document the gross misrepresentation of the findings of a recent scientific paper via press release which appears to skirt awfully close to crossing the line into research misconduct, as defined by the NRC. I recommend steps to fix this mess, saving face for all involved, and a chance for this small part of the climate community to take a step back toward unambiguous scientific integrity.

The paper I refer to is by Marcott et al. 2013, published recently in Science. A press release issued by the National Science Foundation, which funded the research, explains the core methodology and key conclusion of the paper as follows (emphasis added):

Peter Clark, an OSU paleoclimatologist and co-author of the Science paper, says that many previous temperature reconstructions were regional and not placed in a global context.

“When you just look at one part of the world, temperature history can be affected by regional climate processes like El Niño or monsoon variations,” says Clark.

“But when you combine data from sites around the world, you can average out those regional anomalies and get a clear sense of the Earth’s global temperature history.”

What that history shows, the researchers say, is that during the last 5,000 years, the Earth on average cooled about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit–until the last 100 years, when it warmed about 1.3 degrees F.

The press release clearly explains that the paper (a) combines data from many sites around the world to create a “temperature reconstruction” which gives a “sense of the Earth’s temperature history,” and (b) “that history shows” a cooling over the past 5000 years, until the last 100 years when all of that cooling was reversed.

The conclusions of the press release were faithfully reported by a wide range of media outlets, and below I survey several of them to illustrate that the content of the press release was accurately reflected in media coverage and, at times, amplified by scientists both involved and not involved with the study.

Examples of Media Coverage

Here is Justin Gillis at the New York Times, with emphasis added to this excerpt and also those further below:

The modern rise that has recreated the temperatures of 5,000 years ago is occurring at an exceedingly rapid clip on a geological time scale, appearing in graphs in the new paper as a sharp vertical spike.

Similarly, at the NY Times Andy Revkin reported much the same in a post titled, “Scientists Find an Abrupt Warm Jog After a Very Long Cooling.” Revkin included the following graph from the paper along with a caption explaining what the graph shows:

Revkin’s caption:  A new Science paper includes this graph of data providing clues to past global temperature. It shows the warming as the last ice age ended (left), a period when temperatures were warmer than today, a cooling starting 5,000 years ago and an abrupt warming in the last 100 years.

Revkin concluded: “the work reveals a fresh, and very long, climate “hockey stick.”” For those unfamiliar, a hockey stick has a shaft and a blade.

Any association with the so-called “hockey stick” is sure to capture interest in the highly politicized context of the climate debate, in which the iconic figure is like catnip to partisans on both sides. Here is Michael Lemonick at Climate Central:

The study… confirms the now famous “hockey stick” graph that Michael Mann published more than a decade ago. That study showed a sharp upward temperature trend over the past century after more than a thousand years of relatively flat temperatures. . .

“What’s striking,” said lead author Shaun Marcott of Oregon State University in an interview, “is that the records we use are completely independent, and produce the same result.”

Here is Grist.org, which refers in the passage below to the same figure shown above:

A study published in Science reconstructs global temperatures further back than ever before — a full 11,300 years. The new analysis finds that the only problem with Mann’s hockey stick was that its handle was about 9,000 years too short. The rate of warming over the last 100 years hasn’t been seen for as far back as the advent of agriculture.

To be clear, the study finds that temperatures in about a fifth of this historical period were higher than they are today. But the key, said lead author Shaun Marcott of Oregon State University, is that temperatures are shooting through the roof faster than we’ve ever seen.

“What we found is that temperatures increased in the last 100 years as much as they had cooled in the last 6,000 or 7,000,” he said. “In other words, the rate of change is much greater than anything we’ve seen in the whole Holocene,” referring to the current geologic time period, which began around 11,500 years ago.

Back to more mainstream outlets, here is how Nature characterized the study, offering a substantially similar but somewhat more technical description of the curve shown in the figure above:

Marcott and his colleagues set about reconstructing global climate trends all the way back to 11,300 years ago, when the Northern Hemisphere was emerging from the most recent ice age. To do so, they collected and analysed data gathered by other teams. The 73 overlapping climate records that they considered included sediment cores drilled from lake bottoms and sea floors around the world, along with a handful of ice cores collected in Antarctica and Greenland.

Each of these chronicles spanned at least 6,500 years, and each included a millennium-long baseline period beginning in the middle of the post-ice-age period at 3550 bc.

For some records, the researchers inferred past temperatures from the ratio of magnesium and calcium ions in the shells of microscopic creatures that had died and dropped to the ocean floor; for others, they measured the lengths of long-chain organic molecules called alkenones that were trapped in the sediments.

After the ice age, they found, global average temperatures rose until they reached a plateau between 7550 and 3550 bc. Then a long-term cooling trend set in, reaching its lowest temperature extreme between ad 1450 and 1850. Since then, temperatures have been increasing at a dramatic clip: from the first decade of the twentieth century to now, global average temperatures rose from near their coldest point since the ice age to nearly their warmest, Marcott and his team report today in Science.

And here is New Scientist, making reference to the exact same graph:

Shaun Marcott of Oregon State University in Corvallis and colleagues have compiled 73 such proxies from around the world, all of which reach back to the end of the last glacial period, 11,300 years ago. During this period, known as the Holocene, the climate has been relatively warm – and civilisation has flourished.

“Most global temperature reconstructions have only spanned the past 2000 years,” says Marcott.

Marcott’s graph shows temperatures rising slowly after the ice age, until they peaked 9500 years ago. The total rise over that period was about 0.6 °C. They then held steady until around 5500 years ago, when they began slowly falling again until around 1850. The drop was 0.7 °C, roughly reversing the previous rise.


Then, in the late 19th century, the graph shows temperatures shooting up, driven by humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions.The rate of warming in the last 150 years is unlike anything that happened in at least 11,000 years, says Michael Mann of the Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who was not involved in Marcott’s study. It was Mann who created the original hockey stick graph (see upper graph here), which showed the change in global temperatures over the last 1000 years.

Over the Holocene, temperatures rose and fell less than 1 °C, and they did so over thousands of years, says Marcott. “It took 8000 years to go from warm to cold.” Agriculture, communal life and forms of government all arose during this relatively stable period, he adds. Then in 100 years, global temperatures suddenly shot up again to very close to the previous maximum.

It seems clear that even as various media took different angles on the story and covered it in varying degrees of technical detail, the articles listed above accurately reflected the conclusions reflected in the NSF press release, and specifically the “hockey stick”-like character of the new temperature reconstruction. Unfortunately, all of this is just wrong, as I explain below. (If you’d like to explore media coverage further here is a link to more stories. My colleague Tom Yulsman got punked too.)

The Problem with the NSF Press Release and the Subsequent Reporting

There is a big problem with the media reporting of the new paper. It contains a fundamental error which (apparently) originates in the NSF press release and which was furthered by public comments by scientists.

In a belatedly-posted FAQ to the paper, which appeared on Real Climate earlier today,Marcott et al. make this startling admission:

Q: What do paleotemperature reconstructions show about the temperature of the last 100 years?

A: Our global paleotemperature reconstruction includes a so-called “uptick” in temperatures during the 20^th-century. However, in the paper we make the point that this particular feature is of shorter duration than the inherent smoothing in our statistical averaging procedure, and that it is based on only a few available paleo-reconstructions of the type we used. Thus, the 20^th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.
Got that?

In case you missed it, I repeat:

. . . the 20^th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes . . .

What that means is that this paper actually has nothing to do with a “hockey stick” as it does not have the ability to reproduce 20th century temperatures in a manner that is “statistically robust.” The new “hockey stick” is no such thing as Marcott et al. has no blade. (To be absolutely clear, I am not making a point about temperatures of the 20th century, but what can be concluded from the paper about temperatures of the 20th century.)

Yet, you might recall that the NSF press release said something quite different:

What that [temperature reconstruction] history shows, the researchers say, is that during the last 5,000 years, the Earth on average cooled about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit–until the last 100 years, when it warmed about 1.3 degrees F.

So what the paper actually shows is the following, after I have removed from the graph the 20th century period that is “not statistically robust” (this is also the figure that appears at the top of this post):

Surely there is great value in such an analysis of pre-20th century temperatures. And there can be no doubt there will be continuing debates and discussions about the paper’s methods and conclusions. But one point that any observer should be able to clearly conclude is that the public representation of the paper was grossly in error. The temperature reconstruction does not allow any conclusions to be made about the period after 1900.

Does the public misrepresentation amount to scientific misconduct? I’m not sure, but it is far to close to that line for comfort. Saying so typically leads to a torrent of angry ad hominem and defensive attacks, and evokes little in the way of actual concern for the integrity of this highly politicized area of science. Looking past the predictable responses, this mess can be fixed in a relatively straightforward manner with everyone’s reputation intact.

How to Fix This

Here are the steps that I recommend should be taken:

1) Science should issue a correction to the paper, and specially do the following:
(a) retract and replot all figures in the paper and SI eliminating from the graphs all data/results that fail to meet the paper’s criteria for “statistical robustness.”
(b) include in the correction the explicit and unambiguous statement offered in the FAQ released today that the analysis is not “statistically robust” post-1900.
2) NSF should issue a correction to its press release, clarifying and correcting the statements of Peter Clark (a co-author, found above) and Candace Major, NSF program manager, who says in the release:

“The last century stands out as the anomaly in this record of global temperature since the end of the last ice age,” says Candace Major, program director in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Ocean Sciences.

Full story




A comment on Marcott et al.  from Ross McKitrick

"Hiding the (20th century) decline" once more

This isn’t just a filibuster, they are defending themselves on the grounds that their paper made an incredibly subtle misrepresentation and it’s the reader’s fault for not noticing. Without the closing uptick, the main implication of their reconstruction is that, in the 20th century, we experienced the coldest conditions of the Holocene. With the uptick, we experienced nearly the warmest. The sharp uptick in the instrumental record can only be compared against their reconstruction if they can show their low-frequency proxies are capable of registering such events. If the 20th century portion of their reconstruction does not have the same uptick as the instrumental record, we would conclude that it could have missed similar swings in earlier centuries as well, so the absence of such swings in the earlier part of their graph tells us nothing about the presence or absence of decadal and century-scale warming events. Likewise, an annual or decadal observation from the modern instrumental record cannot be compared against values from their reconstruction, if their reconstruction is not capable of resolving events at that time scale.

But that is precisely what they do in Figure 3 of their paper, and it is the basis of their claim that “Global temperature, therefore, has risen from near the coldest to the warmest levels of the Holocene within the past century, reversing the long-term cooling trend that began ~5000 yr B.P.” Without the uptick in their proxy reconstruction this kind of statement could never have been made. The presence of the uptick in the proxy graph validates their comparison of the instrumental record against the proxy record. By admitting that the uptick is not robust and cannot be a basis for any conclusions they have undermined their own findings, root and branch.

Moreover, they can’t conceal the fact that they defended the robustness of the uptick in their paper. Marcott et al. stated that a RegEM variant reconstruction eliminated 0.6 of the 0.7 C closing uptick, but that due to data limitations the difference between reconstructions was “probably not robust” (p. 1198). In the context this implies that they consider the size of the closing uptick to be insensitive to choice of methodology, in other words that the uptick is robust.

But now they say the 20th century uptick is not robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and is not the basis of any of our conclusions. Did they know this prior to drawing Figure 3 and inserting it in their paper, and if so, how could they not have been aware that it would convey a false impression to the reader? Contrary to Revkin, the issue isn’t just the definitive statements they made in the media but the claims they made in the paper itself.

SOURCE




Important questions for Obama nominees

Interior, Energy and EPA nominees raise serious questions that need to be addressed

Craig Rucker

In his second inaugural address, President Obama pledged to address “the threat of climate change” because no one can avoid “the devastating impact of raging fires, crippling droughts and more powerful storms.”  The President had said nothing about climate change during his reelection campaign –because that would have reminded millions of voters that he is committed to replacing hydrocarbons with expensive renewable energy and ensuring that electricity and gasoline prices skyrocket.

But with the election safely behind him, climate change is back on his agenda, even though the Earth has not warmed during the past 17 years; Hurricane Sandy did not end one of the longest stretches ever with no category 3 or higher hurricane making landfall in the USA; and longstanding “progressive” federal policies on timber cutting and fire suppression have made wildfires harder to control.

The President’s nominees to head the Interior and Energy Departments and Environmental Protection Agency – Sally Jewell, Ernest Moniz, and Gina McCarthy – are all supposedly much more mainstream than their highly controversial predecessors.  The media has therefore criticized each of them from the Left, even though they are clearly all “team players” in a decidedly anti-fossil fuels administration.

Sally Jewell began her career as an engineer with Mobil Oil (now ExxonMobil), then switched to banking (advising on oil and gas asset management), before taking over as head of outdoors giant REI. She is touted as having business experience that is virtually nonexistent in the Obama Cabinet.

However, Jewell is being prodded to follow Bill Clinton’s practice of closing millions of acres from human activity, especially oil and gas and mineral leasing, but even livestock grazing. As a lifelong “outdoors enthusiast” whose “loyalties lie with those who view the public lands as a playground, not the source of commodities like minerals or meat” (according to Grist analyst Greg Hanscom), she may find land withdrawals an easy course to take – except where wind and solar installations are involved.

Although Jewell owns fossil fuel (and power) industry stock, she is also likely to toe the Obama line and support a carbon tax, further curbs on coal mining, more restrictions on Arctic oil and gas drilling, and similar actions. We think Congress should repeatedly question her on two major issues:

1) In light of the President’s “all of the above” energy policy and the clear challenge posed by Chinese ownership of most of the world’s rare-earth minerals, how does the need for energy and minerals development mesh with her and the President’s strategy for managing our nation’s public lands?

2) Given that all federal land lies within state boundaries, and that land use decisions affecting federal lands clearly affect state and local economies, what role should states play in decisions about declaring land within state boundaries as national monuments or other “off limits” categories – and regarding mineral leasing, livestock grazing, road building and other activities on federal lands?

Ernest Moniz has long championed the idea that revenues from fossil fuels and nuclear energy can help fund the transition to a “clean fuels” economy. He’s invested heavily in fossil fuel, renewable and “smart-grid” companies. He has not objected to hydro-fracking or offshore oil drilling. That has caused Leftists like Margie Alt of Environment America to complain that Moniz has a “history of supporting dirty and dangerous energy sources like gas and nuclear power.”

But such criticism is likely a smokescreen. Some suspect that Moniz is being brought onboard to be a lone administration voice in support of liquefied natural gas exports, despite testifying in 2011 that the U.S. will soon be a net natural gas importer, even as fracking was substantially increasing domestic supplies.  Similarly, his criticism of the flawed Cornell University study that demonized shale oil as worse than coal on greenhouse gas emissions makes him the perfect choice for future hand-wringing over some new study claiming that fracking could cause serious new environmental problems.

We think the Energy nominee should also answer two vitally important questions:

1) Given that Earth has not warmed for 17 years, despite steadily increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, is it not time to question the wisdom of increasing energy costs for American consumers via carbon taxes, cap-and-trade or the EPA’s plans to rigorously regulate CO2?

2) Given the increasing focus on energy efficiency and conservation, what are the best ways to reduce transmission line losses; curtail impacts on agricultural lands, wildlife habitats, and bird and bat species from wind turbines, solar panels and biofuels; and help families and businesses reduce energy use and expenses – without further sacrificing employment, living standards, basic freedoms or ecological values?

Gina McCarthy as new EPA administrator raises quite different concerns. As Competitive Enterprise Institute analyst Marlo Lewis has noted, McCarthy is guilty of lying to Congress during 2011 testimony, when she and other EPA officials denied under oath that motor vehicle greenhouse gas emission standards played any role in agency implementation of 54.5 mpg fuel economy standards.

Lewis surmised that this false testimony was intended to protect EPA’s efforts to legislate climate policy under the guise of saving energy and implementing the Clean Air Act. The agency’s new fuel rules were devised with the auto industry during secret negotiations – but are unconstitutional Executive Branch lawmaking that will raise consumer costs and make cars smaller, lighter and less safe.

CEI energy policy director Myron Ebell also notes that McCarthy is up to her ears in the “Richard Windsor” scandal, in which outgoing EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson created a fictitious Windsor email address to hide her controversial communications from public scrutiny.  As such, says Ebell, McCarthy has “a strained relationship with disclosure and transparency.” (And with honesty, many would add.)

These actions belie suggestions that McCarthy’s state regulatory experience and face-to-face involvement with industry make her better able than Ms. Jackson to work with the business community. She may well do so with large companies that seek more subsidies, special regulatory arrangements, or regulations that penalize smaller competitors, hurt the economy as a whole or allow renewable energy companies to avoid environmental rules that apply to other industries. But she is unlikely to have a sympathetic ear for companies that she views as “polluters.”

Unless Ms. McCarthy can give honest, satisfactory, public answers to two important questions, her nomination should be rejected outright:

1) Under what authority does EPA assert the right to twist existing law, to create new laws that exceed clear legislative language, the stated intent of Congress, and historical or legal precedent?

2) Under what authority does an EPA official have the right to lie under oath to Congress, or use secret email accounts – thereby implying that Members of Congress are inferior to the Executive Branch, and avoiding disciplinary action because a partisan Justice Department shields Executive Branch officials from prosecution for such unlawful behavior?

Jewell, Moniz and McCarthy would all would be loyal servants to the Obama camp. And though each key bureaucrat takes an oath to uphold the Constitution and serve the public, history shows that any personal views that conflict with the official agenda will likely be reshaped and compromised as department directors carry out their missions. So despite serious concerns that many Senators have over the nominees’ likely policies, we anticipate the Senate will confirm Jewell and Moniz quickly.

McCarthy is another matter.  She has already demonstrated contempt for the Constitution and Congress itself.  Thus, despite claims that her experience and temperament suggest she will work well with Congress and the states, such a person – absent public repentance and a promise to chart a new course – should not be rewarded with any new opportunities to lie to, mislead and harm the public. No matter how noble the ends are purported to be, they cannot justify unlawful and disruptive means.

Via email



Obama Creates More Wealth for Green Crony Soros

On Good Friday, a day fewer people would be paying attention to the headlines than on most other days, the Obama administration released news about its plans to raise the price of gasoline. Gasoline prices for the first quarter of 2013 are higher than the same time in 2012. Intentionally pushing prices up would seem stupid in the midst of a struggling economy—that is, if your goal is to help those most impacted by higher fuel and food prices, rather than boosting the bottom line for your billionaire donors.

The plans, announced Friday, call for stricter limits for sulfur in gasoline—from the current 30 parts per million to 10. (Sulfur is an important element that is found naturally in crude oil has many industrial uses.) The EPA estimates that the low-sulfur gasoline will raise the price of a gallon of gas by “less than a penny,” while industry sources say it will be closer to ten cents a gallon.

Energy analyst Robert Rapier, told me that the new regulations “will certainly make gasoline more expensive.” He said; “Note that diesel was historically less expensive than gasoline until the ultra-low sulfur diesel standard was passed. Since then, diesel has often been more expensive than gasoline. I am not saying whether or not those standards were needed, maybe they were. But the impact on cost is undeniable. I worked in a refinery when those standards were passed, and we spent a lot of capital making sure we could comply.”

Though air pollution is a worthy consideration, it is low on the public’s list of priorities, while gas prices are of utmost importance. If the public doesn’t see air pollution as a problem, and the President’s popularity has peaked, why would he put out policy that would hit the middle class the hardest? Because, despite his campaign rhetoric, he’s not “a warrior for the middle class.”

One year ago, Christine Lakatos launched her blog— “The Green Corruption Files”—through which she set out to prove that “green corruption is the largest, most expensive and deceptive case of crony capitalism in American history. Stay tuned as we expose one piece of this scandal at a time.”  Last summer, Lakatos and I partnered to draw more attention to Obama’s Green-Energy Crony-Corruption Scandal. To date, I’ve written fifteen columns based on her research—this is the sixteenth.

A week ago, she posted her expose on George Soros and his profiting from his, apparent, insider information on green-energy investments. Within her post, Lakatos says: “be prepared for regulations and legislation that will, in some form or another, resemble cap-and-trade and demand additional funds to bank roll Obama’s efforts to save our planet.” Exactly one week later, the new EPA standards on gasoline were released. The standards will raise the cost of fuel—which has been the underlying goal of the Obama energy agenda: make what works more expensive so people will accept the high cost of “green energy” in the name of saving the planet. (Remember outgoing Energy Secretary Chu's 2008 statement: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”)

But, as the Soros story shows, it’s not about the planet, it’s about the profit. Soros’ investment portfolio shows he invests where he can make money—both traditional and green energy (though, as you’ll see, through Obama’s green energy emphasis, he has more control over green energy investments). In a 1998, 60 Minutes interview, Soros said: “I am basically there to make money. I cannot and do not look at the social consequences of what I do.”

Soros’ relationship with Obama goes back almost as far as his manipulation of money and markets.

It is reported that back before Obama became a Senator, or announced his presidential bid, and before the founding of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress (CAP), Morton Halperin, (the director of Soros’ Open Society Institute), John Podesta (the former Clinton White House chief of staff), Jeremy Rosner (a former speech writer for Bill Clinton), Robert Boorstin (a Democrat strategist and also a former speech writer for Clinton) and Carl Pope (a Democrat strategist and environmentalist) met in 2002 at Soros’ Long Island Southampton beach house to draft a plan to defeat President Bush in the presidential election of 2004. Without that meeting, Lt. Col. Robert “Buzz” Patterson, says: “Barack Obama would be … an unremarkable and unheard of state senator. Instead, Barack Obama is the President of the United States.”

Soros was an early donor to Obama’s senatorial race. “Soros and his family gave Barack Obama $60,000. This does not include money that Soros was able to funnel to so-called 527 groups (Moveon.org, for example) that have also been politically active; nor does it include money that Soros was able to raise from tapping a network of friends, business associates, and employees.”

Once Obama was running for president, Soros was there again with support to the tune of $5 million—which put him on the Forbes’ 2008 list of Obama’s Billionaire Buddies. But the king of contributions wasn’t done there, and in September 2012, Soros pledged $1.5 million in donations to a trio of super PACs backing Obama and congressional Democrats. Soros’ political contributions are widely known, as is his funding of left-leaning organizations such as CAP, The Tides Center and the Apollo Alliance—which all play a part in his ability to cash in on green.

Soros was instrumental at the least, integral at the most, in writing Obama’s 2009 Stimulus Bill that put nearly $100 billion into various green energy companies and projects. Additionally, there is a little-publicized connection between Soros, green energy advocacy, and the White House.

Since buying access, Soros has been a frequent White House visitorand met with Obama’s, then, top economist Larry Summers—exerting his influence.

The Soros-funded Apollo Alliance brags about its role in writing the 2009 Stimulus Bill. In an interview, the best-selling author of Throw Them All Out, Peter Schweizer, states: “Billionaire George Soros gave advice and direction on how President Obama should allocate so-called ‘stimulus’ money in a series of regular private meetings and consultations with White House senior advisers even as Soros was making investments in areas affected by the stimulus program.”

Schweizer, then, reveals, “In the first quarter of 2009, Mr. Soros went on a stock-buying spree in companies that ultimately benefited from the federal stimulus.” He continues: “It is not necessarily the case that Soros had specific insider tips about any government grants,” nevertheless, Soros’ “investment decisions aligned remarkably closely with government grants and transfers.” The majority of those investments were in green energy ventures that gained from the stimulus and/or government regulation such as BioFuel Energy that benefitted when the EPA announced a regulation on ethanol.

Shortly after the 2009 Stimulus, more to secure his investments than because of any core belief, Soros launched several new groupsto help propagate the manmade climate change narrative that is the foundation for green energy investments—without belief in manmade climate change, we don’t need renewables as there is no energy shortage.

Some of the little-publicized connections include Cathy Zoi, former CEOof Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, and who, while at the Department of Energy, oversaw the disbursement of more than $30 billionin green-energy stimulus funds. In early 2011, she resigned to work for a Soros fund: Silver Lake Kraftwerk. Another is Denis McDonoughwho has replaced Jack Lewas Obama’s Chief of Staff. McDonoughwas a Senior Fellow at Soros-funded CAP, which Bloomberg Newscalled: “an intellectual wellspring for Democratic policy proposals.” Other CAP/Obama advisors central to the green-energy scheme include Carol Browner, Van Jones, and Steve Spinner.

So, what return has Soros gotten on his stimulus-inspired stock buying spree plus investments in companies like First Solar and Solar City? Lakatos’ thorough research discovered that Soros’ green tab exceeds $11 billion of stimulus money (dwarfing Citibank’s) –– and we, the taxpayers, footed the bill. Keep in mind, this tally doesn’t factor in any profit Soros has made off these investments—or will continue to make as a result of Obama’s climate change agenda being pushed by EPA regulation.

As save-the-planet regulations and legislation come out of the Obama administration, which raise costs for the middle class and hurt America's struggling economy, remember the Soros story. It illustrates that Obama is not the "warrior for the middle class" he campaigned as, but he's most concerned about creating wealth for his "green cronies"—of which Soros is just one. This new EPA low-sulfur gasoline proposal is just the latest in a series of green regulations. We don’t know for whom it creates wealth, but we know it isn’t the middle class.

SOURCE

***************************************

For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN.   My Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Graphics hotlinked to this site sometimes have only a short life and if I host graphics with blogspot, the graphics sometimes get shrunk down to illegibility.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here and here

*****************************************

The prophecies never stop

You don't need any data or facts for a prophecy so why not?

The Arctic will turn green due to rising temperatures within decades, warns a new study.  The study forecasts that rising temperatures will lead to a massive 'greening' - increase in trees and shrubs - in the Arctic.

Scientists have revealed new models projecting that wooded areas in the Arctic could increase by as much as 50 per cent over the next few decades.

The research shows that this dramatic greening will also accelerate climate warming at a rate greater than previously expected.

Lead author Richard Pearson, a research scientist at the American Museum of Natural History's Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation, said: 'Such widespread redistribution of Arctic vegetation would have impacts that reverberate through the global ecosystem.'

Plant growth in Arctic ecosystems has increased over the past few decades, a trend that coincides with increases in temperatures, which are rising at about twice the global rate.

The research team - which includes scientists from the Museum, the University of York, AT&T Labs-Research, Woods Hole Research Centre, Colgate University and Cornell University - used climate scenarios for the 2050s to explore how the trend is likely to continue in the future.

The scientists developed models that statistically predict the types of plants that could grow under certain temperatures and precipitation. Although it comes with some uncertainty, the researchers said such modelling is a 'robust' way to study the Arctic because the harsh climate limits the range of plants that can grow, making this system simpler to model compared to other regions such as the tropics.

SOURCE





Britain has coldest Easter on record  -- but cooling proves warming so not to worry

Britain had its coldest Easter day on record this weekend, with temperatures dropping as low as -12.5C to round off a freezing month.

The reading, taken in the early hours of Sunday in Braemar, northern Scotland, was the coldest Easter day since modern records began in 1960, eclipsing the previous record for an Easter day of -9.8C on Easter Monday in 1986.

It was also the coldest end to March for more than 150 years. According to the book Daily Temperature Extremes for Britain, the previous low for March 31 had been -10C at Balmoral, Aberdeenshire, in 1941.

On Saturday Braemar recorded an overnight temperature of -11.2C, making it the chilliest March 30 on record and bringing an appropriate end to the coldest March in half a century.

Scotland was not the only area to suffer, with temperatures reaching an icy -8.7C in Shap, Cumbria, and -6C in Odiham, Hampshire on Sunday morning, although some areas remained just above freezing.

A drop in wind is expected to make conditions feel slightly warmer during the day on Sunday, with temperatures of 5C-7C across most of the country, but the weather should remain colder than the seasonal average until mid-April at the earliest.

Most of the country should enjoy calm weather but scattered wintry showers are expected in southern coastal areas during the start of the week.

A Met Office forecaster said: "It will be mainly dry across the whole of the UK [on Sunday and Monday] with sunny spells and a low risk of a few wintry showers, mainly across southern parts but few and far between.

"The rest of the week will remain cold with easterly winds continuing, but it should be mainly dry with the chance of a few wintry showers but very isolated ones. A cold week, but dry with sunny spells."

March is on course to be colder than winter this year for the first time since 1975. The average monthly temperature until March 26 was 2.5C – colder than December (3.8C), January (3.3C) and February (2.8C).

SOURCE




New study says that Antarctic sea ice is expanding  -- but ice is caused by warming so not to worry

GLOBAL warming has led to more ice in the sea around Antarctica and could help insulate the southern hemisphere from atmospheric warming.

A Dutch study says that unlike in the Arctic region, sea ice around Antarctica has expanded at a significant rate since 1985.

Published online in Nature Geoscience, the article suggests cool freshwater from melt beneath the Antarctic ice shelves has insulated offshore sea ice from the warming ocean beneath.

Richard Bintanja of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and colleagues say the Antarctic sea ice expands during southern hemisphere autumn and winter in response to this fresh, cool surface layer that freezes easily.

"Against the background of global climate warming, the expansion of Antarctic sea ice is an exceptional feature, which seems to be associated with decreasing sea surface temperatures in the Southern Ocean," they write.

"We predict that this mechanism will be a sizable contributor to the factors that regionally and seasonally offset greenhouse warming and the associated sea ice retreat."

They say the expanding sea ice may constitute a "feedback" that has the potential to oppose southern hemisphere atmospheric warming and amplify increases in global sea level.

Changes in sea ice can significantly modulate climate change because of its high reflective and strong insulating nature, the paper says.

SOURCE




Britain's carbon levy will be a 'stealth poll tax' on energy

The government's new carbon levy is effectively a “stealth poll tax” that will only work to put up household electricity bills and hand a windfall to old nuclear plants, the head of energy giant E.ON has warned.

The Treasury’s “carbon price floor” comes into effect on Monday and official estimates say it will add £5 to household bills this year, rising to about £50 by 2020.

The tax is intended to provide an incentive to invest in new wind farms and nuclear plants by making it more expensive to run coal and gas plants that emit carbon.

Tony Cocker, chief executive of E.ON UK, attacked the policy on the eve of its implementation, arguing that it simply “pushes up the price for electricity” and should be scrapped.

He told The Sunday Telegraph: “The carbon price floor is a tax and it’s pretty close to a stealth poll tax. It’s not based on ability to pay, it’s based on the requirement to keep warm and light your house.

“It was put in place with the stated objective of encouraging investment in low-carbon energy but it certainly doesn’t achieve that objective – it’s just a tax for the Exchequer.”

The measure is expected to raise billions of pounds for the Treasury over the next decade.

Mr Cocker criticised the lack of transparency over the tax. “It’s kind of hidden away,” he said. “If you called it an electricity tax or duty, like the fuel duty on cars, we could all understand that goes to the Exchequer.”

The carbon tax would also provide an unintended “windfall” subsidy for existing old nuclear and hydro plants, which is “completely unnecessary because it’s already been paid for”, he said.

European green policies already make polluting industries buy permits for each tonne of carbon they emit. However, the Government believes the prices have been too low and has introduced the carbon price floor to “top up” the cost per tonne of carbon dioxide.

But the tax has not proven enough to encourage new nuclear and wind power investors, with companies now being offered separate long-term subsidy schemes.

Because Britain is acting unilaterally in increasing carbon costs, critics say the tax will also have no effect on reducing carbon output.“If we charge more for carbon in the UK than is charged in Europe as a whole, all that means is we will burn less coal in the UK and the rest of Europe will burn more coal,” Mr Cocker said.

Manufacturers have called for the tax to be scrapped as they fear it will make British businesses uncompetitive compared with the rest of Europe. Ministers are planning a £150m compensation scheme to help compensate heavy industries.

On Friday, The Daily Telegraph revealed that newly appointed energy minister Michael Fallon had called the tax “absurd”. Mr Fallon has taken on a new role, as joint energy and business minister, working across the departments of Business and Energy in the hope of creating a unified approach.

In a meeting with business leaders in February, Mr Fallon, who at that point had not been given his new responsibilities, said that everyone would “have to pay” for the unintended consequences of the tax.

“This is a fairly absurd waste of your money, this situation we’re now in. Governments intervene in markets they don’t understand and there are consequences and we all have to pay for those consequences.”

Consumer groups have also called for the tax to be scrapped or for its proceeds to be used to help pay for energy efficiency measures. Companies such as EDF, which has a large existing nuclear fleet that is likely to benefit from the higher electricity price, have backed the policy, however.

Mr Cocker insisted his opposition to the carbon tax was not motivated by E.ON’s commercial interest, and said the impact on its power generation portfolio – which includes coal, gas and renewables – would be “relatively neutral”.

It will, however, serve to make E.ON’s Ratcliffe coal plant increasingly uneconomic to run. The company is considering options such as converting it to a biomass plant, which would burn wood instead of coal and be eligible for subsidies.

SOURCE




British government's climate watchdog launches astonishing attack on newspaper ... for revealing global warming science is wrong

By David Rose

The official watchdog that advises the Government on greenhouse gas emissions targets has launched an astonishing attack on The Mail on Sunday – for accurately reporting that alarming predictions of global warming are wrong.

We disclosed that although highly influential computer models are still estimating huge rises in world temperatures, there has been no statistically significant increase for more than 16 years.

Despite our revelation earlier this month, backed up by a scientifically researched graph, the Committee on Climate Change still clings to flawed predictions.

Leading the attack is committee member Sir Brian Hoskins, who is also director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College, London. In a blog on the Committee on Climate Change’s website, Sir Brian insisted: ‘The scientific basis for significant long-term climate risks remains robust, despite the points raised ...... Early and deep cuts in emissions are still required.’

He also claimed our report ‘misunderstood’ the value of computer models. Yet in an interview three years ago, Sir Brian conceded that when he started out as a climate scientist, the models were ‘pretty lousy, and they’re still pretty lousy, really’.

Our graph earlier this month was reproduced from a version first drawn by Dr Ed Hawkins, of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science. Last week it was reprinted as part of a four-page report in The Economist.

The accuracy of computer forecasts is vital because they influence politicians and their key environmental advisers on how urgently to act on climate change – and how many billions of pounds they take from the taxpayer in ‘green’ levies.



The Committee on Climate Change claims such forecasts must be right because world temperatures have previously matched computer models’ ‘outputs’ for most of the past 60 years. Yet as this newspaper pointed out, for almost all of that 60-year period the models were not making predictions – because they did not yet exist.

Instead, the models had recently been making ‘hindcasts’ – backward projections based on climate simulations and tailored to actual temperatures. The evidence shows the models collapse when they try to forecast the future.

Author Andrew Montford, who runs the widely read Bishop Hill climate blog, leapt to The Mail on Sunday’s defence and said Sir Brian’s reliance on ‘hindcasts’ was ‘crazy, crazy stuff’.

David Whitehouse, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the graph showed models were so unreliable that ‘if this kind of data were from a drugs trial it would have been stopped long ago’.

And last week, The Economist repeated our claims that many scientists now believe that previous estimates of ‘climate sensitivity’ – how much the world will warm each time the level of carbon dioxide doubles – are far too high.

In a key 2007 report, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested this was most likely to be about 3C, with 4.5C considered ‘likely’. However, recent research suggests the true figure is much lower – between 1.5C and 2C – giving the world many more decades to avoid disaster through effective new technologies.

The Committee on Climate Change, established by the 2008 Climate Change Act, advises the Government on setting ‘carbon budgets’ and CO2 emissions cuts. It is chaired by Lord Deben, who also heads Veolia Water UK, which connects windfarms to the National Grid.

SOURCE





Israel Begins Pumping Natural Gas From Offshore Field

Israel moved closer to its goal of energy independence on Sunday as natural gas from a large offshore field began flowing into the country, a harbinger of important change that will benefit the country strategically and economically, officials said.

“We are taking an important step toward energy independence,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement after the natural gas started flowing from the Tamar reservoir in the Mediterranean Sea to a terminal in the Israeli port of Ashdod, a journey that officials said would take 24 hours.

“We have advanced the natural gas sector in Israel over the last decade, which will be good for the Israeli economy and for all Israelis,” Mr. Netanyahu added.

Some questions were raised in Orthodox circles in Israel as to why the Tamar field had gone online on the Jewish Sabbath, the religiously mandated day of rest. During his traditional Passover visit to the country’s leading rabbis on Sunday, President Shimon Peres called that decision a “mistake” and said he did not know the reason for it, according to Ynet, a Hebrew news Web site, and some ultra-Orthodox Web sites.

A partnership of Noble Energy, based in Houston, and two Israeli companies, Delek Group and Dor Gas Explorations, carried out drilling operations at the Tamar site, about 56 miles west of the northern port city of Haifa, and discovered large gas reserves there in 2009.

Israel’s Ministry of Energy and Water Resources says that the Tamar field will supply 50 to 80 percent of Israel’s natural gas consumption needs over the next 10 years. About 40 percent of electricity in Israel has been generated from natural gas in recent years, and the rate of natural gas consumption is expected to rise to 50 percent by 2015, the ministry said.

The Tamar field went into production as a smaller natural gas reserve, known as Yam Thetis, at a site farther south, began to run dry.

But the subsequent discovery in 2010 of another major natural gas field off Israel’s northern coast, known as Leviathan, has even positioned Israel as a future energy exporter. Leviathan, discovered through the work of a partnership between Noble Energy and local companies, was said to have been one of the world’s largest offshore gas finds in a decade.

The Israeli government said in 2011 that it would set a tax rate on energy profits at 52 to 62 percent. Mr. Netanyahu said at the time that some of the money would go into a special fund devoted to education and the security of Israel.

The development of Israel’s natural gas sector in recent years has lessened the country’s dependence on foreign energy imports in an unstable and largely hostile region. The vulnerability of Israel’s supplies was underscored in the months after the 2011 ouster of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, when unidentified attackers bombed a gas pipeline in the Egyptian Sinai more than a dozen times, apparently to disrupt the flow to Israel.

Under a deal signed in 2005, Egypt had been supplying Israel’s Electric Corporation, a mostly state-owned utility, with up to 40 percent of the natural gas it needs.

Offshore exploration efforts have also underscored the need for clear maritime borders. Israel and Lebanon have been locked in a dispute over an area of the Mediterranean Sea that is potentially rich with energy resources.

SOURCE

***************************************

For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN.   My Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Graphics hotlinked to this site sometimes have only a short life and if I host graphics with blogspot, the graphics sometimes get shrunk down to illegibility.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here and here

*****************************************