Record high temperature -- by 5 hundredths of one degree Celsius!

It's statistically meaningless, of course.  And the land-based record is crap anyway.  Only the satellite measurements give full coverage -- and are much harder to "rig"

The Earth experienced its hottest month of March since record-keeping began in 1880.  There's been no break from the globe's record heat - the first three months of 2015 have all set new high temperature marks.  Last month's average temperature soared to 56.4°F (13.6°C), averaging 1.5°F (0.85°C) above the average for the 20th century.

The data, released today by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) takes into account global averages across land and sea surfaces.

It follows earlier announcements from US government scientists that 2014 was the hottest year in modern history.

'This was the highest for March in the 1880-2015 record, surpassing the previous record of 2010 by 0.09°F (0.05°C),' said the report.

SOURCE





Hottest Year? Not According To Satellites, Joe!

Even at this early stage of the year, there is a concerted effort to make it the “warmest evah”.  Joe Romm has this graph of the GISS numbers for the first three months of the year, and Gavin has clearly been busy!



Unfortunately, the more comprehensive and accurate satellites show no such thing.



For January to March, UAH rank this as only 4th warmest behind 2010, 1998 and even 2007.

According to RSS, this year so far is even lower down the rankings in 8th place.

Given the weak El Nino conditions in place since last April, there is nothing out of the ordinary about the satellite rankings.

We have been repeatedly assured for the past year that satellite temperatures would catch up with the surface datasets. They have not, and instead the latter continue to diverge more and more.

The alarmist tactic now is to tell us to simply ignore the satellite data, as it is “not measuring the same thing”, and is therefore somehow irrelevant. This is all highly amusing, as the UK Met Office, back in 2013, was reassuring us that the surface datasets were reliable as:

“Changes in temperature observed in surface data records are corroborated by records of temperatures in the troposphere recorded by satellites”

This divergence is now becoming the elephant in the room, which the likes of NASA and their media allies are desperately trying to ignore.

It is time that the matter was fully investigated by a properly independent inquiry.

More HERE  (See the original for links & more  graphics)





Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry rips ‘manufactured consensus’ – Human influence is NOT ‘dominant over natural climate variability’

Georgia Tech Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry on The Mark Levin Show – April 15, 2015.  Selected radio excerpts – Listen to full interview (click on April 15 show – Curry begins at 57 min.)

Curry on Consensus: “I am a scientist who thinks independently  and I happen to disagree with the manufactured consensus about climate change. Just because scientists agree on something doesn’t mean its right. [If you have seen] the collapse of the consensus on cholesterol and heart disease– that one collapsed overnight. I can only hope that sanity will eventually prevail with the climate problem as well.”

Curry on Predictions: “We don’t really know what the climate is going to be like in 70 years. I am sure we will be surprised.”

Curry on impact of CO2: “The carbon dioxide that humans are putting into the atmosphere does have a warming tendency, but it’s not clear that [CO2] is going to dominate with the other things that are going on with the sun or volcanic eruptions or deep ocean circulations – the things that contribute to natural climate variability. Those are the things that could really surprise us.”

Curry on 97% consensus claims: “The so-called 97% consensus is about fairly trivial things: ‘Yes the temperature is warming; Yes, humans are putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and Yes, carbon dioxide does have a greenhouse effect. But that doesn’t tell us whether human caused climate change is dominating over natural climate change and that is where the big debate is about.

On balance, I don’t see any particular dangers from greenhouse warming….[Humans do] influence climate to some extent, what we do with land-use changes and what we put into the atmosphere. But I don’t think its a large enough impact to dominate over natural climate variability. It’s become ideology driven at this point. laughs. Yes definitely.”

Curry on being targeted by Congressman Grijalva of Arizona: “I was one of seven scientists he targeted. All of us had been called to testify by Republicans and wanted our emails and grant information and our travel information and all sorts of info like that. Trying to question our integrity and make us look untrustworthy…At this point, I am used to it. It was really pointless and I think its backfired…

They were trying to smoke out if any of us were getting money from oil companies…It’s an absolute red herring. it doesn’t make any difference.”

SOURCE




The American Environmental Movement - The American Counter-Movement Perspective

A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires presides over a vast well-knit network of like-minded funders, government bureaucrats, and enviro-activists who manufacture phony grassroots campaigns and churn out bogus propaganda disguised as science and journalism in an effort to control economic decision-making across America.

The green billionaires oversee America’s environmental movement which in turn steers major policy decisions and lobbies to further empower ideologically aligned government agencies, like the Environment Protection Agency (EPA), that are statutorily prohibited from lobbying on their own behalves.

Supposedly unbiased agencies like the EPA are run by career environmentalists who work hand-in-glove with their allies in the environmentalist non-governmental organization (ENGO) community. Members of this green state elite have no experience as elected politicians nor in business nor in labour. They are bureaucrats, academics, and former ENGO activists. Having seized branches of government, they now lavish tax dollars upon the ENGOs. Obama’s Administration is unprecedentedly stacked with closed-minded enviro-activists.

American environmentalism’s current agenda centres on aggressively tightening regulations on the coal and oil industries to evermore controversial levels. These and other environmental regulations cost businesses and consumers tens of billions of dollars a year. This enviro-regulatory regime is being gamed by rent-seeking crony capitalists from the renewable energy and pollution control industries who now number among environmentalism’s principal cheerleaders.

Environmentalism’s victories come at the expense of American workers and small businesses. Enviro-regulations cause unemployment, and unemployment undermines the health and well-being of ordinary Americans. Environmentalism consolidates wealth and power into the hands of the already wealthy and powerful. Environmentalism hurts the poor.

If the above passage seems eccentric, overly antagonistic, and perhaps a tad radical, then you are in for a surprise. The above passage is a faithful synopsis of an assessment of environmentalism widely held by members of the United States Republican Party.

This posting condenses and collates four publications from late 2014; two written by Republican staffers employed by the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works; and two published by Republican-allied free-market think-tanks.

More HERE





Heartland’s James M. Taylor Wins Debate Against Floridians for Solar Choice

Heartland Institute Senior Fellow James Taylor soundly defeated Floridians for Solar Choice chairman Tory Perfetti in a debate on creating a special monopoly carve-out for solar power in Florida, the Tampa Tribune and other media reports. The verdict throws cold water on media claims that grassroots conservatives and libertarians are uniting to support giving solar power its desired monopoly carve-out.

Floridians for Solar Choice, which receives 98 percent of its funding from the Atlanta-based anti-coal, anti-natural gas, anti-nuclear power group Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, is attempting to convince Florida free-market advocates that giving solar power – and solar power alone – the monopoly right to sell electricity directly to consumers from small-scale equipment advances free markets because it strikes a blow at regulated utilities.

In a March 24 debate hosted by the Tampa 912 Project, Taylor explained that the proposed solar monopoly carve-out does nothing to introduce free-market competition among utilities. Moreover, the solar monopoly carve-out extends and entrenches anti-free market forces by creating a new monopoly regime and giving the monopoly solely to the solar power industry.

Taylor pointed out the solar power industry would not even exist if not for its successful lobbying for government cronyism and special favors that keep the uneconomical industry afloat. Taxpayers give direct cash subsidies to the solar power industry for 30 percent of the cost of solar power equipment, and most states require consumers to purchase renewable power – including solar power – as part of their electricity mix even though solar power remains five times more expensive than conventional power.

After the debate, the Tampa Tribune reported Perfetti pitched the solar power carve-out “to about 70 members and friends of the Tampa 912 Project, precisely the sort of tea party group that has validated descriptions of supporters as ‘an unusual coalition’ that includes conservatives, libertarians and far-left environmentalists. Well, nobody asked the skeptical Tampa 912ers, and, matched against Heartland Institute senior fellow for environmental and energy policy James Taylor, the best Perfetti could manage was a golf clap.”

The American Spectator affirmed the Tampa Tribune’s verdict:

There was no vote or show of hands at the end of the presentations. No accounting of which presenter swayed more of the congregation. My subjective reaction was that the applause for Taylor was enthusiastic, for Perfetti polite. At the end, Perfetti did not ask for an endorsement of his amendment. And no one offered, though several people told me afterward that they liked the idea. More said they didn’t.

SOURCE





"To the Museums of Science and Natural History" - An Open Response

William Happer, Chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute, is leading an effort to persuade American museums to reject calls in an open letter dated March 24, 2015, by a number of scientists that U.S. museums of science and natural history divest themselves of investments and donations from fossil fuel interests.

Not only would such an ill-advised move deny these vital American institutions much-needed funding to keep them open to the American public, it would also lend credence to the erroneous belief that fossil fuels are a great evil rather than the only cheap and efficient form of energy readily available to continue to lift hundreds of millions of our fellow human beings out of a life of poverty, starvation, and disease.

Professor Happer, along with a number of other members of the Marshall Institute board and distinguished scientists, responded to the open letter with one of their own on April 16, 2015, and urge the boards and management of America's science and natural history museums to "reject the exceptionally bad and misguided advice in the letter. Abandoning fossil fuels, aside from the economic impossibility of that proposition, would not help the environment but would likely harm it, and would be profoundly anti-human and immoral. Without the benefits of low-cost and abundant energy from fossil fuels, much of the world's poor today and in the future would be condemned to continued poverty, ignorance and exploitation."

The George C. Marshall Institute proudly supports and applauds the efforts of Professor Happer, members of our board, and the many distinguished scientists for their continued moral courage and intellectual honesty on this vital issue, and we hope that all of our friends and supporters will do the same.

Via email

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

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  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 or here

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