Those good ol' hundredths of a degree again!

Being by far the longest instrumental temperature record available, the Central England record (CET) is always of interest, even if it has little generalizability to other places.

The latest statistics that have been dragged screaming from it by Warmists are given below.  In case it is not obvious, let me mention that most of what they did ignored the whole record.  They used only the data after 1900.  Interesting?  You can of course prove all sorts of dubious things by carefully choosing your starting point from a longer record.  It's one of the classic ways of lying with statistics.

The one use they did make of the whole record was to assert that 2014 was the hottest year ever.  But, like all such claims so far, it is based on temperature differences of hundredths of one degree Celsius, which even Warmists in their saner moments concede is not statistically significant -- and hence not significant in any other way either. We read in the body of the journal article:

"The annual CET value for 2014 was 10.93 °C, the highest in the 356 year series. However, it is worth noting that, at approximately 0.06 °C above the previous 2006 record, we cannot be entirely certain that 2014 was the warmest on record. Parker and Horton (2005) state that for annual mean CET values to be deemed significantly different a 0.25 °C [a quarter of a degree] difference is required."

Note that "0.06".  In plain English, six hundredths of one degree! They've sure got some impressive results there!  They couldn't even squeeze a quarter of a degree out of it.

The rest of the research was games with models, models of the sort which have repeatedly been shown to have no predictive skill.  What a waste of time!


Last year was the hottest since records began for central England and new research predicts the country is going to get even warmer.

A study found that there was 'significant and substantial increase' in the likelihood that the UK will experience another record-breaking year because of man-made climate change.

Findings suggest that summers today are 22 times more likely to be hot compared to the climate of a century ago.

Detailed analysis of the Central England Temperature (CET) charts - the world's longest instrumental temperature record dating back to 1659 - showed human activities have a large influence on heatwaves across the country, scientists have found.

Published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the discovery is all the more remarkable given it is such a small area of the world.

His team used climate simulations to calculate the likelihood of very warm years when there is just natural forces on the climate and no human influence, such as burning fossil fuels, and then when there is both these and human influence.

The change in the likelihood of warm years due to human influences on the climate was then calculated.

The researchers then observed the CET and picked out the warmest years from the record since 1900, plotting these onto a graph to calculate the odds of warm years happening now and a hundred years ago.

The model based method suggested at least a 13 fold increase due to human influences on the climate, whilst this rose to 22 times using the observation approach.

SOURCE

Attribution of the record high Central England temperature of 2014 to anthropogenic influences

Andrew D King et al.

Abstract

In 2014, Central England experienced its warmest year in a record extending back to 1659. Using both state-of-the-art climate models and empirical techniques, our analysis shows a substantial and significant increase in the likelihood of record-breaking warm years, such as 2014, due to human influences on climate. With 90% confidence we find that anthropogenic forcings on the climate have increased the chances of record warm years in Central England by at least 13-fold. This study points to a large influence of human activities on extreme warm years despite the small region of study and the variable climate of Central England. Our analysis shows that climate change is clearly visible on the local-scale in this case.

SOURCE

Environmental groups want to make soil a red hot climate change issue

This is just the usual Warmist practice of making mountains out of pinheads.  If you look at the change in CO2 composition of the atmosphere since 1977 (the only time that CO2 can have been a factor), the total change in atmospheric CO2 has been 0.009%!!  Do these idiots really believe that soil is going to notice such a miniscule increase?

2015 is shaping up to be a big year for soil — in addition to being Global Soil Week’s third year running, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has declared it the International Year of Soil. José Graziano da Silva, director of the FAO, has called soil a “nearly forgotten resource,” and has implemented more than 120 soil-related projects around the world to mark the International Year of Soil. Farming First, a global agriculture coalition with more than 150 support organizations, has also called for soil health to be a top priority in the UN’s new Sustainable Development Goals.

“If you look at the global carbon created in nature under land-based systems, soil and trees are the two dominant reservoirs where carbon is,” Rattan Lal, director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center at Ohio State University, told ThinkProgress.

Soils — and the microbes that live within them — store three times as much carbon as is in the atmosphere, and four and a half times as much as in all plants and animals. “If the soil carbon reserve is not managed properly,” Lal said, “it can easily overwhelm the atmosphere.”

Climate change can stimulate the release of carbon from soil in a few different ways. Normally, carbon is bonded to minerals in the soil, which helps keep carbon locked in the soil and out of the atmosphere. A recent report by scientists at Oregon State University, however, found that when chemicals emitted by plant roots interact with minerals in soil, it can cause carbon to break free. This exposes the carbon to decomposition by microbes in the soil, which pass it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. As the climate warms, the scientists found, more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will stimulate the growth of plants, which will in turn stimulate the production of the root compounds that breakdown carbon and soil minerals.

“We thought for many many years if you just increase plant productivity, soil carbon will just go up,” Kate Lajtha, professor of biogeochemistry at Oregon State University, told ThinkProgress. “What more and more *models* are seeing now is that the opposite is true.”

The microbes that break down stored carbon are also likely to become more active in a warmer world, according to a 2014 study published in Nature. The study looked at microbes in 22 different kinds of soil from along a climatic gradient, testing samples of soil from the Arctic to the Amazon. They found that as temperature increased, the respiratory activity of the microbes in the soil also increased, releasing more carbon dioxide — and that effect was most pronounced in northern soils, which tend to store more carbon than soils at other latitudes.

More HERE





Anger the best way to address climate issues?

Professional Warmist JOE ROMM, below, seems to think so.  He praises Obama highly below for conveying anger about the climate controversy.  No comment that a lucid discussion of the facts  might have been in better.  But Leftism basically IS anger so I think we could chalk this down as a good proof of that

President Barack Obama just gave pitch-perfect delivery to one of the most brilliant pieces of writing on climate change you are ever going to see. At the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night in DC, Obama used devastating humor to express rare passion and anger over climate science denial.

Obama is famously low key. That’s why on the hit Comedy Central show “Key & Peele,” Keegan-Michael Key plays “Luther, President Obama’s anger translator.”

In a hilarious admission that he has been too low key to convey the moral outrage justified by humanity’s myopic march toward self-destruction — and by the brazen denial of climate science by many conservatives — Obama brought out “Luther” to express that outrage. And then, in an ingenious twist, Obama became so outraged that he didn’t need Luther and in fact Luther himself couldn’t take the genuinely angry Obama, who says of denial, “What kind of stupid, shortsighted, irresponsible, bull–”

SOURCE





Silencing skeptics, conservatives and free speech

Congressional Democrats and Vatican join White House and Leftist assaults on basic rights

Paul Driessen

Our scientific method and traditions of free speech and open debate are under assault as never before, by intolerant inquisitors in our media, universities, government agencies, and even Congress and the Vatican.

They threaten our most basic rights and freedoms, our political and scientific processes – and ultimately our continued innovation and invention, energy reliability and affordability, job creation and economic growth, and modern living standards, health and welfare.

Congressman Grijalva and Senators Markey, Boxer and Whitehouse sent letters to universities, think tanks and companies, demanding detailed information on skeptics’ funding and activities – in an attempt to destroy their funding, reputations and careers, while advancing “crony climate alarm science.” Equally intolerable, Democrats and the White House are blocking efforts to ensure that environmental regulations are based on honest, unbiased, transparent, replicable science that accurately reflects real-world evidence.

The Secret Science Reform Act (S. 544) and its House counterpart would require that the Environmental Protection Agency develop its regulations and the science behind them in the open, and allow experts and other interested parties to examine data, evidence and studies that supposedly support EPA standards and mandates that could cost billions of dollars and millions of jobs. This should not be controversial.

But Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee wanted Chairman James Inhofe to drop the bill from a planned markup. He refused, the bill passed on a party-line vote, and a Senate vote will be set soon. President Obama says he will veto the legislation. Why this opposition?

Obama said his would be the most transparent administration in history. But transparency quickly took a back seat to his radical climate change, renewable energy and other plans to “fundamentally transform” the United States. EPA practices epitomize what goes on throughout his Executive Branch, why our economy is growing at 0.2% and what congressional Democrats are apparently determined to perpetuate.

The problem is not only EPA’s private email accounts and deleted emails, á la Hillary Clinton. It’s illegal experiments on humans – with test results ignored when they don’t support EPA’s agenda of removing the last vestige of soot from coal-fired power plants. It’s rules for 0.5% of the mercury in U.S. air, justified with claims that they would bring a 0.00209 point improvement in IQ scores; economy and job-killing climate regulations that would reduce warming by 0.03 degrees by 2100, assuming carbon dioxide actually does drive climate change; and equally bogus health and environmental benefits of every description that ignore adverse human health and welfare impacts of the EPA regulations themselves.

The President and Democrats claim the “secret science” bill would “unduly burden” regulators. Baloney. The rules would simply require that promulgators of government edicts live according to the same rules they impose on us: Be honest and transparent. Show us your data, calculations and analyses. Demonstrate that you have examined all relevant studies – not just what supports your agenda, while you ignore everything else. Back up your analyses and decisions with actual evidence. Answer our questions. Recognize that collusion, deceit and fraud have no place in public policy, and will no longer be tolerated.

What can possibly be wrong with those guidelines – unless the regulators have a lot to hide?

And now the Vatican is adopting the same secretive, agenda-driven, inquisition tactics.

Its Pontifical Academy of Sciences recently held a workshop on climate change and sustainability. But only religious leaders, scientists, bureaucrats and regulators who support alarmist perspectives on these issues were invited. Those with contrary views were neither invited, welcomed nor tolerated.

However, a dozen climate, health and theological experts skeptical of “dangerous manmade climate change” allegations hosted a press event the day before the workshop. Three of them managed to get into the Vatican event. But when Climate Depot director Marc Morano tried to ask the UN Secretary General to advise Pope Francis that many Catholics and other Christians believe the papal position on global warming is ill-advised, a security guard took Morano’s microphone away and told him, “control yourself, or you will be escorted out of here.” Apostates have no rights at climate confabs, Vatican or otherwise.

Apparently, in the Vatican’s view, there is nothing to discuss – only anti-fossil fuel laws and treaties to implement. Computer model predictions and other assertions of looming disaster are all the Pope and workshop attendees seem to need to support this agenda – even though they are consistently and completely contradicted by real-world observations. Instead of protecting Earth’s poorest people from energy deprivation, disease, poverty and death imposed in the name of preventing global warming, Pope Francis seems more devoted to newly green Liberation Theology concepts of “fairness” and “justice.”

As IPCC leaders have explained, the climate change agenda is no longer about the environment. It is now about “intentionally transforming” the global economy and negotiating the redistribution of the world’s wealth and natural resources, in the name of “social justice” and equal distribution of misery.

These developments are far too typical. Left-Liberal thought police refuse to debate their failed ideas and policies, because they have no answers to inconvenient questions and cannot stomach dissenting views.

On campuses, free expression is limited to boxing-ring-sized “free speech zones.” Conservative speakers are banned from university events, or shouted down if they do appear. The Universities of Michigan and Maryland tried to ban “American Sniper” because a couple hundred students out of 27,000 objected. Oberlin and Georgetown students railed that Christina Hoff Sommers’ mere presence required “trigger warnings,” caused them “distress” and “discomfort,” and “constituted violence” against women.

Brandeis disinvited Ayan Hirsi Ali, because her views on women’s rights might offend some Muslim men. Scripps revoked its invitation to conservative political analyst George Will, who later observed:

“Free speech has never been … more comprehensively, aggressively and dangerously threatened than it is now. Today’s attack is … an attack on the theory of freedom of speech … on the desirability of free speech and indeed … on the very possibility of free speech….

“The Democratic Party’s leading and prohibitively favored frontrunner candidate for the presidential nomination … said she wants to change the First Amendment in order to further empower the political class to regulate the quantity, content and timing of political speech about the political class – and so far as I can tell there’s not a ripple of commentary about this on the stagnant waters of the American journalistic community.”

Meanwhile, NYU happily hosted delegates from Iran, which hangs people for the crime of being gay. President Obama’s Internal Revenue Service harasses conservative donors and organizations, keeps groups out of the political process, stonewalls investigators and lies with impunity. His Federal Communications Commission plans to micromanage internet access, content and operations. At the behest of hyper-partisan Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm, police swat teams burst into homes belonging to Governor Scott Walker supporters, ransacked them, took computers, and told families “Don’t call a lawyer – or else.”

The abuses and intolerance are becoming broader, deeper, more frightening by the day: from Christendom to Islam and Climate Orthodoxy; from universities to the Congress, Vatican, EU and United Nations.

Good people everywhere need to rise up, speak out and fight back, if they still believe in individual rights, freedom of thought and expression, and honest, transparent, trustworthy, accountable government and religious institutions. Otherwise, these fundamental values will disappear – and with them will go modern society and living standards, and efforts to improve the lives of billions of people who still lack the lifesaving energy and technologies so many of us take for granted.

Via email





This EcoNonsense Has To Stop

Roy Spencer

I was watching a Ford commercial last night that highlighted their “EcoBoost” engine technology, which mostly involves turbocharging (nothing new) which allows higher efficiency, and thus greater power output with smaller engine displacements.

That “ecoboost” term sounded familiar, so I went and looked on my washing machine, and found an "ecoboost" switch.

I have no idea what the setting does. I’m pretty sure my washer isn’t turbocharged. And it can’t mean “less water” because the washer already fails to wash my clothes as it is.

I have to wonder how many marketing meetings are now dominated by discussion of how to work “eco” into new (or existing) products. Everyone wants to Save The Earth™, so if we can do that while we are buying more stuff, so much the better.

So, where did all this ecobabble come from? Well, as I recall the first ecoword was “ecology”, which from the Greek root words means “the study of annoying stuff”.

We now have eco-friendly eco-schools with eco-learning for eco-kids. Eco-cars, eco-news, eco-warriors, eco-awards. The list goes on eco nauseum.

The eco-trend does not seem to be nearing its eco-end, either. According to Google Trends, the term “eco” has been at an eco-high for several eco-years now.

The annoying part is that little if any eco-good is done with any eco-product, I suspect. History has shown that if we become less wasteful of some commodity, we will find a way to use more of it. As car engines become more fuel-efficient, we buy cars with bigger engines or we take longer drives.

Money we save on one thing ends up getting spent on something else, which inevitably uses more resources.

British company EasyJet has unveiled a new ecoJet technology to improve the energy efficiency of jet travel. I suppose if rocket engines become sufficiently efficient, we will all be taking eco-tourism trips into low Earth orbit.

Just think of how much energy we will be saving then!

SOURCE





New Cold Climate to Devastate Global Agriculture within Ten Years

Press Release below from Space and Science Research Corporation, commercial forecasters

The Space and Science Research Corporation (SSRC) announces today that the predicted new cold climate will soon begin to end the historic era of growth in US and global agricultural output that began after the end of World War II. Specifically, as a result of recent events on the Sun and changes in the Earth's climate, the SSRC again warns that record crop yields and volume in the US and Canadian corn, wheat, and soybean belts are about to end. The SSRC expects the first substantial damage could be observed at any time but certainly within the next ten years.

This new announcement is based on a well researched set of new climate trends of oceanic and atmospheric temperatures, and solar activity.

The SSRC believes as long as the Sun continues its solar hibernation (a once every 206 year cold climate event) that we are on the precipice of a long term drop in global temperatures. It is entirely possible that the decades-long period of record global agricultural output that our world has enjoyed will soon be over, perhaps for many decades.

This ominous prediction is accentuated by the fact that governments worldwide and their agricultural corporations, systems, and farmers, are preparing for more global warming and doing nothing to adapt to the ongoing transition to a new potentially dangerous cold climate.

According to SSRC President Mr. John L. Casey, "The era of bumper crops that the US and Canadian breadbasket has been delivering for decades, is about to come to an end. The production levels seen in recent years are unsustainable in view of the dramatic decline in temperatures we are expected to see. Unfortunately, the world's agricultural industry and our fellow citizens are totally unprepared for the new cold climate."

The rationale for the SSRC prediction of devastation to global agriculture within ten years is available for download from the link.

SOURCE

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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.  

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