Obama to push global-warming treaty in trip to Alaska

Some awkward facts you won't hear from Obama:  "Alaska’s summers are warm with temperatures that can reach into the 90°s. Ft. Yukon holds the all-time record with a sizzling 100°F temperature recorded in 1915. Many believe that the far northern part of Alaska would be the coldest. Actually, the record for Alaska (and the entire U.S. for that matter) was set in 1971 at Prospect Creek in the northern interior: a bone-chilling -80°F!"

Alaskan temperatures have on average increased considerably in recent decades, far more so than most places on earth.  The fact that they are out of step with the rest of the word does however show that we are not seeing anything global here. The process is local -- probably due to  slow changes in ocean currents which are probably cyclical and so may soon reverse


With melting glaciers and rising seas as his backdrop, President Obama will visit Alaska next week to press for urgent global action to combat climate change, even as he carefully calibrates his message in a state heavily dependent on oil.

Obama will become the first sitting president to visit the Alaska Arctic when he travels to Kotzebue – population 3,153 – just north of the Arctic Circle at the end of his three-day trip. He’ll kick off the visit Monday with a speech to a State Department-hosted conference in Anchorage on climate change and the Arctic.

The unambiguous goal of the president’s trip is to use dramatic and alarming changes to Alaska’s climate to instill fresh urgency into his global warming agenda. Sea ice is melting, critical permafrost is thawing and Alaska’s cherished glaciers are liquefying – powerful visuals that Obama hopes will illustrate the threat to natural wonders and livelihoods and serve as a global call to action.

“This is all real,” Obama said in his weekly address released Saturday. “This is happening to our fellow Americans right now.”

SOURCE






Ya gotta laugh:  California nightmare dreaming

They sure believe in having a bet each way below.  The drought will get worse, they say.  And then there will be floods. They may well be right.  But does that have anything to do with global warming?  Seeing that there has been no statistically significant  global warming for 18 years, global warming cannot account for either phenomenon.  Something that doesn't exist doesn't cause anything. What we are seeing is normal California climate oscillations.  It is mostly a dry state with occasional drought-breaking rains.  Always was.  Always will be.

There were some significant rains recently in fact -- but no mention of them below, of course.  California news from a few weeks ago: "Monsoonal moisture has increased rain events, cloud cover and humidity levels in what is normally a very dry time of year. The active Pacific hurricane season has helped enhance the rain events, leading to flooding for some parts of the state and even record rain amounts."

What clowns the Warmists are!


California's unabated drought (the one that's been going on for four long years) has parched the entire state and led to some frightening consequences (parts of the state are sinking), but the worst is yet to come and "there's no way out," according to climate scientists. Those were their literal words. They presented to regulators and reps from the Governor's Office at the California Climate Change Symposium this week, the Daily Breeze reports, telling them that the drought had been dramatically exacerbated by global warming, and that there's a lot worse in store: less water, more pollution, scarier weather, bigger storms, floods, and fires.

"What we're beginning to understand is that there's no way out," said Susanne Moser, who's described as a leading expert on climate change. "We need transformational change. We don't need more studies as much as we need to communicate the urgency and make solid changes. We need to not debate forever." But as the DB's Sandy Mazza writes, there's little funding at all to handle climate change and its effects, and even less for low-income communities, which are "therefore less prepared than their more affluent counterparts." But even the preparation that's already been done is wildly insufficient: "We're getting over the illusion that we can (fix) this with just a few little changes ... We have to break old habits," says Moser. Here's some of what the scientists are warning about; maybe they'll scare us into breaking some habits:

— An analysis of climate change's effect on the state's drought published in Geophysical Research Letters concluded that climate change made California's "dry season" as much as 20 percent worse. Plus, the combo of hot temperatures and little precipitation are "more likely" to result in a drought, so a warmer climate would probably be a droughtier one, a Stanford researcher explained.

— The heat evaporates more groundwater too, which is depleting underground reserves; those won't refill as easily as a reservoir might, "posing a problem for future drinking-water supplies."

— In addition to droughts, we should also expect excessive water. "We're in the middle of a drought but we're going to be in the middle of a flood, and we're less prepared for that," the president of Oakland's Pacific Institute says. Scientists are expecting an enormous El Niño effect this winter, which will mean biblical amounts of precipitation.

— One result of a warmer overall climate will be higher sea levels. Though areas along the coast, like the Port of LA, have already made some effort to prepare for a rise in waters, coastal 'hoods and "Low-lying areas, including the Los Angeles International Airport, are at risk of being submerged in water."

— Meanwhile, warmer atmospheric conditions hold more water, which can amount to more intense storms, said a US Geological Survey hydrologist, so we'll have those, too. "Atmospheric rivers," a thread of "thick precipitation" that travels through the air like a stream or river, will increase as the climate warms up. (The tail-end of an atmospheric river hit the Bay Area in late December and it was ROUGH.)

— But even though "big storms are expected this winter, Californians should actually anticipate worsening droughts, scientists said." New findings presented at this symposium suggest that there's a 95 percent chance that the changing, warming climate created that high pressure ridge—aka the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge—that's kept rain from falling on California for years—and will probably do it again. "Global warming has at least tripled the probability of the atmospheric condition" that produced the ridge.

— It's not just coastal areas that will be in trouble. Warmer temperatures are creating bigger forest fires (which in turn produce carbon emissions). "Wildfires are of particular concern because conifer forests are thicker than ever and a drier, hotter climate is especially conducive to fire," said one hydrologist.

SOURCE





Climate is dooming the profiteers of doom

Exclusive to WND: Lord Monckton reacts to 'bombshell dropped' on 'global warming' claims

ERICE, SICILY – Here at the World Federation of Scientists’ annual meeting on energy seminars, the warm autumn sun shines on the golden-gray limestone of the medieval monasteries that are now temples of science, asking much the same questions about the origin and destination of the universe as the pious monks once asked.

One thing has become ever clearer in the five years since I first came here to deliver a lecture to 200 of the world’s most eminent scientists on the apparently obscure topic of clouds and climate sensitivity: The profiteers of doom are themselves doomed. The climate is not responding as the bed-wetters had said it would.

There have been two plenary sessions devoted to the climate this year. By convention, the Erice meetings are subject to Chatham House rules, which prevent me from repeating what any particular participant said. However, I can certainly report that the increasing temperature of the debate between the true-believers in climate doom and the hard-headed skeptics is not matched by global mean temperature, which has not risen for 18 years and seven months, even though fully one-third of man’s effect on the climate since 1750 has occurred in the same period.

In the Canadian army, trainees are taught what it is like to have to fight an opposing force. They call the imaginary enemy the “Fantasians.” That seems to me to be the perfect word for the true-believers in climate cataclysm. They are increasingly removed from reality.

Gradually, the Fantasians who used to attend the annual seminars here on a noble mountain-top overlooking the azure Mediterranean have slunk away. They know the end of their dominance is near.

For, as was pointed out during the plenary sessions here, the rate of global warming since the U.N.’s climate panel made its first exaggerated predictions in 1990 has been little more than a third of what we were told it would be.

As always here in Erice, a quiet, learned bombshell was dropped – and dropped so subtly that most of the participants did not at first notice. I cannot give details of the form this bombshell took, for that would pre-empt a forthcoming publication in one of the leading learned journals of climate science.

But I can tell you what it means. The Fantasians’ computer models have made a prodigious exaggeration of one particular variable in the equation that tells them how much global warming to expect. What this means is that there will in fact be considerably less manmade global warming over the coming century than even I had at first thought.

As recently as January this year, in a learned paper with three distinguished colleagues, I wrote in the Science Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences that there would not even be 1 Celsius degree of new manmade global warming this century.

The effect of the bombshell, delivered by one of the sharpest of the many sharp minds here, will halve that estimate. There cannot now be more than 0.5 Celsius, or about 1 Fahrenheit, of new manmade warming by 2100 compared with today.

For that bombshell, though the biggest of them all, was not the only one to be quietly dropped into the windowless, earthquake-proof, reinforced-concrete bunker that is the chief lecture-hall at the Ettore Majorana Centre for Scientific Culture. It was also revealed that the U.N.’s accident-prone climate panel has cut another key variable in the global-warming equation by a quarter, reducing the warming we may expect by as much as a third.

It was also explained that only two-thirds of the global warming predicted to occur in response to our altering the climate will occur within a century of our influence, and that in any event our influence does not all occur in the present but will increase slowly over the 21st century, again halving the warming predicted by the hapless U.N. climate panel.

Of course, the panel also predicts that there will be some further warming from our past sins of emission. But here’s the thing: Even if the U.N. is right about that (which is unlikely after 223 months without any global warming), we can do nothing about it. Once we have returned to the atmosphere some of the CO2 that was once resident there in concentrations at least 15 times today’s, there is very little that we can do to get it back out again. Nature will do that for us over time, but we cannot much accelerate the process.

The point is that, even in theory (through probably not in practice), the only warming we can now affect is the warming that has not yet occurred this century.

But what about the warming that will therefore occur in the next century? Scientifically speaking, there is no need to worry about it, because a rate of warming so slow that we shall only see half a degree of new manmade warming this century is not going to lead to catastrophe.

Economically speaking, it might be worth doing something to try to prevent some of this year’s expected global warming, but the next century is too far away for us to need to take any steps now. The rational course would be to wait and see whether global warming accelerates: After all, the planet is scarcely warmer today than it was two decades ago, so we have plenty of extra time to see whether any action needs to be taken before throwing taxpayers’ money away on boondoggles like wind farms that slice birds and bats to bits and swipe them out of the sky, or solar collectors that fry passing birds to a crisp.

Naturally, the pompous Fantasians who have a meal-ticket for life negotiating meaningless but cripplingly expensive climate deals at the interminable series of U.N. annual climate conferences do not know anything about this. They have no idea how very silly they are beginning to look. If they bothered to read WND, they would know the truth.

SOURCE





Old bag Slingo Making It Up As She Goes Along

With just a couple of days left, the Met Office have confirmed just how cold the summer has been in the UK:

"Despite a dry and sunny June and a brief heat-wave at the start of July, summer overall looks set to be cooler than average and cooler than either summer 2013 or 2014. It has also been rather wetter than average, however sunshine totals are expected to be near average.

In general the weather has been dominated by a westerly flow from the Atlantic, bringing often cool and rather wet conditions, especially in the north and west, with the south-east generally experiencing the best of any warm, dry, sunny spells.

Using provisional figures up to 26 August* and then assuming average conditions for the final few days of the month, Met Office statistics show the UK mean temperature for this summer will be around 14 °C. This is 0.4 °C below the long term average (1981-2010)."

Apart from 2011 and 2012, this would make it the coldest summer since 1998.

Unsurprisingly, the Met Office did not see this coming at the end of May.

While they admit that uncertainty was large, the vast majority of their modelled projections were well above the outcome, including one which would have broken the record of 15.78C by a large margin.

None of this will come as any great surprise, but what is interesting is what Julia Slingo has to say about it on the Met Office blog:



Note again: "If we look beyond our shores there have been some big changes in the global climate this year. El Niño is in full flight, disturbing weather patterns around the world. The low pressure that has dominated our weather is part of a pattern of waves in the jet stream around the world that has brought crippling heat waves to places like Poland and Japan. And, looking back over past El Niños, you could have expected that a more unsettled summer might be on the cards for the UK."

So it’s all the El Nino’s fault! Well perhaps not.

Returning to the 3-Month outlook above, this is what the Met Office had to say at the end of May:



Note: "However, El Niño is not known to have a significant influence on the climate across northern Europe at this time of year."

In other words, Slingo is just making it up as she goes along. They were even saying exactly the same thing in their 3-Month outlook at the end of July.

Slingo claims in her article that none of this could have been foreseen, even though now she also claims that the weather should have been expected with El Nino conditions.

However, one commenter rather shows up her incompetence:



It is a mystery how this incompetent woman has kept her job for so long.

SOURCE  (See the original for links and graphics)





Global Warming Policies May Increase Water Deficits

Is it possible that emissions-curbing policies endanger the water supply even more than climate change itself?

“Using biofuels as a way to cut greenhouse gas emissions could put U.S. water resources under increasing pressure. Researchers find that a heavy reliance on bioenergy could mean a 42 percent increase in water consumption across the US by 2100,” The Carbon Brief reported.

That’s the takeaway from a new study from the University of Maryland and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). The problem centers on emissions policies designed around biofuels.

“The results clearly show, for the first time to our knowledge, that climate change mitigation policies, if not designed with careful attention to water resources, could increase the magnitude, spatial coverage, and frequency of water deficits. The results challenge the general perception that mitigation that aims at reducing warming also would alleviate water deficits in the future,” the study said.

Lead author Mohamad Hejazi said the findings mean that water must be carefully considered in any policy intervention. “If we don’t pay careful attention to water, we could end up with climate mitigation policies that yield such negative consequences,” he said.

Responding To Climate Change (RTCC) broke down the meaning of the study: “Their models show that while mitigating climate change boosts water supply, this is outweighed by increased demand... In other words, green policies risk causing more water stress than climate change itself.”

It’s not the act of curbing emissions, but rather the use of thirsty bioenergy crops, that creates problems. “A scenario involving less bioenergy saw water demand rise 12 percent instead of 42 percent, with nuclear and geothermal energy the main drivers. But the authors noted bioenergy was seen as a cost-effective option, with potential for negative emissions if coupled with carbon capture and storage,” the study said.

Bioenergy crops are also criticized for taking up space that could be used for food crops.

SOURCE





Katrina: Not Global Warming, and Not Worst-Case Scenario

By forecaster Joe Bastardi

I don’t know if people remember but I caused quite a stir the Friday afternoon before Hurricane Katrina struck when, on national TV, I said it was coming for New Orleans. I reminded people that I had downplayed Ivan in New Orleans the year before when apparently there was a rumor the mayor, thinking it would hit the city, ordered 10,000 bodybags. Ivan was not their storm, but I knew exactly what kind of storm would result in a disaster. I will explain that below. In any case, I was recently reminded of all this at a dinner with some clients in Houston. One of them thanked me because, as my client, I called him at two o'clock in the afternoon when the European (ECMWF) computer model run came in confirming my worst fear: It was coming for New Orleans. In what I do, serving the client to keep them prepared comes first. The TV was, is and always will be secondary. That being said, I am always going to speak my mind on these matters.

I am not writing this to relive yesterday. I have kept out of all the Katrina hoopla; in fact, I look on with a bit of ironic amusement at the way people recall the storm. It’s like a 10-year high school reunion, where some of the things that are being said just don’t fit the overall missive. I can’t wait for the 25-year reunion. Should be good. You remember how those go: The 3-1 win in the districts turns into a 7-0 perfect game in the finals of the states. It’s like a weather version of Napoleon Dynamite’s “Uncle Rico.”

The term I used for what Katrina would do was a “pincer movement” pushing water back through Lakes Bourne and Pontchartrain, with the water then coming back into New Orleans from hurricane force northwest winds on the backside. This was based on an idea I had read back when I was a child, in the February 1965 issue of Weatherwise on the review of Hurricane Hilda, 1964. The author made a point to say that if the storm had regained hurricane intensity east of New Orleans it might have flooded the city from the north. The point is that, even back in the 1960s, they were concerned about this. And, well, they should have been, as Category 4 Betsy in 1965 caused major problems there, but even that didn’t track in the ideal manner. Neither did Katrina, and people have to realize that no amount of man-made global warming clamor can change the fact it was not worst case. I said it then, and I will say it again as my contribution to the 10-year reunion: The 1947 hurricane, with Katrina’s intensity or greater (remember, Camille in 1969 was a Category 5 with a similar path to Katrina), would be the worst-case scenario.

This endgame is similar to the Category 5 “Fist of Fury,” a smaller but more violent Camille in 1969.

Now notice Betsy, a giant of a storm, occurred in 1965 despite an El Niño.

The track was south of the Mississippi River, so the worst storm surge came not through Lakes Bourne and Ponchartrain but from the southeast where the Delta can break it up. That being said, water came up so high, people were trapped in their attics! The mayor of New Orleans, before his Ivan misread, said for people to make sure they had axes, in reference to what folks had to do to get out of their houses because of Betsy. But even that was not the worst-case scenario.

Here is the ultimate track, with the intensity of any of these three storms: The 1947 Fort Lauderdale hurricane, a Category 4 storm, but not nearly as strong at New Orleans.

A 20-25 foot storm surge back through those lakes and New Orleans is rendered helpless. There is little anyone can do with an approach from the east-southeast, north of the mouth of the Mississippi.

This is certainly not global warming. It’s like with Sandy. Years before, I wrote a paper and did talks to insurance companies on what I called the “Philadelphia Story,” a storm worse than Sandy but of the same genre — one that came from the southeast. Why? Well, my dad, a meteorologist, would always pull out maps of Hurricane Hazel’s pattern (1954) then track hurricanes like the one in 1933 into the mid-Atlantic States, or the 1903 storm into Atlantic City, and observe: The question isn’t why it should happen, but why not. So it is here.

My contribution to the reunion is this: Katrina was not global warming, and it was not the worst-case scenario. And if a worst-case storm shows up, it should be apparent that it would not be global warming, either.

SOURCE  (See the original for links and graphics)

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