Thou shalt bow the knee to Holy Mother Global Warming at all times

The article excerpted below was headed "Climate change hurting N.E. cod population, study says".  But that's just a token bow -- an assertion for which there is no evidence.  Cod populations do fluctuate.  There's been a big bounceback in the North Sea (near England) cod population recently and the article below mentioned that they almost vanished from Grand Banks off Newfoundland in the early 1990s.  So there is every reason to think that the current situation is part of a natural cycle.

It does appear that the temperature in the Gulf of Maine has risen 4 degrees in the last 10 years and that probably is disliked by the cod.  But is that temperature rise part of global warming?  We also read that "the rise in temperatures in the Gulf of Maine exceeded those found in 99 percent of the world's other large bodies of saltwater"

So it's NOT global, is it?  It is a local phenomenon of unknown cause but probably due to fluctuations in ocean currents.  But those recent changes in ocean currents are due to global warming we are told -- on the basis of no evidence.  But in fact the changes CANNOT be due to global warming -- because there has been no global warming for 18 years.  The satellites are the only way of obtaining a truly global temperature reading and for the last 18 years they just show random fluctuations around a constant mean.

So a desperate attempt to link a local problem to global warming is an abject failure on all counts.  Warmists really are disgusting in their constant obeisances to their false god


The rapid warming of the waters off New England has contributed to the historic collapse of the region's cod population and has hampered its ability to rebound, according to a study that for the first time links climate change to the iconic species' plummeting numbers.

Between 2004 and 2013, the mean surface temperature of the Gulf of Maine - extending from Cape Cod to Cape Sable in Nova Scotia - rose a remarkable 4 degrees, which the researchers attributed to shifts in the ocean currents caused by global warming.

The study, which was released Thursday by the journal Science, offers the latest evidence of climate change - this time, affecting a species once so plentiful that fishermen used to joke that they could walk across the Atlantic on the backs of cod.

Fisheries management officials have sharply limited cod fishing in hopes of protecting the species, but they estimate the number of cod remain at as little as 3 percent of what would sustain a healthy population. The limits, in turn, have hurt fishermen.
"Managers [of the fishery] kept reducing quotas, but the cod population kept declining," said Andrew Pershing, the study's lead author and chief scientific officer of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland. "It turns out that warming waters were making the Gulf of Maine less hospitable for cod, and the management response was too slow to keep up with the changes."

Maine, the state with the highest percentage of forested land, is uniquely vulnerable to climate change, scientists say.

How does the government count the fish?

The institute had reported last year that the rise in temperatures in the Gulf of Maine exceeded those found in 99 percent of the world's other large bodies of saltwater. The authors of Thursday's study link the rapid warming to a northward shift in the Gulf Stream and changes to other major currents in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

They say the warmer water coursing into the Gulf of Maine has reduced the number of new cod and led to fewer fish surviving into adulthood. Cod prefer cold water, which is why they have thrived for centuries off New England.

The precise causes for the reduced spawning are unclear, the researchers said, but they're likely to include a decline in the availability of food for young cod, increased stress, and more hospitable conditions for predators.

Cod larvae are eaten by many species, including dogfish and herring; larger cod are preyed upon by seals, whose numbers have increased markedly in the region.

The researchers also suggest that federal officials have miscalculated the number of cod in the Gulf of Maine. The faulty models, they said, led the officials to allow overfishing, enough that the region's cod catch has fallen 90 percent over the past three decades.

The authors of the study said federal officials should use temperature and climate forecasts "to provide a more realistic picture of the potential size of fish stocks."

Federal officials said they weren't surprised by the findings.
"People have said that fish stocks are impacted by global warming for a long, long time," said John Bullard, regional administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which works with regional officials to set quotas.

The authors of the study said it's possible that the past two winters, which were unusually cold, may have provided a boost to cod. But they said the numbers remain significantly lower than the historical average and the stocks are likely to continue to struggle as the gulf warms.

They noted that cod are often easier to catch as their numbers drop, because they tend to aggregate near their spawning areas when their population declines.

Pershing said that's what happened along the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, where cod vanished in the early 1990s after environmental advocates raised concerns for years about their declining numbers.

SOURCE





National Pledges Could Restrain Global Warming

LOL.  How would they know?  Warming has already stopped.  It stopped over 18 years ago according to the satellites. So how will anything else stop it?  Can you stop a thing that has already stopped?  Or will they just see at last that there has been no warming and say: "We won!"  "We did it!"  I wouldn't be surprised if they did say that

Countries’ collective pledges toward a new international climate change agreement put the goal of averting catastrophic warming within sight, a sweeping new U.N. report out today finds.

If all nations fully implement their targets, about 4 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions will be eliminated from the atmosphere by 2030, according to the report. The level of emissions produced by every person on Earth will also dip about 9 percent by that year.

And while the pledges are not enough to keep global temperatures from rising above the scientifically agreed-upon threshold of 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels, leaders said the efforts significantly improve the chances of getting there.

“We are moving in the direction of bringing the temperature down toward the final defense line that governments have established of staying under 2 degrees,” said U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres.

Speaking from Berlin, where the synthesis report was released, Figueres cited International Energy Agency findings that if the targets were fully implemented, average temperatures would rise 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100. Without any new action, levels could rise as high as 5 degrees.

“It is a very good step. It is actually a remarkable step. But it is not enough,” Figueres said of the targets, known as intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs). Still, she argued, the pledges from 156 countries large and small, wealthy and poor, show the world is “truly, incontrovertibly and very decisively moving down the transition toward a low-carbon economy.”

The INDCs will make up the core of the new accord expected to be signed in Paris in December. Just how, though, remains unclear. Currently the targets are listed on the United Nations’ website but won’t have legal standing until they become embedded in a new international agreement.

Environmental activists said they are heartened by the number of countries that are moved to action but said pressure must remain on nations to both improve their targets and build a way in the Paris deal to regularly review and ratchet up carbon-cutting commitments.

“The Paris agreement has not yet been sealed, but is already raising our sights about what’s possible,” Jennifer Morgan, global director of the World Resources Institute’s climate change program, said in a statement.

“Countries must accelerate their efforts after the Paris summit in order to stave off climate change. The global climate agreement should include a clear mandate for countries to ramp up their commitments and set a long-term signal to phase out emissions as soon as possible,” she said.

SOURCE





Russia’s Putin Says Global Warming Is ‘A Fraud’

Russian President Vladimir Putin believes global warming is a “fraud” — a plot to keep Russia from using its vast oil and natural gas reserves.

Putin believes “there is no global warming, that this is a fraud to restrain the industrial development of several countries, including Russia,” Stanislav Belkovsky, a political analyst and Putin critic, told The New York Times.

“That is why this subject is not topical for the majority of the Russian mass media and society in general,” Belkovsky said.

Putin has been casting doubt on man-made global warming since the early 2000s, according to the Times. In 2003, Putin told an international climate conference warming would allow Russians to “spend less on fur coats,” adding that “agricultural specialists say our grain production will increase, and thank God for that.”

Putin’s comments likely came after his staff “did very, very extensive work trying to understand all sides of the climate debate,” according to Andrey Illarionov, Putin’s former senior economic adviser, who’s now a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute.

“We found that, while climate change does exist, it is cyclical, and the anthropogenic role is very limited,” Illarionov said. “It became clear that the climate is a complicated system and that, so far, the evidence presented for the need to ‘fight’ global warming was rather unfounded.”

The New York Times published an article on how the Russian media’s skepticism of global warming is being driven by Putin’s laissez faire attitude on the issue. The Times bashed the Russian autocrat for offering “only vague and modest pledges of emissions cuts ahead of December’s U.N. climate summit in Paris.”

Russia’s largely state-run media has spent little to no time covering global warming despite huge fires raging across Siberia. Instead of blaming the fires on warming, Russian news outlets tended to focus on “locals who routinely but carelessly burn off tall grasses every year, and the sometimes incompetent crews struggling to put the fires out.”

Such reasoning wasn’t good enough for the Times, which argued that “Russian media continue to pay little attention to an issue that animates so much of the world.”

Russian media leaders argue it’s not just the tone being set by Putin, but a weak economy and unemployment woes are a top concern of the Russian public — they don’t seem to care much about the weather.

“It is difficult to spend editorial resources on things that are now a low priority in the midst of the economic crisis,” Galina Timchenko, who runs a news site, told the Times. “Unfortunately climate change is not very interesting to the public.”

SOURCE





Skeptical Climate Scientists Fire Back at RICO 20 Colleagues: Demand Investigations Against Their Warmist Accusers

Scientists who dissent from the man-made global warming fears fired back at their warmist colleagues who want to see RICO investigations into skeptical claims.

“I would like to see RICO investigations for people on the other side of this,” demanded Climatologist and former NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer, at a CATO Institute climate forum in DC today.  Spencer is the leader of a climate research group at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

“People have been pushing for energy policies for people that we know will kill them. And they know that, and yet they have hidden that information from the public and from politicians for the purposes of advancing an agenda,” Spencer said.

“They should be careful what they ask” Spencer added, warning that the investigations “could be going the other direction in spades.”
Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry, the former Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, spoke about the new climate of intolerance.  “I am very concerned by scientists calling to stifle dissent, disagreement,” Curry explained.

“The last three or four months have made it clear to me that I could be spending time in court. If it’s not just for RICO kind of activities but all of these lawsuits,” she said.

“It looks like climate scientists are going to be spending more time in courts. This never occurred to me until three or four months ago,” Curry lamented.

Curry also challenged other climate claims and spoke of her evolving scientific views on climate change. “There is so much flouting over mythical 97% consensus…This is stifling debate. I fell into that (consensus trap) and after 2009 with Climategate, I said no more!” Curry explained. “There is enormous pressure for scientists to fall in line behind the consensus,” she added.

Meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue of WeatherBELL Analytics said: “I have personal experience with two of the RICO 20” professors. Ryan warned that such efforts to silence scientific dissent will have a chilling effect on young scientists.

“The question would be for a graduate student — if you have a professor who is signing petitions calling for a RICO investigation based upon climate science — do you have to wonder if what you’re researching, is this going to be met with the approval of your professor? This is a sort of slippery slope in terms of research.”

“I find it rather appalling,” Maue concluded.

SOURCE





UN IPCC Lead Author Dr. Richard Tol Mocks UN Climate Treaty Process As ‘Futile Effort’ Where Countries ‘Pretend To Reduce Emissions’

UN IPCC Lead Author Dr. Richard Tol slammed the upcoming Paris climate negotiation as a “futile effort.”

President Obama is determined to sign a new agreement in December in Paris and commit the U.S. to the UN’s climate agenda of emission reductions.

But UN Lead Author Tol was skeptical of the entire UN climate treaty process. Tol predicted that the UN climate summit will “ultimately proven to be a futile effort” and achieve nothing more than “sending people to Paris for no apparent reason other than to keep these people well-travelled.”

Tol, an economist and statistician, is the Professor of the Economics of Climate Change at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and he is ranked among the “top 50 most-cited climate scholars”. He has well over 200 publications in academic journals.

“I don’t know what will happen in Paris, and I don’t quite know what all those 50,000 people will do,” he explained. “International negotiations on binding targets and timetables have failed since 1995,” Tol said at a CATO Institute climate forum in DC today.

Tol continued:  “The discussion is now about money. How much do rich countries need to pay poor countries to pretend to reduce emissions?”

According to Tol: “Climate policy has been about rewarding allies with rents and subsides rather than emission reduction.”
“Twenty five years of climate policy has made most a little bit poorer and some a whole lot richer and it has not reduced emissions much.”

“International climate policy is shifting from a hopeless focus on binding emission targets to a more realistic pledge and review,” Tol added.

SOURCE





NOAA Attempts To Hide The Pause In Global Warming: The Most Disgraceful Cover-Up Since Climategate

James Delingpole

The US government’s main climate research agency has refused a request by House Republicans to release key documents concerning the controversial issue of whether or not there has been a “pause” in global warming.

Despite being a public, taxpayer-funded institution, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) insists that it is under no obligation to provide the research papers, as demanded in a subpoena by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX)

Gosh. What vital information of national secrecy importance could NOAA possibly have to hide?

That question is entirely rhetorical, by the way. The answer is obvious – well known to every one within the climate change research community. And the whole business stinks. When these documents are released, as eventually they surely must be, what will become evident is that this represents the most disgraceful official cover-up by the politicized science establishment since the release of the Climategate emails.

At the root of the issue is the inconvenient truth that there has been no “global warming” since January 1997.

This is clearly shown by the most reliable global temperature dataset – the RSS satellite records – and was even grudgingly acknowledged in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment report. While still insisting that there has been a slight warming – an increase, since 1998, of around 0.05 degrees C per decade – the IPCC had in all honesty to admit that this is smaller than the 0.1 degrees C error range for thermometer readings, and consequently statistically insignificant.

But if there has been no “global warming” for nearly 19 years how can alarmist proselytisers like President Obama and John Kerry possibly hope to convince an increasingly skeptical public that this apparently non-existent problem yet remains the most pressing concern of our age?”

Step forward the Obama administration’s helpful friends at NOAA. It’s not supposed to be a politicized institution: its job is to do science, not propaganda. But the memo must have been missed by NOAA scientists Thomas Karl and Thomas Peterson who, in May this year, published a “study” so favourable to the alarmist cause it might just as well have been scripted by Al Gore and Greenpeace, with a royal foreword by the Prince of Wales, and a blessing from Pope Francis.

“Data show no slowdown in recent global warming” declared NOAA’s press release. “The Pause”, in other words, was just the construct of a few warped deniers’ twisted imaginations.

Naturally this new “evidence” was seized on with alacrity by the usual media suspects.

    “No Pause in global warming” crowed Scientific American.

    “Global warming hasn’t paused, study finds” echoed the Guardian.

But as I reported at the time – in a piece titled “‘Hide the Hiatus!’ How the Climate Alarmists Eliminated the Inconvenient ‘Pause’ in Global Warming” – there was precious little hard science in this swiftly-debunked “study”.

Rather, it was a case of “getting your excuses in early before the UN climate conference in Paris in December.” Or, as Judy Curry of Georgia Tech put it:

    “This short paper is not adequate to explain the very large changes that have been made to the NOAA data set… while I’m sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration [which is currently bent on using executive action to set unilateral emissions limits against the will of Congress], I don’t regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on.”

Which is the real reason, of course, that NOAA is so reluctant to respond to Rep Lamar Smith’s subpoena. As will almost certainly become clear, NOAA’s study was a nakedly political artefact not a scientific one.

Alarmist sympathizers such as Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas) may claim that the subpoena constitutes harassment:

    “By issuing this subpoena, you have instigated a constitutional conflict with an inquiry that seems more designed to harass climate scientists than to further any legitimate legislative purpose,” she wrote last week. “This is a serious misuse of congressional oversight powers.”

But this is a standard trick in the climate alarmist playbook. The same excuse was trotted out by Michael Mann when Steve McIntyre tried – unsuccessfully – to ask him to share the raw data he had used to create his infamous “Hockey Stick”; it was also employed by another notorious figure from the Climategate emails – Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia – as part of a campaign to present himself as an innocent victim of harassment rather than an FOI-breaching, data-fudging, grant-troughing conspirator in the great global warming scam.

As I revealed in my book Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing The Planet, Destroying The Economy And Stealing Your Children’s Future, the climate change scam has only been able to keep going for so long because of the complicity of the politicized activist-scientists who have hijacked every one of the world’s leading scientific institutions from NASA GISS, NOAA, and the National Academy of Sciences in the US to the Royal Society and the CRU in Britain to CSIRO in Australia. They endorse one another’s scientifically dubious papers (not so much “peer-review” as “pal review”), they recommend one another for awards, they big one another up at fancy all-expenses-paid climate “science” junkets all around the globe.

This has nothing to do with science. This is pure political activism. Rep Lamar Smith is quite right to investigate this grotesque abuse of taxpayers’ money and this flagrant corruption of the scientific method at NOAA. I think we can safely bet, however, that NOAA will find a way of staving off his investigation until after the UN Paris talks are over and that the Obama administration will do everything in its power to support its stonewalling.

“The Pause”, as most alarmists are painfully aware, represents the last nail in the coffin of man-made global warming theory. That’s why they’ll go on fighting so hard to pretend it doesn’t exist.

SOURCE

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