A "smashing" one tenth of one degree! Ya gotta laugh

Hansen emits no inaccuracy in what he says below.  The key to seeing what a risible emission it is lies in context and knowing what he does NOT say.

The glaring omission is of course a total failure to mention the satellite record -- but there is much more to amuse even in the small excerpt below. His claim that a temperature rise of one tenth of one degree "smashed" the temperature record would amuse most people but, in the context of the truly minuscule changes Warmists normally are burdened with, I suppose you can understand his excitement.

Even that one tenth is a mirage, however. Hansen is the king of corrections and adjustments but, in another amusing act, he makes  no attempt to correct for the El Nino effect. In the past, Warmists often found fault with skeptics who did not correct for the effects of the 1998 El Nino so it is quite a travesty that Hansen is not making any corrections for the current El Nino.  "Do as I say, not as I do" seems to be the gospel of the Green/Left

He is well aware of the current El Nino and describes it fairly but fails to mention that all or nearly all of that wondrous one tenth is due to El Nino, not CO2.  I showed yesterday why that is so.  The unusual "leap" in warming has no corresponding unusual leap in CO2 levels. Reality is so disappointing to the Green/Left.  But they have become experts at seeing only what they want to see  -- and Hansen has a well-developed talent in that direction.

And he HAS to see that one tenth as significant.  He admits that the past changes that have sparked proclamations of "warmest" years have been only in hundredths of one degree.  He is not blind to how trivial are the changes that Warmists hang their hats on.

We really should be a bit sorry for the old fraud. Warmism is his life's work but he must know by now that it is a castle built on sand.  He knows the numbers, unlike his disciples in the media.  And the numbers are not kind.  The reality that repeatedly emerges from them is that we live in an era of exceptional temperature stability.  How galling for people who fancy themselves as "saving the planet"!

Note finally that he uses the "adjusted" sea surface temperature record originally promulgated by Tom Karl.  The adjustments were very convenient to Warmists and Karl is very secretive about the deliberations that went into creating them.  As usual, getting research details out of Warmists is like getting blood out of a stone. Warmists don't subscribe to normal scientific ethics.  They can't afford to.

But at any event, why make any adjustment at all?  The satellite record covers both land and ocean evenly, simultaneously and comparably.  It is a far superior methodology to trying to create some comparability in the higgeldy-piggeldy thermometer data.  Because of El Nino, the satellite data might even show a small uptick for 2015.

All in all, the article is a rather good example of lying with statistics.  Everything he says is factually true.  It's just not the full story.


Global Temperature in 2015

James Hansen et al.

Update of  the GISS (Goddard Institute for Space Studies) global temperature analysis (GISTEMP) finds 2015 to be the warmest year in the instrumental record.  Unlike the prior three record years, 2014, 2010 and 2005, each of which exceeded the preceding record by only a few hundredths of a degree, 2015 smashed the prior record by more than 0.1°C . The only prior record-raising jump of annual global temperature as large, probably slightly larger, was in 1998. The 1998 temperature was boosted by the strong 1997 - 98 “El Niño of the century".  The 2015 temperature was boosted by an El Niño of comparable magnitude.

The high 2015 global temperature should practically terminate discussion of a hypothesized “global warming hiatus”, as the past two warm years remove the impression that warming has plateaued.  Close examination (Fig. 1b) reveals that the warming rate of the past decade is less than in the prior 30 years, but such fluctuations are not unusual and can be accounted for by a combination of factors. The present GISTEMP analysis uses the NOAA ERSST.v4 (Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature, Version 4) 5 for ocean surface temperatures. Principal change in v4, relative to v3 that was used in recent years, is a revision of the ship SST bias adjustment, which Huang et al. 5 well justify.

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MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen on ‘hottest year’ claim: ‘Why lend credibility to this dishonesty?’



NASA and NOAA today proclaimed that 2015 was the ‘hottest year’ on record.

Meanwhile, satellite data shows an 18 plus year standstill in global temperatures.

MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen balked at claims of the ‘hottest year’ based on ground based temperature data.

“Frankly, I feel it is proof of dishonesty to argue about things like small fluctuations in temperature or the sign of a trend.  Why lend credibility to this dishonesty?”

Lindzen, an emeritus Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT, told Climate Depot shortly after the announcements.

“All that matters is that for almost 40 years, model projections have almost all exceeded observations.  Even if all the observed warming were due to greenhouse emissions, it would still point to low sensitivity,” Lindzen continued.

“But, given the ‘pause.’ we know that natural internal variability has to be of the same order as any other process,” Lindzen wrote.

Lindzen has previously mocked ‘warmest’ or ‘hottest’ year proclamations.  “When someone says this is the warmest temperature on record. What are they talking about? It’s just nonsense. This is a very tiny change period,” Lindzen said in November 2015.

Lindzen cautioned: “The most important thing to keep in mind is – when you ask ‘is it warming, is it cooling’, etc.  — is that we are talking about something tiny (temperature changes) and that is the crucial point.”

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You Want to be Pro-Environment? Then you need Less Government

It should not come as a galloping shock to…well, most of the planet – that American farms are a bit more sophisticated and technologically advanced than…well, most of the planet. Our farms are far more efficient – and thus far better on the environment.

And this is where the Environmental Left goes off the rails. The economic advancement they decry – is the economic advancement that allows for our vastly better treatment of the bits of land we use to farm (and every other bit).

Americans are one of the world’s few peoples who can afford to care about the environment. A Third World resident who hasn’t eaten for three days and drinks water from a sewer – doesn’t care quite so much about mythical problems like climate change.

The more efficient farms are – the “greener” is the planet. Because they can maximize their use of the least amount of natural resources (land and water being but two major examples). Which is what the Environmentalists claim they want.

Except Environmentalists don’t actually want that. What they are really all about – is anti-capitalism. (Earth Day’s date? Vladimir Lenin’s birthday.) What they want is economic regression. Back to a day when farmers were much less efficient – and MUCH harder on the environment.

The thing is, we have visual aids of what they want – all over the world. And these visual aides are environmental horror shows – in nations that are environmental horror shows. Because they are inefficient nightmare messes.

"Yaa Amekudzi bounces along dirt roads in a sport-utility vehicle from one village to the next as part of a $1 billion scramble by the world’s top chocolate makers to fix the industry’s most vexing problem….

(C)ocoa production is down, including a steep slide last year in Ghana, the second-largest cocoa-growing country. Cocoa prices have jumped nearly 40% since the start of 2012.cocoa production

As a result, the pressure is on Amekudzi and her team of five employees at Mondelez International Inc., the maker of Cadbury Dairy Milk bars and Oreo cookies, to help cocoa farmers boost their dwindling crop yields.

“They need to change the way they farm,” says Amekudz….

Similar instructions to farmers in neighboring Ivory Coast, the world’s No. 1 cocoa grower, have helped produce back-to-back record crops, companies say. But average crop yields are just one-third as big as they could be if all cocoa farmers in Ghana and Ivory Coast followed good agricultural practices.

The problems worry the industry so much that 10 of the largest chocolate producers and cocoa processors agreed in 2014 to begin sharing with each other a wide swath of private data on farming practices and crop yields. The move was unprecedented."

“Good agricultural practices” – are the practices of farms here in America. The $1 billion these desperate cocoa companies are spending – is to spread the word about what we’re doing here.

And here’s the irony: This private money is being spent to mitigate the damage being done by billions and billions of government dollars – being spent subsidizing said slovenly, anti-environment farming.

As but one example: a product near and dear to these cocoa companies – sugar. Global sugar-producing farms are for the most part regressed, anti-environment messes – microcosms of their regressed, anti-environment nations.

Why are these farms stuck in the past? Because their governments are. These governments – in 20th Century, centralized-style – spend billions and billions of dollars subsidizing their sugar status quos, In effect bailing them out for their inefficiencies – and locking those inefficiencies in.

Human nature: If you pay someone to do something – they’ll keep doing it. And others will join them in doing it. These governments have paid a LOT of coin for inefficient, anti-environment farming. It is no shock that the world suffers so much of it.

Thankfully for these desperate cocoa companies – and anyone else who likes to eat food – there is a bigger, broader solution to this problem. We should sit down with these nations – and free trade away their ridiculous farm programs. In exchange for us free trading away ours.

And not just with sugar (See: Florida Republican Congressman Ted Yoho’s “Zero-for-Zero” Resolution). But with every crop and product farms produce – and governments warp with stupid programs.

It is the efficient, pro-environment, pro-humanity thing to do.

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The Myth of Global Temperature

The idea that the Globe is warming has been repeated so often and by so many eminent scientists of both sides – I mean both by Warmists and Skeptics – that surely it must true. earth v sunBut the fact is that nothing could be farther from the truth. Believe me, any Tom Dick or Harry with reasonable intelligence can prove this to himself – or herself, if I must be politically correct.

There is no such entity as a Global Temperature. Wait a moment! A few days ago I was assured by email by none other than Professor John Christy that there is an average Global Temperature. Who am I to disagree? And remember he is a renowned Skeptic at the University of Alabama for Space Studies. Sure there is an average temperature, though God alone knows how he or any of the others work it out. But I did not deny some sort of average. What I have said and I repeat – There is no such entity as a Global Temperature. That is entirely different to an average.

Any fool can understand that. As the Sun goes down the temperature falls, even in the Sahara. Where has all that midday heat disappeared? As my central heating switches off the temperature in my living room and throughout my house falls. Should my central heating fail, as it has done every now and then to the consternation of my wife and myself, I am bereft – I feel extremely miserable if I am cold. I may jump about and get on my exercise machine in order to keep warm; I may put on a thick pullover or even crawl into bed, but what must be my inexorable conclusion? The conclusion is that everything everywhere is cooling by itself.

It just so happened that this afternoon I watched a documentary with the renowned Dr Iain Stewart – perhaps some of you will remember his documentary where he is in the Siberian wastes telling us that methane is ten times more powerful than Carbon Dioxide, and woe betide us all if through Global Warming the permafrost began to melt. To demonstrate this he scraped some snow off till he could see the ice packed with bubbles of methane and to illustrate his point he lit this gas, which flared and almost blew him off his feet. If the permafrost began to melt all this methane would be released and this would make for an infernal round of more and more Global Warming and Climate Change.  It all sounds so plausible.

Well, until one asks a simple question. Where did the heat from the methane go? Shall I tell you, as if you do not know already? The heat has gone up and away by convection. He is a great scientist and in this case a famous Warmist one. He is concerned that the gases in the atmosphere are getting hotter and hotter and warming the Globe. Is he correct? Or have I misunderstood him?

He thinks that the atmosphere warms the Globe. But precisely the opposite is true. All the gases of the atmosphere without exception carry the heat from the Earth upwards and away. It is called convection and when convection can no longer operate the much-maligned Greenhouse Gases radiate what’s left to Outer Space. So when I say that any Tom, Dick or Harry can observe this for themselves that is very largely true. Everybody knows that hot gases rise upwards and as they rise the molecules grow farther apart and cooling takes place.

What we all know is that the Globe is cooling. The Globe is cooling naturally and all the time without any exception. Wait a minute! How then do we get warm? Answer: You, Sir, whether your name is John or Joshua, you know that the Sun warms the Earth and the Oceans. Every child who plays out in the Sun knows instinctively that it is the Sun that warms the Earth and the Oceans.

Without the Sun would Carbon Dioxide or Methane keep you warm? Don’t be silly – it is inconceivable. It is a myth. There is some stupid myth that without Carbon Dioxide the Earth would be miles colder, and luckily for us the Earth has an average temperature of 15ºC. Did you know that? Well, if you did you can forget it now.

The whole Global Warming myth – that is to say that Man is warming the Globe is all based on averages, not reality. There are pompous idiots who sincerely believe that man can regulate the temperature of the Globe by cutting emissions of Carbon Dioxide. This is just delusional nonsense. Why? Because there is no such thing as a Global Temperature. Any fool knows that. The Globe has thousands and thousands of temperatures constantly changing. As we orbit the Sun at over 66,000 miles an hour we are toasted on one side and we cool on the other. Any column of air gets colder and colder with altitude. Ask any mountaineer, or any walker in the Lake District or the Cairngorms. This is common knowledge. Why is there snow on the tops of mountains? Wherever you go in the world whether you fly over the mountains of Turkey, whether you try to climb Everest in Nepal it is always the same – it is law conformable – the higher you go the colder it gets.

A lot of scientists love averages. But tell me this – the temperature of the surface of the moon varies, so I am told, between 240C and minus 240C. So what is the average? The average is zero. But did the astronauts experience zero? Of course not! They landed in a lunar daytime – they had to take extreme precautions against the heat with space suits and special boots. In the same way if a person is trekking across Antarctica trying to get to the South Pole, is it any consolation to him that it warm in Mauritius or really steamy in Jakarta? None at all. The reality is the experience of the moment. One does not experience averages.

Take any 2 numbers. 12 and 8, the average is 10. Yet if I take 17 and 3 the average is still 10, though the reality is different. If I take 7 numbers let us say 16, 24, 96, 108, 33, 72 and 2 I can add them together and divide by 7 and I will get an average. So what?  This is what the climate wizards do. So they may indeed arrive at an average figure, whether it is done by a series of thermometers 5ft off the ground or by remote sensing from satellites, what is the difference? The difference is all leger-de–main.

It is all a means to persuade the man-in-the-street that the Globe is getting hotter and hotter and that it is all his fault. Absolute poppycock. Balderdash. On top of this these charlatans would persuade us all that they can regulate the Global temperature to within 2ºC, when no such temperature exists.

Sure, there is an average. There may be a Global Mean Temperature. But these averages are divorced from reality. There are even some Skeptics who roundly declare that there has been no warming for 18 years and so many months. But that is arrant nonsense. It is scientific gibberish. The reality is flux – there is incessant movement as we hurtle through space and orbit the Sun. How big is the Sun? The Sun can contain one million three hundred thousand Earths, (1,300,000). In the face of this magnitude, in the face of solar storms and solar winds we are concerned about the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is but 0.04% of the whole. It is ludicrous. It is an absolute myth. It is the biggest con that has ever been committed on mankind. Lord preserved us all from the Black Magicians.

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Did early farmers trigger global warming 7,000 years ago?

Controversial theory suggests even small amounts of human activity can cause climate change.  Ruddiman has been pushing this barrow for years but it only makes sense if you subscribe to the Warmist view of CO2 effects.  He may be right about varying CO2 levels but whether they affect temperatures to any noticeable degree is the issue

It's not just modern society that is being blamed for climate change. A small group of scientists claim global warming first began when humans went from being hunter-gatherers to farmers 7,000 years ago.

If their theory is correct, it suggests our efforts to curb emissions from industrial activity will need to be ramped up dramatically to have any impact.

It argues a cooling period was halted after the advent of agriculture 7,000 years ago.

William Ruddiman from the University of Virginia found that carbon dioxide levels rose beginning 7,000 years ago, and that methane began rising 5,000 years ago.

The rise in carbon dioxide emissions was blamed on the slash and burn techniques used by early farmers to make available large areas of land for crops.

Archaeological studies have also found that early rice irrigation, which releases methane gas to the atmosphere, explains most of the high rise in the gas about 5,000 years ago.

The spread of livestock farming during that time period also may explain part of the methane increase, the researchers claim.

Most scientists say early farmers had relatively small effects on the environment because of their small population and basic tools – but William Ruddiman disagrees.

Twelve years ago, the University of Virginia climate scientist put forward the controversial theory that early humans altered the climate by burning massive areas of forests to clear the way for crops.

Now Ruddiman and his team are pointing to a new analysis of ice-core climate data, archaeological evidence and ancient pollen samples to back up his hypothesis.

A study detailing the findings is published online in a recent edition of the journal Reviews of Geophysics, published by the American Geophysical Union.

'Early farming helped keep the planet warm,' said William Ruddiman, a University of Virginia climate scientist and lead author of the study.

He says resulting carbon dioxide and methane released into the atmosphere had a warming effect that 'cancelled most or all of a natural cooling that should have occurred.'

That idea, which came to be known as the 'early anthropogenic hypothesis', was hotly debated for years by climate scientists, and is still considered debatable by some of these scientists.

But in the new paper, Ruddiman highlights evidence in the past few years, particularly from ice-core records dating back to 800,000 years ago.

They show that an expected cooling period was halted after the advent of large-scale agriculture. Otherwise, they say, the Earth would have entered the early stages of a natural ice age, or glaciation period.

The Earth naturally cycles between cool glacial periods and warmer interglacial periods because of variations in its orbit around the sun.  We currently are in an interglacial period, called the Holocene epoch, which began nearly 12,000 years ago.

In 2003, Ruddiman developed his early anthropogenic hypothesis after examining 350,000 years of climate data from ice cores and other sources.

He found that during interglacial periods, carbon dioxide and methane levels decreased, cooling the climate and making way for a succeeding glacial period.

But, only during the Holocene era, these gas levels rose, coinciding, he said, with the beginning of large-scale agriculture. He attributed the rise to this human activity, which began occurring millennia before the industrial era.

The rise in carbon dioxide emissions was blamed on the slash and burn techniques widely used by early farmers to make available large areas of land for crops.

Ruddiman found that carbon dioxide levels rose beginning 7,000 years ago, and that methane began rising 5,000 years ago.

He said this explains why a cooling trend didn't happen that likely otherwise would have led to a new glacial period.

In the new study, Ruddiman and his colleagues delved more deeply into the climate record using Antarctic ice-core data, dating back to 800,000 years ago.

This use of a historical data set clearly shows, they say, that the Holocene is unlike other interglacial periods in its abundance of carbon dioxide and methane, further implicating the impact of humans.

'After 12 years of debate about whether the climate of the last several thousand years has been entirely natural or in considerable part the result of early agriculture, converging evidence from several scientific disciplines points to a major anthropogenic influence,' Ruddiman said.

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Greenie billionaire ready to support socialist

    Billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer said he is not yet prepared to back Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee for president and he would not rule out supporting her main rival, Bernie Sanders, if he beats her in the primaries.

    One of the biggest Democratic donors, Steyer could help Clinton boost her standing among environmentalist activists who are a key constituency within the Democratic party. Clinton is locked in tight races with Sanders in Iowa and New Hampshire, which both have early nominating contests.

    "Our real goal has been not to support any one candidate, but to emphasize and highlight the issue (of climate change) so that the candidates can lay out their solutions and so the American people can have a chance to make a decision," Steyer said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.

    After the Democratic party picks its presidential nominee, that will change.

    "We have always come out and supported the climate champion," Steyer said. "The idea that for some reason we wouldn’t do that, I’d have to understand why in hell we didn’t. Because that has been our practice always."

Steyer said he is open to supporting Sanders, and not put off by his rhetoric on billionaires or campaign finance reform. This is the sort of news that, on the heels of losses in Iowa and New Hampshire, could be the beginning of the end for Hillary.

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