Earth Is Experiencing a Global Warming Spurt

But it's not due to CO2!

Cyclical changes in the Pacific Ocean have thrown Earth’s surface into what may be an unprecedented warming spurt, following a global warming slowdown that lasted about 15 years.

While El Niño is being blamed for an outbreak of floods, storms and unseasonable temperatures across the planet, a much slower-moving cycle of the Pacific Ocean has also been playing a role in record-breaking warmth. The recent effects of both ocean cycles are being amplified by climate change.

A 2014 flip was detected in the sluggish and elusive ocean cycle known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO, which also goes by other names, including the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation. Despite uncertainty about the fundamental nature of the PDO, leading scientists link its 2014 phase change to a rapid rise in global surface temperatures.

What’s Ahead For Climate Change In 2016?

The effects of the PDO on global warming can be likened to a staircase, with warming leveling off for periods, typically of more than a decade, and then bursting upward.

“It seems to me quite likely that we have taken the next step up to a new level,” said Kevin Trenberth, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

The 2014 flip from the cool PDO phase to the warm phase, which vaguely resembles a long and drawn out El Niño event, contributed to record-breaking surface temperatures across the planet in 2014.

Climate Records Broken In 2015

The record warmth set in 2014 was surpassed again in 2015, when global temperatures surged to 1°C (1.8°F) above pre-industrial averages, worsening flooding, heatwaves and storms.

Trenberth is among an informal squadron of scientists that in recent years has toiled to understand the slowdown in surface warming rates that began in the late 1990s, which some nicknamed a global warming “pause” or “hiatus.”

SOURCE






Hiding the Hiatus: Global Warming on Pause

Despite the constant barrage of hyperventilating headlines of a melting planet and the unceasing clamor of climate catastrophists and computer modelers, global temperatures have not been rising as predicted — except in the always-wrong computer models. It is important to note that this is not just the view of a few fringe scientists relegated to what the alarmists rancorously dismiss as “deniers”; it includes most of the top alarmists themselves, including individual scientists, institutions, and organizations — as we will show. While “hiatus” is the most commonly accepted label, other frequently used terms for the temperature phenomenon include “pause,” “standstill,” “slowdown,” and “lull.”

Over the past few years, an amazing process has been playing out in climate “science” circles, as the alarmists have struggled to explain the huge discrepancy between the real, observed temperature data and their falsified computer predictions. The general public, however, is only beginning to realize the enormous importance of this issue, as the alarmist media has, in the main, censored news regarding the hiatus and/or swamped any coverage of its impact on the falling “consensus” regarding the theory of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming, or AGW.

First, we’ll examine the evidence for the hiatus, and then we’ll look at some of the notable admissions by top alarmists that the pause is real. Until the end of the 20th century, it was not possible to obtain a reliably accurate picture of global average surface temperatures, owing to the fact that so much of the Earth’s land and sea surface remained unmonitored by traditional thermometer recordings. The southern hemisphere, especially, was very poorly covered. Even today, combined sea and land areas representing half of the planet’s surface are not monitored by traditional methods. In addition, the methods used to record temperatures — thermometers aboard ships, buoys, or radiosondes (weather balloons), or located at land-based weather stations — suffered from (and continue to suffer from) lack of uniformity, continuity, and maintenance, as well as the severe problem of encroaching “urban heat island effect,” which biases temperatures in the warming direction. To top it off, the “scientists” at various government agencies have engaged in blatant tampering (they call it “adjusting”) of the temperature readings, always tilting the bias toward ever-hotter temperatures.

Since the late 1970s, however, we have had access to reliable lower troposphere temperature records for 99 percent of the globe, obtained from highly accurate microwave sounding instruments aboard a series of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather satellites. There are two main datasets that record, post, and analyze these global temperature measurements: the Earth System Science Center of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and Remote Sensing Systems (RSS). Both of these datasets, comprising the most reliable global temperature data available, show no detectable global warming over the past 19 years. The RSS satellite dataset shows no global warming at all for 225 months, from October 1996 to June 2015.

For much of the past decade, the AGW alarmist lobby was in denial of the hiatus. In other words, they were the real “deniers,” a smear label they have tried to affix to skeptical scientists, to imply that AGW skeptics are the equivalent of Holocaust deniers. In the past few years, however, they have been forced by the evidence to shift their tactics, switching from denying the hiatus to making feeble attempts to explain it away. The “they” we refer to are some of the biggest guns and loudest voices in the AGW catastrophe choir: James Hansen, Phil Jones, the U.K. Met Office, The Economist, Washington Post, New York Times, New Republic, and, even the UN’s own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The Economist, the very influential British journal, is one of the most notable examples of an establishment alarmist organ admitting the hiatus, while still stubbornly clinging to the AGW thesis and trying desperately to account for the “puzzling” lack of predicted warming. In a series of articles in 2013, The Economist wrestled with the thorny problem, and made some surprising concessions.

“Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar,” The Economist reported in a March 30, 2013 article entitled “A sensitive matter.” “The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750,” the article continued. “And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, ‘the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.’”

So, not only is the temperature record defying the fright-peddling scenarios of the alarmist computer models, it is also falsifying the claim that man-made CO2 is responsible for causing the (non-existent) global warming “threat.” The troublesome hiatus explains why a number of years ago the alarmists rebranded “global warming” with the newer, preferred “climate change” label.

But The Economist has more. “The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now,” says the journal, and “the puzzle does need explaining,” it admits. The Economist then presented a welter of competing explanations from top “experts” that it confesses only adds to the confusion, not to mention that it also destroys the supposed “consensus” that “the science is settled.” James Hansen, for instance, actually posited that the warming pause is being caused by the massive increases in coal burning by China and India! What? But isn’t the burning of evil coal causing AGW? Isn’t that what we’ve been told — repeatedly, for years?

Well, Hansen, referred to by many as “the grandfather of global warming,” has a novel and convenient explanation for this inconvenient truth. The soot and nitrogen from coal, says Hansen, is masking the warming in the short term, but long term we will see a “doubling down” of the “Faustian debt,” with terrible consequences. An interesting theory, but one based on wild speculation and literary references, not on science. NASA’s Gavin Schmidt, NOAA’s Ryan Neeley, and other veteran alarmists suggest that gas emissions from volcanoes are responsible for the hiatus. Perhaps the most popular explanation is that “the oceans ate the global warming.” Kevin Trenberth, a top “expert” for the IPCC, is one of the most prominent advocates of this claim that the missing heat went into the deep oceans, but it will be coming back at us with a vengeance — someday.

In a June 2013 article on the hiatus, “The Cooling Consensus,” The Economist conceded, “There’s no way around the fact that this reprieve for the planet is bad news for proponents of policies, such as carbon taxes and emissions treaties, meant to slow warming by moderating the release of greenhouse gases.” The reality is “that the already meagre prospects of these policies ... will be devastated if temperatures do fall outside the lower bound of the projections that environmentalists have used to create a panicked sense of emergency.” They “will become harder, if not impossible, to sell to the public, which will feel, not unreasonably, that the scientific and media establishment has cried wolf.” As indeed they have.

SOURCE






1001 Reasons Why Global Warming Is So Totally Over In 2016

by James Delingpole

Let’s start the New Year as we mean to go on: by dancing joyfully and triumphantly on the grave of man-made global warming.

Climate change is over. It’s a busted flush. The alarmists now have all the credibility of bewildered Harold Camping followers shivering on a mountaintop the morning after the night before, looking all shifty and embarrassed as they realise the Rapture their models so confidently promised just ain’t going to happen…

If you still doubt this, here are three recent pieces which should put your mind at rest.

The first – modestly titled The Most Comprehensive Assault On Global Warming Ever – was written by a US physics professor called Mike van Biezen. It lists ten of the reasons (though there are many more) why man-made global warming theory no longer has any credibility. They are:

    1.Temperature records from around the world do not support the assumption that today’s temperatures are unusual

    2. Satellite temperature data does not support the assumption that temperatures are rising rapidly

    3. Current temperatures are always compared to the temperatures of the 1980’s, but for many parts of the world the 1980’s was the coldest decade of the last 100+ years

    4. The world experienced a significant cooling trend between 1940 and 1980

    5.Urban heat island effect skews the temperature data of a significant number of weather stations

    6. There is a natural inverse relationship between global temperatures and atmospheric CO2levels

    7. The CO2 cannot, from a scientific perspective, be the cause of significant global temperature changes

    8. There have been many periods during our recent history that a warmer climate was prevalent long before the industrial revolution

    9.Glaciers have been melting for more than 150 years

    10. “Data adjustment” is used to continue the perception of global warming

Then there are two pieces on what, for me, is the single most persuasive argument against man-made global warming theory: the (considerably more dramatic) fluctuations of climate long before mankind was in any position to influence it.

Here are the key points of an essay on the subject by Ed Hoskins:

    Our current beneficial, warm Holocene interglacial has been the enabler of mankind’s civilisation for the last 10,000 years. The congenial climate of the Holocene epoch spans from mankind’s earliest farming to the scientific and technological advances of the last 100 years.

    However all the Northern Hemisphere Ice Core records  from Greenland show:

        the last millennium 1000AD – 2000AD has been the coldest millennium of the entire Holocene interglacial.

        each of the notable high points in the Holocene temperature record, (Holocene Climate Optimum – Minoan – Roman – Medieval – Modern), have been progressively colder than the previous high point.

        for its first 7-8000 years the early Holocene, including its high point “climate optimum”, had virtually  flat temperatures, an average drop of only ~0.007 °C per millennium.

        but the more recent Holocene, since a “tipping point” at ~1000BC, has seen a temperature diminution at more than 20 times that earlier rate at about 0.14 °C per millennium.

        the Holocene interglacial is already 10 – 11,000 years old and judging from the length of previous interglacials the Holocene epoch should be drawing to its close: in this century, the next century or this millennium.

        the beneficial warming at the end of the 20th century to the Modern high point has been responsible the “Great Man-made Global Warming Scare”.

        eventually this late 20th century temperature blip will come to be seen as just noise in the system in the longer term progress of comparatively rapid cooling over the last 3000+ years.

        other published Greenland Ice Core records as well as GISP2, (NGRIP1, GRIP) corroborate this finding. They also exhibit the same pattern of a prolonged relatively stable early Holocene period followed by a subsequent much more rapid decline in the more recent past.

    When considering the scale of temperature changes that alarmists anticipate because of Man-made Global Warming and their view of the disastrous effects of additional Man-made Carbon Dioxide emissions in this century, it is useful to look at climate change from a longer term, century by century and even on a millennial perspective.

    The much vaunted and much feared “fatal” tipping point of +2°C would only bring Global temperatures close to the level of the very congenial climate of “the Roman warm period”.

    If it were possible to reach the “horrendous” level of +4°C postulated by Warmists, that extreme level of warming would still only bring temperatures to about the level of the previous Eemian maximum, a warm and abundant epoch, when hippopotami thrived in the Rhine delta.

Finally, a study by another amateur enthusiast, JWR Whitfield, examining the relationship between CO2 and climate on an even longer term scale (400,000 years plus).

This represents a fairly recent development in our understanding of climate. Back in 1998, for example, when Michael Mann et al presented their hugely influential paper “Observed Climate Variability & Change”, the ice-core data available to scientists went back only 100,000 years (thus covering only one of the planet’s glaciation periods). Since then, thanks to two enlarged time scale Antarctica ice cores – Vostok and Epica – we can go back much further, covering at least four Glacial (cold) and Interglacial (warm) periods.

Two key things become clear from this data. The first is that, on a longer-term scale, Earth’s climate has fluctuated far more dramatically than the puny and inconsequential 0.8 degrees C rise in global mean temperature we’ve experienced since 1850. And the second is that rises and falls in CO2 lag rises and falls in temperature: that is, it’s temperature which pushes CO2 levels, not the other way round.

Whitfield goes on to examine the influence of the sun and of the oceans on climate which, he demonstrates, is much stronger than the small-to-non-existent influence of the trace gas CO2.

Not that any of this stuff is new, of course. But it’s useful information to keep handy every time you come upon another of those of smug, sanctimonious types who has been taught by the New York Times, the Guardian, the BBC, HuffPo or whoever that “deniers” are motivated solely by money or ideology and have no scientific arguments to support their case.

Actually, this is a classic case of what psychologists call “projection”. The climate alarmists were abandoned by scientific reality long ago – and the only reason they keep on trying to prop up their bankrupt cause is either because it pays the mortgage or because it suits their left-liberal Weltanschauung – or both.

The good news for those on the sceptical side of the argument is that we won it long ago – as will become increasingly clear over the months and years.

The bad news is that there won’t be what our friend Greg Garrison likes to call on his WIBC talk radio show a “blue dress moment” where some killer scientific fact emerges that decides the issue once and for all.

That’s because the whole global warming scare isn’t really about “the science” and never was about “the science.” Always, but always, it has been about the cynical exploitation of mass crowd hysteria and about the sly manipulation by activists and crony capitalists of the political system in order to advance the cause of global governance.

None of the people involved in this scam deserve the merest scintilla of respect. They are pure scum. They have not a single redeeming quality and everything they do is worthless – as I shall not hesitate to remind them from now on.

It strikes me that in the past that I have been far too kind and generous to this bunch of parasites and tinpot tyrants. My New Year’s resolution is to take the gloves off and take the fight to the enemy.

Join me, why don’t you? It could be fun.

SOURCE  





Recycling Myths of Environment Religion

“Reduce, reuse, recycle” is a slogan enshrined in municipal code in cities across the United States. It’s also among the most illogical. Most recycling programs, according to Independent Institute Senior Fellow William F. Shughart II, actually expend more resources than they save. Mandatory recycling therefore works against the conservation ethic it was supposed to reflect.

In an op-ed published in more than two dozen media outlets, Shughart debunks widespread myths, including falsehoods put out by the Environmental Protection Agency, about some of the leading targets of municipal recycling programs: scrap paper, plastic, and glass. Estimates that claim recycling these materials saves resources and reduces carbon dioxide emissions fail to account for the substantial environmental impact caused by transporting them to a recycling center. “By sending an extra fleet of trucks around town once a week, adherents of the recycling religion actually are undermining their stated goal of protecting the environment,” Shughart writes. Materials that consumers sometimes rinse before sorting into recycling bins, such as cans and plastic containers, leave an even greater impact.

“The true recycling test is whether someone is willing to pay you to sort and save your trash,” Shughart writes. “If they’re not, what you’ve been told about recycling in the past is probably just garbage.”

SOURCE





Despite Green Energy Push, API Chief Says Oil and Gas Will Provide 80% of U.S. Energy Needs Through 2040

 American Petroleum Institute president and CEO Jack Gerard said Tuesday that federal government data show the United States will continue to rely on fossil fuels as its main source of energy for decades to come, despite efforts by environmentalists to work toward a goal of banning them.

CNSNews.com asked Gerard about the United Nations climate change conference in Paris last month at which scientists and environmentalists expressed the belief that addressing climate change would require an eventual ban on all fossil fuels.

“The experts will tell you that by 2040, 80 percent of the energy resource we’ll rely on in the United States will continue to be fossil fuels,” he said.

Gerard was speaking at a press conference  after addressing the oil and gas trade association’s annual State of American Energy event in Washington, D.C.

According to the federal Energy Information Administration, although renewable and nuclear are the fast-growing energy sources – each increasing by 2.5 percent a year – “fossil fuels continue to supply nearly 80% of world energy use through 2040.”

In his prepared remarks, Gerard said the U.S. was the world’s leader in gas and oil production while also leading the world in carbon reductions – thanks, in part, to increased production of fossil fuels, specifically liquefied natural gas (LNG).

“The science today shows us that natural gas is a key opportunity to further improve the environment,” he said. “I would suggest one of the things we should look at is how do we expedite and move LNG export opportunities in the United States.”

“Fortunately, we know how to bring about America’s brighter energy future, which means lower cost for American consumers, a cleaner environment and American energy leadership, because it is today’s reality,” Gerard said.

“We call it the U.S. model.”

“Simultaneously, the United States is leading the world in energy production, we have one of the strongest western economies, and are leading the world in reducing greenhouse gas emissions – a trifecta of success unmatched by any other nation,” Gerard said.

Gerard told CNSNews.com at the press conference that the U.S. should “build on the success” in these areas.

“The reality is, we are leading the world and how did we get there?” Gerard said. “That’s the simple point we’re trying to make, as you look and you build on the success we have today, we believe we can deal with the challenge of carbon. But we can also do it in other ways, other than those driven purely by political ideology.”

SOURCE





Svalbard polar bear numbers increased 42% over last 11 years

Results of this fall’s Barents Sea population survey have been released by the Norwegian Polar Institute and they are phenomenal: despite several years with poor ice conditions, there are more bears now (~975) than there were in 2004 (~685) around Svalbard (a 42 30% increase) and the bears were in good condition.

Oddly, in a September report right after the count, biologist Jon Aars reported them in “excellent” condition, with some of them “as fat as pigs.” I guess “good” is the same as “excellent.”

Bears in the Russian portion of the Barents Sea were not counted this year because the Russians would not allow it; the previous total count, from 2004, was 2,650 (range ~1900-3600) for the entire region.

Oddly, the comments made by lead researcher Jon Aars to a Norwegian newspaper (in English), which picked this up yesterday (“Polar bears make a comeback” ), were far more positive than those in the press release (which is likely all that western media will see).

SOURCE


***************************************

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

*****************************************