Monday, March 21, 2016



Woe is me!

I forgot that it was Earth Hour in Australia on 19th.  You "save the planet" by turning off all your lights for one hour, allegedly.  In my evil planet-destroying way, I normally make a point of turning on every light in the house on Earth hour but missed doing that this time.  I had some lights on but not enough

Another personal gripe I have mentioned a few times concerns the fact that Warmists are having orgasms about the recent rise in average temperature in some places on earth.  This has been translated to give a global average that is higher than usual.  But that higher temperature is NOT global.  How do I know that?  My Crepe Myrtle (botanically "Lagerstroemia") trees tell me that.  Crepe Myrtles produce a great mass of blossom in various colors when they flower and Brisbane people really like flowering trees.  They are everywhere in Brisbane: Jacarandas, Poincianas and Crepe Myrtles, plus others.

The catch is that Crepe Myrtles originate in warm regions of India and are heat sensitive.  They blossom reliably only in the tropics.  When I lived in the tropics, we called them Christmas bushes because they came out just before Christmas in December.  In the subtropics where I now live, however, the warm weather is slower to arrive and they normally blossom in January.  And this year my eight trees did not blossom at all. So my locality experienced COOLING at the same time that global warming was being proclaimed.

So does that show anything?  It does.  It shows that the "smashing" temperature rise proclaimed by Jim Hansen was in fact so weak that it coincided  with cooling in some places.  It was not a "global" temperature rise at all.  It was only a rise in some places.  That is all one can accurately say about it

Below is part of what I saw when I looked out my backdoor in January, 2015:  17 metres of blossom right across my backyard







How to explain the LACK of extreme weather events?

Warmists model their little hearts out trying to link various extreme weather events to global warming.  But what about the extreme weather events that have become LESS frequent?  How do we explain them?  Is the loss of extreme events caused by global warming too?  I'm guessing that Warmists  will indeed say that.  After all, EVERYTHING is explained by global warming.  Paul Homewood below sets out what a big task lies before them

Unable to persuade the public that a slightly warmer world is a bad thing, the climate establishment has turned to peddling the myth that global warming is leading to more extreme weather.

There have been a number of studies which have attempted to connect the two. Even then, as I showed with the above AMS attempt a few months ago, most extreme events cannot be linked, and those that are claimed to be are extremely tenuous.

Of course, weather is an impossibly complex affair, and it is inevitable that some weather events may be made more likely or more intense in a warmer world. But, equally, the opposite is also true – that some events are less likely. Naturally, we never hear the absence of extreme weather analysed in this way by the likes of the AMS or Met Office.

So, I invite them to have a go at these examples:

Hurricanes

US land falling hurricanes have been at record low levels in recent years, and it is now more than ten years since a major hurricane hit.

image

image

http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/All_U.S._Hurricanes.html

Tornadoes

There has been a long term decline in both the number of tornadoes, and particularly, the frequency of stronger ones.

image_thumb54

image_thumb55

Droughts

Droughts were much more commonplace, prolonged and severe prior to the 1970s.

mudltigraph

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/us/110/0/pdsi/ytd/12/1895-2016?base_prd=true&firstbaseyear=1901&lastbaseyear=2000

Summer Heatwaves

There has been a marked absence of extreme heatwaves in recent years, and nothing approaches the run of intensely hot summers in the 1930s.

mulstigraph

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/us/110/0/tmax/3/8/1895-2016?base_prd=true&firstbaseyear=1901&lastbaseyear=2000

Bitter Winters

According to NOAA’s albeit highly adjusted data, extremely cold winters are a thing of the past in the US.

multigramph

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/us/110/0/tmin/3/2/1895-2016?base_prd=true&firstbaseyear=1901&lastbaseyear=2000

Precipitation

As with drought indicators, US rainfall has tended to be greater since the pre 1970 period.  There is no indication, however, of precipitation becoming more extreme since then. The wettest year was 1973.

multigrapph

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/us/110/0/pcp/ytd/12/1895-2016?base_prd=true&firstbaseyear=1901&lastbaseyear=2000

Regional Precipitation Extremes

National totals can, of course, cover up regional imbalances.The NOAA chart below shows the balance of extremely wet and dry areas. As with PDSI, very dry areas are much less common, while the area of very wet weather is stable.

(NOAA’s graph is not well presented; although it says “December”, it is in fact for all months since 1895. Each bar represents a single month)

multigraph

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/uspa/?area=wet-dry&month=0&submitted=View

SOURCE  




Pushing Back Against the EPA

Coal waste can be converted to useful energy, if the EPA would just get out of the way.

Lately, Congress has been taking some significant steps to push back against federal regulatory agencies. Regulations cost our economy $2 trillion a year, and are written and enforced by unelected bureaucrats with no accountability to voters. They undermine property rights, representative government and the rule of law, and its high time someone did something about it.

Yesterday, I wrote about Joni Ernst’s bill to put a moratorium on new regulations between the election and the swearing in of the new Congress, a time when lawmakers are notoriously unaccountable to voters and uninterested in fighting any difficult fights. Today, the House of Representatives voted on a bill authored by Rep. Keith Rothfus (R-PA-12) to rein in some of the EPA’s emissions standards on coal refuse plants.

Coal refuse plants work by using the discarded remnants of coal production, transforming them into steam energy. From both an environmental standpoint, and based on consumer needs, this is preferable to simply letting coal refuse sit around and take up space. However, the EPA has issued strict emissions standards on coal refuse plants that make them difficult to operate, and in many cases, unprofitable.

Rothfus’ bill, known as the SENSE Act, would loosen emission requirements on these types of plants, would clarify that plants can only be forced to comply with one standard, as opposed to several competing simultaneous standards, and allows alternative means for plants to comply.

Supporters of the bill argue that it will save jobs in the energy sector, and will help the environment by allowing for a productive use of coal refuse, which was previously nothing more than useless waste.

All this may seem like a relatively small advance in the battle against overregulation, but the mere fact that Congress is starting to wake up to the need to take action is encouraging. THe nature of regulations is that agencies rarely put forward sweeping packages that enact major changes all at once. It happens, of course, but far more often, agencies promulgate dozens of small rules that it’s difficult for individuals to really care about. It’s a fiendish strategy designed to neutralize grassroots action and make the messaging war for small government advocates more difficult.

That’s why it’s so important for Congress to remain vigilant, and exercise its constitutional power of the purse to rein in these agencies and protect the American economy from overregulation. THe House passed Rothfus’ bill by a vote of 231-183, and it will now be transmitted to the Senate.

SOURCE





Beware! Your emails, SMS’ are adding to global warming

This appears to be seriously meant -- JR

The dozens of e-mails we send every day and the text messages from our smartphones are contributing to global warming. And we are not even aware how.

In isolation, these discrete units of our virtual existence seem weightless and without cost. A short email, for example, is estimated to add about four grammes (0.14 ounces) of CO2-equivalent (CO2e) into the atmosphere.

By comparison, humanity emits some 40 billions tonnes of CO2 every year.

But as the digital era deepens, the accumulated volume of virtual messages has become a significant part of humanity’s carbon footprint. “Electricity consumption related to the growth of digital technologies is exploding,” notes Alain Anglade of the French Environment and Energy Management Agency.

In France it already accounts for more than 10 percent of total electricity use, he said, a percentage that holds for many developed countries.

Sending five dozen of those four-gramme emails in a day from your smartphone or laptop, for example, is the equivalent of driving an average-size car a kilometre (0.6 miles).

The culprits are greenhouse gases produced in running the computer, server and routers, but also include those emitted when the equipment was manufactured.

Add a 1-megabyte (MB) attachment -- a photo or invitation, say -- and the energy consumed would be enough to power a low-wattage lightbulb for two hours.

If that email is sent to a mailing list, multiply by the number of recipients.

Email tips for the energy-conscious include avoiding unnecessary recipients, slimming the weight of attachments, emptying your trash box.

Even not being too verbose is helpful -- the carbon counter is running as someone reads your long-winded missive about that trip to Disney World.

And then there’s spam, the notorious canned ham that became a byword for unsolicited advertising.

Anti-virus software maker McAfee estimated that upward of 60 trillion spams are sent each year, generating the same greenhouse gas emissions as three million cars using 7.5 billion litres (two million gallons) of petrol.

Even no-frills SMS text messages -- like the tiniest of atoms -- are not without mass, weighing in at about 0.014 grammes of CO2e.

And e-readers are not necessarily more eco-friendly than old-fashioned books.

It takes about a kilo of CO2e to make an airport paperback, but at least 200 times as much to manufacturer an e-reader.

That means you would need to read no less than 70 books a year for three years on a digital device to be “carbon neutral” compared to a book.

SOURCE





Philippine church groups believe in global warming so it must be right

The Third world is very much  at the mercy of First world fads

Church groups in the Philippines called on environmental advocates to seriously work for a "productive environment and climate justice" to address the roots of global warming and to bring about strategic and lasting solutions.

"People rise up, speak out and take concrete actions," read the March 16 statement from the group Stewards of Creation.

The group issued the statement following this week's Climate Reality Project event led by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore in Manila.

The Stewards of Creation noted that the Philippines has been on the receiving end of extreme weather conditions resulting in super typhoons and long droughts.

In the 2016 Climate Change Vulnerability Index, released by risk analysis company Verisk Maplecroft, the Philippines ranked 13th among the most climate-vulnerable countries.

With the onslaught of this year's dry season, the country expects crop losses and lower livestock and poultry production.

Jose Arnel Aguilar, spokesman of Stewards of Creation, noted that world leaders have failed to address the root causes of climate change.

"After more than two decades of climate summits ... the poorest and most vulnerable people remain at the margins, experiencing not only an inconvenient truth but a harsh and dangerous reality," said Aguilar.

In the central Philippine city of Cebu, environmental groups band with the church and educational institutions to amplify their call for discussion of environmental agendas during the election campaigns of presidential candidates for this year's elections.

The Concerned Cebuanos for the Environment, a newly formed group, said the environmental issue is an "urgent and important cornerstone platform and agenda."

"It's high time that politicians prioritize a green agenda and ensure implementation," said Sister Virgie Ligaray of the Association of Women Religious of Cebu.

SOURCE




Rand Paul: Hillary Clinton should apologize for coal comments

Sen. Rand Paul on Thursday called on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to apologize for questionable comments she recently made about killing coal industry jobs:

    “I think she should apologize. She should apologize to every Kentucky worker that’s lost their job in recent times because of her policies,” he said in a video, which was uploaded by Kentucky news site CN2. “I’m calling today for Hillary Clinton to apologize for all of Kentucky for these outrageous comments.” ...

    Paul added that her remarks were a “brazen comment” that showed “casual disregard for hardworking Kentucky coal miners — for them losing their jobs because of Hillary Clinton’s policies.”

At a CNN town hall on Sunday, Clinton proclaimed that she’s “going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” in her effort to move America toward “clean renewable energy.” The remark has drawn criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike who represent Appalachian communities reliant on the coal industry.

Clinton tried to clarify her position in a letter sent to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) earlier this week.

SOURCE
 
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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

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