The 1978-1997 Warming Trend Is an Artifact of Instrumentation

S. Fred Singer

How we tackle, using newly available data, what may have caused the fictitious temperature trend in the latter decades of the 20th century

We first look at ocean data. There was a great shift, after 1980, in the way Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) were measured (see Goretzki and Kennedy et al. JGR 2011, Fig. 1), “Sources of SST data.” Note the drastic changes between 1980 and 2000 as global floating drifter buoys geographic changes increasingly replaced opportunities for sampling SST with buckets.

Note the drastic changes between 1980 and 2000 as global buoys increasingly replaced bucket sampling of SST – with also important geographic changes. Source: JJ Kennedy et al., JGR 2011.

Data taken from floating drifter buoys increased from zero to 60% between 1980 and 2000. But such buoys are heated directly by the sun, with the unheated engine inlet water in lower ocean layers. This combination leads to a spurious rise in SST when the data are mixed together.

In merging them, we must note that buoy data are global, while bucket and inlet temperatures are (perforce) confined to (mostly commercial) shipping routes. Nor do we know the ocean depths that buckets sample; inlet depths depend on ship type and degree of loading.

Disentangling this mess requires data details that are not available. About all we might demonstrate is the possibility of a distinct diurnal variation in the buoy temperatures.

The land data have problems of their own. During these same decades, quite independently, by coincidence, there was a severe reduction in “superfluous” (mostly) rural stations—unless they were located at airports. As seen from Fig. 2, the number of stations decreased drastically in the 1990s, but the fraction of airport stations increased sharply...

...from ~35% to ~80%, in the fraction of “airport” weather stations, producing a spurious temperature increase from all the construction of runways and buildings. These are hard to calculate in detail. About all we can claim is a general increase in air traffic, about 5% per year worldwide (Fig. 19, “HTCS-1”).

We have, however, MSU data for the lower atmosphere over both ocean and land; they show little difference, so we can assume that both land data and ocean data contribute about equally to the fictitious surface trend reported for 1978 to 1997. The BEST (Berkeley Earth System Temperatures) data confirm our supposition.

The absence of a warming trend removes all of the IPCC’s evidence for AGW (anthropogenic global warming). Both IPCC-AR4 (2007) and IPCC-AR5 (2013), and perhaps also AR-6, rely on the spurious 1978–1997 warming trend to demonstrate AGW (see chapters on “Attribution” in their respective final reports).

Obviously, if there is no warming trend, these demonstrations fail—and so do all their proofs for AGW.

SOURCE 




New Santer Study: 97% Consensus is now 99.99997%

A new paper in Nature Climate Change by Santer et al. (paywalled) claims that the 40 year record of global tropospheric temperatures agrees with climate model simulations of anthropogenic global warming so well that there is less than a 1 in 3.5 million chance (5 sigma, one-tailed test) that the agreement between models and satellites is just by chance.

And, yes, that applies to our (UAH) dataset as well.

While it’s nice that the authors commemorate 40 years of satellite temperature monitoring method (which John Christy and I originally developed), I’m dismayed that this published result could feed a new “one in a million” meme that rivals the “97% of scientists agree” meme, which has been a very successful talking point for politicians, journalists, and liberal arts majors.

John Christy and I examined the study to see just what was done. I will give you the bottom line first, in case you don’t have time to wade through the details:

The new Santer et al. study merely shows that the satellite data have indeed detected warming (not saying how much) that the models can currently only explain with increasing CO2 (since they cannot yet reproduce natural climate variability on multi-decadal time scales).

That’s all.

But we already knew that, didn’t we? So why publish a paper that goes to such great lengths to demonstrate it with an absurdly exaggerated statistic such as 1 in 3.5 million (which corresponds to 99.99997% confidence)? I’ll leave that as a rhetorical question for you to ponder.T

There is so much that should be said, it’s hard to know where to begin.

Current climate models are programmed to only produce human-caused warming

First, you must realize that ANY source of temperature change in the climate system, whether externally forced (e.g. increasing CO2, volcanoes) or internally forced (e.g. weakening ocean vertical circulation, stronger El Ninos) has about the same global temperature signature regionally: more change over land than ocean (yes, even if the ocean is the original source of warming), and as a consequence more warming over the Northern than Southern Hemisphere. In addition, the models tend to warm the tropics more than the extratropics, a pattern which the satellite measurements do not particularly agree with.

Current climate model are adjusted in a rather ad hoc manner to produce no long-term warming (or cooling). This is because the global radiative energy balance that maintains temperatures at a relatively constant level is not known accurately enough from first physical principles (or even from observations), so any unforced trends in the models are considered “spurious” and removed. A handful of weak time-dependent forcings (e.g. ozone depletion, aerosol cooling) are then included in the models which can nudge them somewhat in the warmer or cooler direction temporarily, but only increasing CO2 can cause substantial model warming.

Importantly, we don’t understand natural climate variations, and the models don’t produce it, so CO2 is the only source of warming in today’s state-of-the-art models.

More HERE 





Why Trump Must Veto the Federal Land Grab Bill

President Trump gave one of his most memorable and impactful speeches two weeks ago, when he systematically dismantled the case for socialism. In that speech, he recalled the economic harm and destruction in nations that have adopted socialism, communism or Stalinism. "America will never be a socialist country," Trump pledged in his speech in Florida.

Well said. And the first big step that Trump could take in preventing any slippery slide in that direction would be to veto the Land and Water Conservation Fund bill, which enables the federal government to spend billions to purchase millions of acres of private lands for "conservation." What? Uncle Sam is going to take out of private hands millions more acres of America's valuable landmass? This is the reverse of privatization — it is the nationalization of our nation's farmland, forests, streams and pastures.

I am told by House Republican Policy Committee Chairman Gary Palmer that this land grab was a high priority of the anti-growth environmental groups that oppose further development in the Western states — where most of this land would be seized. Amazingly, a Republican-controlled Senate approved the federal land grab with little debate, and the House under Speaker Nancy Pelosi snuck the bill through with virtually no debate at all. It's a good bet almost none of the House or Senate members read this 700-page bill.

According to an analysis by Rep. Garret Graves, R.-La., and an expert on natural resource issues, the bill "permanently authorizes $9 billion per decade for the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) to acquire new federal and state lands." My Heritage Foundation colleague Nick Loris reports that the Department of the Interior already has a $16 billion maintenance backlog on the lands the government already owns but can't take care of. At its core, this legislation violates a central and common-sense principle of the Republican Party and its fight against the Democrats' ongoing "War on the West." That principle dating back to the Newt Gingrich years is simple: Congress shall allow no net loss of private property to the feds. For every acre the government plans to purchase or simply seize, it must sell off at least one acre in return.

The federal land holdings are already gargantuan, with almost one-third owned by the government and with half of the land in the Western states owned by Uncle Sam. In Nevada and Utah, the government owns almost two-thirds of the land. President Obama nationalized millions of additional federal lands — and though Republicans whined, they did little to stop him.

How depressing it would be if Donald Trump — who has been rightly critical of the Obama land grabs — were to launch a new federal land-purchasing program on his watch? One common justification for federal land ownership is to preserve these properties with national significance for future generations. But the federal government has proved over the last 30 years that it is an atrocious protector of our forests and wildlife. The feds have let millions of acres of federal lands be destroyed through awful land management and even "let it burn" policies during forest fires.

But there is another even more important reason Trump should veto this spending bill. It would take royalty payments from valuable oil and gas drilling leases and use those funds for the government's land purchasing scheme.

This would short-circuit a plan that Rep. Palmer has proposed. He smartly wants to devote potentially trillions of dollars raised from the leases to pay for a massive infrastructure bill. We need more roads and bridges, new pipelines and better ports. And an ingenious way to pay for them is through leases. Two new studies from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity estimate that the net value of drilling and mining on federal lands and waters could reach $3 to $5 trillion over the next 30 years. That money could pay for a lot of roads, airports, pipelines, bridges and fiber-optic cables to connect America — and without having to charge taxpayers a single penny.

I would wager to bet that President Trump has no idea this land socialism is tucked inside a bill that he is expected to sign. Don't do it, Mr. President. Fight against land-grab socialism, and fund your coveted infrastructure plan by charging fair value leases on drilling and mining. If there were ever a bill that deserves Donald Trump's first veto, it is this one.

SOURCE 




Weepy Jay Inslee: We Need to Talk About Climate Change ‘From a Character Issue Rather Than Just Science’

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, who is running for president on a climate change platform, told ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopolous” on Sunday that the way to convince voters that climate change should be a top priority is to frame it as a “character issue rather than just science.”

“The way this works is to talk about this from a character issue rather than just science. Look, I really believe that the way to win this is to talk about the basic American character of who we are. We think big. We go to the moon. We invent. We create. We build. We lead the world, we don't follow it, and we don't fear the world, you know, we lead it. And I think we have got to argue this from a character standpoint, and an optimistic standpoint, because that's what wins in America, and I truly believe that,” he said.

Inslee responded to President Donald Trump mocking the Green New Deal, saying, “he is so pessimistic.”

“We're the optimists in this debate, we know we can invent and create and build a clean energy economy. We know we can do that, because we're doing it in my state where we’ve built a wind turbine industry from $0 to $6 billion in 12 years. We’re electrifying our transportation fleet. Two days ago my legislature passed my 100 percent clean grid bill,” he said.

“We're making progress like crazy in my state, but what we need is a president to do what presidents do, which is to blow the bugle and really call the country to a higher mission,” Inslee added.

“Don't you have to also level with people? You laid out the optimistic view and there’s a good case for that and there’s no question that taking on the issue of climate change, all the science has reached a consensus on this is critical. But who is going to bear the burden of taking on -- what kind of sacrifices will you require from Americans?” Stephanopolous asked.

“You know, if you net this out, what's going to require sacrifices is the course of inaction. You got to understand there’s enormous cost of doing nothing here,” Inslee said.

“It means we're going to have more Paradise, California,” the governor said, referring to the wildfires that claimed the lives of 85 people. “I drove for an hour in darkness, and it looked like an apocalypse set from a movie theater.”

“People are going to bear this burden, particularly front line communities, marginalized communities who are going to be flooded and burned out. In my state, our kids could not go outside because we had the worst air quality in the world in Washington State. So there’s a huge cost to our economy, to our health, to our national security if we do not act, but there’s an enormous economic advantage by embracing clean energy,” he said.

“We're experiencing it today where we’re spinning carbon fiber for electric cars in my state, where we’re making biofuels. We're getting jobs -- you know it’s interesting, clean energy jobs in the clean energy sector today, before we take action, are growing twice as fast as the rest of the United States economy,” Inslee said. “If you’re bullish and you want to have a growth-oriented economy, this is the message.”

Stephanopolous pointed out that Inslee failed to pass a carbon tax through the Washington Legislature.

“You mentioned your experience in Washington state, but you failed to pass a carbon tax through your legislature, you had a ballot initiative on a carbon fee that you campaigned hard for. It went down in November. If you couldn't succeed in your state, how can you succeed with the whole country?” Stephanopolous asked.

Inslee said they’re using “multiple tools” to fight climate change.

“Well we are succeeding in our state. Look, there’s multiple tools in our toolbox, and this is good news, right? It’s good news that we don't have to depend on just one tool. So we're exercising multiple tools that are working. Our renewable portfolio standard, as I said, developed a $6 billion wind industry in 12 years,” he said.

“We now are growing jobs in all kinds of sectors because of my clean energy development fund, a $100 million fund that we have. We’re electrifying and put people to work in software, dealing with the integration of batteries, new battery technology,” Inslee said, adding that the day he announced his bid for the presidency, the state senate passed a bill to provide 100 percent clean energy, “and that ought to be a goal that we ought to give all Americans.”

SOURCE 




Florida bill would make banning plastic straws illegal

A bill in Florida that advanced through a state Senate committee Monday would prohibit local municipalities from banning plastic straws for five years.

The Tampa Bay Times reported that the bill, when first introduced in the committee, would have actually forced restaurants and other dining establishments to only give out plastic straws when requested by a customer.

The bill was amended during its committee hearing after state Sen. Travis Hutson (R), the bill's sponsor, said he realized he was going too far and considered the initial bill “government overreach.”

The amended bill if passed would establish a study to be conducted by the state Department of Environmental Protection to examine the impact of plastic utensils.

"So what I did was file an amendment that would put a moratorium but give us a study,” Hutson told the local news outlet.

The study would also look into the impact a plastic straw ban would have on people with disabilities who “may rely on single-use plastic straws for feeding and hydration," according to the Orlando Sentinel.

Additionally, the bill would fine local governments $25,000 if they violate the five-year moratorium on passing plastic straw bans.

The Senate Commerce and Tourism Committee approved the amended bill on a party-line vote. The measure will go to two more committees for hearings before the full Senate votes on it.

SOURCE 

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