How Do The AGW People Get Away With This?
by Joe Bastardi
A few graphics make the position of the AGW people completely absurd. It’s why I am so confident as to my position on this matter, and by the way it does have something to do with the weather because if you know where the weather has been, you have a better chance to know where it’s going. (No Tricks Zone)
Posted in Climate
UPDATE: I highly recommend this August 7 2011 post by Roy Spencer
Is Gore’s Missing Heat Really Hiding in the Deep Ocean?
where he uses observed and modeled ocean heat content changes as the evaluation criteria. I look forward to him adding other models and extending the data up to as close to the present as possible.
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On July 26 2011 I posted on a
New Paper “On the Misdiagnosis Of Surface Temperature Feedbacks From Variations In Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance” By Spencer and Braswell 2011
Today, I want to comment on the science of this very much-needed, important paper
Spencer, R.W.; Braswell, W.D. On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance. Remote Sens. 2011, 3, 1603-1613. (Roger Pielke Sr.)
Message and the messenger victims of debate
Chip Le Grand
IT is not easy watching one of your reporters get done over by Media Watch. Particularly when you have worked with the bloke for the best part of 20 years and not once had reason to question his journalistic integrity. But there was something about last Monday night’s mauling of Stuart Rintoul more troubling still.
Rintoul has done some great work over the past month examining the vexed issues of sea rise projections and the response of coastal councils to the risk of future inundation.
He exposed ludicrous planning laws stifling development at Port Albert, a fishing village on Victoria’s Bass Coast. Those laws are currently being being torn up by the Baillieu government. (The Australian)
PM’s top scientist defends sea-rise data
Chip Le Grand
CLIMATE Commissioner Will Steffen has backed the accuracy of sea-level rise modelling and rejected criticism that climate scientists spend too much time in front of computer screens and not enough in the field.
Professor Steffen, executive director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University and a member of the Prime Minister’s Independent Climate Commission, said not all climate change modelling was reliable.
“I get annoyed when people say the models are great or the models are poor,” he said. “The models are improving all the time. They do some things really well. We have a ways to go on other things. That is the nature of science.”
However, modelling of sea-level rises — which has been used by climate scientists for 20 years — was both reliable and essential, he said. (The Australian)
Warming may be good for us, but this tax is not
Peter R. Hartley, the George & Cynthia Mitchell Professor of Economics at Rice University, warns Australia that warming may not hurt us, but trying to stop it certainly will: (Andrew Bolt)
Posted in Cap and tax, Climate change
Study: Severe low temperatures devastate coral reefs in Florida Keys
Writer: Beth Gavrilles
Athens, Ga. – Increased seawater temperatures are known to be a leading cause of the decline of coral reefs all over the world. Now, researchers at the University of Georgia have found that extreme low temperatures affect certain corals in much the same way that high temperatures do, with potentially catastrophic consequences for coral ecosystems. Their findings appear in the early online edition of the journal Global Change Biology.
Lead author Dustin Kemp, a postdoctoral associate in the UGA Odum School of Ecology, said the study was prompted by an abnormal episode of extended cold weather in January and February 2010. Temperatures on inshore reefs in the upper Florida Keys dropped below 12 C (54 F), and remained below 18 C (64 F) for two weeks. Kemp and his colleagues had planned to sample corals at Admiral Reef, an inshore reef off Key Largo, just three weeks after the cold snap. When they arrived, they discovered that the reef, once abundant in hard and soft corals, was essentially dead. “It was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen,” Kemp said. “The large, reef-building corals were gone. Some were estimated to be 200 to 300 years old and had survived other catastrophic events, such as the 1998 El Niño bleaching event. The severe cold water appeared to kill the corals quite rapidly.” (UGA)
Posted in Climate
On Arctic Ice and Warmth, Past and Future
For more than a decade, I’ve been probing changes in Arctic climate and sea ice and their implications for the species that make up northern ecosystems and for human communities there.
There are big changes afoot, with more to come should greenhouse gases continue to build unabated in the atmosphere. There will be impacts on human affairs in the Arctic, for worse and better, as we explored extensively in 2005 and I’ve followed here since.
But even as I push for an energy quest that limits climate risk, I’m not worried about the resilience of Arctic ecosystems and not worried about the system tipping into an irreversibly slushy state on time scales relevant to today’s policy debates. This is one reason I don’t go for descriptions of the system being in a “death spiral.” (NYT)
Posted in Climate
but they won’t necessarily be so. What they fail to consider is that markets will notice little if anything of “peak oil” since prices will ensure a rapid increase in coal to liquid production, inter alia (Earth has hundreds of years’s supply of readily accessible hydrocarbons, just not in convenient to pump reservoirs, making some processing required). As the man said, the stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones…
Peak Oil & Public Health: Political Common Ground?
By Wes Hickman
WASHINGTON, D.C. (August 8, 2011)—Peak petroleum—the point at which the maximum rate of global oil extraction is reached, after which the rate of production begins to decline—is a hot topic in scientific and energy circles. When will it occur? What will the impact be? While geologists and economists debate the specifics, American University School of Communication professor Matthew Nisbet believes peak petroleum and the associated risks to public health may provide an opportunity to bring conservatives and liberals together in the move toward alternative forms of energy. (American University)
Posted in Energy
Of course, his motivation is “climate change” which pretty much destroys his credibility before he starts but he is right in that we have no obligation to support renewables.
Greens must not prioritise renewables over climate change
Abandoning nuclear at a time of escalating emissions is far more dangerous than maintaining it
Before considering the case that Jonathon Porritt makes, “Why the UK must choose renewables over nuclear: an answer to Monbiot”, we should ask ourselves what our aim is. Is it to stop climate breakdown, or is it to engineer the maximum roll-out of renewable power? Sometimes it seems to me that greens are putting renewables first, climate change second.
We have no obligation to support the renewables industry – or any other industry – against its competitors. Our obligation is to persuade policy-makers to bring down emissions and reduce other environmental impacts as quickly and effectively as possible. The moment we start saying we won’t accept one technology under any circumstances, or we must use another technology whether it’s appropriate or not, is the moment at which we make that aim harder to achieve. (Guardian)
Any set of figures needs adjusting before it can be usefully reported
Tricky concept ahoy – so cue some nerdy tables
Ben Goldacre
Fox News was excited: “Unplanned children develop more slowly, study finds.” The Telegraph was equally shrill in its headline (“IVF children have bigger vocabulary than unplanned children”). And the British Medical Journal press release drove it all: “Children born after an unwanted pregnancy are slower to develop.”
The last two, at least, made a good effort to explain that this effect disappeared when the researchers accounted for social and demographic factors. But was there ever any point in reporting the raw finding, from before this correction was made?
I will now demonstrate, with a nerdy table illustration, how you correct for things such as social and demographic factors. You’ll have to pay attention, because this is a tricky concept; but at the end, when the mystery is gone, you will see why reporting the unadjusted figures as the finding, especially in a headline, is silly and wrong. (Guardian)
Posted in Research
The curse of the moth
They’re back – and this time we haven’t got the balls to stop them. Francesca Infante reports
One of Britain’s grubbier little secrets is out of the closet. Clothes moths appear to be making an annoyingly widespread return – their numbers swollen by the insects’ love for our bulging, and not always impeccably laundered, wardrobes.
Reports of infestations have risen sharply in the past six months. Some have attributed this to the demise of the traditional mothball, others to global warming. But, it seems, the real problem is us and our over-heated bedrooms full of more clothes than ever before, not all of which are as clean as they could be. (Independent)
Posted in Activists, Chemophobia, Misanthropy
A bizarre plan to tow giant icebergs thousands of miles from the polar ice caps to drought-ridden hotspots in the Third World could soon become a reality.
Eco-entrepreneur Georges Mougin was dismissed as a crank when he first floated his plan to end drought 40 years ago.
But new computer technology has shown that his project to tap into the ‘floating reservoirs’ is in fact viable and affordable. (Daily Mail)
Posted in Development
Worldwide CO2 emissions and the futility of any action in the West
Guest post by Ed Hoskins
Prof Richard Muller in a presentation made last October [1] made the dilemma facing the warmists abundantly clear:
The developing world is ‘not joining-in with CO2 emission reductions nor does it have any intention of doing so.
So the whole warmist idea is a creature of a limited number of developed western nations whose governments have been persuaded by the control Global Warming / Climate Change / Climate Disruption agenda.
These notes using information on emission levels by nations published by the Guardian and Google [2] re-emphasize Professor Muller’s initial point. (WUWT)
Posted in Cap and tax, Crazy carbon schemes
Is Gore’s Missing Heat Really Hiding in the Deep Ocean?
As I and others have pointed out, the 20th Century runs of the IPCC climate models have, in general, created more virtual warming in the last 50 years than the real climate system has warmed.
That statement is somewhat arguable, though, since the modelers can run a number of realizations, each with its own “natural” year-to-year internal climate variability, and get different temperature trends for any giver 50-year period.
Furthermore, uncertainty over how fast heat is being mixed into the deep ocean also complicates matters. If extra surface heating from more CO2 is being mixed deeper and faster than the modelers have assumed, then climate models warming the surface too fast in the past 50 years does not necessarily mean we will not see their forecasts come true eventually.
As Kevin Trenberth has recently alluded to, it only delays the day of reckoning. (Roy W. Spencer)
Yesterday, I presented an example, in my view, of the misuse of models to provide climate forecasts decades into the future;
I have also posted extensively on the funding by the National Science Foundation of multi-decadal climate model predictions which are not robust scienficially; e.g. see
The Failure Of Dynamic Downscaling As Adding Value to Multi-Decadal Regional Climate Prediction
In this context, I was sent an announcement concerning a set of jobs at the National Center for Atmospheric Research [NCAR] that involves the application of this (in my view) overreach of what models can provide. NCAR is funded in part by the National Science Foundation (I do not know the source of the funds, however, for this specific set of NCAR positions). (Roger Pielke Sr.)
Climate Change Forecasts Flawed Say Scientists
Friday, 05 August 2011 11:40 Lancaster University
Climate change forecasts used to set policy and billions of pounds in investment are flawed, according to new research from Lancaster University Management School (LUMS).
Complex climate models have been used by scientists to reach a consensus (through the International Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC) of global warming of 0.2 °C per decade. But this fundamental finding for governments and the global population continues to be fiercely contested by sceptics of the role of human activity in climate change. The competing interest groups involved have led to a decline in confidence generally in the wake of claims of manipulated data from the University of East Anglia, and incorrect projections – such as Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035 .
The new study by Robert Fildes and Nikolaos Kourentzes at the Lancaster Centre for Forecasting applies the latest thinking on forecasting to the work of climate change scientists, in a bid to make 10 and 20 year ahead climate predictions more accurate and trustworthy for policy-makers, and help address growing doubts over the realities of climate change. Such decadal forecasts have the most relevance to current thinking and policy plans and if they are to be credible and useful, they need to demonstrate their accuracy. But the forecasts produced by the current models do not achieve this. (GWFP)
On Green Hell Blog On JunkScience.com On Corporate Energy Subsidies
