Filed under: Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Science/Technology | Tags: Climate Change, New NASA Satellite Data, Not So Much
New NASA satellite data from the years 2000 to 2011 show that the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than the computer models of the IPCC have predicted. A new study reported in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing indicate that increases in atmospheric CO2 trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.
The observations suggest that “there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show.,” said study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.”
Spencer and UA Huntsville’s Dr. Danny Braswell compared what a half-dozen of the IPCC’s climate models say that the climate should do with satellite data showing what the atmosphere actually did during the 18 months before and after warming events between 2000 and 2011.
Not only does the atmosphere release more energy than was believed, it starts releasing it earlier in a warming cycle—more than three months before the warming event reaches its peak.
The paper “On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant energy Balance“can be found here, comments from Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. can be found here.
And all that stuff about the “greenhouse effect,” nevermind.
Filed under: Environment, Global Warming, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear, Politics, Progressivism | Tags: Climate Change, Debunking Liberal Lies, Global Warming
Actually, it was yesterday, but nonetheless — “progressive” warm-mongers hardest hit:
Himalayan glaciers are actually advancing rather than retreating, claims the first major study since a controversial UN report said they would be melted within quarter of a century.
Researchers have discovered that contrary to popular belief half of the ice flows in the Karakoram range of the mountains are actually growing rather than shrinking.
The discovery adds a new twist to the row over whether global warming is causing the world’s highest mountain range to lose its ice cover.
It further challenges claims made in a 2007 report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the glaciers would be gone by 2035.
Although the head of the panel Dr Rajendra Pachauri later admitted the claim was an error gleaned from unchecked research, he maintained that global warming was melting the glaciers at “a rapid rate”, threatening floods throughout north India.
Filed under: Junk Science, Science/Technology | Tags: Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology MIT, Climate Change, Richard Lindzen
Richard Lindzen is one of our most esteemed climate scientists, and he has a new essay posted at the Global Warming Policy Foundation:
The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well. Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and there have been previous periods that appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th Century these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat.
For small changes in climate associated with tenths of a degree, there is no need for any external cause. The earth is never exactly in equilibrium. The motions of the massive oceans where heat is moved between deep layers and the surface provides variability on time scales from years to centuries. Recent work (Tsonis et al, 2007), suggests that this variability is enough to account for all climate change since the 19th Century.
Do read the whole essay, it’s worth your time, or bookmark it and read it this weekend. Clear information. No Hype.
Filed under: Capitalism, Environment, Junk Science, Science/Technology | Tags: Climate Change, ClimateGate, Corruption of Science
It has been a little over a year since the so-called Climategate e-mails were leaked from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England. The e-mails showed the scientists behind the climate scare plotting to hide, delete and manipulate data. They denigrated scientists presenting differing views in order to force journals to publish only papers that promoted alarm about global warming. They turned “peer review” into review by friends, and made the reports of the IPCC no more than alarmist propaganda.
The Climategate e-mails and the story of the corruption of science are carefully laid out in A.W. Montford’s The Hockeystick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science. A worthy companion is Dr. Roy W. Spencer’s The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists. Dr. Spencer has a marvelous ability to explain complicated subjects simply and clearly. His book has the coolest book cover ever.
I said that the Climategate e-mails were leaked. The media has liked to claim that the e-mails were “illegally hacked,” but people looking at it clearly are quite sure that a member of the CRU was horrified and distressed by the perversion of science going on.
Since that time, the work of the IPCC has been largely discredited. They were found to be using papers from Greenpeace and ordinary mountaineers rather than the work of scientists. Their claims about African crop yields, the Amazon rainforest, disappearing mountain ice, claims about Dutch sea levels, the melting Himalayan glaciers, and trends in disaster losses — all false exaggerations.
From Andrew Kenny, a consulting engineer with degrees in physics and mechanical engineering:
There is no evidence that mankind is changing the climate in a dangerous way. The slight warming of the past 150 years is no different from previous natural warming periods, such as the worldwide medieval warm period from about 900 to 1200 AD. Global warming and cooling are closely correlated to variations in the sun, especially in its emission of charged particles. Carbon dioxide (CO²), a harmless, natural gas upon which green plants depend, is a feeble greenhouse gas. Its only significant absorption band (15 micron) is saturated, so adding more to the atmosphere has a small and diminishing effect.
Over the past half-billion years (the span of multicelled life), CO² levels have averaged more than 2000 ppm (parts per million) but with wild fluctuations, from more than 6000 ppm to less than 500 ppm. This has had no noticeable effect on global temperatures, which have remained remarkably constant for long periods, pointing to a stable global climate system, without which higher life might not be possible. This stability probably comes from low clouds, which increase when temperatures rise and have a powerful cooling effect by reflecting away sunlight.
The “hockey stick graph” was first published in Nature magazine in 1998, and then shown 6 times in the IPCC’s 2001 report. It showed temperatures in the northern hemisphere steady from 1000 to 1900 (compared to the long straight handle of a hockey stick) then suddenly rising to unprecedented heights in the 20th century (the blade of the hockey stick). No medieval warm period, long considered the most beneficent climate of all, which spawned the Renaissance, and wine grapes grew in England, and was well documented in history. The hockey stick was accepted with unquestioning faith by the IPCC and much of the scientific establishment. (Not too big on history, those folks).
The hockey stick theory was demolished by Steven McIntyre, an expert (and stubborn) statistician. He got hold of the data on which it was based,” and found outrageously wrong statistical methods, deliberate use of data known to be wrong, and other manipulation.”
Harold Lewis, emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, recently resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) after 67 years. He wrote in his resignation letter: “the global warming scam with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful psuedoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the Climategate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organises the facts very well) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion.”
The temperature data on which the CRU supposedly based their work on climate is unavailable, apparently lost. NASA has admitted that they were just using the CRU temperatures. Anthony Watts at Watts Up With That with an army of volunteers to photograph American thermometer stations has found that far too many are located next to air conditioner exhausts, trash burners, reflective concrete walls and other temperature-corrupting elements. Except for the satellite temperatures from University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) which are relatively recent — we don’t have any reliable temperature records.
Weather can be defined as what’s going on outside today. Predictions come as a 5-Day Forecast, not a 50 year estimate. Climate is an average for a large area, but you can’t predict that for 50 years either. In fact, scientists are beginning to wonder if the idea of a global climate average is in any way meaningful. Think that one through — how would you get a meaningful global temperature average?
CO2 is only a minor and beneficial trace gas in the atmosphere. By far the largest and most extensive “greenhouse gas” is water vapor. We just don’t understand clouds very well.
Filed under: Energy, Global Warming, Junk Science, National Security | Tags: Clean Energy Economy, Climate Change, National Security Strategy
President Barack Obama’s National Security Strategy of 2010 is a much longer document than George Bush’ 2006 edition, and that was longer than his 2002 edition. There are parts of it that are quite revealing about focus and priorities. The document says that:
Climate Change: The danger from climate change is real, urgent, and severe. The change wrought by a warming planet will lead to new conflicts over refugees and resources; new suffering from drought and famine; catastrophic natural disasters; and the degradation of land across the globe. The United States will therefore confront climate change based upon clear guidance from the science, and in cooperation with all nations—for there is no effective solution to climate change that does not depend upon all nations taking responsibility for their own actions and for the planet we will leave behind.
Home: Our effort begins with the steps that we are taking at home. We will stimulate our energy economy at home, reinvigorate the U.S. domestic nuclear industry, increase our efficiency standards, invest in renewable energy, and provide the incentives that make clean energy the profitable kind of energy. This will allow us to make deep cuts in emissions—in the range of 17 percent by 2020 and more than 80 percent by 2050. This will depend in part upon comprehensive legislation and its effective implementation. (…)
Transform our Energy Economy: As long as we are dependent on fossil fuels, we need to ensure the security and free flow of global energy resources. But without significant and timely adjustments, our energy dependence will continue to undermine our security and prosperity. This will leave us vulnerable to energy supply disruptions and manipulation and to changes in the environment on an unprecedented scale.
The United States has a window of opportunity to lead in the development of clean energy technology. If successful, the United States will lead in this new Industrial Revolution in clean energy that will be a major contributor to our economic prosperity. If we do not develop the policies that encourage the private sector to seize the opportunity, the United States will fall behind and increasingly become an importer of these new energy technologies.
We have already made the largest investment in clean energy in history, but there is much more to do to build on this foundation. We must continue to transform our energy economy, leveraging private capital to accelerate deployment of clean energy technologies that will cut greenhouse gas emissions, improve energy efficiency, increase use of renewable and nuclear power, reduce the dependence of vehicles on oil, and diversify energy sources and suppliers. We will invest in research and next-generation technology, modernize the way we distribute electricity, and encourage the usage of transitional fuels, while moving towards clean energy produced at home.
This is the clearest and most complete statement that we have had from the Obama administration of their views on climate change, and it is frightening. In their world, ClimateGate never happened, contrary science does not intrude, the IPCC is not discredited, and evidence that global warming is a natural phenomenon is false. Robert Bryce, editor of the Energy Tribune and author of Gusher of Lies and Power Hungry says:
Energy independence is hogwash. From nearly any standpoint— economic, military, political, or environmental — energy independence makes no sense. Worse yet, the inane obsession with the idea of energy independence is preventing the US from having an honest and effective discussion about the energy challenges it now faces.
Mr. Bryce adds that:
[N]one of the alternative or renewable energy sources now being hyped — corn ethanol, cellulosic ethanol, wind power, solar power, coal-to-liquids, and so on — will free America from imported fuels. America’s appetite is simply too large and the global market is too sophisticated and too integrated for the U.S. to secede.
All of Obama’s policies are intended to force us to forego fossil fuels, and into forms of energy that simply will not work. Wind power must be backed up 24/7 with energy produced by fossil fuels because wind turbines produce energy only when the wind is blowing at the right speed, which happens less than 1/3 of the time. Solar energy is produced only when the sun shines , not at night, and not on cloudy days.
It may be worth some investment to search for alternates, but for the foreseeable future we are dependent on fossil fuels. Obama is so anxious to be the president who brings about the “clean energy economy” that in a recession, with deep unemployment, he is attempting to force it on an unwilling population in order to bring about his vision. But there will be no green energy jobs unless the government pays for them, and they will kill (according to Spain’s experience) 2.2 jobs in the regular economy for every green job, because of the higher cost of energy. It bankrupted Spain.
Filed under: Environment, Humor, Junk Science | Tags: A Solution, Climate Change, True Believers
Pat Sajak, who I have never quoted before, has the solution to Global Warming. If Kevin Costner and his brother can come up with a method to separate oil and water in drilling rig disasters — and they apparently can— perhaps we should listen to Mr. Sajak. He says:
Manmade global warming, like so many other social and economic issues, has become hopelessly politicized. Each side has dug in its heels and has accused the other of acting irresponsibly and dishonestly. For the believers, the other side has become the equivalent of Holocaust deniers; and for the doubters, the other side has become a cult intent on manipulating mankind to remake the world in some sort of natural Utopian image. (…)
Let’s assume that a third of the world’s population really believes mankind has the power to adjust the Earth’s thermostat through lifestyle decisions. The percentage may be higher or lower, but, for the sake of this exercise, let’s put it at one-third. Now it seems to me these people have a special obligation to change their lives dramatically because they truly believe catastrophe lies ahead if they don’t. The other two-thirds are merely ignorant, so they can hardly be blamed for their actions.
Now, if those True Believers would give up their cars and big homes and truly change the way they live, I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t be some measurable impact on the Earth in just a few short years. I’m not talking about recycling Evian bottles, but truly simplifying their lives. Even if you were, say, a former Vice President, you would give up extra homes and jets and limos. I see communes with organic farms and lives freed from polluting technology.
He does state the problem pretty clearly. So we only have to wait and see how it all turns out. Or wait to see how long it takes for the True Believers to give up?
Filed under: Environment, Junk Science | Tags: Climate Change, Professor Ian Plimer, The Missing Science
The great Professor Ian Plimer, scourge of climate alarmists, was scheduled to give a lecture in May, at “the Prince Philip Annual Lecture” at the Royal Society of Artists (RSA). The Duke of Edinburgh was to be in the audience.
Now Professor Plimer has suddenly been disinvited by the RSA:
“The debate around climate change has recently become highly politically charged both globally and especially in your home country. Equally, as I am sure you are aware, members of the Royal Family need to be scrupulous in avoiding any appearance of advocating or supporting a particular political stance. The RSA’s charitable status also requires us to maintain absolute political independence in our programme of events and research events.”
The good James Dellingpole takes the RSA to task:
Actually, no I don’t think that Prof Plimer DOES “recognise that the now highly controversial debate surrounding this issue would make it inevitable that he was seen to be taking a particular position.” Au contraire, he’d consider closer to being a case of bringing a sense of balance and proportion to a hitherto very one-sided debate. After all, if the Prince of Wales is permitted to take such an extremist “100 months left to save the world” approach to AGW, why on earth shouldn’t his Dad be allowed to adopt a more sensible, sceptical position.
As Plimer puts it: “Strange that those who preach environmentalism at The Palace are feted as concerned scientists with no political agenda whereas those that try to speak rationality are regarded as political.”
Professor Ian Plimer is one of my heroes. His splendid book, Heaven and Earth: global warming, the missing science, is available here. Or a fascinating earlier interview with Dr.Plimer is available here.
I suppose it is a little difficult when you have a family member being one of the most extreme alarmists, to attend a lecture that gently establishes that Prince Charles’ “100 months” is a little overwrought. Disinviting someone is tacky, though.
Filed under: Energy, Environment, Junk Science | Tags: Climate Change, ClimateGate, Marlo Lewis
Right in tune with the demolition of the activist global warming fraud, CEI’s very own Marlo Lewis comments in musical form. And this is his day job.
Filed under: Environment, Junk Science, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear, Politics | Tags: Climate Change, Debunking Liberal Lies, EPA
The House of Cards begins to fall. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, with the support of new Republican Governor Bob McDonnell, has filed a petition with the EPA to reconsider its finding based on the acknowledgment of ClimateGate’s former CRU Director Phil Jones, to be very unsettled science indeed.
He has at the same time filed a petition with the Federal Appeals court requesting a review of the EPA finding.
The Richmond Times Dispatch clucked that “A commission appointed by previous Governor Timothy M. Kaine, a Democrat, found that global warming could spread disease in Virginia, threaten coastal areas and imperil native animals such as crabs.”
The panel, which included scientists, business people, lawmakers and environmentalists, unanimously adopted its final report in 2008.
The Director of the Virginia State Sierra Club, Glen Besa was horrified:
The attorney general is wasting taxpayer’s money on frivolous litigation…In effect, he’s questioning climate change.
Well, yes. In the last five months it has become increasingly clear that climate change is a fraud. The Earth is cooling, not warming, and there has been no significant warming for the last 15 years.
The IPCC has been exposed as a political organization, in error about every aspect of climate science. Carbon Dioxide, which is one of the basic building blocks of life, (no CO2 no life) is not a pollutant, and attempts to regulate it as such, are strictly political and have no basis in science.
Filed under: Democrat Corruption, Environment, Junk Science, Liberalism | Tags: Climate Change, Liberal lies, National Climate Service, New Government Bureaucracy
Perhaps the Obama administration is vaguely aware of ClimateGate after all. This week they unveiled its National Climate Service (NCS). Yes, another useless government bureaucracy. The Federal Government is hard at work creating government jobs, by spending more taxpayer money overpaying more bureaucrats. Here is their bureau-speak announcement:
Americans are witnessing the impacts of climate change in their own backyards. They increasingly are asking the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for information about climate change in order to make the best choices for their families, communities and businesses.
The best meteorologists can forecast the weather a few days ahead, but the National Climate Service is going to help us plan for changes in future decades in global temperature, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), incoming sunlight, sea level, and Arctic ice. That’s just what you needed to know, is it not? The NCS says:
People are searching for relevant and timely information about these changes to inform decisionmaking about virtually all aspects of their lives.
Well, no they’re not. Junk Science’s Steven Milloy responds:
The real purpose of the NCS, of course, has nothing to do with education. It has everything to do with the politicization of the natural process of climate change for the unnatural ends of egomaniacal profiteers like Al Gore, and international socialists who want to use greenhouse gas regulation as a means of imposing their political agendas.
Cap-and-Trade is dead in the Senate, Climategate, glaciergate, rainforest gate, the failed Copenhagen conference, and the exposure of IPCC Chief Rajendra Pachauri’s financial conflicts of interest and calls for his resignation have derailed the alarmist climate gravy train. This Ministry of Propaganda is intended to reawaken Al Gore’s climate panic agenda so they can get the things they want done, done.
Reminder: To all you nice folks in the eastern part of the country. That white stuff in your yards and blocking your streets is not Climate, it’s not global warming, it’s simply weather. Climate is a statistic, and at present, it’s not a very reliable one.
Filed under: Environment, Junk Science, Military, National Security | Tags: Climate Change, Debunking Liberal Lies, National Defense, Quadriennial Defense Review
The 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review gives an unusual amount of attention to the issue of climate change. Brett Schaefer and Baker Spring note, at National Review, that:
Previous QDR reports did not identify climate change, global warming, or other environmental issues as major concerns for U.S. security. The 2010 QDR, by contrast, dedicates three of its 105 pages (plus executive summary) to the issue, highlighting it (along with energy) in a section dedicated to its impact on the “future security environment.”
All in all, the report mentions “climate change” 19 times. China is mentioned only eleven times, Iran five times, Russia four times, and North Korea three times. It seems that the Obama administration views climate change as a major national-security concern. The QDR sees the potential consequences of global warming — retreating glaciers, extreme weather, rising sea levels and temperatures, food security and water scarcity, disease — as potential contributors to instability and conflict. (emphasis mine)
It appears that the Obama administration which has appeared to be somewhat uninterested in national security, regards climate change as a major security threat. Probably no one in the administration is familiar with ClimateGate, or the subsequent collapse of the authority of the UN’s IPCC and relies instead on their friend, noted climate scientist Al Gore.
This summary comes from the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP).
• Mid-August, 2009, after repeated requests for data under the Freedom of Information Act, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, one of the three international agencies that calculate global temperatures, announced that it had discarded the raw data used to calculate global surface temperatures. Makes independent review and verification impossible.
• October, 2009 annual meeting Geological Society of America: Dr. Don Easterbrook presented graphs demonstrating how tree-ring data from Russia showing cooling after 1961 were artfully disguised in IPCC Assessment Report 4 contained deceptions making the entire document scientifically questionable.
• November: emails and code from the CRU leaked to the public, which reveals efforts to suppress independent studies that are contrary to IPCC conclusions of human-caused warming. IPCC scientific review process has systematic bias in favor of anthropogenic warming.
• Mid-December: Russian Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) reported that the Hadley Center for Climate Change of the Met Office had probably tampered with Russian climate data, and the Russian station data do not support human caused global warming. Met Office collaborates with CRU in reporting global temperatures. Reported global surface temperature trends are unreliable and have a strong warming bias of unknown magnitude.
• January: Joe D’Aleo and E. Michael Smith reported that the National Climatic Data Center (NOAA-NCDC) and NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) dropped many meteorological stations from their data bases— those in colder climates. Thus their reported temperature trends are unreliable and likely have a strong warming bias of unknown magnitude.
• All global surface temperatures and trends announced by the three major reporting international organizations probably have a warming bias of an unknown magnitude rendering their work scientifically unreliable.
• January: IPCC AR4 claimed that here was a probability of the disappearance of Himalayan Glaciers by 2035 or sooner. A possibility that could be devastating to India and S.E. Asia. Investigated, it turned out to have no basis in scientific fact.
• January: Claims in the 2007 IPCC report that climate change could endanger up to 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest came from activist who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and had no basis in scientific fact. The disappearance of rainforest was due to logging.
• February: No scientific basis for the claim that global warming could cut-rain-fed African crop production by 50% by 2020.
Beyond the QDR’s view that consequences of global warming could be potential contributors to instability and conflict, the approach leads to recommendations that limit the flexibility of the military.
If carbon dioxide is not a cause of global warming, and it isn’t, then just how far should we go to try to eliminate it? And perhaps we should try to resolve more of the scientific questions before we start changing our national security strategies. And possibly we should find out if there is any warming at all, and who we can trust with those questions.
This is a very troubling basis on which to shift America’s defense strategy. As Schaefer and Spring suggest: “In its oversight role, Congress should challenge the administration’s inclusion of climate change as a defense priority.”
