Is The Cold Weather Coming?

By Bryan Leyland on Joanne Nova blog

El Nino/La Nina effect (SOI) predicts global cooling by the end of 2010

A July 2009 paper by McLean, de Freitas and Carter showed that global average temperatures followed the Southern Oscillation Index (El Nino/La Nina) with a 5-8 months lag. The graph below shows that when the SOI is shifted forward by 7 months the two plots change direction together (except when volcanic eruptions caused cooling).

The chart above (enlarged here) shows a projection of temperatures to Feb 2011. The chances are that the present warm spell will end quite suddenly before the end of this year. Over the next few months the SOI will indicate whether or not the cooling will continue beyond Feb 2011. Evidence from studies on past climate and sunspot cycle related effects gives a strong indication that the cooling will continue.

Where can I find more information?
The paper is here and contains more graphs (see especially Figure 7)

Wasn’t this paper disputed?
Yes, but because the critics failed to understand the process (“derivative”) that was used to match the peaks and valleys in the two sets of data and derive the 7 month delay. Therefore they refused to accept that the above plot is actual temperatures and SOI. (They are). The response by the authors is here.

————

A few thoughts on the peer review process
Jo Nova

The Response by the Authors (here) tells the story of how their paper was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR). Prior to publication on July 23 2009 they received glowing referee reviews, but afterwards the usual ClimateGate Team leapt into action for speedy damage control.

Within a couple of weeks Foster et al (Grant Foster, James Annan, Phil Jones, Michael Mann, Jim Renwick, Jim Salinger, Gavin Schmidt and Kevin Trenberth) submitted their critique of it to the editor of JGR Atmospheres. At the same time as this, it was posted on the Internet – formatted in JGR style, as if it had already been accepted by JGR.

About then new editor was appointed at JGR (Editor-2).

The editor asks for suggestions (from Forster) for unbiased expert reviewers and Forster et al suggested six. But all six were well known to Phil Jones. Jones comments to friends that “All of them know the sorts of things to say – about our comment and the awful original, without any prompting.” So much for independent impartial reviewers.

Editor-2 was advised twice of the existence of these Climategate emails but was not concerned. Nor was he concerned that the paper had been published already on the internet (on August 7), and worse, with the JGR page header, in clear breach of the JGR rules.

Editor 2 invites McLean et al to reply to the critique of them (as is the norm), but then rejects the McLean reply. There are few official guidelines that a reply has to meet, and there were no obvious problems with the science, yet McLean et al was not allowed to even reply to the criticism.

Yet the three reviews of our response that we were provided with were scientifically insubstantial. Only one reviewer mentioned the time lag that we established, despite its pivotal importance to our findings. And two reviewers focussed mainly on the derivative technique that Foster et al.’s comment falsely implied was the basis of our conclusions.

So the guys who pervert the system by suggesting friends as reviewers, and who breach the rules by falsely prepublishing, are given a free pass to the printing press, and the team who ought to be entitled to defend their own work are shut out for no clear reason.

This is the state of modern peer review: A few anonymous unpaid reviewers, whose names are suggested by the reviewees themselves; this is rigorous? Who are we kidding. We have tighter controls and better standards for peer reviewing Cab Sav.

NOAA’s Magic Wand Waves Away 2000-2009 Cooling

By Paul MacRae, August 5, 2010

The recent report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that surface temperatures have increased in the past decade. In fact, the NOAA report, “State of the Climate in 2009,” says 2000-2009 was 0.2 Fahrenheit (0.11 Celsius) warmer than the decade previous. The press release was so splashy it made the front page of Toronto’s Globe and Mail with the headline: “Signs of warming earth ‘unmistakable’”.

Of course, given that the planet is in an interglacial period, we would expect “unmistakable” signs of warming, including melting glaciers and Arctic ice, rising temperatures, and rising sea levels. That’s what the planet does during an interglacial.

Furthermore, we’re nowhere near the peak reached by the interglacial of 125,000 years ago, when temperatures were 1-3C higher than today and sea levels up to 20 feet higher, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself. In other words, the Globe might as well have had a headline reading “Signs of changing weather ‘unmistakable’.”

Similarly, the NOAA report laments: “People have spent thousands of years building society for one climate and now a new one is being created – one that’s warmer and more extreme.” The implication is that we can somehow freeze-dry the climate we’ve got to last forever, which is absurd.

Sea levels have risen 400 feet in the past 15,000 years, causing all kinds of inconvenience for humanity in the process-and all quite naturally. As the interglacial continues, sea levels will rise and temperatures will increase-until the interglacial reaches its peak, at which point the planet will again move toward glacial conditions. To think that we can somehow stop this process is insane.

Even die-hard alarmists admitted 2000-2009 cooling
But what about the NOAA claim that the surface temperature increased .11C during 2000-2009? Although they did everything possible to hide this information from the public, media, politicians, and even fellow scientists, by the late 2000s even die-hard alarmists were eventually forced to accept that the surface temperature record showed no warming as of the late 1990s, and some cooling as of about 2002. In other words, overall, for the first decade of the 21st century, there was no warming and even some cooling.

One of the consistent themes in the Climategate emails was consternation that the planet wasn’t warming as expected by the models (that is, about 0.2C per decade). For example, as early as 2005 the then head of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Phil Jones, wrote in an email: “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”

Fellow Climategate emailer and IPCC contributor Kevin Trenberth wrote to hockey-stick creator Michael Mann in 2009: “The fact is that we cannot account for the lack of warming at the moment and it’s a travesty that we can’t.” Note the date: 2009, the last year of the decade. As far as Trenberth knew-and he should have known as a leading IPCC author-the planet hadn’t warmed for several years up to that time.

Even Tim Flannery, author of the arch-alarmist The Weather Makers, acknowledged in November 2009: “In the last few years, where there hasn’t been a continuation of that warming trend, we don’t understand all of the factors that creates Earth’s climate, so there are some things we don’t understand, that’s what the scientists were emailing about. These people [the scientists] work with models, computer modeling. When the computer modeling and the real world data disagree you have a problem.”

Jones tries for climate honesty
Yes, you do have a problem, to the point where, in February 2010, after he’d been suspended as head of the CRU following the Climategate scandal, and in an attempt to restore his reputation as an honest scientist, Jones came a bit clean in an interview with the BBC. For example, Jones agreed with the BBC interviewer that there had been “no statistically significant warming” since 1995 (although he asserted that the warming was close to significant), whereas in his 2005 email he was at pains to hide the lack of warming from the public and even fellow researchers.

Jones admitted that from 2002-2009 the planet had been cooling slightly (-0.12C per decade), although he contended that “this trend is not statistically significant.” In short, as far as Jones knew in February 2010-and as the keeper of the Hadley-CRU surface temperature record he was surely in a very good position to know-the planet hadn’t warmed on average over the decade.

In the BBC interview, Jones calculated the overall surface temperature trend for 1975 to 2009 to be +0.16C per decade. Since that includes the warming years 1975-1998, it seems incredible that NOAA could manufacture a warming of 0.11C for 2000-2009, as shown in this graph from the 2009 NOAA report, page 5.

To show this level of warming, NOAA must have included lead-up to the January-March 2010 El Nino. A surge in warming at the end of the decade would tend to pull the 2000-2009 average up, but this doesn’t negate the fact that for almost all of the last decade, the planet did not warm.

(Note that the temperature is in Fahrenheit degrees. This caused much confusion in Canadian newspapers, including the Globe and Mail, the National Post, and most newspapers on the National Post’s Postmedia news network. All reported the increase as 0.2 Celsius rather than Fahrenheit, thereby doubling the already dubious warming claimed by NOAA. On Monday, Aug. 1, I sent letters to the Globe, National Post and Victoria Times Colonist pointing out this factual error. None of these newspapers has printed either the letter or a correction.)

NOAA’s U.S. temperatures contradict 2009 report

Curiously, another part of the NOAA website directly contradicts the NOAA report. On its site, NOAA offers a gadget that lets browsers check the temperature trend in the continental United States for any two years between 1895 and 2010. Here’s what the graph shows for the years 2000-2009 in the United States:

This graph shows a temperature decline of 0.73Fahrenheit (-0.4C) for 2000-2009 in the U.S. To get a perspective on how large a decline this is: the IPCC estimates that the temperature increase for the whole of the 20th century was 1.1F, or 0.6C. In other words, at least in the United States, the past decade’s cooling wiped out two-thirds of the temperature gain of the last century.

While the U.S. isn’t, of course, the whole world, it has the world’s best temperature records, and a review of the NOAA data since 1895 shows that in the 20th century the U.S. temperature trends mirrored, quite closely, the global temperature trends. So, for example, between 1940-1975, a global cooling period, the NOAA chart showed a temperature decline of 0.14F (-0.07C).

In other words, it stretches credulity to the breaking point to believe that the global temperature trend from 2000-2009 could be a full 0.51C – half a degree Celsius – higher than the temperature trend for the United States (that is, -.4C + .11C).

Until NOAA issues a correction (which isn’t likely), the cooling of the past decade – which has been such an embarrassment to the hypothesis that human-caused carbon emissions will cause runaway warming – is gone, conjured away by a wave of the NOAA climate fairy’s magic wand.

See compilation of scientist responses to NOAA’s report by SPPI here.

Icecap Note: the warm spring and hot summer for a lot of places is characteristic of a La Nina summer post an El Nino winter. Best example may be 1988. This was used by many forecasters to warn of a hot summer. The same hypocritical alarmists touting the extreme summer heat in places (one of the coldest summers in a century in the west), told us to ignore the coldest winters in decades and in places ever in the Northern Hemisphere last winter as that was weather not climate. . 

Brazilian Snow Pictures – Worst Snow For Some In A Decade

Alexandre Aguiar, METSUL

Another Antarctic high pressure brought cold and heavy snow to Argentina and then southern Brazil.

This is a sampling from Santa Catarina, where it was the heaviest snow in over a decade:

CO2 Is Not A Pollutant But A Huge Benefactor

By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow

There is a wild debate in the skeptic community on whether CO2 plays a role in climate changes over time and if so how much. I am going to avoid getting embroiled in that discussion because no one knows, including the IPCC, which starts with the basic assumption that it does, that we understand the forcing and proceeds from there. They back into the forcing in their models which are seriously flawed with very poor understanding of the clearly important factors of water in all its forms in our atmosphere and in the role of the sun and oceans. Even with seriously contaminated surface observation data, their models are failing miserably even just a decade or two into the runs.

There was a very similar divisive argument in the meteorological community in early to middle part the last century as Dr James Fleming of Colby College documented in the book “Historical Perspectives on Climate Change”. The pertinent chapter was on the web and can be found here. This was before models and was based on theory as the write-up documents.

As a Synoptic Meteorologist and Climatologist over the years I have let the data do the talking.  The data says that CO2 plays little or no role in climate change – which is cyclical and relates far better with the cycles in sun and ocean.

When correlating CO2 with temperature trends in various periods of cyclical warming and cooling the last 110 years we find a negative correlation from the late 1800s to 1917 (-0.35), positive from 1917 to 1940 (+0.43), negative during the WWII and post WWII boom from 1940 to around 1975 (-0.40), positive from 1975 to around 2000 (+0.36) and negative in the short period to 2009 (-0.56).

Enlarged here.

The Russian scientists Klashtorin and Lyubushin (2003) found a similar alternating pattern comparing GLOBAL temperature trends and World Fuel Consumption. They found a +0.92 from 1861 to 1875, a -0.71 from 1875 to 1910, +0.28 from 1910 to 1940, -0.88 from 1940 to 1975, +0.94 from 1975 to 2000.

Enlarged here.

In the paper they projected a reversal post 2000 which has verified. This on again, off-again correlation suggests that CO2 is not the primary climate driver. Since the solar TSI and ocean multidecadal cycles are much better correlated, they are more likely candidates.

Enlarged here.

CO2, The Gas of Life

As opposed to be a pollutant or an agent of harm, CO2 is a blessing, a plant fertilizer that has supported an agricultural revolution. Nurseries use CO2 to boost plant growth in greenhouses, pumping it in at levels maybe 3 times ambient levels.

Just the increase in the last century has improved crop yields as shown by NASA greening studies and the UN’s own graph.

Enlarged here.

Yes better hybrids, better crop practices, fertilizers, insect and disease control as well as irrigation has helped, but CO2 has played a key role. This can be shown by isolating on CO2 and keeping other factors constant as shown in the following two studies:

Enlarged here.

Enlarged here.

More CO2 means more plant growth. Yale professor Robert Mendehlson testified to congress in 2000, climate change as projected then by IPCC would result in benefits of up to $23B/year to agriculture and forestry

CO2 enriched plants are more drought resistant and have lower water irrigation needs. CO2 benefits crops under moisture stress most! This eases water supply issues in semi-arid regions and in Mediterranean climates like California, an added benefit. Ironically California greenies are all too anxious to negate that benefit under the delusion they are saving the planet.

We should be rewarding producers of CO2 not taxing them out of existence. Taxing them becomes a value-added tax as it affects of prices of all goods and services on the way to consumers. It is a highly regressive tax, hurting the poor and middle class the most. 

But we know the real motive is not to save the planet but to address or generate revenues to pay for other issues that the administration favors.

NOAA’s Lubchenko when she was president of AAAS in 1999 said:

“Urgent and unprecedented environmental and social changes challenge scientists to define a new social contract…a commitment on the part of all scientists to devote their energies and talents to the most pressing problems of the day, in proportion to their importance, in exchange for public funding.”

The government has delivered to the tune of $79B so far to support the big lie.

We hear this week, the UN with the administration’s help is said to be seeking to tax the world $100B/year for 10 years to help fight climate change (a George Soros idea). That is $1 trillion the next decade – a redistribution to a totally corrupt and ineffective global organization.

The right US move would be to kick their collective corrupt butts out of New York City and turn off the spigot. And get off the carbon kick. Address real issues like the economy and jobs. Your wacky enviro friends may not appreciate it but the vast majority of real Americans would. 

NOAA, CONGRESS, USHCNV2 and an Expensive New Climate Network

By Joseph D’Aleo

The Inspector General wrote on behalf of NOAA a response to Congressman Barton and Rohrabacher and the other committee members about the issues raised about the US climate data base (USHCN) (see attached letter and report here). They spoke with the NWS, NCDC, ATDD, several state climatologists, the AASC, the USGRP and the AMS to form their response. They examined quality control procedures, background documentation, operating procedures, budget requirements and management plans.

They examined the USHCN program to ensure that steps were taken to ensure quality control of the data. NOAA admitted to issues with siting, undocumented relocation, instrument changes, urbanization and missing data but claimed that these issues were being addressed in their new version 2 with its new ‘pal reviewed’ algorithm designed to detect “previously undisclosed inhomogenieties”.

The write up and description of the process of pal review is very amusing including an internal review, a mixed journal review with one reviewer claiming a number of issues had not been addressed. Ironicaly the reviews were apparently with one exception accidently eaten by the NOAA mascot dog and were unavailable to the Insprector General. Though there was one negative review, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, not surprisingly given their advocacy goal, chose to publish it giving it ‘peer review’ status credit.

The inspector general spoke with several other individuals not directly involved in the review process and got comments from one that NOAA needed to explain the process more and a humorous claim by the chair of the Applied Climatology committee of the AMS that the developers of the new algorithm did a ‘fantastic job’ with the new algorithm.

All reviewers to their credit admitted there was a need for an improved climate data set not requiring the many adjustments made to the existing one. NOAA is requesting $100 million to implement a new national station network. This is so even though the pilot program in Alabama cost only $30,000 to implement and make operational. It’s only your tax dollars.  Though they argued against what Anthony Watts, Roger Pielke Sr, I and others have claimed about the issues with their network, this is an tacit admission that these issues were real and in need of addressing (progress made).

THE VERSION 2 ALGORITHM

Despite intimation that the algorithm corrects for all the deficiencies ADMITTED by NOAA, the new algorithm really only address 2 well. It is a change point algorithm looking for discontinuities that would indicate previously undocumented station moves/land use change or instrument changes. It is not clear how many of these issues among the 1221 stations in the network were uncovered with the new algorithm.

Here is an enlarged version of the example (courtesy of Anthony Watts surface station.org effort) of a land use change that the new algorithms ‘should’ have caught.

Here a tennis court was built around a station in Tahoe City CA. The enclosure around the Stevenson shelter, housing the sensor included a trash burn barrel within 5 feet. The data plot for Tahoe City reflected the change made around 1980.

What is left uncovered and unaddressed are far worse issues, urbanization and bad siting. The new algorithms would never catch the following slow ramp up of temperatures you find in most cities and towns as they grow (as in Sacramento below, enlarged here. Oke (1973) noted that even small towns can develop a significant urban warm bias (population of just 1000 – 2C).

Nor would the new algorithm catch the slow degradation of siting as trees grow up and pavement, buildings or other heat sources slowly encroach around a station or the shelter is not properly maintained as in the Snake Creek, Utah one below enlarged here.

In actual fact version 2 took a step backwards by removing a previous urbanization adjustment. Far more stations both urban areas and even small to moderate size towns exhibited growth and many airports saw growth of the city around them. This introduced a warming trend in what had been a cooling linear trend since 1940 and about which even James Hansen admitted in 1999:

“The U.S. has warmed during the past century, but the warming hardly exceeds year-to-year variability. Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year was 1934.”

The temperature plot at that time in USHCN version 1 looked like this (enlarged here) with the recent warming significantly less than that around 1940.

After removing the urban adjustment in 2007, the US plot looked like this (enlarged here.

The difference in the two is shown below (enlarged here):

This change introduced a cooling of the previous warm period from the 1910s to 1940s and a warming post 1985 but especially after 2000.

IS THE URBAN ADJUSTMENT REALLY NECESSARY?

Literally dozens of papers have documented it is. See our paper on Surface Temperature Records: A Policy Driven Deception for a lengthy discussion of it and of the siting issue which despite NCDC’s claims is not properly addressed for in the version 2. Almost every night your local television broadcaster will make a forecast like ‘lows tonight in town near 60 but down in the upper 40s the colder (more rural) spots.’

NOAA uses a paper by their own Tom Peterson who played statistical games with a data set and claimed it showed an urban adjustment was no longer needed.

Steve McIntyre challenged NOAA’s Peterson (2003), who had said, “Contrary to generally accepted wisdom, no statistically significant impact of urbanization could be found in annual temperatures” by showing that the difference between urban and rural temperatures for Peterson’s own 2003 station set was 0.7C and between temperatures in large cities and rural areas 2C (below, enlarged here). 

Despite the new algorithm which might catch a few station moves or changes that previously went undocumented, NOAA’s USHCN remains seriously flawed. In fact it is likely WORSE than it was a decade ago when it adjusted for urbanization.  Ironically their global data set GHCN is even less trustworthy because it has huge holes in and much more missing monthly data requiring infilling, a process that may require using data from 1200km away to estimate the missing data (the equivalent of using New York City to fill in for missing months in Birmingham, Alabama) (below, enlarged here). 

More to come. See PDF here.

CO2 Molecules Fight Back

By Kirk Myers, Examiner

What if CO2 molecules went on strike?  Would they talk like this?

Climate experts, politicians, environmentalists and assorted green organizations have been beating the daylight out of CO2 for decades, charging it with a litany of crimes against Mother Earth – heating the atmosphere, melting ice caps, raising sea levels, acidifying oceans, driving polar bears to extinction and generally making a mess of things on the planet.

As the hobgoblin of the green movement, CO2 has taken it on the atmospheric chin. But what if CO2 had its own atmospheric lobby and could fight back? Perhaps we might see a story like this one in the news.

———–

ORLANDO, Fla. – Faced with growing criticism, the CO2-molecule lobby said today that it will no longer take the heat for earth’s climate change, and has launched a campaign to restore its blackened reputation.

“It’s time to clear the air about the benefits of CO2,” announced chairman Nate Carbo at today’s Alliance of CO2 Molecules (ACO2M) tropospheric conference held high above Walt Disney Resort. “CO2 molecules have been the climate fall guy for years. We’ve been unfairly charged with crimes against humanity. Now we’re going to fight back with all our molecular energy.”

Chairman Carbo said ACO2M�s executive panel has drawn up a list of grievances that it will send this week to CO2 critics at the White House, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), EPA, Climate Research Unit (CRU), NASA, Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) and major environmental organizations. A copy of the preliminary draft, received earlier today, makes the following 10 demands:

1. Stop calling CO2 molecules a pollutant – Plants depend on CO2, and they�ve been CO2-undernourished since the Jurassic period (an era plants refer to as “photosynthesis heaven”) when our molecular presence was nearly five times higher than current levels. Not surprisingly, the CO2-famished plants of today are green with envy. (Note: The world’s plant life is solidly behind our organization in backing this demand. They’ve given ACO2M the power of attorney to represent all earth vegetation in a lawsuit against Carol Browner and the scientists at the EPA, which recently declared CO2 a pollutant.)

2. Tell Michael Mann to shut up – There is no hockey stick-shaped warming in the atmosphere (in fact, the earth is cooling now), and if there was, it wouldn�t be CO2’s fault. Why don’t you blame the sun for a change? We CO2 molecules have been around this earth long enough to remember the gloriously comfortable days of the Roman Warm Era and Medieval Warm Period – a time when there were no cars, factories and power plants. Back then, humans were growing vineyards in England and raising crops in Greenland. Now their descendants want a one-way ticket to the beaches in Rio. We don’t deserve credit or blame for climate change.

3. End discrimination – CO2 is the whipping boy for every major climate disaster. We get blamed when it’s hot and screamed at when it’s cold. But the big yellow ball in the sky never takes the heat. Why? We CO2 molecules get our hind atoms scorched every time the sun spews another sunspot or solar flare. But, oh no, it�s always CO2 gas that gets fingered for imaginary global warming. Please look at the blast furnace overhead for a change.

4. Quit passing the buck – Frankly, we CO2 molecules feel betrayed. Not all of us emanate from cars, factories and burning wood piles. Many of us are sent on our tropospheric journey when humans breathe. Humans are breathing CO2 factories, but you never want to acknowledge your gaseous contribution. So if you’re truly serious about reducing the percentage of CO2 molecules, stop breathing and talking. (We’ve discovered, by the way, that CO2 emissions � and our molecular numbers – rise dramatically whenever Chicken Little eco-dummies like Al Gore take the microphone.)

5. Apologize to trees and other vegetation – Most of you spend lots of time and money tending your garden, caring for plants, trimming trees and manicuring your lawn. Your yard is a source of pride, and you brag about it to neighbors. So why in Heaven do you want to reduce its precious CO2 supply ‘ nature’s sustenance? Shame on you! If you discover a brown patch in your St. Augustine tomorrow, consider it payback.

6. Urge Al Gore to take an oath of silence – The former VP is a charlatan and disgrace. All his flashy multimedia presentations cast us as some sort of global warming satan. But our molecular membership has never been responsible for rising temperatures. Look carefully at CO2 and temperature charts. When you superimpose them, you’ll find CO2 shuffling along hundreds of years after temperatures have risen. No wonder the enemies of CO2 show the charts separately. Telling the truth is just too inconvenient. (Note: Some of our normally friendly gas molecules want to lock Gore in a greenhouse for 30 days. But we warned them it might trigger a plant protest.)

7. Stop ignoring water vapor – We hate to rain on your parade, but water vapor is by far the most abundant greenhouse gas. Yet it rarely gets mentioned in all the sky-is-falling rhetoric about global warming. At slightly less than four percent, CO2 is the small fry on the greenhouse-gas scale, along with methane, nitrous oxide, ozone and a few other trace gases. The big Kahuna, water vapor, is responsible for 95 percent of the greenhouse effect, and keeps your climate cozy and warm. Without its insulating effects, life on earth would be unbearably cold. We’d like to see you try to ban water vapor!

8. Stop fudging data – We�ve had to watch from afar as Professor Phil Jones, Dr. Michael Mann and other so-called climate scientists have manipulated temperature data to make CO2 look like the most harmful molecule on the planet. After reading a few of their CRU e-mails, we now know that they’ve warmed the earth more with their cooked research and phony models then we could ever do as a lowly CO2 gas. They’ve done a great disservice to plant life on earth with their incessant attacks on a blameless group of molecules whose atmospheric presence is a piddly 385 parts per million. If these hucksters truly desire redemption, they should shut up about climate change and exhale frequently for the good of the redwoods.

9. Protect earth�s food supply – When it comes to sustaining life, we CO2 molecules are high on the list of essential gases. If you succeed in carrying out your CO2 ethnic cleansing plan, you�ll hurt all vegetation. (Trees and plants don’t react well when deprived of their favorite atmospheric meal.) A CO2-depleted world will stunt plant growth, reduce crop yields and lead to famine and starvation. You want that on your tree-hugging green conscience?

10. Listen to honest scientists – Most of the climate experts predicting greenhouse doom are either on the government payroll, knee-deep in research grants or supplying the scientific rationale behind legislation designed to extort money from consumers in the form of carbon taxes. They have a vested interest in scaring the bejeebers out of people about the wickedness of the CO2 molecule – one of the most good-natured elements in the atmosphere. Their gloomy forecasts and high drama are full of hot air – pure junk science. They should be out on the street looking for work instead of receiving awards and more grant money.

The CO2 Alliance’s list of demands is not open to negotiation, said Greta Carbo, president of the League of Carbon Dioxide, a CO2-friendly lobby group with close ties to AC20M. In her opening speech last night, she called the anti-CO2 movement “dangerously extreme” and “a threat to all life on earth.” She said her group expects a White House response to its demands by early next week.

“We’ve stood by for decades while pseudo-scientists, self-serving politicians and the hysterical green movement bad-mouthed earth-friendly CO2 molecules for simply floating around and minding their own business. We’re tired of the fright-mongering. It’s time to set the record straight.”

ACO2M�s executive panel also announced today that it has scheduled talks next week with the Organization for the Protection of Plant Life on Earth (OPPLE) to discuss ways to counter the eco-alarmists’ anti-CO2 message and educate humans about the many benefits of carbon dioxide.

“This is serious business. We need to expose the lies, hysterics and rigged climate models driving the greenhouse scare campaign. Humans need to hear the truth about CO2. Their lives, and their children�s lives, depend on it,” Carbo said.

Global Temperature And Data Distortions Continue

By Dr. Tim Ball

Recent reports claim June was the warmest on record, but it seems to fly in the face of reports of record cold from around the world.

Reports from Australia say, “Sydney recorded its coldest June morning today since 1949, with temperatures diving to 4.3 degrees just before 6:00 a.m. (AEST).” “Experts say it is unusual to see such widespread cold weather in June.”

In the southern hemisphere reports of cold have appeared frequently but rarely make the mainstream media. “The Peruvian government has declared a state of emergency in more than half the country due to cold weather.” “This week Peru’s capital, Lima, recorded its lowest temperatures in 46 years at 8C, and the emergency measures apply to several of its outlying districts.”

“In Peru’s hot and humid Amazon region, temperatures dropped as low as 9C. The jungle region has recorded five cold spells this year. Hundreds of people – nearly half of them very young children – have died of cold-related diseases, such as pneumonia, in Peru’s mountainous south where temperatures can plummet at night to -20C.” “A brutal and historical cold snap has so far caused 80 deaths in South America, according to international news agencies. Temperatures have been much below normal for over a week in vast areas of the continent.”

“It snowed in nearly all the provinces of Argentina, an extremely rare event. It snowed even in the western part of the province of Buenos Aires and Southern Santa Fe, in cities at sea level.” (Source)

Evidence of the cold is reflected in the fact that Antarctic ice is continuing to reach record levels. “Antarctic sea ice peaks at third highest in the satellite record”.

The same contradictory evidence is happening in the Arctic. They claimed the most dramatic warming was occurring in the Arctic but this contradicts what the ice is doing. Ice continues its normal melt of the summer with a slowing rate slowed in the months of June and July. (Figure 1). The red line is for 2010.

So where are the stories coming from? It goes back to the manipulation of temperature data by the two main generators the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) and the Hadley Climate Research Unit (HadCrut). They use data provided by individual countries of the World Meteorological Organization. This is supposedly raw data, but in fact it has already been adjusted for various presumed local anomalies.

But the arctic warming is even more problematic. The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) is the source of data for Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change yet it tells us there is no data for the entire Arctic Ocean Basin. Figure 2 shows the diagram from their report.

Figure 2: Weather stations for the Arctic.
Source: Arctic Climate Impact Assessment Report

This is why the map showing temperature for the Arctic shows “No data” for the region (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Temperatures for the period 1954 to 2003. They give the source as the CRU. Source: Arctic Climate Impact Assessment Report

So how do they determine that the Arctic is warming at all, let alone more rapidly than other regions? The answer is, with GISS at least, they use computer models to extrapolate. They do this by assuming that a weather station record is valid for a 1200 km region. Figure 4 shows the 1200 km smoothing results for the Arctic region (The green circle is 80N latitude.) showing the interpolation of southern weather stations to Arctic. Source: wattsupwiththat.com

Then we see what happens when the interpolation or smoothing is done using a more reasonable 250 km (Figure 5). Temperature pattern using a 250 km range for single station data. Source: wattsupwiththat.com

None of this is surprising because GISS have consistently distorted the record always to amplify warming.  The problem of data adjustment is best illustrated by comparing the results of GISS and Hadcrut (Figure 6).

Figure 6: Comparison of Global temperature record. Source: Steve Goddard, WUWT.

The Hadcrut data shows what Phil Jones, former Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) confirmed to the BBC that global temperatures have not increased since 1998. However, the GISS data shows a slight warming over the period and a significant increase from 2007. How can two records both using the same weather data achieve such different conclusions? The simple answer is they use different stations and adjust them differently, especially for such things as the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHIE). 

There is another problem.

The number of stations used to produce a global average was significantly reduced in 1990 and this affected temperature estimates as Ross McKitrick showed (Figure 7). He wrote, “The temperature average in the above graph is unprocessed. Graphs of the ‘Global Temperature’ from places like GISS and CRU reflect attempts to correct for, among other things, the loss of stations within grid cells, so they don’t show the same jump at 1990.” McKitrick got the idea for the problem from an article by meteorologist Joe D’Aleo (2002).

The challenge is to produce meaningful long-term records from such interrupted data, but that is not the only problem because the loss of stations is not uniform. “The loss in stations was not uniform around the world. Most stations were lost in the former Soviet Union, China, Africa and South America.”This is may explain the distortions currently occurring because it adds to the distortions that already exist toward eastern North American and western European stations. The pattern of temperatures of the Northern Hemisphere in the early spring and summer saw heat in eastern North America and Western Europe. There is a greater density of weather stations in these regions and they have the greatest heat island effect. The rest of the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere had cooler conditions but in the deliberately distorted record this was minimized.

McKitrick, Essex and Andersen, in “Does a global temperature exist?”concluded, “he purpose of this paper was to explain the fundamental meaninglessness of so-called global temperature data.” “But nature is not obliged to respect our statistical conventions and conceptual shortcuts.”

That is clearly the case this year and it confirms Alfred Whitehead’s observation that, “There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain”.

Read and see more here.

Northern Lights Seen As Far South As Michigan After Sun’s ‘Solar Tsunami’. Now It’s The UK’s Chance Tonight

Skywatchers in the UK will get a second chance to witness the Northern Lights tonight after missing out on the spectacular sight last night.

Parts of northern America, in particular the state of Michigan, were lucky enough to be given clear skies last night and managed to catch the incredible display.

And David Gavine, the director of the British Astronomical Association’s Aurora division, said that there is every chance the UK might be able to see similar views tonight.

‘I am looking into reports that Denmark saw aurora last night, which is exciting because they are on the same latitude as Scotland,’ he said.

‘So there’s every chance, if the skies are clear that we might see something tonight.’

Even though northern states like Michigan are far further south than the UK they are still more likely to see the Northern Lights.

A stunning panoramic image of Lake Superior in Michigan taken by amateur photographer Shawn Malone of Marquette last night. Michigan was one of the US states which were lucky enough to get a full aurora borealis display last night as the solar tsunami disturbed the Earth’s magnetic field

The Northern Lights shine over the West Arm of Grand Traverse Bay in Old Mission, Michigan, early this morning

This is because the aurora appears along Earth’s geomagnetic latitude rather than geographic latitude.

The sun’s recent activity and solar flare has led to the recent activity in the Earth’s atmosphere

Earth’s geomagnetic Pole is based in northern Canada rather than the North Pole meaning the viewable zone for aurora is tilted so that northern states in the US are much more likely than the UK to see a display.

The prospect of seeing the aurora borealis from the UK is because two minor solar storms that flared on Sunday are shooting tons of plasma directly at Earth.

Usually only regions closer to the Arctic can see the aurora of rippling reds and greens, but solar storms pull them south.

Early on Sunday morning, the Sun’s surface erupted and blasted tons of plasma  – ionised atoms – into interplanetary space.

‘This eruption is directed right at us, and is expected to get here early in the day on August 4th,’ said astronomer Leon Golub of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). ‘It’s the first major Earth-directed eruption in quite some time.’

The eruption, called a coronal mass ejection, was caught on camera by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) – a spacecraft that launched in February. SDO provides better-than-HD quality views of the Sun at a variety of wavelengths.

‘We got a beautiful view of this eruption,’ said Golub. ‘And there might be more beautiful views to come, if it triggers aurorae.’

When a coronal mass ejection reaches Earth, it interacts with our planet’s magnetic field, potentially creating a geomagnetic storm. Solar particles stream down the field lines toward Earth’s poles. 

Those particles collide with atoms of nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere, which then glow like miniature neon signs.

Aurorae normally are visible only at high latitudes. However, during a geomagnetic storm aurorae can light up the sky at lower latitudes.

Sky watchers should look toward the north this evening and tomorrow evening for rippling curtains of green and red light.

The Sun goes through a regular activity cycle about 11 years long on average. The last solar maximum occurred in 2001. Its latest minimum was particularly weak and long lasting.

This eruption is one of the first signs that the Sun is waking up and heading toward another maximum.

The storms are not expected to be much of a threat to satellites or power grids.

Lindsey Graham Said What About Climate Change?

By Kate Sheppard

On Tuesday, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham told reporters that he would vote against the climate bill he helped author. Now he’s going one step further. Graham, one of the few Republicans who claimed to care about climate change, now says global warming is no big deal.

Graham appeared on Wednesday at a press conference with Dick Lugar (R-Ind.), who was rolling out his own energy bill, a measure that relies heavily on expanding nuclear power and raising fuel economy standards without putting a cap on carbon dioxide emissions. Yesterday, Graham said he didn’t think any energy bill could get 60 votes this year because oil drilling has become too controversial. Today he decided, at the last minute, to back Lugar’s bill.

Reporters asked Graham several times about why he was supporting Lugar’s bill, when just a few months ago he had argued that the Senate shouldn’t pass a “half-assed” bill that lacked hard restrictions on carbon emissions. Graham replied that he now doesn’t think pricing carbon is that important. “The science about global warming has changed,” he noted, offhandedly. “I think they’ve oversold this stuff, quite frankly. I think they’ve been alarmist and the science is in question,” Graham told reporters. “The whole movement has taken a giant step backward.”

I followed up with him. “Can you clarify that statement that the science on global warming has changed?” I asked.

“The public acceptance about global warming has changed,” he said.

“Well, what do you think?” I replied.

I’ll print his response in full, because it’s a humdinger:

It makes sense to me that the planet is heating up because you can measure heat. It’s not a stretch to say that what goes into the air is contributing to global warming, but I don’t want to be in the camp that says I know people in Northern Virginia will never see snow. At the end of the day, I think carbon pollution is worthy of being controlled, whether you believe in global warming or not. I do believe that all the CO2 gases, greenhouse gases from cars, trucks, and utility plants is not making us a healthier place, is not making our society better, and it’s coming at the expense of our national security and our economic prosperity. So put me in the camp that it’s worthy to clean up the air and make money doing so. This idea that carbon’s good for you. I want that debate. There’s a wing of our party who thinks carbon pollution is okay. I’m not in that wing.

I asked him, if carbon emissions aren’t warming the planet, why are they bad? Here’s his reply:

I just think it’s bad…the reason I don’t hang out in traffic jams and get out and suck up the wind is I think this crap is bad for you. We’ve had an increase in asthma cases. If you’ve ever been to Thailand stuck behind 400 motorcycles, it’s a lousy place to be. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist in my view to understand that the stuff floating in the Gulf, if you burn it doesn’t make it better for you. If you wouldn’t go swimming in this stuff, why would you burn it and want to breath it?

Graham ended his commentary on the subject on this note: “I do believe the environmental benefit of a low carbon economy is worth the Republican party’s time and attention. Does climate change have to be your religion? No, it is not my religion, it is my concern.”

This is quite different from what Graham has been saying for the past eight months. Last October, he co-authored an op-ed with John Kerry (D-Mass.) arguing that that “climate change is real and threatens our economy and national security.” Now he’s fumbling to figure out how to make it seem like he still cares – but not too much. Read more on Mother Jones news here.

Editorial: Obama’s Oil Crisis Politics

Wall Street Journal

Not too many weeks ago it looked as if President Obama’s cap-and-tax program for energy was dead for this year. But with the political and media left whacking the President for his handling of the worst spill in U.S. history, Democrats have suddenly decided that this is one more crisis that shouldn’t go to waste.

Consult Mr. Obama’s remarks last Wednesday about “the future we must seize” at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon. “The time has come, once and for all, for this nation to fully embrace a clean energy future,” he said. “I want you to know, the votes may not be there now, but I intend to find them in the coming months.”

Nancy Pelosi forced House Democrats to walk the cap-and-tax plank last July, and the White House now plans a summer push in the Senate, where Midwest and coal-state Democrats are still leery of imposing huge new energy costs on their constituents. But Democrats won’t stop merely because cap and tax is unpopular and destructive. ObamaCare was too.

As with health care, the strategy is to ram the thing through by any means necessary. Amid a revolt against government excess, and a rising liberal panic about November losses, Democrats understand that the political window for their green ambitions is closing. Without any policy concessions to the public mood, they’ve simply decided that they haven’t done enough to convince voters how great their plans are.

Wednesday’s speech was a preview of this new rhetorical campaign: The Gulf crisis will replace the artist formerly known as the climate bill. “The next generation will not be held hostage to energy sources from the last century,” Mr. Obama said, throwing in some banalities about GOP narrow-mindedness and dependence on foreign oil at no extra charge. BP will play the political foil, like the insurer WellPoint did during the health-care debate.

As policy, this is a non sequitor. Cap and trade will do little or nothing to end U.S. oil dependence. It will merely make a globally traded commodity more expensive domestically. Oil consumption will naturally decline somewhat, but the reality is that there isn’t a viable oil substitute-especially for the transportation that accounts for about 70% of U.S. consumption. Electric cars are years if not decades away from commercial viability, while ethanol isn’t energy-dense enough to get a jet off the tarmac. Maybe hot air balloons?

Mr. Obama conceded as much in March when he bid for Republican support for a carbon tax by expanding offshore drilling. “Given our energy needs, in order to sustain economic growth and produce jobs, and to keep our businesses competitive,” he said, “we are going to need to harness traditional sources of fuel even as we ramp up production of new sources of renewable, homegrown energy.” He noted only days before the BP rig exploded that “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills.”

 

Er, about those spills. Even if Mr. Obama’s current drilling moratorium is extended ad infinitum, the U.S. will simply import more from Canada and Mexico (the main sources of “foreign oil”) as well as the rest of the world, most of it with more lenient environmental regulations. At any rate, the emphasis of the Senate bill rolled out last month by John Kerry and Joe Lieberman is on emissions from coal-fired electricity. Utilities will mostly fuel-switch to natural gas, which is produced by . . drilling.

As for the idea that cap and tax is the best way to punish BP and Big Oil, it’d be more convincing if Kerry-Lieberman hadn’t been written in concert with ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell and-bad-timing department-BP. “Ironically, we’ve been working very closely with some of these oil companies in the last months,” Mr. Kerry said in early May.

The Senator from Nantucket added that “they’ve acted in good faith and they’ve worked hard with us to try to find a way to get us to a solution that meets all of our needs.” Lobbyists for the three oil majors were regular visitors to Mr. Kerry’s closed-door negotiations.

Democrats have also co-opted other should-be opponents, and not only in the oil industry. Corporate cap-and-tax enthusiasts include Duke Energy and most of the other utilities, as well as Honeywell, DuPont and other large corporations on the Business Roundtable. General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt captured this mentality best, as he so often does. “National policy-including an effective price on carbon and a strong, nationwide clean energy standard-is needed to drive increased investment, which in turn creates new technologies and jobs,” he wrote in endorsing Kerry-Lieberman.

Like the medical-industrial complex, these businesses will soon come to rue their concessions for a seat at the table and some momentary corporate welfare. But everyone else should understand the stakes. Democrats know this is their last opportunity to control another huge chunk of the economy. Facing diminished majorities next year if not an outright loss of power on Capitol Hill, liberals are going to make one more bloody-minded charge to do for energy what they’ve already done for health care.  See editorial here.