Global Warming or Global Bullshit?

[festeringZit]

[ Damned global warming is causing more all-time cold records. Go figure. But the lemmings swallow the propaganda like mindless sheep... ]


[h=1]Polar vortex brings more historic cold in eastern U.S.[/h] By Angela Fritz February 20 at 10:40 AM

A plume of frigid, Arctic air is pushing south into the eastern U.S. this week. Shown above is an analysis of pressure over North America this week, illustrating a strong ridge of high pressure over the western U.S. and Alaska, and a deep trough in the east, which is allowing polar air to dive south. (weatherbell.com)
Friday arrived with an icy slap as Arctic air surged into the eastern United States. The cold snap caused long-standing records to tumble across the Midwest and Eastern Seaboard.
A new, all-time record low for any month was set in Lynchburg, Va., on Friday morning, when the city dropped to minus 11 degrees. The previous all-time low was minus 10, set in 1985 and 1996.
Flint, Mich., has tied its all-time record low for any month when the temperature dropped to a brutal minus 25 degrees on Friday morning. The last time it was so cold in Flint was on Jan. 18, 1976.
Cleveland broke its all-time record low for the month of February when the thermometer bottomed out at 17 degrees below zero on Friday morning. The new record surpassed the previous by one degree, set more than a century ago on Feb. 10, 1899.
Many record lows for the date have been set in major cities in the eastern U.S., including New York, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Atlanta and Miami.

Friday morning low temperatures will be running 20 to 50 degrees below average for this time of year across most of the eastern U.S. (tropicaltidbits.com)
In Washington, a temperature of 5 degrees Friday morning was enough to smash a 120-year-old record for this date. That temperature, as measured at Reagan National Airport, broke the mark of 8 degrees that entered the record books on this date in 1896. D.C.’s record low of 5 degrees also surpassed last winter’s coldest low of 6 degrees on Jan. 7, 2014.
A wind chill advisory remained in effect across most of the area until noon.
[D.C. forecast: Snow and ice possible on Saturday]
Today’s highs in Washington are expected to climb into the upper teens, maybe around 20 degrees in the city, but will peak only around 15 degrees in the suburbs. All three Washington-area airports will be in range to set record cool high temperatures on Friday; the old records are 18 degrees at both Baltimore-Washington and Reagan National set in 1896, and 26 at Dulles set in 1972.
NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center writes that the dangerously cold outbreak is surging south thanks in part to an appendage of the polar vortex. “There are indications that this could be some of the coldest weather since the mid-1990s for parts of the Southeast U.S., Mid-Atlantic, and central Appalachians,” it wrote. “An eddy of the polar vortex will add to the potency of the surface cold front, thus creating a deep layer of bitterly cold air.”
[How to protect your home, pets and car from this bitter cold]
But the week’s record-breaking cold is not just Arctic, but Siberian air that has been trudging across the North Pole and into North America — leading many to refer to the outbreak as the “Siberian Express.”

Wind chill warnings and advisories stretch from North Dakota to Florida as the polar vortex makes a return across the eastern U.S. this week. (National Weather Service)
When combined with winds, the cold is leading to dangerous wind chills. Wind chill warnings and advisories stretched from the Upper Midwest to the Deep South — even as far as Miami, where Friday morning lows around 40 degrees could break records for the date and will surely be the coldest air that southern Florida has seen in five years.
A freeze warning remains in effect for the northern Florida peninsula for Saturday morning lows. The National Weather Service warns that imminent, sub-freezing temperatures “will kill crops and other sensitive vegetation.”
Friday marked the second morning in a row of record-breaking temperatures across the eastern United States. Some temperatures in the Upper Midwest plummeted to minus 35 Thursday morning. Widespread sub-zero temperatures were recorded from North Dakota to Kentucky and east into Pennsylvania and New York.
Contrast the Eastern Seaboard cold with the above-average temperatures in the West, where record highs fell this week. On the north slope of Alaska, temperatures were running an astonishing 40 degrees above average on Thursday morning.

It’s all connected — while the eastern U.S. freezes, Alaska is surging to more than 40 degrees above normal for this time of year thanks to a strong ridge of high pressure over western North America. (weatherbell.com)
A strong ridge of high pressure has been building over the West, all the way north into the Arctic circle, which has not only brought extreme warmth over western North America but has also forced the eastern United States into its record-setting February cold snap.
Though the cold is expected to linger in the Northeast over the weekend, temperatures will moderate across most of the eastern United States by Saturday.

 

[Acebb]

120 + million people in 20 states affected by freezing temperatures.

 

[Acebb]

Great Lakes Ice will likely be the highest ever recorded despite "global warming"

 

[Acebb]

[h=1]Global warming: plants may absorb more carbon dioxide than previously thought[/h]
According to researchers, climate models have failed to take into account that when carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere, plants thrive, become larger, and are able to absorb more CO2.

As part of the carbon cycle, plants use light to photosynthesise carbon dioxide, turning it into carbohydrate to grow and releasing oxygen as a waste product.

Now a team at Wyoming University has found that carbon dioxide stays in leaves longer than previously thought, acting as a fertiliser and accelerating plant growth.

“The terrestrial biosphere may absorb more CO2 than previously thought,” said lead author Professor Ying Sun, of Wyoming University.

The scientists say it explains why levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are not rising as quickly as models predict.

 

[SheriffJoe]

NYT SMEARS SCIENTIST WILLIE SOON FOR TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT ‘GLOBAL WARMING’

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P Photo/Romas Dabrukasby JAMES DELINGPOLE21 Feb 20151455

Another day, another attack on the integrity of the Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon, this time in the New York Times.

I first became aware of Soon in 2009 when reading through the Climategate emails. One of them was a jocular suggestion by a warmist called Tom Wigley as to how best to smear Soon and his co-author Sallie Baliunas.

Might be interesting to see how frequently Soon and Baliunas, individually, are cited (as astronomers). Are they any good in their own fields? Perhaps we could start referring to them as astrologers (excusable as…’oops, just a typo’).


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You might be wondering what Soon and Baliunas had done to incur the wrath of the climate alarmist establishment. Well, they’d just published a meta-analysis of all the papers which had been written on the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). What their paper showed is that contrary to claims by one Michael Mann (the name may be familiar), the MWP was not a small, localised event but global, big and widespread.

So the memo went out from the Hockey Team (the uber-vindictive Mann and his lickspittle posse) to get Soon, and they’ve been going at him ever since: not by criticising the quality of his science — that would be too difficult because his science is impeccable — but simply by trying to make his life miserable, deny him tenure, and to smear him as compromised and corrupt.

The reason for the latest attack on Soon is that he is the co-author, with Christopher Monckton et al, of a paper published earlier this year in the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences journal Science Bulletin.

This study — Why Models Run Hot — infuriated the alarmist establishment, first because it was unusually popular (receiving over 10,000 views — thousands more than most scientific papers get) and second because it made a mockery of their cherished computer models.

As Paul Driessen explains:

Results from an irreducibly simple climate model,” concluded that, once discrepancies in IPCC computer models are taken into account, the impact of CO2-driven manmade global warming over the next century (and beyond) is likely to be “no more than one-third to one-half of the IPCC’s current projections” – that is, just 1-2 degrees C (2-4 deg F) by 2100! That’s akin to the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods and would be beneficial, not harmful.
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Rather than attack the substance of the paper, the warmists reverted to their usual tricks, lead by Kert Davies, an activist lawyer who works for a Greenpeace front organisation called Climate Investigations Center.

Climate Investigations Center executive director (and former top Greenpeace official) Kert Davies told the Boston Globe it “simply cannot be true” that the authors have no conflict of interest over their study, considering their alleged industry funding sources and outside consulting fees. Davies singled out Dr. Willie Soon, saying the Harvard researcher received more than $1 million from companies that support studies critical of manmade climate change claims. An allied group launched a petition drive to have Dr. Soon fired.

Davies’ libelous assertions have no basis in fact. Not one of these four authors received a dime in grants or other payments for researching and writing their climate models paper. Every one of them did the work on his own time. The only money contributed to the Science Bulletin effort went to paying the “public access” fees, so that people could read their study for free.
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I spoke to Soon last night. He told me that of course he receives private funding for his research: he has to because it’s his only way of making ends meet, especially since the Alarmist establishment launched its vendetta against him when, from 2009 onwards, he became more outspoken in his critiques of global warming theory.

Harvard-Smithsonian strove to make his life harder and harder, first by banning him from working on anything even remotely connected with issues like climate change or CO2, then by moving his office away from the astrophysics department to a remote area Soon calls Siberia. What the faculty couldn’t quite do was actually sack Soon because it had no cause: he was producing too many quality papers, and he was also bringing in too much money (40 per cent of which goes straight into the faculty coffers).

So there’s nothing new or scandalous about this latest New York Times hit job on poor Willie Soon. It’s just a continuation of a vendetta which has been waged for years against an honest, decent, hardworking — and incredibly brave — scientist who refuses to toe the official (and increasingly discredited) line on man-made global warming.

What most definitely is scandalous is the vile hypocrisy of Soon’s harrassment by the warmist establishment, which receives billions every year from the US government, left-wing charities, and billionaire activists like Tom Steyer and George Soros to prop up their bankrupt cause by promoting exactly the kind of junk science which Soon (and similarly principled scientists) have made it their business to shred.

The warmists are losing their argument. Their desperation is beginning to show.

 

[SheriffJoe]

 

[festeringZit]

[ it's all about the almighty $$, but the Global Warming lemmings in here are to dumb to realize it. lol. ]
[h=1]Experts Smeared by Media and Greenpeace for Debunking Global Warming[/h] 149

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by Robert Wilde23 Feb 2015233

Prescott Set For Return To Politics

Sky News


A not so funny, but somewhat predictable, event occurred after Dr. Matt Briggs co-authored a major peer-reviewed climate physics paper that exposed significant errors in the billion-dollar computer models used by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).




Briggs and his colleagues were smeared by the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe because the revealed errors suggest that there is no climate crisis after all.
Dr. Briggs joined Breitbart News Executive Chairman, Stephen K. Bannon, on Breitbart News Sunday and explained that he, lead author Lord Monckton, physicist Dr. Willie Soon, and David Legates, professor of Geography at the University of Delaware, developed a simple climate model that exposed the errors in the more complex computer models used by the IPCC. The report was released in a joint article titled: “Why Models Run Hot: Results from An Irreducibly Simple Climate Model.”
Dr. Briggs, who has a Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from Cornell, was assistant editor for the Monthly Weather Review, and is widely published on matters concerning climate. He explained that for decades “the computer climate models on which the IPCC and others rely, make forecasts where the temperature will be way up there. But, the reality is the temperature has been way down here. So these models are running hot!”
The reason that the models are running hot is based on a “firm scientific principle,” says Briggs. “If a model is making bad predictions, which these climate models are, the theory that underlies them must be wrong. So these models must be wrong.”
Briggs explained that atmospheric reaction to carbon dioxide, known as climate sensitivity, is probably too high for these models. “If you take this climate sensitivity model and tone it down, you get a much closer match to reality.” He contends that the computer models are overcompensating for the addition of CO2’s to the atmosphere.
Although their findings weren’t that controversial scientifically, it was “unwelcome news” to the IPCC and other “Global Warmists”—“and that’s when the whole thing began to blow-up,” Briggs said.
Chairman Bannon asked Briggs how he reacts to all the “smug” entertainers, celebrities, personalities, and others who assert that global warming is a settled science. Briggs responded by explaining that what is settled, “is the fundamental, unshakable scientific principle, that if you have a theory that makes bad predictions, that theory must be wrong. And we have had lousy predictions from these climate models for years and years and years. Something must be wrong. This is undeniable.”
Briggs elaborated that his paper has been downloaded 10,000 times, making it one of the most downloaded reports on climate change ever. But the statistician acknowledged that a lot of money and careers are on the line, largely relying on the premise that the planet is heating up.
Consequently, he said, reporters from the aforementioned media outlets have done their best to smear the authors’ names. Moreover, they made attempts to get Soon and Legates fired from their jobs. Accusations were made that the authors wrote the paper for financial gains. Yet, no money was ever given or received for writing it. Briggs said the reporters “did not want to believe the truth I was telling them.”
Greenpeace was able to access all of eminent solar physicist Willie Soon’s emails from his employer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center regarding the paper. But they found nothing suggesting any kind of foul play, deception or receiving of illegal funds. Mr. Bannon mocked the Harvard-Smithsonian center for having released Soon’s correspondence, sarcastically referring to the institution as a “profiles in courage” for providing all of Soon’s private emails.
Eventually, Greenpeace sent the emails to the media in a desperate attempt to unveil some sort of mistake in the study, or deception on the part of the authors. Bannon observed, “so they were trying to smear you, ruin your reputations?” Briggs said that they tried, but every point was refuted entirely.
Briggs emphasized that “if you don’t remember anything else from this radio program listen to this: If you have a theory and that theory makes bad predictions, that theory is in error….Climate forecasters have made, for decades, lousy predictions. They are therefore in error….People should not rely on them to make decisions. Certainly, they should not rely on them to make legislation.”

 

[SheriffJoe]

Coldest Months On Record: February 2015 Could Be Among Top 5

February 23, 2015 6:56 AM

DETROIT (WWJ) – February 2015 could be one for the record books in terms of cold weather. Accuweather’s Dean DeVore says the coldest month ever was in January 1977, with an average temperature of just under 13 degrees, and we’ve got a shot at breaking that record.

“I’m doing some calculations but I think we are on track here to have the coldest month ever in Detroit, the way things are looking,” said DeVore. “And it’s going to be brutally cold here today.”

http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2015/02/23/february-could-top-weather-record-as-coldest-month/

 

[festeringZit]

Coldest Months On Record: February 2015 Could Be Among Top 5

February 23, 2015 6:56 AM

DETROIT (WWJ) – February 2015 could be one for the record books in terms of cold weather. Accuweather’s Dean DeVore says the coldest month ever was in January 1977, with an average temperature of just under 13 degrees, and we’ve got a shot at breaking that record.

“I’m doing some calculations but I think we are on track here to have the coldest month ever in Detroit, the way things are looking,” said DeVore. “And it’s going to be brutally cold here today.”

http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2015/02/23/february-could-top-weather-record-as-coldest-month/

If global warming gets any worse, we might freeze to death.

 

[superbeets]

Are Siberia's mysterious craters caused by climate change? Scientists find four new enormous holes in northern Russia

• Four new craters have been spotted by scientists in the Yamal peninsula, in Siberia
• May be caused by gas from underground and fear craters becoming more common due to rising temperatures
• Bright flash of light seen close to one crater which led to theories that buried gas pockets in the soil may be igniting
• Another new crater has been found less than six miles from a major gas plant and experts have called for an urgent investigation into the phenomenon

Four new mysterious giant craters have appeared in the Siberian permafrost in northern Russia, sparking fears that global warming may be causing gas to erupt from underground.
Scientists spotted the new holes, along with dozens of other smaller ones, in the same area as three other enormous craters that were spotted on the Yamal Peninsula last year.
The craters are thought to be caused by eruptions of methane gas from the permafrost as rising rising temperatures causes the frozen soil to melt.

• SHARE PICTURE

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Unexplained: The first of the new craters discovered, named B1 (pictured above), shows signs of an huge eruption of gas





It has sparked fears that the craters could become more common as climate change continues to warm and led to warnings that the area is facing a looming natural disaster.



One of new craters, surrounded by at least 20 smaller holes, is just six miles from a major gas production plant.
Experts have predicted there could be up to 30 more are waiting to be discovered.
Scientsts, however, are still largely baffled by the exact processes causing the craters.
Professor Vasily Bogoyavlensky, deputy director of the Moscow-based Oil and Gas Research Institute, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has called for 'urgent' investigation of the new phenomenon amid safety fears.






Until now, the existence of only three Siberian craters had been established when great caverns in the frozen landscape were spotted by passing helicopter pilots.
'We know now of seven craters in the Arctic area,' Professor Bogoyavlensky told The Siberian Times.
'Five are directly on the Yamal peninsula, one in Yamal Autonomous district, and one is on the north of the Krasnoyarsk region, near the Taimyr peninsula.
'We have exact locations for only four of them.
'The other three were spotted by reindeer herders.



'But I am sure that there are more craters on Yamal, we just need to search for them. I would compare this with mushrooms.
'When you find one mushroom, be sure there are few more around. I suppose there could be 20 to 30 craters more.'
Two of the newly-discovered large craters - also known as funnels to scientists - have turned into lakes, revealed Professor Bogoyavlensky.
'It is important not to scare people, but this is a very serious problem.
'We must research this phenomenon urgently to prevent possible disasters.
We cannot rule out new gas emissions in the Arctic and in some cases they can ignite.'

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Explosion? This crater (named B3) was spotted near to Antipayuta in the Yamal Peninsula after locals saw a flash of light nearby

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This map shows the location of the new craters (labelled B1-4) along with the previously discovered holes marked with black dots

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The top satellite image shows an accumulation of ice beneath the surface, known as a pingo, while a more recent image shows a lake has formed in a crater scientists have called B2, surrounded by smaller holes






Professor Bogoyavlensky said that the parapet of the craters suggested an eruption of gas from a shallow underground reservoir.
The first hole was spotted in 2013 by helicopter pilots 20 miles from a gas extraction plant at Bovanenkovo, on the Yamal Peninsula.
An examination of the area using satellite images, comparing landscapes in the past with the present day, has alerted Russian experts to the prospect that the phenomenon is more widespread than first thought.

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Abyss: This crater, called B1, was first spotted 18 miles (30 km) from the Bovanenkovo by passing helicopter pilots

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Simmering: Methane gas can be seen bubbling up out of this lake in the Yamal region and is thought to be an old crater





Experts are particularly interested in a crater they have named B2, which just six miles to the south of the Gazprom gas field at Bovanenkovo.
Old satellite imagery shows no sign of craters at the site but more recent images show there is now a lake there measuring about 5,000 square metres.
The lake is thought to have formed in a hole that is 100 metres by 50 metres in diametre and is surrounded by 20 smaller holes filled with water that are around one to two metres wide.

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Last year scientists took a closer look at one of the older craters by climbing 54 feet down its frozen sides

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When this crater was discovered in 2014, theories ranged from a man-made hoax, to aliens or a meteorite

'These questions are important for the safe operation of the northern cities and infrastructure of oil and gas complexes.'
There is already scientific concern that Lake Baikal, the largest and oldest freshwater lake in the world, but well outside the Arctic Circle, could be at risk of similar gas explosions.
Scientists have previously said there is growing evidence that rising temperatures in the region could be the main catalyst triggering the blasts.
It is thought permafrost at the sites could have one million times more methane hydrates locked inside than ordinary gas.
One expert estimated that the total explosive power of the craters has been the equivalent of about 11 tonnes of TNT.

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Scientists are attempting to visit all of the craters, like above, to better understand how they were formed

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In the winter the sides of the craters freeze, like above, making it easier for scientists to take samples







There are also two tectonic fault lines across the Yamal Peninsula, with another possibility being that the blow-outs are caused by a deadly combination of heat leaving these rifts, a higher than normal air temperature, and the 'fire ice' melting.
Professor Bogoyavlensky revealed one picture of a Yamal lake showing signs of what he calls 'degassing'.
'This haze that you see on the surface shows gas seeps from the bottom of the lake to the surface,' he said. 'We call this process 'degassing'.'
He is not sure if this lake, too, was previously a crater 'or if the lake formed from another process.
'More important is that the gases from within are actively seeping through this lake.'



Residents living near to another of the craters, close to Antipayuta on the Yamal Peninsula, reported seeing a flash of light.
This has led some to conclude that it was the result of gas trapped in the permafrost exploding.
Professor Bogoyavlensky said: 'We need to answer now the basic questions: what areas, and under what conditions, are the most dangerous?

 

[scottcarter]

If global warming gets any worse, we might freeze to death.

..:missingte

 

[Acebb]

Resolving the discrepancies between the methodology adopted by IPCC in its Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports that are highlighted in the present paper is vital. Once those discrepancies are taken into account, the impact of anthropogenic global warming over the next century, and even as far as equilibrium many millennia hence, may be no more than one-third to one-half of IPCC's current projections.

 

[Acebb]

[h=1]Head of UN climate panel steps down amid harassment case[/h]
Pachauri is being investigated in India after a 29-year-old woman accused him of sexually harassing her while they worked together at the New Delhi lobbying and research organization he heads, The Energy Resources Institute.
A police report said the woman gave police dozens of text messages and emails that she alleged had been sent by Pachauri. A Delhi court on Monday ordered Pachauri to cooperate in the investigation.

http://news.yahoo.com/head-un-climate-panel-steps-down-amid-harassment-122135632.html

 

[SheriffJoe]

What a loser.

Loser!@#0

 

[festeringZit]

In related news... Scientists for decades told parents not to feed their kids < 3 peanut butter, as supposedly their immune system wasn't ready for it.
Many airlines won't serve peanuts, for fear of anaphylaxis among passengers.

In the United States alone, the prevalence of peanut allergy has more than quadrupled in the past 13 years, growing from 0.4% in 1997 to 1.4% in 20081 to more than 2% in 2010.2 Peanut allergy has become the leading cause of anaphylaxis and death related to food allergy in the United States.

In 2000, the AAP told parents not to give their kids peanuts for fear of atopic disease.

Guess what just came out in the news? The scientists' advice is causing an epidemic in allergies.

But what long seemed to be an inexplicable and growing threat now seems "extremely simple," said Scott Sicherer, a pediatrician and a researcher at the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at Mount Sinai. "We might have caused this increase by telling people not to eat these things."

 

[festeringZit]

[ Yep, it's turned into a mindless cult ]

[h=1]ABANDONED BY SCIENCE, THE CLIMATE CULT IS A FULL-TIME WITCH HUNT NOW[/h]

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AP Photo/Romas Dabrukas

by JOHN HAYWARD3 Apr 2015304

The climate-change cult is a full-on witch hunt now, and very little else. Bereft of any actual climate change, desperately seeking to avoid tough questions about why none of its sacred computer models has borne even the slightest resemblance to reality, forced to watch its every attempt to grab a headline debunked within hours, and facing new studies that might deal a death blow to its core beliefs regarding “greenhouse gas,” the Church of Global Warming can do nothing except attack its critics as heretics – or “deniers,” to use the term they haven’t yet realized isn’t scaring anyone.
A running Inquisition is the only way our mandatory State religion can keep the faithful in line. Remember, we’re not talking about anything resembling “science” any more – the scientific method says that when real-world data fails to confirm your hypothesis, you change the hypothesis, and the theory we’re talking about was supposed to be civilization-smashing climate apocalypse brought about by human industry, not naturally-occurring variances in global temperature so tiny that odds must be laid on whether they’ve occurred at all. The climate cult is scrambling to explain why there hasn’t been any significant global temperature variation for two decades, and has been reduced to screaming “GOTCHA!” when someone says the amount of climate change has been exactly zero when there’s a chance it might have changed by some tiny fraction of a degree, maybe, depending on how the data is compiled.
Thus we have a piece at Slate attempting to work up a little burn-the-witch political enthusiasm by sobbing that the best-case scenario for the climate cult from the 2016 is preservation of the status quo, “leaving us with a climate-conscious president, if a Democrat wins, still stymied by a climate change-denying Congress.” The worst case, of course, would be some Republican heretic who accurately points out that nothing even vaguely resembling the crisis we’ve been taxed billions of dollars to prevent has occurred, so maybe it’s time to cut into the Church of Global Warming’s lavish funding a bit.
There follows a side-splittngly funny “voters’ guide” rating random Republicans – not just likely White House contestants or even long shots, but senators – on their level of heresy (er, excuse me, “denialism.”) How funny is it? The first category of “We’re Ready to… Talk,” rated “as good as it gets,” includes only two “White House hopefuls:” Chris Christie and Lindsey Graham. You need a heart of stone not to laugh at a broken movement that thinks Lindsey Graham is (a) the best-case scenario and (b) a viable candidate.
Also hilarious: what gets a Republican into that best-case “ready to talk” category was voting for symbolic language in the Keystone pipeline bill which “acknowledged man plays a ‘significant’ role in climate change.” Forget what you learned in school, kids, “science” has nothing to do with testing theories against hard data. It’s all about signing symbolic political attachments to bills that get vetoed because influential Green fanatics don’t give a hoot about all the science that proves the Keystone pipeline is a good idea – they need it killed because their movement would be emotionally incapable of handling defeat after so many years of fighting the project, and some of their leaders make a lot of money by keeping that pipeline down.
Even signing that ritual confession of possible climate sin wasn’t good enough to keep poor Senator Rand Paul from getting bumped into the next category down, “It’s Just Not Worth It,” because he dares to make reasonable concessions to the short-term economic health of American citizens, instead of destroying everything Church elders point a trembling finger at, no question asked. His supposedly damning quote comes from an interview with Bill Maher on HBO: “I’m not against regulation. I think the environment has been cleaned up dramatically through regulations on emissions as well as clean water over the last 40 or 50 years, but I don’t want to shut down all forms of energy such that thousands and thousands of people lose their jobs.”
He’s in favor of sensible environmental regulation that produced detectable gains in clean air and water, but doesn’t want to shut down all forms of energy and wantonly destroy thousands of jobs because of a long-shot theory? BURN THE WITCH! Well, okay, just burn his feet, or something. The carbon emissions of burning witches haven’t been studied carefully enough yet.
The lower categories of this dopey “voters’ guide” are reserved for people with enough common sense to notice that our “international partners” love to give lip service to treaties that cripple the U.S. economy without requiring anything but vague commitments from them (Carly Fiorina), those who note that the data isn’t lining up with the Church of Global Warming’s predictions (Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry), and those who believe – with copious evidence, such as the Climategate emails and the “hockey stick graph” debunking – that the climate cult has been deliberately lying to retain their money and power. That lowest circle of climate hell is reserved for Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, and Mike Huckabee, and of course the infamous heretic James Inhofe in the Senate category. Basically, if you’ve ever made a public statement about the Climategate emails that proved certain researchers were deliberate fudging the data to make it look like global warming was happening, you’re the worst.
Last up is the “unclassifiable” Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who “has attacked Obama’s proposed power plant rules and pledged to oppose any climate bill that includes a tax or fee of any kind,” but has “nonetheless routinely refused to answer specific climate science questions—even when they are posed by a second-grader.” A politician who thinks science should be left to (non-politicized) scientists? What a strange creature! Let’s burn him at the stake anyway, just to be sure. After all, if he’s opposed to punitive taxation, he’s guilty of the heresy that our dying climate cult really cares about.
Given that polls show the American people are weary of climate alarmism, and can’t help noticing that none of its predictions have been coming true, the Slate guide is useful if you turn it upside down and take the toughest skeptics as your best bet. Skepticism is the essence of true science, not a perversion. People are generally willing to entertain the theory that industrial emissions can affect the environment, and possibly alter the climate – remember that most voters today grew up with non-stop indoctrination about “greenhouse gas” in both school and popular culture, and they’re not generally up to speed on the latest news about how the effects of man-made carbon may have been dramatically overestimated.
But people can also see what’s right in front of their faces, and if they’re old enough to remember the early days of global warming hysteria, they know 2015 looks nothing like what the doomsday prophets of the Eighties predicted. They’re also rightly skeptical of international deals that think the planetary climate can be fixed by hammering clean U.S. industry ever harder, while the rest of the world goes right on polluting.
They also know enormous sacrifices have been made in the name of environmentalism, and they can see tangible results from the more sensible policies, so they resist the demands for a few hundred billion more, especially at a time when the American economy is too shaky for such hysteria. The successful Republican candidate will work with that skepticism, and has little to fear from desperate fanatics screaming “DENIER!”

 

[The Guesser]

[h=1]Drought, Climate Change and California's Multibillion-Dollar Problem[/h] Comment Now Follow Comments



Two weeks before California Governor Jerry Brown’s announcement on Wednesday that residents and businesses in the Golden State — which is withering amid one of its worst droughts in modern history — would be subjected to unprecedented restrictions on water usage, he issued a blistering attack on those who continue to question fundamental climate science.

Such thinking, Brown said during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press late last month, “borders on the immoral,” and the Democratic governor offered particular opprobrium for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican. Brown described McConnell’s actions to protect coal interests as risking “the health and well-being of America.”
Whether Brown had the devastating drought in his home state in mind when he lashed out is impossible to know, and the governor stopped short of attributing California’s woes to human-driven climate change — a point of ongoing scientific debate.
But a new report published Thursday by a nonprofit risk-analysis organization suggests that what California is currently experiencing will only get worse — with tens of billions of dollars hanging in the balance — if global greenhouse gas emissions aren’t soon curtailed and adequate adaptation measures aren’t put in place.

As California enters its fourth year of severe drought and the state’s snowpack is at record lows, little water runoff is reaching reservoirs and recharge ponds that capture water and that percolates through the soil to replenish underground aquifers. (Photo: AP)

Short of such measures, the study — produced by the Risky Business Project, which is co-chaired by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and hedge-fund manager and environmental advocate Tom Steyer — suggests that California will likely face “multiple and significant economic risks from climate change,” over the 21st century.
This includes a likely doubling, and perhaps even a tripling, of the average number of days above 95ºF and a 60 percent to 90 percent decline in the average number of days below freezing across the state. That would further reduce crucial high-mountain snowpack, which accounts for as much as 30 percent of California’s freshwater supply in nominally normal years.
This year’s snowpack measured in at a mere 5 percent of normal — a key catalyst in triggering Brown’s emergency water restrictions this week.
The combination of high temperatures and reduced precipitation — particularly snowfall — could trigger large disruptions in agricultural output in the state, the Risky Business analysis suggests. “Without significant adaptation by farmers, several regions will likely see yield losses for heat-sensitive commodity crops like cotton and corn, with potentially high economic costs,” the authors noted. “For example, the Inland South region will likely take an economic hit of up to $38 million per year due to cotton yield declines by the end of the century.”
Other climatic shifts, including rising seas, could cost the state billions of additional dollars in property losses and infrastructure damage. This could include between $8 and $10 billion worth of property that will likely be underwater by mid-century. An additional $6 to $10 billion of property would be threatened by high tides in 2050, the report suggested, and as much as $20 billion of California real estate will be entirely below sea level by 2100.
“Climate change is a dire challenge facing California and our nation,” said Paulson in a statement accompanying the release of the report. “As droughts and wildfires plague California, we are already seeing the devastating toll that climate change is taking on our economy and way of life.”

Of course, just what role anthropogenic climate shifts are playing in California’s three-year stretch of record low precipitation is a matter of fertile scientific discussion. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration suggested in a detailed report earlier this year that the drought could well be a function of the regular give-and-take of Mother Nature.
What’s clear, however, is that climatic shifts tied to rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — a direct result of burning fossil fuels — can only make matters worse. The authors of the NOAA study confirmed as much, stating that “record-setting high temperature that accompanied this recent drought was likely made more extreme due to human-induced global warming.”
A recent study spearheaded by scientists at Stanford University found that human emissions have increased the probability that years with lower-than-normal precipitation in California are increasingly coinciding with higher-than-average temperatures — a relationship linked to periods of drought.
This, the researchers found, suggests that “anthropogenic warming is increasing the probability of the co-occurring warm–dry conditions that have created the current California drought.”

 

[scottcarter]

 

[festeringZit]

[h=1]Bad News for Global Warming Alarmists, According to New Study[/h] Apr. 24, 2015 10:19am Liz Klimas
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New research from Duke University found that current climate models might be overestimated expected warming.
Photo credit: Shutterstock

“Based on our analysis, a middle-of-the-road warming scenario is more likely, at least for now,” Patrick Brown, a doctoral student at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, said in a statement. “But this could change.”
Natural variability in surface temperatures, the study authors found, can affect warming rates from decade to decade, something the researchers called “climate wiggles.”
Climate models, like those used by the International Panel on Climate Control, got the “big picture right,” Brown said, but according to the new analysis at Duke, they underestimated the “climate wiggles” that can occur with natural variability.
“Our model shows these wiggles can be big enough that they could have accounted for a reasonable portion of the accelerated warming we experienced from 1975 to 2000, as well as the reduced rate in warming that occurred from 2002 to 2013,” Brown explained.
“Statistically, it’s pretty unlikely that an 11-year hiatus in warming, like the one we saw at the start of this century, would occur if the underlying human-caused warming was progressing at a rate as fast as the most severe IPCC projections,” Brown said. “Hiatus periods of 11 years or longer are more likely to occur under a middle-of-the-road scenario.”
Brown explained that the IPCC’s middle-of-the-road scenario “match[ed] up well” with their model that suggested there was a 70 percent likelihood a warming hiatus could last from 1993 and 2050.
The Duke researchers with San Jose State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture created this new model based on reconstructed records of surface temperatures for the last 1,000 years.
“Our analysis clearly shows that we shouldn’t expect the observed rates of warming to be constant. They can and do change,” co-author Wenhong Li said.
Last year, the IPCC released its fourth and final volume of its giant climate assessment, which concluded that emissions, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels needed to drop to zero by the end of this century for the world to have a chance of keeping the temperature rise below a level that many climate scientists consider dangerous.
Failure to do so, which could require deployment of technologies that suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, could lock the world on a trajectory with “irreversible” impacts on people and the environment, the report said. Some impacts already being observed included rising sea levels, a warmer and more acidic ocean, melting glaciers and Arctic sea ice and more frequent and intense heat waves.
“Science has spoken. There is no ambiguity in their message. Leaders must act. Time is not on our side,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at the report’s launch in Copenhagen.
On Earth Day this week, President Barack Obama echoed similar thoughts.
“Climate change can no longer be denied,” Obama said. “It can’t be edited out. It can’t be omitted from the conversation. And action can no longer be delayed. That’s why I’ve committed the United States the world in combatting this threat.”
The federal agricultural officials announced voluntary programs and initiatives for farmers, ranchers and foresters to combat global warming.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack unveiled the plans at Michigan State University Thursday, where Obama signed the sweeping farm bill into law last year. The efforts, many of which have their roots in that law, aim to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions, boost carbon capture and storage and come with various enticements, including grants, low-interest loans and technical assistance.
Vilsack said that the agriculture industry accounts for about 9 percent of U.S. emissions, adding that compares favorably with the rest of the globe but can be improved.
“American farmers and ranchers are leaders when it comes to reducing carbon emissions and improving efficiency in their operations,” he said in prepared remarks. “We can build on this success in a way that combats climate change and strengthens the American agriculture economy.”

 

[SheriffJoe]

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Environmental activists hold placards as they protest during the 19th conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP19) in Warsaw November 21, 2013. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel

Congressman: Global Warming Is A ‘Religion’

Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, the top Republican on the House Science Committee, isn’t pulling any punches when criticizing the Obama administration’s plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions. Smith called President Barack Obama’s global warming agenda a “religion” and not based on sound science.

Smith writes that Obama’s warnings of catastrophic global warming just aren’t coming true, and the claims peddled by the administration “sound more like scare tactics than fact-based declarations.”

“Instead of letting political ideology or climate ‘religion’ guide government policy, we should focus on good science,” Smith wrote in the oped pages of the Wall Street Journal. “The facts alone should determine what climate policy options the U.S. considers.”

“That is what the scientific method calls for: inquiry based on measurable evidence,” Smith wrote. “Unfortunately this administration’s climate plans ignore good science and seek only to advance a political agenda.”

http://dailycaller.com/2015/04/24/congressman-global-warming-is-a-religion/

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