It’s the same old tired stuff, Koch, anti-science, big fundraisers while claiming skeptics are well funded, etc., but at least there’s a new humorous label from Gore.
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Former Vice President Al Gore made an appearance at a Democratic fundraising dinner Wednesday night at the home of Tom Steyer and referred to the California billionaire as: Continue reading
By Dr. Richard McNider and Dr. John Christy
In a Feb. 16 speech in Indonesia, Secretary of State John Kerry assailed climate-change skeptics as members of the “Flat Earth Society” for doubting the reality of catastrophic climate change. He said,
“We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists” and “extreme ideologues to compete with scientific facts.”
But who are the Flat Earthers, and who is ignoring the scientific facts?
Guest essay by Craig Lindberg
In a recent post, A Relationship Between Sea Ice Anomalies, SSTs, and the ENSO? (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/13/a-relationship-between-sea-ice-anomalies-ssts-and-the-enso/), I introduced the Sea ice Anomaly Oscillation (“SAO”) – an observation that there is an oscillation in the sign and magnitude of the changes in the relationship between the hemispheric sea ice anomalies over time. This post takes a look at one possible internal mechanism of the SAO: sea level pressure (“SLP”).
This picture looks a lot like some murals we’ve seen in the past to deify “heros of some revolution”. Compare the photos below. Continue reading
From the University of Hawaii ‑ SOEST, something I’ve never heard of before. Note the photo.
This shows flat-top Porites coral on a shallow reef near American Samoa. Coral heads are fully submerged under normal conditions. During El Niño Taimasa, tops of large flat coral on the reef are exposed to air at low tide. Credit: Image courtesy of the National Park of American Samoa.
During very strong El Niño events, sea level drops abruptly in the tropical western Pacific and tides remain below normal for up to a year in the South Pacific, especially around Samoa. Continue reading
Guest essay By Roger A. Pielke Sr.
My son and Kevin Trenberth did an interview for Colorado Public Radio on February 17th. The entire interview is worth listening to, but here I want to comment on a specific statement that Kevin made that is scientifically inaccurate.
The entire interview (well worth listening too) is titled
Is climate change causing extreme weather? Experts disagree – click the listen button at http://www.cpr.org/news/story/climate-change-causing-extreme-weather-experts-disagree for the interview
In the discussion on added heat during droughts that is due to the increase of atmospheric CO2, Kevin Trenberth said
Statistics research could build consensus around climate predictions
Philadelphia, PA—Vast amounts of data related to climate change are being compiled by research groups all over the world. Data from these many and varied sources results in different climate projections; hence, the need arises to combine information across data sets to arrive at a consensus regarding future climate estimates.
In a paper published last December in the SIAM Journal on Uncertainty Quantification, authors Matthew Heaton, Tamara Greasby, and Stephan Sain propose a statistical hierarchical Bayesian model that consolidates climate change information from observation-based data sets and climate models.
Guest Essay by Kip Hansen
I have one advantage over the journalists of the NY Times when it comes to covering the current drought in California:
Memories.
I grew up in Southern California, in Los Angeles. I lived through drought after drought as a child. I grew up through the wildfire seasons that followed dry summer after dry summer. It was hard to distinguish drought from the usual dry summers and simply no rain for months on end. I remember nights when the horizon was smokey and rose-colored, the LA basin ringed to the north with the hills afire after a long hot summer. The real droughts I remember best, those they told us about in school, when teachers checked the boy’s rooms to make sure no one left the sink-faucets running, are 1958-59 and the famous one in 1961, I was on the East coast when the worst hit in 1977, but my family kept me posted.
Last week a number of people were in shock about the news that James Delingpole had his last column at the Telegraph. It was all rather abrupt. As to why, I have the inside scoop.
I asked James directly, and in a nutshell it was three things. Continue reading
There’s a lot of hullabaloo recently about Natural Gas being too leaky to be a good substitute for coal. The claim is based on the fact that methane has a much larger GHG potential than carbon dioxide. But, the study those claims are based on can be interpreted two ways. I tend to think that the leak issue might be overblown, because if you are a producer, leaks mean money literally going into thin air. There’s a high incentive to fix leaks. Abandoned oil and gas wells, cited in the study, would of course be an exception.
The other reason is the IPCC, which produced this graph in the AR5 draft showing that methane just isn’t cooperating with models, and measurements are out of bounds with projections. Methane just doesn’t seem to be much of a problem:
I don’t put much merit in this study especially when we see statements like “statistically significant, though minor, increase in extreme Arctic cyclone frequency” because we really haven’t had good observational capability until the satellite era to check their model output against back to 1850. Recent improved observation would have more effect than anything, but that isn’t even a factor in this case, it’s a model simulation. I wonder if they factored in this paper, which said that Arctic Cyclones are more common than previously thought, even in the satellite era? I reckon if we don’t even have a good handle on Arctic Cyclones in our current satellite observations, what possible hope could anyone have of determining an accurate historical trend back to 1850? Guesswork GIGO IMHO.
Increase in Arctic Cyclones is Linked to Climate Change, New Study Shows
Winter in the Arctic is not only cold and dark, it is also storm season when hurricane-like cyclones traverse the northern waters from Iceland to Alaska. These cyclones are characterized by strong localized drops in sea level pressure, and as Arctic-wide decreases in sea level pressure are one of the expected results of climate change, this could increase extreme Arctic cyclone activity, including powerful storms in the spring and fall.
Britain’s winters are getting colder because of melting Arctic ice, the Government’s forecaster said yesterday. Met Office chief scientist Julia Slingo said climate change was “loading the dice” towards freezing, drier weather. –Ben Jackson, The Sun, 11 April 2013
Bungling weather bosses predicted a drier than usual winter, it has emerged. The Met Office’s staggeringly inaccurate forecast was made at the end of November last year – just a month before the record-breaking deluge began. –Tom Newton Dunn, The Sun, 11 February 2014
People send me stuff. Here’s a press release from a PR firm that I really don’t understand. Why are LGBTQ activists joining in a climate protest against Google? The only reason I can think of is that based on their past performance, “Forecast the Facts” couldn’t find enough warm bodies to hold a protest. I had to laugh at the tagline.
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
There’s a new study in PNAS, entitled “Observational determination of albedo decrease caused by vanishing Arctic sea ice” by Pistone et al. Let me start by registering a huge protest against the title. The sea ice is varying, it isn’t “vanishing”, that’s just alarmist rhetoric that has no place in science.
In any case, here’s their figure 4B, showing the decrease in albedo from the “vanishing” sea ice:
Figure 1. Graph from Pistone2014 showing CERES albedo data (green, solid line) for the ocean areas of the Arctic.
The authors say:
Using the relationship between SSM/I and CERES measurements to extend the albedo record back in time, we find that during 1979–2011 the Arctic darkened sufficiently to cause an increase in solar energy input into the Arctic Ocean region of 6.4 ± 0.9 W/m2, equivalent to an increase of 0.21 ± 0.03 W/m2 averaged over the globe. This implies that the albedo forcing due solely to changes in Arctic sea ice has been 25% as large globally as the direct radiative forcing from increased carbon dioxide concentrations, which is estimated to be 0.8 W/m2 between 1979 and 2011.
The present study shows that the planetary darkening effect of the vanishing sea ice represents a substantial climate forcing that is not offset by cloud albedo feedbacks and other processes. Together, these findings provide direct observational validation of the hypothesis of a positive feedback between sea ice cover, planetary albedo, and global warming.
So … how are they going about making that case?
Readers surely recall the Stadium Wave hypothesis for ‘the pause’. Marcia Wyatt (co-author with Judith Curry) writes:
I have built a web site. It started out as just a site with the stadium-wave publications posted. But within the last month, after realizing that many could not access the papers, or were not inclined to tackle the reading, I decided I would try to make the hypothesis more accessible. Much of this revised web-site content focuses on the ‘wave’, explaining it in layperson-friendly terms, giving in-depth discussion in supplementary sections, and describing how the ‘wave’ idea came about and subsequently evolved. In addition, I have posted all related publications on a separate page. And finally, on yet another page of the site, I will post some of my work. This will include: past research related to the development of the stadium-wave concept; a variety of topics in climate and geology; and reviews of current articles. I will try to keep this page new and alive by adding to it regularly.
How she got started in this is even more interesting, like me, she fell into climate later in life: Continue reading
Steve McIntyre writes:
The Mann libel case has been attracting increasing commentary, including from people outside the climate community. Integral to Mann’s litigation are representations that he was “investigated” by 6-9 investigations, all of which supposedly gave him “exonerations” on wide-ranging counts, including “scientific misconduct”, “fraud”, “academic fraud”, “data falsification”, “statistical manipulation”, “manipulation of data” and even supposed findings that his work was “properly conducted an fairly presented”. Mann also represented that these investigations were widely covered in international and national media and thus known to Steyn and the other defendants.
Image Credits: NOAA Great Lakes Surface Environment Analysis (GLSEA)
By WUWT Regular “Just The Facts”
Per the images above, on February 13th, 2014, Great Lakes Ice Coverage was 88.4%. On February 14th, Ice Coverage dropped to 80.2 %, and has expanded only slightly to 81.4% in the two days since. The reason for this drop in Ice Coverage does not appear to be related to temperature, as it has remained below freezing over the Great Lakes during the period in question:
Continue reading
Truth is often stranger than fiction, and Al Gore’s missives are often stranger than both. Robert Schaefer writes:
I just got back from the 2014 International UFO Congress, the largest UFO conference in the world, where somebody was passing out the following to the attendees (a double-sided paper on orange stock). Looks like Al Gore is using Extraterrestrials to help fight Global Warming!
From PNAS:
Direct satellite observation reveals that the Arctic planetary albedo, a measure of reflectiveness, decreased from 0.52 to 0.48 between 1979 and 2011, a change in albedo that corresponds to a climate forcing 25% as large as that due to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the same time period, according to this study.
But looking at more recent CERES measured data showing what is light is reflected into space by the posited changing albedo, neither Arctic nor Antarctic seem to have changed much at all; less than a watt per decade everywhere. For recent CERES data the trend lines look dead flat at any reasonable scale. See the graph: Continue reading
The 2007 Aggie Student Bonfire
The Cyber-Bonfire is Big and Bright, Deep in the Heart of Texas
By: Chris Horner
In the early 2000’s, the public was introduced to Enron “Shredding Parties,” where documents were destroyed to avoid possible embarrassment or legal consequences. These bashes represented the height of corporate decadence, an open flouting of the law. It came from a rotten corporate culture that saw itself as being above everyone else.
That sounds familiar, aptly describing the global warming industry, to which Enron introduced me during my brief fling in 1997 as Director of Federal Government Relations.
After sitting in on one meeting with BP, Union of Concerned Scientists and the like I raised questions about Enron’s leading role in organizing a classic Bootlegger-and-Baptist coalition to get a global warming treaty (this was pre-Kyoto). This was received quite poorly, and I was gone in a matter of weeks.
But, back to Texans, the global warming industry and destroying documents. WUWT readers may have caught this recent item, in which I suggested there was more nuance involved when public employees delete their work-related emails than a ClimateWire article reported was being advocated among that crowd. Continue reading
to help keep the www.surfacestations.org project going.
