Observations during lunar eclipses show how Earth’s atmosphere has cleared, letting in more sunlight

Strange but true: You can learn a lot about Earth’s climate by watching a lunar eclipse. This week at the 46th Global Monitoring Annual Conference (GMAC) in Boulder, CO, climate scientist Richard Keen of the University of Colorado announced new results from decades of lunar eclipse monitoring.

“Based on the color and brightness of recent eclipses, we can say that Earth[s stratosphere is as clear as it has been in decades. There are very few volcanic aerosols up there,” he explains.

This is important, climatologically, because a clear stratosphere “lets the sunshine in” to warm the Earth below.

To illustrate the effect that volcanic aerosols have on eclipses, Keen prepared a side-by-side comparison (above) of a lunar eclipse observed in 1992 after the Philippine volcano Pinatubo spewed millions of tons of gas and ash into the atmosphere vs. the latest “all-clear” eclipse in January 2018.

“Compared to the murky decades of the El Chichon and Pinatubo, the clear stratosphere since 1995 has allowed the intensity of sunlight reaching the ground to increase by about 0.6 Watts per square meter,” says Keen. “That’s equivalent to a warming of 1 or 2 tenths of a degree C (0.1 C to 0.2 C).”

“In other words,” he adds, “over the past 40 years, the decrease of volcanic aerosols and the increase of greenhouse gases have contributed equally to the total warming (~0.3 C) observed in global satellite temperature records.”

Enlarged

Total lunar eclipses happen somewhere on Earth typically once or twice a year. Keen is looking forward to the next one on July 27, 2018, which will be the longest lunar eclipse of the century. The Moon will pass almost directly through the middle of Earth’s shadow, remaining inside for 1 hour and 43 minutes. That’s just a few minutes shy of the theoretical maximum.

“This will give us plenty of time to measure the color and brightness of Earth’s shadow and, thus, the aerosol content of the stratosphere,” says Keen.

For more information about lunar eclipses and climate change, check out Keen’s poster from the GMAC.

Note as we showed here, the satellite temperatures show clearly the effects of high and low aerosols using NASA’s Aerosol Optical Thickness (Sato).

And this annual temperature plots for high and low aerosols show the patterns globally.

Several eastern US states are planning major investments in offshore wind. Wind turbines are touted as clean, green, and economically sound. But experience from around the world shows that offshore wind systems are both expensive and at high risk for early system degradation.

The governors of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia have signed executive orders or passed laws to procure offshore wind systems valued at billions of dollars. Officials are eager to win leadership in what is perceived to be a new growth industry. The US Department of Energy has funded over $200 million in offshore wind research since 2011.

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker signed a law in 2016 requiring utilities to purchase 1,600 megawatts of electricity from offshore wind systems over the next 10 years. The law requires that wind systems be “cost effective to electric ratepayers.” But history shows that costs are likely to be far above the New England wholesale market price of 5 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Massachusetts paid solar generators a subsidy of 25 cents per kilowatt-hour during the state’s solar build-out in 2013. Rhode Island’s Block Island wind system, the first offshore system in the United States, now receives over 27 cents per kW-hr, with an annual guaranteed rate increase of an additional 3.5 cents per kW-hr. New England residents must enjoy paying renewable generators more than six times the market price for electricity.

In May of last year, Maryland’s Public Service Commission (PSC) approved electricity-rate increases to fund two wind projects east of the Ocean City shoreline. Maryland’s residents will pay an additional $2 billion over 20 years in increased electricity rates to support the projects. The Maryland PSC claims the systems will create jobs and spur economic growth, but analysis shows that rate payers will pay $200,000 for each of the estimated 9,700 jobs created.

Also in 2017, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced approval of the South Fork Wind Farm off the coast of Long Island, stating “This project will not only provide a new reliable source of clean energy, but will also create high-paying jobs, continue our efforts to combat climate change and help preserve our environment for current and future generations of New Yorkers.”

But are offshore wind systems reliable? Ocean-located turbines face one of the harshest environments on Earth. Turbines are battered by wind and waves, struck by lightning, and need to endure salt spray that is very corrosive to man-made structures.

In February, it was reported that Danish wind operator Orsted must repair more than 600 wind turbines due to early blade failure. The blades are to be disassembled and brought to shore for repair after only five years of operation, at a cost on the order of $100 million.

Then in March, it was announced that wind turbines at the 175-turbine London Array, the world’s largest offshore wind system, would also need major repairs after only five years of use. Few offshore systems have made it to the end their specified 25-year lifetimes without a major overhaul.

Wind turbines sited off the eastern US coast must survive brutal weather compared to offshore turbines in Europe. From March 1 to March 22 of this year, four powerful extratropical cyclones, called nor’easters, battered our east coast from Virginia to Maine. These storms produced ocean storm surges, large snowfalls, wind gusts of up to 100 miles per hour, and even 20 tornados.

Specifications call for wind systems to withstand gusts up to 156 miles per hour, but this isn’t good enough for some of our Atlantic hurricanes. Last September, hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico with Category 4-strength winds and destroyed many of the wind turbines on the island.

Strong hurricanes occasionally collide with our eastern coastal states. The Great New England Hurricane of 1938 brought Category 3 winds to New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. The Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944 delivered Category 2 winds along the coast from North Carolina to Maine. Hurricane Carol in 1954 and Hurricane Gloria in 1985 brought Category 3 winds to the shores of the wind system-promoting states.

Finally, the Norfolk and Long Island Hurricane of 1821 passed through most of the proposed wind turbine sites with up to Category 4 wind strength. The expensive wind systems planned by Atlantic States could all be destroyed by a single well-placed hurricane.

Offshore wind turbines are expensive, prone to early degradation, and in the case of the US East Coast, at risk in the path of strong hurricanes. State officials should reconsider their plans for offshore wind systems.

Steve Goreham is a speaker on the environment, business, and public policy and author of the book Outside the Green Box: Rethinking Sustainable Development.

A new study suggests those skeptical about climate change and climate alarmism behave in more climate-friendly ways than do those who are very concerned about the issue.

University of Michigan psychology graduate student Michael Hall’s study looked at 600 Americans who “regularly reported their climate change beliefs, pro-environmental behavior, and other climate-change related measures.”

The results, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, divided subjects into three categories: the “Skeptical,” the “Cautiously Worried,” and the “Highly Concerned.” As you might expect, the “Skeptical” were most opposed to government climate policies; however, they were also “most likely to report engaging in individual-level pro-environmental behaviors” (emphasis added).

On the other hand, the “Highly Concerned,” while very supportive of government action on climate, were the least likely to behave in eco-friendly ways.

Does this surprise anyone?

Pacific Standard has more:

On seven occasions- roughly once every eight weeks -participants revealed their climate change beliefs, and their level of support for policies such as gasoline taxes and fuel economy standards.

They also noted how frequently they engaged in four environmentally friendly behaviors: recycling, using public transportation, buying “green” products, and using reusable shopping bags.

While policy preferences of group members tracked with their beliefs, their behaviors largely did not: Skeptics reported using public transportation, buying eco-friendly products, and using reusable bags more often than those in the other two categories.

This pattern was found consistently through the year, leading the researchers to conclude that “belief in climate change does not appear to be a necessary or sufficient condition for pro-environmental behavior.”

Hall and his colleagues can only speculate about the reasons for their results. But regarding the concerned but inactive, the psychological phenomenon known as moral licensing is a likely culprit.

That “moral licensing” certainly sounds like an inconvenient truth regarding the best known climate alarmist, former veep Al Gore. His mansion reportedly uses 21.3 times more kilowatt hours than the average US household - “including 66,159 kWh just to heat his swimming pool [for a year] - but his camp counters with the following:

“[Gore] leads a carbon neutral life by purchasing green energy, reducing carbon impacts and offsetting any emissions that cannot be avoided, all within the constraints of an economy that still relies too heavily on dirty fossil fuels,” said Betsy McManus, Gore’s director of communications.

She just didn’t respond, however, when asked what those offsets are.

Click on image to see more.

The Weather Channel turned 36 years old May 2nd.

Most everyone has watched The Weather Channel at some time over the years. Have you ever wondered how the channel came about and what it took to become one of the most successful and well-recognized names in cable. The Founders and doers of the early days in ‘Weather Channel Pioneers’, give you a glimpse of these wild early days when it all came together. The updated website describes the adventure with videos and excerpts. It features a spoof video by a Pioneer honoring the Pioneers here and gone. Authors of the book include the late, great John Coleman, a friend, a true visionary and a fellow crusader for good climate science and many of the original staff.

John Coleman first told me about his dream of a 24x 7 cable weather network when I was working as a vacation fill-in weather producer for his weather shows for Good Morning America in the hot summer of 1980.  Like a moth to a flame I was drawn to follow him. My family and I left my home in beautiful Vermont to work with John full-time on Good Morning America (GMA) out of the WLS studio in Chicago.

John was a veritable meteorological broadcaster rock star. He worked magic with chromakey green screen technology, pulling weather maps out of the air on WLS and GMA in a world mostly still using magnetic maps. He was winning awards for his on-air weather presentations.

I worked with him, 2 artists and two producers all night starting before midnight to produce 4 shows. As exciting as that was, John was frustrated by the fact the time allotted for each show was never guaranteed. If the news or sports segments ran over, weather took the hit on time.

He was convinced that what was needed was a 24x7 weather network like CNN was doing for news instead of the 15 to 18 minutes of weather/day on the networks and most local channels. We would always be there when they needed weather information - much like what the internet brings today

Over the year, he polished up the business plan and sometimes after his last morning show would fly off to a distant city to try and sell the idea, was rejected or even laughed at, flew home, changed his clothes and came to work. The other days after the last show, we’d go to the office and talk about his weather cable idea. What would we produce and present, how many forecasters and broadcasters and artists would we need, what companies would we team with for data and technology. What doesn’t exist we will need to create to do it right.

After a year of rejections though I was feeling a little like Sancho Panza following Don Quixote on his impossible dream quest.

But suddenly there was interest - Dow Jones then WGN - each time the interest and our excitement spiked then faded but then Landmark Communications entered the picture - with newspapers, radio and TV stations, cable systems, they had wanted to expand into cable programming to do news when the CEO developed cancer. While they waited, Ted Turner launched CNN. After the CEO recovered, they set up new venture groups to explore alternatives. One of the members was in a poker game with John Coleman and when John told him about his weather programming idea. He brought him to Landmark, they quickly worked out a deal and we were off and running.

That’s when it got crazy - we were off to Atlanta in October1981. John and I were very busy defining the product with the artists and producers. I hired two of my students to help me screen candidates for on and off camera positions.  Resumes and tapes poured in during December and January. We hired many over the phone. The Pioneers reported for orientation March 1, we started practicing in April and launched May 2, 1982.

At start-up, amazingly we had 58 full-time broadcasters and forecasters with a total of 66 degrees and 450 years of meteorological experience.

We were state of the art for the time, but the technology was changing at a breakneck pace.

It was just the start of the computer graphics revolution in broadcasting and we lead the way with more than half a dozen such graphics systems including the first in the lines of high resolution paint boxes. Our artists, who originally did some graphics or art on paper that was then captured by cameras, quickly transitioned to using pen and palette. All graphics were funneled through a unique frame storage system. 

The On Camera Meteorologists would load their shows and control the graphics display from the studio desk.  There were no directors.

In parallel our technical staff worked furiously to be able to deliver the local weather, local forecasts and all severe weather NWS messages.  We developed computer units that went into every cable system that knew its location and grabbed and displayed its information in formatted pages in the Local Weather and across the bottom of the screen. For it to work, we had to get the NWS to change how they formatted their local forecasts and warnings with address coding that allowed our systems to know what was important to them and where they get displayed. 

When the weather was serious and it usually was somewhere in the nation, we were very serious on-air and worked very hard behind the scenes. When it was quiet, we let our hair down a little (it was the 1980s) and had some fun while still communicating information. The network in the early days was described as the first TV reality show, one of its appeals.

It really was an amazing journey that can’t be told in 1000 words, which is why we wrote a book.

In the book, we attempted to capture more of that story, that journey from one man’s vision to a shared vision of a large team of wonderful, courageous and talented individuals that came to Atlanta from all corners of the country in many different disciplines to undertake something special and unprecedented, unique people we call the Weather Channel Pioneers.

During this incredibly dynamic period, everyone went straight out, never entertaining the thought that what we wanted to do was impossible. We pulled off everyday miracles, overcame all obstacles and changed the paradigms for technology, weather data and warning delivery, graphics and on-air weather presentations. It was a time and a team like no other.

In the book, the Pioneers tell that story. It is about the early days not about what has transpired over the years.

http://Weatherchannepioneers.com is the web page that tells you more and links to the Amazon site where you can purchase the book. There are soft copy and e-book versions with over 120 pictures.  We dedicated it to john Coleman. We hope if there is any profit, it will help support the reunion of the original Pioneers in 2019 in Atlanta. It may be the last time we will be together to revisit those magical days. We have already lost over a dozen of the originals’. We hope to do a video with the originals revisiting the days leading up to and following the successful launch in a network that set new paradigms for meteorology, presentation, technology for local data, forecast and warning delivery and so much more. It will bring back memories. Tom Skilling, who was a sounding board and helped John market the idea wrote this about the significance of TWC and on “his friend John Coleman’s passing:

“It was in a world which had never seen a weather channel---had no idea what such an entity would even look like---that John Coleman embarked on a mission which would occupy years of his life and end up revolutionizing the way meteorological information was communicated.”

Then Tom after reading the book responded:

Hi Joe,

That you to included me in this effort is an honor beyond words. THANK YOU, Joe ”

Jim Cantore, the face of todays’s TWC echoed Tom:

“Even though I didn’t start my TWC journey until 1986, I had no idea as a young man of 22 years what a wonderful opportunity I had been given to learn about life and meteorology from many of these TWC Pioneers.  There are too many to name, but dozens of these men and women had a profound and lasting influence on the broadcaster I am today.  What an incredible trip down memory lane revisiting the heart and soul of The Weather Channel as it was being born and as it became one of the most trusted brands in the world. These TWC pioneers didn’t just start a cable TV weather channel, they saved lives and created a mission of service which still resonates with millions of people to this day.”
- Jim Cantore

Memories....from TWC Art Director Eddie Terrill

Opinion: Paris is a climate fairy tale. It has always been more about money and politics than the environment

Two weeks of climate talks in Bonn ended last week without agreement on a draft negotiating text, the Washington Post reports. Developing countries demanded to know when the US$100-billion package promised to them as part of the Paris climate agreement would be forthcoming. Hopefully, the answer will be “never” and that will lead to the end of the deal.

Paris is a climate fairy tale. It has always been more about money and politics than the environment. Last year, U.S. President Donald Trump wisely announced that America would withdraw. For developed nations who still believe Paris is a viable plan, the prospect of a massive transfer of wealth under the guise of carbon reductions must seem less attractive without the U.S. to help foot the bill. Still, other world leaders seem irrationally committed to pursuing the real objectives of Paris: wealth redistribution, virtue signalling and globalist governance.

At the core of Paris, signed in 2015, and its 1992 umbrella document, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, is the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.” The term means that developed countries are expected to go first, do more, and pay more. “To each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities,” as Marx wrote in a similar vein.

The objective is to rebalance resources. How much more must developed countries do and how many more dollars should they transfer? In the Paris negotiations, the parties confirmed a breathtaking minimum transfer of US$100 billion per year starting in 2020, with the expectation that higher amounts would be forthcoming as time progressed. In exchange, developing countries with high and accelerating carbon emissions, such as China and India, talked of reducing emissions, eventually, probably.

At the time the UNFCCC was adopted in 1992, the greater share of global emissions did indeed come from wealthier countries. However, that has not been the case since approximately 2007 and annual emissions from developing countries now dwarf those from the developed world. China became the world’s largest carbon emitter in 2006 and by some estimates emits twice what the U.S. does annually. Yet under Paris, China has said its annual emissions will keep growing until 2030.

As a matter of arithmetic, the lifestyles of people in Western countries do not pose nearly as acute a risk to greenhouse gas concentrations as even a small rise in per capita emissions from countries with “emerging” economies and enormous populations. The Paris consensus blames the West for the world’s problems while privileging countries that pose the most serious threats. If the danger is carbon emissions, it is developing countries that are now the biggest problem.

Paris is more a movement than a legal framework. It imagines the world as a global community working in solidarity on a common problem, making sacrifices in the common good, reducing inequality and transcending the negative effects of market forces. In this fable, climate change is a catalyst for revolution. It is the monster created by capitalism that will turn on its creator and bring the market system to the end of its natural life. A new social order will emerge in which market value no longer determines economic decisions. Governments will exercise influence over economic behavior by imposing “market-based mechanisms” such as carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems. Enlightened leaders will direct energy use based upon social justice values and community needs. An international culture will unite peoples in a cause that transcends their national interests, giving way to the next stage of human society. Between the lines of the formal text, the Paris agreement reads like a socialist nightmare.

The regime attempts to establish an escalating global norm that requires continual updating, planning and negotiation. To adhere, governments are to supervise, regulate and tax the energy use and behavior of their citizens (for example, the Trudeau government’s insistence that all provinces impose a carbon tax or the equivalent, to escalate over time.) Yet for all of the domestic action it legitimizes, Paris does not actually require it. Like the US$100-billion pledge, reduction targets are outside the formal Paris agreement. They are voluntary; neither binding nor enforceable. Other countries have condemned Trump’s withdrawal and reaffirmed their commitment to Paris but many of them, including Canada, are not on track to meet even their initial promises. Global emissions are rising again.

If human action is not causing the climate to change, Paris is irrelevant. If it is, then Paris is an obstacle to actual solutions. If there is a crisis, it will be solved when someone develops a low-carbon energy source as useful and cheap as fossil fuels. A transition will then occur without government interventions and international declarations. Until then, Paris will fix nothing. It serves interests that have little to do with atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. Will America’s repudiation result in its eventual demise? One can hope.

Bruce Pardy is Professor of Law at Queen’s University. This column is based upon an article forthcoming in the Journal of Environmental Law and Practice.

Enlarged

Gregory Wrightstone

The demonization of the “miracle molecule,” carbon dioxide, continued last week with the announcement that its concentration had reached 410 parts per million (ppm). Nearly all reporting of this noted that this was the highest level in 800,000 years and predicted a host of associated climate calamities. While the current concentration of this vital gas is about 40% higher than at the start of the Industrial Revolution, unreported is that Earth has been suffering from steadily decreasing and perilously low concentrations of CO2. Until the consumption of fossil fuels began liberating this important gas from ancient rocks , the Earth had been flirting with dangerously low levels not seen for more than 600 million years.

During nearly all of Earth’s history, carbon dioxide concentration was at many multiples of our current level, averaging 2,600 ppm, or 6.5 times our current measurement. Forerunners of most of the plants we rely on for sustenance first appeared around 150 million years ago when CO2 levels were more than 2,000 ppm. Since that time CO2 has fallen steadily and precipitously.

In fact, at the end of the last ice age, carbon dioxide reached the dangerously low level of 182 ppm, thought to be the lowest since the Pre-Cambrian time period more than 600 million years ago. Why is it dangerous? Because 150 ppm is the lowest level at which plant life can survive. We came within a whisker of breaching that “line of death.” Until we began adding CO2 to the atmosphere, there was no guarantee that this horrific threshold would not be crossed in the future.

Rather than spreading fear of increasing carbon dioxide, we should be thankful that both the Earth and humanity are thriving, in part due to more CO2.

It has been long known that increasing CO2 benefits plant growth through the CO2 fertilization effect. Recognizing the benefits of this, greenhouses often increase CO2 to 1,500 ppm. Research from laboratory studies by the Center for the Study of CO2 and Global Change have documented that a 300 ppm rise in CO2 levels would increase plant biomass by 25 to 50%. This significant boost in plant productivity, along with a boost from lengthening growing seasons, means that we are better able to feed a hungry planet.

Enlarged

An additional significant benefit from this increasing CO2 fertilization is that the plants have smaller stomata (pores) and have lessened water needs. Less water used means that more stays in the ground and is leading to increasing soil moisture across much of the planet and a “greening” of the Earth. According to NASA, up to 50% of the Earth is “greening,” in part due to higher CO2 levels. This increased soil moisture is a primary cause for the long-term decrease in forest fires and droughts worldwide.

The benefits of increasing CO2 don’t stop with accelerating plant growth and increasing soil moisture. The biological impacts section of the 2014 white paper Climate change reconsidered II provided quite a lengthy list of additional benefits in addition to those mentioned above. The main points are listed below:

More CO2 makes plants grow faster and with less stress.

Forests are growing faster in response to increasing CO2.

More CO2 stimulates growth of beneficial bacteria in both soil and water.

CO2 fertilization, leading to more plant growth, means less erosion of topsoil.

More CO2 means bigger crop yields, and more and bigger flowers.

More CO2 fosters glomalin, a beneficial protein created by root fungi.

More CO2 helps plants to create natural repellants to fight insect predators.

Although I do not pretend to speak for the planet’s flora, I am quite certain that, if plants had a say in the matter, they would not lobby for reductions in CO2 levels. For plants, CO2 is food. They need more of it, not less.

]

By Robert Bryce, Manhattan institute

Another day, another spate of headlines about the growing mess at Tesla.

Last week, the electric carmaker announced that its head of engineering, Doug Field, was taking a leave of absence to “spend time with his family.”

That news came just a few days after the company announced dreadful first-quarter financial results. As usual, the company posted a huge loss (nearly $785 million) and the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, promised that Tesla will soon - really soon, and he means it this time - begin churning out Model 3 cars by the thousands.

But the media’s infatuation with Tesla is overshadowing a story that’s far more important than the number of electric cars, solar panels and batteries that Tesla may (or may not) be producing.

Two days before Tesla announced its first-quarter results, the Energy Information Administration reported that US production of both oil and natural gas are at record levels.

In February, oil output hit 10.2 million barrels per day and gas production hit 87.6 billion cubic feet per day. The fact that US oil and gas companies are producing such prodigious quantities of energy - and by doing so, are saving consumers billions of dollars per year - should be headline news.

As my colleague at the Manhattan Institute, Mark P. Mills, has noted, the shale revolution has turned the US into an energy superpower. The combination of horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing and other technologies, he says, has resulted in “the fastest and biggest addition to world energy supply that has ever occurred in history.”

How big is that addition? Over the past decade, merely the increase - I repeat, just the increase - in US oil and gas production is equal to seven times the total energy production of every wind turbine and solar project in the United States.

Climate-change activists like to claim that renewable energy can power the entire economy and that we should “do the math.” I couldn’t agree more - on the math part. In 2008, US oil production was about 5.2 million barrels per day. Today, it’s about 10.2 million barrels per day. In 2008, domestic gas production averaged about 55.1 billion cubic feet per day. Today, it’s about 87.6 billion cubic feet per day.

That’s an increase of about 32.5 billion cubic feet per day, which is equivalent to about 5.5 million barrels of oil per day. Thus, over the past decade, US oil and gas output has jumped by about 10.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per day.

Let’s compare that to domestic solar and wind production which, since 2008, has increased by 4,800 percent and 450 percent, respectively. While those percentage increases are impressive, the total energy produced from those sources remains small when compared to oil and gas.

In 2017, according to the Energy Information Administration, US solar production totaled about 77 terawatt-hours and wind production totaled about 254 terawatt-hours, for a combined total of 331 terawatt-hours. That’s the equivalent of about 1.5 million barrels of oil per day.

Simple division (10.5 divided by 1.5) shows that since 2008, the increase in energy production from oil and gas is equal to seven times the energy output of all domestic solar and wind.

This surge in hydrocarbon production has resulted in huge benefits to the US economy. Over the past half-decade, foreign and domestic companies have invested about $160 billion in new chemical-manufacturing facilities in the United States. A 2016 study by IHS found that lower natural-gas prices have created about 1.4 million jobs and increased disposable income by about $156 billion.

Those real-world gains are being lost amid the neverending hype over Tesla and Musk, who during the May 2 briefing referred to a “solar-battery-powered mega charger” and claimed that Tesla drivers can “have sort of like a mind meld with the car.”

The punchline here is obvious: chatter about mega chargers and mind melds captivates the masses. But the most consequential energy story in America isn’t happening at Tesla, or other “green” energy companies. It’s happening in the oil and gas business.

Robert Bryce is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

IBD Editorial

Inconvenient Science: NASA data show that global temperatures dropped sharply over the past two years. Not that you’d know it, since that wasn’t deemed news. Does that make NASA a global warming denier?

Writing in Real Clear Markets, Aaron Brown looked at the official NASA global temperature data and noticed something surprising. From February 2016 to February 2018, “global average temperatures dropped by 0.56 degrees Celsius.” That, he notes, is the biggest two-year drop in the past century.

“The 2016-2018 Big Chill,” he writes, “was composed of two Little Chills, the biggest five month drop ever (February to June 2016) and the fourth biggest (February to June 2017). A similar event from February to June 2018 would bring global average temperatures below the 1980s average.”

Isn’t this just the sort of man-bites-dog story that the mainstream media always says is newsworthy?

In this case, it didn’t warrant any news coverage.

In fact, in the three weeks since Real Clear Markets ran Brown’s story, no other news outlet picked up on it. They did, however, find time to report on such things as tourism’s impact on climate change, how global warming will generate more hurricanes this year, and threaten fish habitats, and make islands uninhabitable. They wrote about a UN official saying that “our window of time for addressing climate change is closing very quickly.”

Reporters even found time to cover a group that says they want to carve President Trump’s face into a glacier to prove climate change “is happening.”

In other words, the mainstream news covered stories that repeated what climate change advocates have been saying ad nauseam for decades.

That’s not to say that a two-year stretch of cooling means that global warming is a hoax. Two years out of hundreds or thousands doesn’t necessarily mean anything. And there could be a reasonable explanation. But the drop in temperatures at least merits a “Hey, what’s going on here?” story.

What’s more, journalists are perfectly willing to jump on any individual weather anomaly - or even a picture of a starving polar bear - as proof of global warming. (We haven’t seen any stories pinning Hawaii’s recent volcanic activity on global warming yet, but won’t be surprised if someone tries to make the connection.)

We’ve noted this refusal to cover inconvenient scientific findings many times in this space over the years.

Hiding The Evidence

There was the study published in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate showing that climate models exaggerate global warming from CO2 emissions by as much as 45%. It was ignored.

Then there was the study in the journal Nature Geoscience that found that climate models were faulty, and that, as one of the authors put it, “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models.”

Nor did the press see fit to report on findings from the University of Alabama-Huntsville showing that the Earth’s atmosphere appears to be less sensitive to changing CO2 levels than previously assumed.

How about the fact that the U.S. has cut CO2 emissions over the past 13 years faster than any other industrialized nation? Or that polar bear populations are increasing? Or that we haven’t seen any increase in violent weather in decades?

Crickets.

Reporters no doubt worry that covering such findings will only embolden “deniers” and undermine support for immediate, drastic action.

But if fears of catastrophic climate change are warranted - which we seriously doubt - ignoring things like the rapid cooling in the past two years carries an even bigger risk.

Suppose, Brown writes, the two-year cooling trend continues. “At some point the news will leak out that all global warming since 1980 has been wiped out in two and a half years, and that record-setting events went unreported.”

He goes on: “Some people could go from uncritical acceptance of steadily rising temperatures to uncritical refusal to accept any warming at all.”

Brown is right. News outlets should decide what gets covered based on its news value, not on whether it pushes an agenda. Otherwise, they’re doing the public a disservice and putting their own already shaky credibility at greater risk.

NOTE:

One by one the long term temperature data sets have been ‘adjusted’ to better match greenhouse model projections. That includes some of the balloon and one of the satellite data sets (RSS) which had shown a distinct pause approaching 20 years. The recent paper by Christy etal (2018 showed why their analysis (UAH) is most trustworthy and that the changes made to RSS TLT data was based on the inclusion of shown to be dodgy data.

Regarding any particular, relevant temperature data, the magnitude and statistical significance of its Linear Trend’s Slope is irrelevant to the key question - which is ‘did increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration levels have a statistically significant positive impact on this temperature data’? For UAH TLT 6.0 data, this paper provides mathematically rigorous proof that it did not.

Besides the fraud involving official Global Average Surface Temperature data that the authors have previously demonstrated, there are a number of critical mathematical errors to which many well-intentioned climate scientists have continued to seem oblivious. These errors have led many climate scientists to claim that increasing CO2 concentrations have had a statistically significant impact on (properly measured) temperature. If this were truly the case, in the U.S., the Clean Air Act would force at least some level of regulation of CO2 emissions.

Regulations come with a huge penalty to our economy and therefore, it is absolutely critical that climate science deliver an unbiased test of this hypothesis. And, a great deal of work has been published related to this issue. But very little work directly addresses this critical hypothesis test using appropriate mathematical methods - and where all the work can be replicated by other experts in the relevant fields. This paper properly preforms such a hypothesis test.

If EPA elects to grant a Reconsideration of the 2009 Endangerment Finding as as a result of its ANPRM CPP Replacement Comment request, only research meeting these criteria will be viewed as relevant based on EPA’s announced new rules. This paper would pass such new rule tests and provide climate scientists with assistance regarding mathematical and process errors to avoid. As usual, all work was done on a Pro Bono basis.

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PRESS RELEASE

Comment on “Examination of space-based bulk atmospheric temperatures used in climate research” by Christy et al (2018)
Research Report
Third Edition, May, 2018

A just released peer reviewed Climate Science Research Report has once again proven that it is all but certain that EPA’s basic claim that CO2 is a pollutant is totally false. All research was done pro bono.

This research was carried out using as its temperature data the UAH TLT 6.0 atmospheric temperature data. UAH data has been clearly shown to be the very best data available (1) . This research involved the use of mathematical methods of econometrics specifically designed for structural analysis of time series data. These methods have been demonstrated to be highly credible when applied to data such as the UAH temperature data (2) .

The Christy et al (2018) paper discussed in this Research Report does provide lower temperature linear trend positive slope estimates than do many other researchers. However, quite properly, the Christy et al (2018) paper does not claim that this lower linear trend positive slope finding implies anything whatsoever regarding a proof that CO2 has had a statistical significant impact on the Earth’s temperature over the last 50 years or so (1).

This Research Report argues that this statistical significance issue must be addressed using appropriate mathematical methods. Such methods are once again used in this new research and prove that increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations did not have a statistically significant impact on the UAH TLT 6.0 temperature data set over the period 1979 to 2016.

In fact, this Research Report demonstrates that there was a “Pause” in UAH TLT temperature trend increases over the 1995 to 2016 period. This is a time period over which atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased by over 12.0%. 

Furthermore, based on a well-known solar activity forecast (Abdussamatov 2015 (3)) and specific assumptions on the other natural explanatory variables (i.e., volcanic and oceanic/ENSO activity), this new Research Report also provides a long-term forecast that UAH TLT temperatures are very likely to exhibit a declining trend over the period through 2026 at the least.

But, the Research Report points out that, even if temperature data had happened to have had a statistically significant downward sloping trend, it would not have guaranteed that CO2 had not had a statistically significant positive impact on temperature. It simply would have required the use of the proper mathematical tools to obtain the statistical results to have proved it. This is why all of the focus on the magnitude of the slope of linear temperature trends by most climate scientists makes no sense to analysts experienced in econometrics-based structural analysis.

Finally, making another key technical point, the Research Report argues against the use of reanalysis data in structural analysis since its use makes mathematically rigorous hypothesis testing virtually impossible.

The merits of the econometrics-based statistical methodology used in this Research Report and its predecessors versus that used in developing the Climate Models relied upon in EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding becomes more obvious every day, the explanation for which has been further discussed in highly relevant Congressional Testimony quoted at length in this Comment.
(4)

1 See: Link
2 See: Link
3 See: Link page S282
4 See: U.S. House Committee on Science, Space & Technology March 29, 2017, Testimony of John R. Christy, pages 10-11, Professor of Atmospheric Science, Alabama State Climatologist University of Alabama in Huntsville

Let the fight begin

In March the Heartland Institute fired a big broadside right into the teaching of climate change alarmism in America’s schools. They began sending Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming directly to many of the Nation’s science teachers. Of course the alarmists went nuts, especially Sen. Sheldon “jail the skeptics” Whitehouse, who denounced Heartland’s bold move in a series of letters to various education groups.

My group is now taking the next skeptical step. We are crowd funding the Climate Change Debate Education (CCDE) project. While Heartland’s effort explains skepticism to teachers, our goal is to explain it to the students. You can make donations here.

Our project will establish a website portal that collects and distributes materials to teach about the climate debate. Once established and given sufficient funding we will also produce new teaching materials. The long term goal is to build a collection that systematically addresses all of the important climate science issues at the appropriate grade levels. Our target audience is not just teachers, but parents, friends of students and the students themselves.

There are presently a lot of alarmist websites offering one-sided classroom materials teaching the false dogma of dangerous human induced climate change. That this alarmism is highly debatable is nowhere to be seen on these websites. So we want to counter these alarmist websites with one that teaches about the real debate, between alarmism and realistic skepticism.

Both the Federal government and many advocacy groups maintain websites that distribute alarmist climate teaching materials. These materials teach that dangerous human induced climate change is settled science, which is far from true.

For example, the CLEAN website is funded jointly by NOAA, NSF and DOE. CLEAN stands for Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network. In fact “climate literacy” is code for the false belief that humans are causing dangerous climate change. CLEAN says it has over 600 free, ready to use resources suitable for use in secondary and higher education classrooms. They also boast that they are the core of the “Teaching Climate” part of the federal Climate.gov website. This is Government bias targeting children.

All of CLEAN’s teaching materials are biased and based on this false premise. The reality is that dangerous human influence on climate is completely unproven and the subject of intense scientific debate. That only the scary side is being presented as settled science is a severe lack of balance.

Creating balance in climate science education

The first step toward creating balance in climate education is to provide teaching materials that properly present the scientific debate as it actually is. We propose a phased approach to this effort. First an implementation phase then, if funding is available, a production phase. Here the goal is to recruit and guide volunteers who will produce highly targeted teaching materials. In particular, there is a need for simple, yet well designed, lesson plans that teach a specific scientific issue to a specific grade level.

These lesson plans need to be tailored to the state standards, which typically dictate what topics are taught in which grades. There are numerous specific scientific issues that need to be taught at different grade levels. Each potential lesson needs to be simple and compact, designed to fit into the mandated curriculum. Moreover, each lesson must stand alone, because teaching time is limited.

Getting around the gatekeepers

We will also develop short, handout types of materials as a way to get around what we call the gatekeepers. Gatekeepers are doctrinaire people who make it hard to get balance into the classroom. It may be the principal, the teacher’s supervisor or even the teacher.

Our handouts will be something that a parent or student can bring to class. It is normal for students to bring supplementary materials to class, especially when the topic is controversial. In the case of climate change, surveys have also shown that parents often become involved. As with the lesson plans, these handouts will be highly focused, nonpolitical, and tailored to a specific grade level. Since they will be online they can easily be emailed as well. Thus the gatekeepers cannot prevent their distribution.

Target audiences

There are three distinct target audiences - teachers, parents and students. Teachers need lesson plans, which are relatively specialized documents. Students need materials written at their grade level. Parents need non-technical information that they can explain to their children or use to confront a gatekeeper. Of course teachers and non-parents can use this information as well. The website will be organized in such a way that each group can find what they need.

It is important to keep in mind that many K-12 science teachers do not have science degrees, nor do most parents. K-12 is not the place to go into the technical details of climate science. Simplicity is the key.

Climate alarmism dominated the Obama era and run-up to Paris. But it’s at least as bizarre, dogmatic and intolerant now that: President Trump pulled the United States out of the all pain/no gain Paris climate pact; the US EPA is reversing anti-fossil fuel programs rooted in doom-and-gloom climatology; America is producing and exporting more oil, gas and coal; developing nations are burning vastly more of these fuels; Poland is openly challenging EU climate diktats; and German, British Australian and other politicians are voicing increasing concerns about job-killing, eco-unfriendly “green” energy.

With trillions of dollars in research money, power, prestige, renewable energy subsidies, wealth redistribution schemes, and dreams of international governance on the line, the $1.5-trillion-per-year Climate Industrial Complex is not taking the situation lightly. Climate fear-mongering is in full swing. Tried-and-true scare stories still dominate the daily news, often with new wrinkles tied to current events.

The Winter Olympics were going to take “a huge hit from our warming planet,” the pressure group Protect Our Winters warned us (yes, it’s an actual organization). Of course, that was before fiendishly frigid conditions repeatedly postponed events and drove spectators from PyeongChang slopes.

But of course, bitter cold is “exactly what we should expect’ from the global warming “crisis,” said Climategeddon expert Al Gore, who got a C and D in the only two science courses he took in college. It’s reminiscent of dire predictions that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2010 (or 2015 or 2025), and “children just aren’t going to know what snow is” (until record cold and snow battered the UK a couple years later).

We’re likewise propagandized constantly with deliberate falsehoods about “carbon pollution.” We burn carbon, in the form of hydrocarbons and coal. In the process, we emit carbon dioxide which is not a pollutant. It is the miracle plant food that makes life on Earth possible.

Other standard scares ignore the innumerable, monumental benefits of carbon-based fuels - and blame these fuels and CO2 emissions for planetary warming (and cooling), rising seas, forest fires, and every major problem from malaria to rainstorms, droughts, hurricanes and tornadoes.

A newly discovered danger, say a couple researchers, endangers green sea turtles. Planetary warming is causing up to 99% of turtle eggs to hatch as females. It won’t be long, perhaps just decades, until “there will not be enough males: to propagate the species. Some “30 years of knowledge” support this thesis. That would take us all the way back to 1988, a decade before the 18-year global warming “hiatus” that was interrupted by the 2015-16 El Nino; a half-century since the Dust Bowl and record high planetary temperatures of the 1930s; 40 years after scientists were convinced Earth was about to enter a new little ice age; and some 750 years after the 300-year-long Medieval Warm Period. One has to wonder how sea turtles managed to survive such previous warm spells - and cold periods like the four-century-long Little Ice Age, since cold weather apparently churns out only male sea turtles.

Not to be outdone, Hillary Clinton asserted that women “will bear the brunt of looking for food, looking for firewood, looking for the place to migrate to when all the grass is finally gone, as the desertification moves south” because of climate change. Wrong. Entire families will continue to bear these burdens because of anti-energy policies imposed in the name of sustainability and climate change prevention.

(For more fearsome forecasts, see The Warmlist, a no longer complete, but still entertaining compendium of some 800 horrors supposedly caused by “dangerous manmade global warming and climate change.") The constant consternation strikes many as ridiculous. But others have become true believers - and have committed to not having children, not taking showers, de-carbonizing, de-industrializing and de-growing developed countries, shutting off oil pipelines, and other futile actions that bring no earthly benefits.

Our planet has certainly been warming. Thank goodness for that, because the extra warmth lifted habitats and humanity out of the Little Ice Age and its chilly, stormy weather, greatly reduced arable land, short growing seasons and CO2-starved crops. Powerful, uncontrollable natural forces drove that temperature rise. Earth may now face dangerous Mann-made global warming and climate cataclysms concocted by computer models - but no “unprecedented” or “existential” human-caused dangers in the real world.

Question or challenge climate crisis orthodoxy, however, and you will be vilified and face RICO prosecutions, bogus slander and SLAPP lawsuits, censure or expulsion from your university, attacks for sponsoring museum exhibits, or even “four hots and a cot” in a jail or a faraway gulag.

Thankfully, there are excellent antidotes: books by climatologists Roy Spencer, Patrick Michaels, Jennifer Marohasy, Tim Ball, political observer Marc Steyn and others; and websites like ClimateDepot.com, WattsUpWithThat.com, DrRoySpencer.com and Global Warming Policy Foundation.org, for example.

For a concise, yet comprehensive, and eminently readable lay guide to real climate science, geologist Gregory Wrightstone’s Inconvenient Facts: The science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know may meet your needs. Its 123 pages are organized into two sections and 30 easily understood chapters, written in plain English and complimented by over 100 colorful charts, graphs, tables and illustrations, covering all the common climate issues, fears and myths. The book is capped off by a handy list of 60 inconvenient facts that eviscerate alarmist dogma, and15
pages of references. As Lord Christopher Monckton’s says in his foreword, Wrightstone has succeeded “splendidly” in reliably distinguishing myths from realities in the climate debate.

The opening section devotes 54 pages to explaining greenhouse and climate basics, showing how carbon dioxide is huge in planetary life but minuscule on the climate front, skewering the myth of a 400 ppm CO2 “tipping point,” analyzing climate models versus real world measurements of global temperature, and showing why and how water vapor plays such a vital and dominant role in weather and climate.

Carbon dioxide, he notes, is essential plant food that makes forests, grasslands and crops grow faster and better, with less water, and thus able to feed more people from less land. Figure I-15 summarizes data from 3,586 experiments on 549 plant species and depicts how crop yields would increase and generate trillions of dollars in overall monetary benefits, if CO2 levels rose by 300 ppm. His analysis of the “hockey stick,” computer models and temperature predictions is equally illuminating. Part II of Wrightstone’s book examines the many assertions and myths of a coming climate apocalypse, and demonstrates why they fail to meet basic standards of scientific evidence and integrity. The opening chapter demolishes the phony 97% “consensus” of scientists who supposedly agree that humans are now the primary cause of extreme weather and climate change, ushering in a catastrophic future. Subsequent chapters address famines, forest fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, melting ice packs, rising seas, polar bear populations, and other staples of climate alarmism.

“Ocean acidification,” he points out, is a term deliberately chosen to alarm people about an imaginary problem. Being honest, and saying seas might become very slightly less alkaline (have slightly lower pH levels) from more atmospheric and oceanic CO2 in the coming centuries, wouldn’t suffice. Worse, an oft cited study ignored a full century of readily available data, and instead used computer models to fill in the contrived “gaps” on pH levels. As Wrightstone suggests, many people would call it Climate pHraud.

The bottom line? Scientists still do not understand the complexities of climate and weather. They still cannot separate human influences from the effects of powerful natural forces that have brought often profound climate changes throughout history. There is no evidence of a coming climate cataclysm. Spending trillions of dollars - and condemning billions of people to expensive, insufficient, unreliable, land and raw material gobbling wind, solar and biofuel energy - is not just unnecessary. It is immoral.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy and environmental policy.

Climate change has been blamed for causing higher temperatures, drought, wildfires and hurricanes - and now it’s being credited with generating record snow.

A study released Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports found that snowfall on the highest peak in the Alaska Range has more than doubled since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-19th century, which researchers attribute to climate change.

How? The study linked the heavy snow accumulation to “warmer waters thousands of miles away in the tropical Pacific and Indian oceans,” driven by rising greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Dartmouth College press release.

“We were shocked when we first saw how much snowfall has increased,” said Erich Osterberg, an assistant professor of earth sciences who led the investigation with researchers from Dartmouth, the University of Maine and the University of New Hampshire.

“We had to check and double-check our results to make sure of the findings,” Mr. Osterberg said. “Dramatic increases in temperature and air pollution in modern times have been well established in science, but now we’re also seeing dramatic increases in regional precipitation with climate change.”

The paper, which analyzed “two ice cores collected at 13,000 feet from Mount Hunter in Denali National Park” demonstrated that the modern snowfall is “unprecedented for at least the past 1,200 years and far exceeds normal variability.”

Lead author Dominic Winski, a Dartmouth research assistant, said it was “now glaringly clear from our ice core record that modern snowfall rates in Alaska are much higher than natural rates before the Industrial Revolution.”

“This increase in precipitation is also apparent in weather station data from the past 50 years, but ice cores show the scale of the change well above natural conditions,” Mr. Winski said.

Less convinced were climate skeptics, who have long taken issue with the climate change movement for chalking up any number of weather patterns and natural disasters to global warming.

Meteorologist Ryan Maue, chief operations officer at Weather.us, made the point that Alaska presumably would have experienced significant natural variability during that time frame and beyond.

“Is the null hypothesis that climate remained static in Alaska since year 1600?” he said on Twitter. “The Pacific Ocean surely has variability on decadal/centennial/millennial time scales that would affect mountain snow.”

The “global warming causes heavy snow” thesis isn’t new. During a 2011 cold snap, former Vice President Al Gore said that “scientists have been warning for at least two decades that global warming could make snowstorms more severe” by sending more moisture into the air.

Others have claimed the opposite. In 2000, University of East Anglia senior research scientist David Viner concluded that winter snowfalls would become “a very rare and exciting event,” thanks to global warming.

Quipped Climate Depot’s Marc Morano, “Why not? Less snow used to ‘prove’ global warming. Snow used to be ‘a thing of the past’ according to climate activists. Now more snow ‘proves’ global warming. No matter the weather, they can claim it is consistent with global warming theory.”

“Man-made global warming has become unfalsifiable,” said Mr. Morano, author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,” slated for release Feb. 26 by Regnery.

The latest study, “Industrial-Age Doubling of Snow Accumulation in the Alaska Range Linked to Tropical Ocean Warming,” found that winter snowfall has risen by 117 percent in south-central Alaska and that summer snows increased by 49 percent in less than 200 years.

The paper cited scientific models predicting increases in global precipitation per degree of warming of as much as 2 percent but concluded that such an explanation still didn’t explain the heavy Denali snow.

“The research suggests that warming tropical oceans have caused a strengthening of the Aleutian Low pressure system with its northward flow of warm, moist air, driving most of the snowfall increases,” said the release. “Previous research has linked the warming tropical ocean temperatures to higher greenhouse gas concentrations.”

Mr. Osterberg said scientists continue to discover that “climate change is full of surprises.”

“We need to understand these changes better to help communities prepare for what will come with even more carbon dioxide pollution in the air,” he said.

CO2 is not pollution!!!

A new study conducted by the independent grid operator in New England includes a stark warning for utilities, politicians and customers. While the United States has already become the world’s leading energy producer, ISO New England’s research shows that the region may have to rely on increasing amounts of imported liquefied natural gas (LNG) to meet its future power needs, even though it sits on the doorstep of one of the world’s largest natural gas fields.

The research is consistent with the region’s lack of natural gas infrastructure that was highlighted in our own report ‘What if Pipelines Aren’t Built into the Northeast’ released last year. This shortage means that the region could face a regular risk of rolling winter blackouts by 2024 and would have to rely on more expensive fuel and overseas LNG to meet peak demand.

Worse, the problem is so severe that emergency measures will likely be necessary almost every winter by the mid-2020s, with the grid operator estimating that rolling blackouts would be necessary in 19 out of the 23 scenarios they studied.

ISO New England’s study concluded with a blunt assessment of the problem: “while the use of natural gas for both heating and power generation is growing, the natural gas supply infrastructure is not expanding at the same pace, resulting in natural gas supply constraints in winter. Given the region’s current and growing reliance on natural gas, limitations on the region’s natural gas delivery infrastructure are the most significant component of New England’s fuel-security risk.”

None of this should come as a surprise to those who have been following the energy debate in New England over the past few years. The region has seen closures of many of its coal and nuclear plants, making it increasingly dependent on natural gas generation. A lack of infrastructure has already led to residential electricity prices that are 44 percent higher than the U.S. average, and 62 percent higher for industrial users. New Englanders are also paying 29 percent more, on average, for natural gas.

The impact of those high prices is significant. Our report found that if additional pipeline infrastructure isn’t built, it will cost New England more than 78,000 jobs and $7.6 billion in regional GDP by 2020.

Of course, the irony is that neighboring states like Ohio and Pennsylvania sit above the Marcellus and Utica Shales, two of the world’s richest gas reserves. Unfortunately, an aggressive and well-funded campaign by extreme activists has fought against and prevented new pipeline projects that proposed to deliver this energy resource to New England markets.

Projects like the Northeast Energy Direct, Access Northeast and Constitution pipelines could bring abundant and affordable Pennsylvania gas to New England, but activists have successfully lobbied regulators to deny key permits necessary for pipeline construction.

These misguided efforts have actually worked against regional environmental goals. While renewable sources of energy show great promise, they also require backup sources that must be quickly scaled up to meet peak demand and pick up the slack when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. People still need fuel to heat their homes and power their businesses, schools, and hospitals.

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But because of a lack of infrastructure, rather than using cheaper and cleaner domestic fuel from neighboring states, New Englanders are forced to pay more to burn fuel oil and import higher-priced natural gas from overseas to meet their energy needs. Neither of these scenarios makes economic or environmental sense.

New England needs modern infrastructure to compete. Energy infrastructure is no exception. We applaud the current administration’s focus on revamping our nation’s infrastructure, and hope New England is included. It’s time for state and local lawmakers to face reality and put consumers over extreme special interests to ensure affordable, reliable energy for all of their residents.

Karen Harbert is the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute.

WHERE’S THE BEEF?

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A climate scientist infamous for incorrectly claiming he once won the Nobel Prize is criticizing a museum for not being faithful to the truth and facts because of its association with a billionaire climate skeptic.

A so-called climate denier does not deserve a leadership position at the American Museum of Natural History, according to Penn State University professor Michael Mann. He was referring to Rebekah Mercer, a wealthy conservative who sits on the museum’s board of trustees.

‘A natural-history museum must be accurate, faithful to the facts and trusted by the public,” Mann wrote Monday in an editorial for The News York Times. He urged the museum to distance itself from Mercer, a supporter of President Donald Trump and donator to conservative causes.

Mann has consistently been called out for falsely claiming to have co-won the Nobel Prize in 2007 with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former Vice President Al Gore.

The prize was awarded to Gore that year for his “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change,” according to the panel.

Mann claimed in his lawsuit in 2012 against conservative pundit Mark Steyn and National Review that he was a Nobel Laureate, but the Nobel committee has consistently rebuked this claim. Mann went on to slam the museum and Mercer for not adhering to the truth and scientific standards.

“For years, many scientists were hesitant to come out of their labs and speak up for fear that truth-telling would result in personal attacks or threaten their professional credibility,” said Mann, who gained fame for his “hockey stick” graph showing global temperature rise - Gore eventually used the academic’s graphs in his documentary, “Inconvenient Truth.”

Mann and a handful of scientists used a super PAC to get their colleagues to align against Trump during the presidential election over the president’s willingness to “embrace of conspiracy theories, anti-science attitudes, and disregard for experts.”

The group, Not Who We Are PAC, wasn’t heavily involved during the election, compared to the tens of millions spent by other super PACs. The group has only spent $23,000 on ads targeting Trump, according to federal filings.
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Mann dismissed the idea that the push against Mercer is a politically partisan issue. He later suggested the museum move to use the Mercer family’s donations “to develop exhibitions and programs that educate the pubic about the climate-denial machine that illuminate its history of using propaganda to obstruct pro-climate action and the document how we’ve arrived at this current crisis point for the planet.”

Germany—that’s the place where there really is a 100% consensus on the need for immediate action to solve the supposed “climate crisis.” It’s the land of the “Energiewende”—the forced transition to the use of intermittent renewables like wind and solar to generate electricity.  It’s the place where—as I noted in this post back in September -- no major political party has dissented on the need to act on the “climate” issue.  It’s the place that has happily driven its usage of renewables to generate electricity up to about 30% of the supply, and therefore its cost of residential electricity up to more than triple the average U.S. price.  It’s a place where anyone questioning the so-called “science” underlying the warming scare can expect to be greeted with derision and scorn.  And yet, somehow reality still seems to be intruding.

Over the weekend, the talks among political parties in Germany to form a coalition government collapsed.  As of now, nobody seems to know what is going to happen next.  And—even though there is little overt dissent on the virtue of reducing carbon emissions—it seems like the ever-more-evident costs of this “climate” program are starting to drive events.

Just to set the table, let me remind readers about the state of the political playing field on this issue in Germany and the rest of Europe and other major countries.  A good background article is this one from Dana Nuccitelli in the Guardian from October 2015, “The Republican Party Stands Alone in Climate Denial.” The article summarizes some work from Norwegian political scientist Sondre Batstrand, analyzing the positions on this issue of all conservative political parties from countries including the USA, UK, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Germany.  The conclusion:

[Batstrand] found that the US Republican Party stands alone in its rejection of the need to tackle climate change and efforts to become the party of climate supervillains.

That’s not the only example of over-the-top rhetoric in the piece.  For example, Nuccitelli quotes Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine on the position of then-candidate Jeb Bush on this issue:

In any other democracy in the world, a Jeb Bush would be an isolated loon, operating outside the major parties, perhaps carrying on at conferences with fellow cranks, but having no prospects of seeing his vision carried out in government.

In Germany, a political party needs to get 5% of the vote in an election to get any seats in the Bundestag.  As an indication of how correct Batstrand was, in the previous (2013) election, the only party that could remotely be considered a climate dissenter, AfD, got only 4.7% and no seats.  Another party, FDP—a free market classic liberal party and not really climate dissenters, but legitimately concerned about the costs of “climate” policies—got 4.8% and also no seats.

In the recent elections in September, those two parties suddenly got, between them, 23.3% of the vote and 24.6% of the seats.  And suddenly Angela Merkel needs one or both of them to form a coalition government.  Oh, and she also needs the Green Party.  How is that playing out?  An impasse!  Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation reports this morning:

Most remarkable: Germany’s failed and increasingly unpopular climate policies are at the core of the crisis. It also signals the collapse of Germany’s decade-old climate consensus.  While the Green Party demanded the immediate shut-down of 10-20 of Germany’s 180 coal power plants, the Liberal Party (FDP) stood by its manifesto promise of a radical reform of the Energiewende, advocating the end to subsidies for renewable energy.

Experts at the Federal Ministry of Economics had warned participants at the exploratory coalition talks that Germany will miss its legally binding 2020 climate targets by a mile and that trying to achieve its 2030 goals would risk the economic prosperity of the country.  The Ministry also warned that any attempt to force a radical reduction of CO2 emissions :by 2020 would only be possible by partial de-industrialisation of Germany.”

Climate business as usual is no longer an option for the Liberals [aka FDP]. The party fears that a fast exit from coal-fired power generation, as demanded by the Greens, would result in severe social, economic and political problems. A continuation of radical climate policies would affect Germany’s main coal regions, not least in Eastern Germany where the right-wing protest party Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) had gained significant support in the federal elections in September.

So, if you were to go around the streets of the major cities of Germany and take an opinion survey, you will find very close to one hundred percent agreement on the need to ‘take action’ on climate change immediately.  But what?  Does this mean that we will be putting thousands of coal miners out of a job, and more thousands of utility workers at coal plants out of a job, and driving the cost of electricity from three times the U.S. average to five times or maybe ten, and making our electric grid not work right any more, and by the way also “partially de-industrializing” Germany?  Wait, you didn’t tell us about those things!

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I’m actually hoping that Chancellor Merkel does a deal with the Greens and maybe the S
DP, and continues down her road of green folly.  The real world needs some concrete examples of actual disaster to teach us a lesson in reality. 

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On cue: The Green Empress has no clothes

By Viv Forbes

During December 2017, Germany’s millions of solar panels received just 10 hours of sunshine, and when solar energy did filter through the clouds, most of the panels were covered in snow.  Even committed Green Disciples with a huge Tesla battery in their garage soon found that their battery was flat and that there was no solar energy to recharge it.

The lights, heaters, trains, TVs, and phones ran on German coal power, French nuclear power, Russian gas, and Scandinavian hydro, plus unpredictable surges of electricity from those few wind turbines that were not iced up, locked down in a gale, or becalmed.

Germany has long supported two incompatible ideas: engineering excellence and green totalitarianism.  Angela Merkel’s support of climate alarmism while preaching energy efficiency continues this discordant tradition.

But King Winter has exposed the weak underbelly of Germany’s energy policy.  Empress Merkel now faces a hostile political climate with no clothes.

The green energy retreat has started in the green energy movement’s own heartland.

Further Reading:

Germany gets 10 hours of Sunshine for December 2017:
http://notrickszone.com/2018/01/03/dark-days-for-german-solar-power-country-saw-only-10-hours-of-sun-in-all-of-december/#sthash.JBk2C8XQ.dpbs

Germany’s climate change hypocrisy:
http://dailysignal.com/2018/01/11/germany-becomes-new-poster-child-climate-change-hypocrisy/

Wind Turbines produce Zero Global Energy:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/05/wind-turbines-are-neither-clean-nor-green-and-they-provide-zero-global-energy/

Mugged by Reality - German Climate Consensus Collapsing:
http://mailchi.mp/thegwpf.org/germanys-climate-consensus-is-collapsing?e=e1638e04a2

During December 2017, Germany’s millions of solar panels received just 10 hours of sunshine, and when solar energy did filter through the clouds, most of the panels were covered in snow.  Even committed Green Disciples with a huge Tesla battery in their garage soon found that their battery was flat and that there was no solar energy to recharge it.

The lights, heaters, trains, TVs, and phones ran on German coal power, French nuclear power, Russian gas, and Scandinavian hydro, plus unpredictable surges of electricity from those few wind turbines that were not iced up, locked down in a gale, or becalmed.

Germany has long supported two incompatible ideas: engineering excellence and green totalitarianism.  Angela Merkel’s support of climate alarmism while preaching energy efficiency continues this discordant tradition.

But King Winter has exposed the weak underbelly of Germany’s energy policy.  Empress Merkel now faces a hostile political climate with no clothes.

The green energy retreat has started in the green energy movement’s own heartland.

Further Reading:

Germany gets 10 hours of Sunshine for December 2017:

Germany’s climate change hypocrisy:

Wind Turbines produce Zero Global Energy:

Mugged by Reality - German Climate Consensus Collapsing:

Read more.

Trump gives hope to derailment of the establishment’s plans (both parties) for a New World Order - which would cede our rights and control over our lives including a redistribution of any wealth to the UN.

Update: see the whole story behind the story in their own words in Global Warming Quotes & Climate Change Quotes: Human-Caused Global Warming Advocates/Supporters by C3 Headlines.

Quotes by H.L. Mencken, famous columnist: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed - and hence clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” And, “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it.”

We start with Mencken’s quotes because they are so well known from the past, but yet still so relevant so many years later. His past insights to those whose lives are addicted to the seeking of power, or control, or fame, or money is still as valid today, as it was 70 years ago. Below are quotes from the powerful; the rich; the religious; the studious; the famous; the fanatics; and, the aspiring, all sharing a common theme of keeping “the populace alarmed” to further their own personal, selfish goals.

The threat to the world is not man-made global warming or climate change. The threat to the world, as is always the case, is a current group(s) of humans who want to impose their values and desires on others. The people below represent such a group, and they are not saints as individuals; in fact, quite the opposite, unfortunately.

Once you read the below quotes, come back and re-read the previous paragraph. The threat to the world is not man-made global warming or climate change. The threat to the world, as is always the case, is a current group(s) of humans who want to impose an ‘Agenda’ based on their elite values and self-importance. The people below represent such a group, and they are not saints as individuals; in fact, quite the opposite, unfortunately.

See the quotes here.

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Australia PM’s adviser: climate change is UN hoax to create new world order

Maurice Newman, chairman of Tony Abbott’s business advisory council, says UN is using debunked climate change science to impose authoritarian rule.

The Australian prime minister’s chief business adviser has accused the United Nations of using debunked climate change science to lead a new world order - provocative claims made to coincide with a visit from the top UN climate negotiator.

Christiana Figueres, who heads the UN framework convention on climate change, touring Australia this week, urged the country to move away from heavily polluting coal production.

Under Tony Abbott’s leadership, Australia has been reluctant to engage in global climate change politics, unsuccessfully attempting to keep the issue off the agenda of the G20 leaders’ summit in Brisbane last year.

Maurice Newman, the chairman of Abbott’s business advisory council and a climate change sceptic with a history of making provocative statements, said the UN was using false models showing sustained temperature increases to end democracy and impose authoritarian rule.

“The real agenda is concentrated political authority,” Newman wrote in an opinion piece published in the Australian newspaper. “Global warming is the hook. It’s about a new world order under the control of the UN....

“It is opposed to capitalism and freedom and has made environmental catastrophism a household topic to achieve its objective.”

Figueres used an address in Melbourne to urge Australia to move away from coal, the country’s second-largest export, as the world grapples with global warming.

“Economic diversification will be a challenge that Australia faces,” she said.

Abbott has described coal as “good for humanity” and the “foundation of prosperity” for the foreseeable future.

Figueres also urged Australia to play a leading role at the climate summit in Paris in December, a call unlikely to be heeded given Abbott’s track record.

At the Brisbane G20 meeting, he warned that the Paris summit would fail if world leaders decided to put cutting carbon emissions ahead of economic growth.

At home, Abbott, who in 2009 said the science behind climate change was “crap”, repealed a tax on carbon pricing and abolished the independent Climate Commission advisory body.

Asked on the Canberra leg of her trip if the politics around renewable energy was as toxic elsewhere in the world, Figueres said: “No. At the global level what we see is increased participation of renewables, increased investment in renewables, increased excitement about renewables.”

Abbott’s office and the UN did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Updated: Public and many to most real scientists are unconvinced.

From: Malcolm Roberts [mailto:malcolmr@conscious.com.au]
Sent: Friday, 24 April 2015 12:07 PM
To: UQ VC OFFICE
Cc: John Cook; Ove Hoegh-Guldberg; FORBES VIV; Carter Bob; Plimer Ian; Jennifer Marohasy
Subject: D15/7927: Complaint of serious corruption of science by UQ’s John Cook and Ove Hoegh-Guldberg

Dear Professor Hoj:

As an honours engineering graduate from the University of Queensland I am inquiring of you as to the reasons our university supports the work of John Cook who serially misrepresents climate and science? Specifically, why is our university wasting valuable funds to mislead the public through a free course and by producing associated international video material?  Course

Please refer to the lower half of page 4 of Appendix 5, here.

It details John Cook’s fabrication of an unscientific ‘consensus’. Science is not decided by claims of consensus. Resorting to claims of consensus is unscientific and contradicts the scientific process.

Fabricating false claims of scientific consensus is not honest.

Science is decided by empirical scientific evidence. John Cook has repeatedly failed to provide any such evidence that use of hydrocarbon fuels is causing the entirely natural climate variability we experience.

A succinct summary of John Cook’s fabrication of a consensus, and of the corruption of science upon which his claims rely and that is furthered by his claims, and of the empirical scientific evidence he blatantly contradicts, are discussed in pages 6-18 of my report to federal MPs Senator Simon Birmingham and Bob Baldwin. It is available at this link. 

My seven years of independent investigation have proven that there is no such empirical scientific evidence anywhere in the world. Climate alarm is unfounded and is a purely political construct pushing a political agenda. Please refer to Appendices 2, 6, 6a, 7 and 8 at this link.

John Cook’s core public climate claims are false and blatantly contradict empirical scientific evidence. Please refer to appendix 4 at the same link.

Further, John Cook and / or his employer are receiving funds in return for his deceiving the public, politicians and journalists and I’m wondering if that would make his work a serious offense.

As you likely know, John Cook works closely with the university’s Ove Hoegh-Guldberg who reportedly has many serious conflicts of financial interest surrounding his false climate claims. These are discussed on pages 54-59 of Appendix 9 at this link and briefly on pages 16 and 17 of my report to Senator Birmingham and Bob Baldwin MP.

I draw your attention to my formal complain dated Wednesday 10 November 2010 to the university senate about the work of Ove Hoegh-Guldberg misrepresenting climate and science. That was not independently investigated by then Vice Chancellor Paul Greenberg who was subsequently dismissed over another event, reportedly for a breach of ethics. My formal complaint is discussed on pages 57 and 58 of Appendix 9 at this link.

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg’s responses to my request for empirical scientific evidence of human causation of climate variability have repeatedly and always failed to provide such evidence.

This email is openly copied to both Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and John Cook and to reputable Australian scientists and academics expert on climate and to Viv Forbes an honours graduate in geology from our university. Viv Forbes understands the key facts on climate and on the corruption of climate science by beneficiaries of unfounded climate alarm perpetrated falsely by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and John Cook.

Please stop John Cook’s misrepresentations and restore scientific integrity to our university. I please request a meeting with you to discuss our university’s role in deceiving the public and to discuss restoring scientific integrity. I would be pleased for that meeting to be in the company of John Cook and Ove Hoegh-Guldberg if that suits you.

Pages 19-26 of my report to Senator Birmingham and Bob Baldwin discuss the serious damage to our nation and to humanity and our natural environment worldwide as a result of unfounded climate alarm spread by our university’s staff. I hope that you will fulfill your responsibility for investigating and ending such corruption. To neglect to do so will mean that you condone such damage and dishonesty. I seek confidence that you will restore the university’s scientific integrity and look forward to your reply.

Yours sincerely,

Malcolm Roberts

BE (Hons) UQ, MB U Chicago, Member Beta Gamma Sigma Honours Society

Fellow AICD, MAIM, MAusIMM, MAME (USA), MIMM (UK), Fellow ASQ (USA, Aust)

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The 97% “consensus” study, Cook et al. (2013) has been thoroughly refuted in scholarly peer-reviewed journals, by major news media, public policy organizations and think tanks, highly credentialed scientists and extensively in the climate blogosphere. The shoddy methodology of Cook’s study has been shown to be so fatally flawed that well known climate scientists have publicly spoken out against it,

“The ‘97% consensus’ article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed. It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately poor level of public and policy debate in this country [UK] that the energy minister should cite it.”

Mike Hulme, Ph.D. Professor of Climate Change, University of East Anglia (UEA)

Only 65 Scientists of 12,000 Make up Alleged 97% on Climate Change and Global Warming Consensus According to Breakdown of Cook et al study, say Friends of Science

In response to multiple inquiries from media and global warming advocates, Friends of Science issue this release to expose the statistical manipulation evident from the break down of the Cook et al paper. Friends of Science decry the linking of this flawed study with alleged danger from man-made carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) as there has been no global warming in 16 years despite a rise in CO2 levels; Friends of Science say the sun and oceanic oscillations are the main drivers of climate change, not CO2.

See faulty methodology of Cook study.

The following is a list of 97 articles that refute Cook’s (poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed) 97% “consensus” study. The fact that anyone continues to bring up such soundly debunked nonsense like Cook’s study is an embarrassment to science. See the list here.

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See the Galileo Movement here. Visit Then click on the blue text: “9.2.12 Evidence of Political Fraud - Malcolm Roberts”

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See Dr. Doug Hoyt’s Greenhouse Scorecard on Warwick Hughes site here.

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From Jack Black’s Climate Change Dictionary

PEER REVIEW: The act of banding together a group of like-minded academics with a funding conflict of interest, for the purpose of squeezing out any research voices that threaten the multi-million dollar government grant gravy train.

SETTLED SCIENCE: Betrayal of the scientific method for politics or money or both.

DENIER: Anyone who suspects the truth.

CLIMATE CHANGE: What has been happening for billions of years, but should now be flogged to produce ‘panic for profit.’

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE: Leftist Nutcase Prize, unrelated to “Peace” in any meaningful way.

DATA, EVIDENCE: Unnecessary details. If anyone asks for this, see “DENIER,” above.

CLIMATE SCIENTIST: A person skilled in spouting obscure, scientific-sounding jargon that has the effect of deflecting requests for “DATA” by “DENIERS.’ Also skilled at affecting an aura of “Smartest Person in the Room” to buffalo gullible legislators and journalists.

JUNK SCIENCE: The use of invalid scientific evidence resulting in findings of causation which simply cannot be justified or understood from the standpoint of the current state of credible scientific or medical knowledge

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Speaking of junk science, see Lubos Motl’s excellent point by point counter to the John Cook 104 talking points document attacking the skeptical science here.

NOTE:

See all the talks at the latest ICCC9 Conference in Las Vegas in 2014 here.

Heartland has the presentations and powerpoints posted for the Heartland ICCC IV.  If you could not go, there is plenty to see there. Please remember the goldmine of videos and PPTs at the Heartland ICCC proceeding sites for 2008 NYC here, 2009 NYC here and 2009 DC here. Here is a PPT I gave at the Heartland Instutute ICCC Meeting in 2008 and here is the follow up in 2009. Here is an abbreviated PPT in two parts I presented at a UK conference last month: Part 1, Part 2.

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See C3 Headlines excellent collection of graphs and charts that show AGW is nonsense here.

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See Climate Theater with a collection of the best climate skeptic films and documentaries here. See additional scientific youtubes here.

The left loves to reference desmogblog.com when any skeptic produce an analysis or paper challenging CAGW - see the real story about this looney left green PR firm here.

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1350+ Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of “Man-Made” Global Warming Alarm and here a list of 1000 stories suggesting global cooling has begun.

“The above papers support skepticism of “man-made” global warming or the environmental or economic effects of. Addendums, comments, corrections, erratum, replies, responses and submitted papers are not included in the peer-reviewed paper count. These are included as references in defense of various papers. There are many more listings than just the 900-1000 papers. Ordering of the papers is alphabetical by title except for the Hockey Stick, Cosmic Rays and Solar sections which are chronological. This list will be updated and corrected as necessary.”

The less intelligent alarmists have written a paper allegedly connecting the scientists to Exxon Mobil. Here is the detailed response from some of the featured scientists. Note that though this continues to be a knee jerk reaction by some of the followers, there is no funding of skeptic causes by big oil BUT Exxon has funded Stanford warmists to the tune of $100 million and BP UC Berkeley to $500,000,000. Climategate emails showed CRU/Hadley soliciting oil dollars and receiving $23,000,000 in funding.

See still more annotated here.

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Many more papers are catalogued at Pete’s Place here.

The science and economics of global warming are not too complicated for the average person to consider and make up his or her own mind. We urge you to do that. Go here and view some of the articles linked under “What’s New” or “A Primer on Global Warming.” Or go here and read about the new report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), which comprehensively rebuts the claims of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Go here for the sources for the factual statements in the ads.

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See the ICECAP Amazon Book store. Icecap benefits with small commission for your purchases via this link.

Go to and become a member of WeatherBell Analytics here.

Website of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) here. It’s latest report (2013) details information from almost 4,000 papers.

Science and Public Policy Institute here.

Intellicast Dr. Dewpoint Library here.

RedNeck Engineer Energy and Innovation here.

The Weather Wiz here. See how they have added THE WIZ SCHOOL (UPPER LEFT) to their website. An excellent educational tool for teachers at all class levels. “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel” - Socrates (470--399 BC)