Climate Conversation Group

Only in the USA

Carbon Emissions Projected to Remain Flat for Decades – Forbes.

So the good news is the alarmists might be slightly pleased and quieten down a bit.

The bad news is the price of slowing the pace of the Western industrial miracle that’s been relentlessly pulling the world out of poverty, ignorance, sickness, early death and misery for over two centuries.

Will the alarmists reflect on the poverty, lack of medical care, loss of education and general reduction in levels of happiness this will bring?

Anyway, this slow-down concerns emissions only from the US. Considering they emit less than China does, it can’t make much difference to the global climate.

From Forbes, seven months ago, we heard about climate-related changes in the wind for the USA. The measures being proposed at potentially insane costs by the Obama administration include reducing the sulphur content of petrol ($2.4 billion pa), impossible boiler operating standards (reduce GDP by $1.2 billion) and highly restrictive cement production standards (shortfall imported from China, 80,000 out of work, construction costs hiked by up to 36%).

A new report released by the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Minority Committee enumerates a slew of planned EPA regulations that have been delayed or punted on until after the election that will destroy millions of American jobs and cause energy prices to skyrocket even more.

Read more… »

from The Global Warming Policy Foundation

The Street, 4 October 2012

Bill Gunderson

When Al Gore talks, people listen. Just ask the folks who hand out Academy Awards and Nobel Peace Prizes.

Al Gore also talks to investors. Since 2007, the former Vice President in Bill Clinton’s administration has been preaching the benefits of putting your money where his mouth is: Alternative energy.

But if Al Gore has any message for investors today, it might very well be this: “Stay the hell away from alternative energy!” Not that he would say so. At least out loud. Read more… »

Chevy Volt electric car. Stylish but impractical for national use. Crashes not only other vehicles, people and power poles, but also the electricity network. Didn’t anyone think of this?

Electric cars are a great idea and they’ll save the earth, right? Well, sorry, but it’s going to be a whole lot harder to handle large numbers of electric cars than we hoped.

The whole point of electric cars is that they’re powered by clean, far-away electricity generators instead of petrol engines putting out that dirty carbon dioxide which dangerously heats our planet.

We would prefer to gently erect some pretty windmills or softly lay delicate and lovely solar panels to generate electricity non-intrusively, without antagonism and free of violence to our beloved Mother Earth.

But no matter what we might prefer, if we eliminate all those wonderful, rumbling newtons (known to Jeremy Clarkson as horsepowers) from petrol we must make them up from somewhere else. Ok. Simple question: can we make it up with electricity?

A New Zealand study

A long time ago, in 2008, the CCG published NZ sustainable energy supplies, a paper by local engineer Gary Kendall. Read more… »

Anthony Watts has done it again and given the big boys a bloody nose – this time over the US temperature record.

NOAA announced today:

The average temperature for the contiguous U.S. during July was 77.6°F, 3.3°F above the 20th century average, marking the hottest July and the hottest month on record for the nation. The previous warmest July for the nation was July 1936 when the average U.S. temperature was 77.4°F. The warm July temperatures contributed to a record-warm first seven months of the year and the warmest 12-month period the nation has experienced since recordkeeping began in 1895.

Anthony had always wondered why NOAA didn’t provide data from the brand-spanking-new United States Climate Reference Network (USCRN). So he did it himself. Read more… »

The Economist carried an online article on 29 June ridiculing the North Carolina legislature for wanting to ban climate-change projections in coastal planning and allow only historical data. (h/t Barry Brill)

It is odd that the always-conservative Economist seems to distrust the temperate, time-tested use of observations to predict likely bounds of future tides. Never mind the success enjoyed by generations of engineers in building our coastal and riverine assets, the Economist now prefers unproven computer models deliberately distorted by the theory that we’re controlling the climate with tiny quantities of an inoffensive gas.

Computers can’t do more than about a fortnight of the weather before accuracy turns to chaos, but the Economist apparently trusts an impressive 90 years of forecast climate.

Am I the lone dullard who doesn’t believe them? Read more… »

Nature Climate Change just published a paper called “Hotspot of accelerated sea-level rise on the Atlantic coast of North America” written by Asbury H. Sallenger Jr, Kara S. Doran & Peter A. Howd, of the USGS. Hey, another climate scientist named Sallenger but not called Jim!

Is this paper a credible source? John Droz, jr, is spearheading support for proposed, unprecedented, “anti-green” legislation in North Carolina that would make it illegal for state agencies to use accelerated SLR projections as a basis for state rules and regulations. The bill is called HB-819. Read more… »

The following article was just published in none other than the Wall Street Journal, signed by the 16 scientists listed at the end of the article. The mood towards catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) is surely in some upheaval. It’s wonderful to hear the disgraceful treatment of Chris de Freitas described in sympathetic terms, and the scandalous behaviour of the warmist clique towards him condemned. No doubt those enthusiastic world-savers would love to hide their dirty deeds and save their skins, but one day Salinger (the ring-leader in attacking de Freitas as both editor and academic), Jones and Schmidt, with others who have long flouted scientific courtesy, will reap the consequences of the odious conduct they have sown. Ignorant people might be expected to deny free speech to those who disagree with them, but climatology is alone in science in its disgraceful tolerance of conspiracy to prevent scientific critics being published. It’s a further scandal that the IPCC, while paying mere lip-service to solid science, does nothing to clean it up, even after severe criticism in August last year of its processes and attitudes by the InterAcademy Council (representing national academies of science such as the Royal Society) on behalf of the UN and the IPCC itself. It is left to us to preserve memory of their shameful practices, and we’ll do that despite attempts by our local climate deniers to bully local newspapers into silencing us.

No Need to Panic About Global Warming

A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about “global warming.” Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.

This is an adopted article.

In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: “I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: ‘The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.’ In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?” Read more… »

The four Marines seen in a video that purports to show them urinating on dead bodies in Afghanistan have been identified and will face charges soon, a senior military official told Fox News.

… the Marine Corps has appointed a three-star general to decide what disciplinary action to take against the four Marine snipers.

These soldiers are trained to kill people whom their officers inform them are their “enemies”. Now, I’m really only guessing, but I would say it takes more hatred than love to kill your enemies. So at some point during either their training, their deployment or a specific mission, the men must spontaneously generate, or their officers must carefully invoke in them a considerable strength of hatred towards those they are about to harm. Without it, the killing probably could not take place.

It presents a confused picture. Read more… »

We’ll get that data fixed up in no time. – NOAA  technicians   philosophers   thinkers  strategists

From American Thinker via C3.

This came up a few days before Christmas. I didn’t get to it then but it needs airing. The surface temperature series of GISS and HadCrut are scarcely worth the disk drives they’re stored on. No wonder the records show warming.

It’s a joke. The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming. That seems familiar — now where have I read that before…

NOAA changes old temperature records every month. This is a new climate sport in which we imagined Kiwis led the world. But the Yanks have more stamina. They don’t just do it once, they keep on doing it. The data-altering champions in NOAA and NASA put the climate scientists in NIWA to shame. Read more… »

Here in New Zealand, the NZ Climate Science Coalition has battled for several years to understand the national temperature record and get the data released that lies behind it. Now we battle to correct it.
 
Because NIWA, in “reconstructing” the record, manages miraculously to lower past temperatures and increase recent ones to create a spurious warming that overstates the actual national warming over the last hundred years by 168%!
 
We’ve told NIWA about it and we’ve sent them our report that proves it, but they refuse to acknowledge our finding, much less explain themselves. It is a national disgrace which our newspapers, magazines, radio stations and television channels strangely refuse to investigate.
 
The warming is truly man-made, for it hasn’t happened in the real world, it has been created only by the adjustments.
 
Now, from C3 Headlines, we learn that an even more invidious process has been going on in the United States. Read more… »

The Associated Press, as reported in the Los Angeles Times, keep to their warmist line. Now they’re keen to highlight a steep increase in carbon dioxide emissions, without letting on that it hasn’t affected the temperature.

The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped last year by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world’s efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.

The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst-case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.

In 2008, the annual increase was half of the year before. Now there’s a crisis?

It is a “monster” increase that is unheard of, said Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, who has helped calculate Department of Energy figures in the past.

Which just means it hasn’t happened before that we know of.

This one’s really off the radar.

Wind farms, along with solar power and other alternative energy sources, are supposed to produce the energy of tomorrow. Evidence indicates that their countless whirring fan blades produce something else: “blank spots” that distort radar readings.

Now government agencies that depend on radar — such as the Department of Defense and the National Weather Service — are spending millions in a scramble to preserve their detection capabilities…

Read more at Fox News.

The United States Senate meets in the Senate side of the Capitol Building in Washington, DC — to the left of this splendid rotunda.

From the SPPI site comes a remarkable statement from a US Senator reaffirming the primacy of science in the search for truth and emphasising that between the scientific and political arms of the IPCC there are strong contradictions.

Statement by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch Before the United States Senate,
June 10, 2010

EPA Disapproval Resolution

Mr. President, I rise today as an original cosponsor of the Disapproval Resolution of the carbon regulations proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency. I would like to start off by applauding Senator Murkowski for her strong leadership on this issue, and I stand squarely behind her effort.

To summarize what has already been laid out today, the EPA has released findings that, one, human carbon emissions contribute in a significant way to global warming; and, two, that global warming – which has been going on for about 10,000 years now — is an endangerment to humans. The EPA’s foundation for its proposal relies on the assumption that both of these findings are true.

Mr. President, I was sorely disappointed – but not too surprised – when I learned that the EPA based it’s “findings” almost entirely on the work by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the IPCC. I have no problem with much of the science produced by IPCC scientists, but I have a real problem with the way that science is summarized by the political leaders at the IPCC and by the conclusions drawn by those same political leaders in the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers, which is not a science document. And it becomes immediately evident that the EPA relies very heavily on these political summaries and conclusions rather than actual science produced by the IPCC. Because we now have abundant proof that a wide gulf exists between what the science indicates and what the political leaders at the IPCC pretend that it indicates. Read more… »

Brian Rudman, in White roofs are good for society, in the Herald last Wednesday, dredges up Professor Steven Chu’s wacky idea from last May to paint our roofs white, reflect more sunlight and thus temper the severe global warming presently afflicting us.

Professor Chu, US Energy Secretary and Nobel-prize-winning physicist, said lightening roofs and roads in urban environments would offset the global warming effects of all the cars in the world for 11 years.

He doesn’t tell us how long everything must remain painted white to earn those 11 years, or how much we’d need to pay for all the paint.

We can tell him, however, that it wouldn’t make any difference to global warming, although it might reduce the urban heat island (UHI) effect.

How does the UHI work? Well, roads and buildings absorb heat from the sun more than trees or grasslands do. So, as a village becomes a town and the town grows into a city, adding more and more roads and buildings, average temperatures climb, especially at night. This happens in both hot places and cold places, it makes no difference; if you build a city, you raise the temperature.

But if more surfaces were light-coloured instead of dark, more sunlight would be reflected and downtown wouldn’t get so hot.

The trouble is, it’s just not enough to combat global warming. With only about 0.1% of the sun’s energy being reflected away even if every road and building in the whole world was painted white (which would be a miraculous feat of co-operation), we wouldn’t see any change in the global average temperature, which might go down by about 0.1°C.

So we’d pay trillions to keep our parts of the world painted and we wouldn’t see any result for it.

The irony of this proposal is that the US-managed global surface temperature record is contaminated by the UHI effects from urban weather stations all over the world, since so many of them are in towns and cities. Anthony Watts, at Watts Up With That, has gathered evidence of this and for years has been lobbying to have adjustments made to the dataset to remove the spurious UHI warming and see whether we really do have global warming.

There is strong evidence that if this was done most of the surface “warming” recorded over the last part of the 20th century would simply disappear.

How ironic that Rudman picks up on a solution incapable of solving a problem that doesn’t exist, but whose effect could be to remove evidence of the problem.

Uh, so it will solve global warming! White paint, anyone?

By the way, it’s important to remember that this solution only makes sense in low latitudes (closer to the equator), where cooling your building is sensible. In higher latitudes (closer to the poles), where it’s already colder, you must heat the building and you really want darker colours to warm it a bit and save that heating money. So you can’t really paint all the buildings white, only those in the warmer places. And you don’t want to paint the colder roads white, since they ice up more readily.

What a pity. It was such a good idea.

President Obama is charming, credible and he fronts well, but he just revealed some of what truly lies within. It was a disturbing insight and I hope his advisors can amend his ignorance.

It was just last Tuesday — Barack Obama, at a White House press conference, was urging the House of Representatives to pass the Waxman-Markey bill, properly known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act, when he let slip that he doesn’t know what carbon dioxide is. Read more… »

President Obama has been promising firm action against global warming, his tone strengthening. Watch out! I think he’s serious… Right — now he’s done it!

So the Obama administration releases a hard-hitting report on the effects of global warming in America today. It says Americans have been living with the heavy downpours, rising sea levels and blistering summer heat waves produced by man-made climate change for 30 years.

Oh. Have they, really?

Meteorologist Joe D’Aleo, the first Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel: “This is not a work of science but an embarrassing episode for the authors and NOAA.”

Roger Pielke Jr., professor of environmental studies at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder: “Imagine if an industry-funded government contractor had a hand in writing a major federal report on climate change. And imagine if that person used his position to misrepresent the science, to cite his own non-peer reviewed work, and to ignore relevant work in the peer-reviewed literature. There would be an outrage, surely…”

“ So, to summarize: sentence one is not supported by the citations provided, which lead in both cases to selectively chosen non-peer reviewed sources, and the citations that are peer reviewed on this subject come to an opposite conclusion and are ignored.”

Have a look at some contrary views to this major new report intended to form popular opinion from Climate Depot. Or this one from Climate Skeptic.

A controversial new tax on CO₂ emissions has just been set by the Air Quality Management board. Companies are to measure and report their own emissions. Businesses say out-of-area firms get an instant advantage over them. Once again, California leads the charge into radical action. Read the original story and see local comment on the new tax at Watts Up With That.

The polar bear is now a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. It’s a major victory for environmentalists, who have been looking for a legal back door to limit carbon-dioxide emissions, but Roy Spencer reflects on what else it might mean. Will the bears now be saved? Did they ever need saving? What about freedom and prosperity? more…

History and reason say no—so can we greatly alter the climate? Study history, for it says the climate has changed like this before. Study science, for it says that puny man has no effect. more…

This is great news. Have they “statistically corrected” the poorly-sited stations’ data? If the data’s been fixed, why move the stations? Are they still ignoring a documented warm bias? Read NOAA’s press release—they say that a global monitoring network “protects” the planet. They don’t reveal how. more…

Here’s a story you haven’t heard, and you should have. An analyst, working for the government, uses computers to crunch numbers and find the truth. Let’s call him “Mann.” The trouble with Mann is, he has an ideology. He knows what he wants his results to be. more…