Reducto Al absurdium?
The former vice president [Al Gore] set out to create the Apple Computer of climate change — but instead he’s running the Microsoft. From a sweeping, expensive “blitz” to a “niche” effort in digital media.
…
The numbers, according to a review of the nonprofit’s tax filings, show the change has been severe. In 2009, at its peak, Gore’s group had more than 300 employees, with 40 field offices across 28 states, and a serious war chest: It poured $28 million into advertising and promotion, and paid about $200,000 in lobbying fees at the height of the “cap and trade” energy bill fight on Capitol Hill.
Today, the group has just over 30 people on staff and has abandoned its on-the-ground presence — all of its field offices have since shut down — in favor of a far cheaper digital advocacy plan run out of Washington. Advertising expenses have decreased from the millions to the thousands, and the organization no longer lobbies lawmakers. Donations and grants have declined, too — from $87.4 million in 2008 to $17.6 million in 2011, and many of its high-profile donors have drifted away, one telling BuzzFeed she now sees the group’s initial vision as “very naïve.”…Susie Tompkins Buell, a California-based Democratic donor and one of Hillary Clinton’s closest friends, seeded $5 million in 2007 to the organization, but now says she hasn’t “followed it very much” or contributed since.
Gee, I wonder what happened in 2009? Climategate anyone?
More at Buzzfeed: Al Gore’s Incredible Shrinking Climate Change Footprint
======================================================
Speaking of Absurdium, this columnist at The Atlantic, William R. Polk, blames “climate change” for the chemical weapons incident in Syria.
Syria has been convulsed by civil war since climate change came to Syria with a vengeance. Drought devastated the country from 2006 to 2011. Rainfall in most of the country fell below eight inches (20 cm) a year, the absolute minimum needed to sustain un-irrigated farming. Desperate for water, farmers began to tap aquifers with tens of thousands of new well. But, as they did, the water table quickly dropped to a level below which their pumps could lift it.
[USDA Foreign Agricultural Service, Commodity Intelligence Report, May 9, 2008]
In some areas, all agriculture ceased. In others crop failures reached 75%. And generally as much as 85% of livestock died of thirst or hunger. Hundreds of thousands of Syria’s farmers gave up, abandoned their farms and fled to the cities and towns in search of almost non-existent jobs and severely short food supplies. Outside observers including UN experts estimated that between 2 and 3 million of Syria’s 10 million rural inhabitants were reduced to “extreme poverty.”
Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/your-labor-day-syria-reader-part-2-william-polk/279255/
Like the country has never had a drought before? I blame Joe Romm for stirring this pot.
==============================================================
Murray Grainger writes in Tips and Notes:
According to TVNZ news tonight, the Pacific Forum will make an announcement tomorrow about Global Warming (and rising seas threatening low-lying Pacific atolls) that will make the world sit up and take notice.
You have been warned!
Gosh what could it be? Tuvalu is sinking 6.0? Been there done that, snoarzzz.
===============================================================
NASA: Black soot melted glaciers
“PASADENA, Calif. – A NASA-led team of scientists has uncovered strong evidence that soot from a rapidly industrializing Europe caused the abrupt retreat of mountain glaciers in the European Alps that began in the 1860s, a period often thought of as the end of the Little Ice Age.
The research, published Sept. 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may help resolve a longstanding scientific debate.
In the decades following the 1850s, Europe underwent an economic and atmospheric transformation spurred by industrialization. The use of coal to heat homes and power transportation and industry in Western Europe began in earnest, spewing huge quantities of black carbon and other dark particles into the atmosphere.
Black carbon is the strongest sunlight-absorbing atmospheric particle. When these particles settle on the snow blanketing glaciers, they darken the snow surface, speeding its melting and exposing the underlying glacier ice to sunlight and warmer spring and summer air earlier in the year. This diminishing of the snow cover earlier in each year causes the glacier ice to melt faster and retreat. ”
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-267&cid=release_2013-267
h/t to reader mogamboguru
===============================================================
UHI on steroids
An interesting illustration of the Urban Canyon Effect.
The skyscraper that’s melting cars
===============================================================
Readers may recall that WUWT published: NOAA’s claim on El Reno tornado may not hold up
And so it goes….the El Reno tornado has been downgraded to an EF3 from an EF5: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/52900379/
===============================================================
Um, Dana, did you notice that your own paper was rejected?
Mr. Bliss writes:
An amusing little twitter exchange that ends up with a dig at Nuccitelli’s reliance on psychology in the climate debate:
@GernotWagner I think answering that question would require a psychologist, honestly.
— Dana Nuccitelli (@dana1981) September 1, 2013
===========================================================
If disaster strikes this hurricane season, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will use an unconventional system to evaluate damage: the ‘Waffle House Index.’
FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate told “The Fine Print” that he started using Waffle Houses as an informal metric of measuring the severity of a storm in its aftermath. He first started using the method in his previous post overseeing emergency management in Florida.
“If the Waffle House was open and had a full menu, it was green because that meant they hadn’t lost power.”
“If [it] was open but had a limited menu, it meant that there were more problems, so they were yellow. And if the store was closed, it was red.”
h/t to OssQss
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
We’re in to a new month.
REPLY: Old template, fixed thanks – A
Gore’s funding is down, but the adoration of this acolytes is not. Liberals just do not like to give to their faiths it appears.
Black soot may indeed have helped melt glaciers. Nice try. Methinks this is more an attempt to say the LIA never happened. After all, the soot ‘spewed’…and as we all know, when things ‘spew’ it can’t be good. At all.
Curved glass building melting cars – build a boiler at the focus.
$200k for lobbyists is a pittance. I worked for a automotive brake company in 2008 trying to get the government contract to supply brake systems on the MRAAPs. We were looking at a $2M contract and paying a lobbyist 10% of it if we got it. And that’s just some little po-dunk brake company no one has ever heard of.
I like the Waffle House index.
Didn’t I leave a note in the “tips and notes” last week about the El Reno tornado 🙂
Tragic. Simply tragic. If only he had resources to fall back on …
“Al Gore sells Current TV to Al-Jazeera, nets reported $100 million”
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2013/01/03/al-gore-nets-reported-100-million-in-sale-current-tv-to-al-jazeera/
Mike Bromley the Kurd,
I think they are angling for ‘CO2 got us out of the LIA’. From the article: “But glacier records show that between 1860 and 1930, while temperatures continued to drop, large valley glaciers in the Alps abruptly retreated … ”
The article says later: “Something was missing from the equation,” said Thomas Painter, a snow and ice scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who led the study. “Before now, most glaciologists believed the end of the Little Ice Age came in the mid-1800s when these glaciers retreated, and that the retreat was due to a natural climatic shift, distinct from the carbon dioxide-induced warming that came later in the 20th century. This result suggests that human influence on glaciers extends back to well before the industrial temperature increases.”
It sounds like they are half way to suggesting it was cold when the glaciers began retreating and only warmed due to CO2 some time later.
This should be easy to prove or disprove. Some distance upstream in the glaciers there is still ice older than 1850. Simply measure the amount of black carbon.
Personally I’m a bit skeptical. This has already been done in Greenland, where the soot is mainly from industrial areas in the northeastern US. There the amount of soot culminates c. 1915 AD and starts to decline – which is also exactly when when the glaciers started retreating due to warmer climate.
But…. but…. but I thought aerosols cooled the climate. But soot causes ice to melt. So, which is it? Both? Neither? Sometimes one or the other? In some places one, in other places the other? It all cancels to zero? (Rhetorical questions of course)
I notice the Syria drought graphic stops in April 2008. I was wondering what happened to their main wheat crop and rain since 2008? It looks like just the weather and not the climate as usual.
2012 Wheat Crop Outlook
2012 – A splash of rain.
http://youtu.be/GytrBLcvACc
NASA will be twittering about ice today at 3 et
https://twitter.com/NASA_ICE
Make that 2 pm EDT
Since they say the Syria unrest is caused by ‘climate change’ would I be right to conclude the same for Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, Oman, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain etc. Since many of these countries are now calm, can I conclude that ‘climate change’ is now over for them. What a load of horseshit.
“(and rising seas threatening low-lying Pacific atolls)”
The reason atolls are always near sea level is because they are made of coral, which grows towards the surface when below the water and erodes when above the water.
Given that coral reefs grow at roughly 1 cm per year (depending on a whole bunch of things), much faster than the sea level is rising, I don’t see why atolls would be imperiled.
Anthony, it’s September. You need to change the heading.
REPLY: Yep, the template was for August – Anthony
The case of the wandering “i”: Latin reductio ad absurdum v. typo reducto ad absurdium.
This reminds me of the legendary Weather Rock, a rock hanging on a tether:
If the rock is wet, it’s raining.
If the rock is swinging, the wind is blowing.
If the rock casts a shadow, the sun is shining.
If the rock does not cast a shadow and is not wet, the sky is cloudy.
If the rock is not visible, it is foggy.
If the rock is white, it is snowing.
If the rock is coated with ice, there is a frost.
If the ice is thick, it’s a heavy frost.
If the rock is bouncing, there is an earthquake.
If the rock is under water, there is a flood.
If the rock is warm, it is sunny.
If the rock is missing, there was a tornado.
If the rock is wet and swinging violently, there is a hurricane.
If the rock has white splats on it, watch out for birds.
Gee, I wonder what happened to Climategate 3.0 ?
Nobody talks about it. Are we supposed to just forget about it?
“I don’t see why atolls would be imperiled.”
Because there is lots of money involved…
Rabbit, don’t you know all coral atolls are going to dissolve as the oceans acidify?
/sarc off
Fugate did a great job when Florida was smacked by 5 hurricanes in 2 years, including three that dead centered where I live with damage that took two years to repair. He is serious about the Waffle house index, and for good reason. All Waffle Houses are in the hurricane prone Gulf and south east states. They have developed a sophisticated storm response system that even includes a fortified mobile emergency command center. They see it as part or their corporate mission to be able to reliably provide coffee and hot food even if no one else can. There is information about this in serious places like Harvard Business School case studies.
How can it be a “hot sheet” if it is a month old already?
Regarding the retreat of glaciers – I’m going to go ahead and blame that on the lack of what caused them to advance when they did. The LIA was a brief glacier building era and when it ended so too did the advance of glaciers followed shortly be a retreat to pre-LIA levels. What a surprise.
“Something was missing from the equation”
NASA needed another “climate control knob”, (preferably manmade), and presto, soot filled the bill. The double-plus good part is they got to say “It’s a reminder that the actions we take have far-reaching impacts on the environment in which we live.”
They just can’t help themselves, continually conflating environmental concerns with (they hope) climate.
I’ll be satisfied when Gore’s group reaches zero employees and has no digital presence. I’ll be happier when I see articles such as “All theories and hype now disproved as unfounded; IPCC disbands in disgrace’.
A Blessed Rosh Hashanah to all the Jewish commenters and readers of WUWT!
May your celebration fill your hearts with joy and, as you cast away the past, may you look forward in great hope to a future full of peace and prosperity.
“The Lord bless you and keep you.
The Lord make His face to shine upon you … .”
With love and Shalom,
Janice