I have some important work to do today, and so I’m going to put my interaction with WUWT on hold for a bit. However, I see here an opportunity to ask a question I have been pondering for quite some time. Please help me out by answering the question and discussing it. Of course other things within site policy are fair game too.
(Note – I saved this for the weekend, when people who might read this would likely be more relaxed. This is not the usual fare for WUWT, but it is something that is revealing, enlightening, entertaining, and educational, while at the same time sad and sunny all at once. If you want science, skip this article. If you want a perspective on life, read on – Anthony)
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Warning: Viewer discretion advised. This post discusses adult themes and content. Oh, not the usual adult themes we get on TV, like D: Suggestive Dialogue or V: Violence. Instead, it is a discussion of the following well-known wanted criminal:
Continue reading
![truth-and-lies[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/truth-and-lies1.gif)
Guest essay by Tom Harris,
International Climate Science Coalition
Over the past twenty years, we’ve been subjected to a barrage of catastrophic climate change forecasts and prophecies that would put Moses to shame. Coastal communities will be submerged due to rapid sea-level rise caused by soaring temperatures and glacier melt. Record heat waves, droughts, floods, insect infestations, and wildfires will result in millions of climate change refugees fleeing their ruined homelands. Competition over increasingly scarce water resources will lead to armed conflict. About all that has been missing from these doom and gloom predictions is alien invasion.
Like Moses’ warnings to Pharaoh in the Bible, we are told there is a high price to pay if we are to avoid climate change-driven “death, injury, and disrupted livelihoods,” to quote from the March 31 report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). We must reduce our carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions by 40 to 70% by 2050 to keep so-called global temperature from exceeding 2° C above pre-industrial levels, the IPCC claims. This will require massive cuts in our use of coal, oil, and natural gas, the sources of 87% of world primary energy consumption. What’s also needed, according to yet another IPCC report, Climate Change 2014 – Mitigation of Climate Change, released on April 12, is nothing less than:
By Paul Homewood
As WUWT points out, John Holdren is one of many who have tried to link the cold winter in the USA this year to global warming.
In his White House video in January, he had this to say:
“A growing body of evidence suggests that the kind of extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States as we speak is a pattern that we can expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues….
We also know that this week’s cold spell is of a type there’s reason to believe may become more frequent in a world that’s getting warmer, on average, because of greenhouse-gas pollution.”
But is there any evidence that extreme cold winters are becoming more common, or, for that matter, more extreme?
First, let’s check the temperature trends for the CONUS in winter.
Josh writes:
As many know I have a bit of a ‘glass half full’ opinion on the state of climate science and with the recent IPCC offerings along with activist mutterings of ‘we are all heading for a cliff type’ alarmism and calls for Climate Scientist strike action, I imagined this view of where we/they are at. Continue reading
In the preceding post, we looked at the evolution of the weekly sea surface temperature anomalies in two regions of the equatorial Pacific (NINO3.4 and NINO1+2), comparing the data so far in 2014 to those of the strong 1982/83 and 1997/98 El Niño events. (See 2014/15 El Niño – Part 3 – Early Evolution – Comparison with 1982/83 & 1997/98 El Niño Events.) We presented them because there are a lot of comparisons of this El Niño to those strong El Niños.
In this post, using the same two regions, we’ll compare the evolution of the sea surface temperature anomalies this year to the rest of the satellite-era El Niño events. And we’ll also compare this year to the average, because someone was bound to ask.
This post serves solely as a reference. What it illustrates very well is that there is a tremendous amount of diversity in the evolutions of sea surface temperatures during El Niño events. A tremendous amount of diversity.
Are you ready for some spaghetti?
Climate change is real and getting worse, Al Gore told the packed audience. Image: PF Bentley/Civil Beat
The story below is from from Honolulu Civil Beat, who covered a political rally on April 15th by Gore to 9000 people in Honolulu’s Stan Sheriff Center. It is a 12,500 seat sports auditorium where his voice was amplified by, his slideshow enabled with, and his persona illuminated by and made comfortable with air-conditioning, all made possible by the “dirty energy” electricity generated by fossil fuels that he railed against.
HECO power plant at Kahe Point, powered by oil.
The electricity that enabled Mr. Gore’s rally was courtesy of the oil burning power plants of the Hawaiian Electric Company, such as the HECO power plant at Kahe Point in West Oahu seen at right.
Gore himself once said in a crackpot statement: “there is no such thing as ethical oil.”
Yes, fossil fuels in the form of “dirty oil” enabled Gore to tell these people all about why they shouldn’t be using it.
But, that’s just the start of Mr. Gore’s hypocrisy. Read on. Continue reading
From the University of Vermont
Science: There’s something ancient in the icebox
Researchers find 3-million-year-old landscape beneath Greenland Ice Sheet
In this one-minute video, University of Vemont scientists demonstrate how they discovered 3 million-year-old soil under the Greenland Ice Sheet.
Glaciers are commonly thought to work like a belt sander. As they move over the land they scrape off everything—vegetation, soil, and even the top layer of bedrock. So scientists were greatly surprised to discover an ancient tundra landscape preserved under the Greenland Ice Sheet, below two miles of ice.
“We found organic soil that has been frozen to the bottom of the ice sheet for 2.7 million years,” said University of Vermont geologist Paul Bierman—providing strong evidence that the Greenland Ice Sheet has persisted much longer than previously known, enduring through many past periods of global warming.
CEI is taking John Holdren to task over his “polar vortex” video.
In a post today at globalwarming.org we have this:
DC’s cherry trees hit their official peak blossom date last Thursday, April 10th. That’s the latest in the year that the Capital has experienced peak blossoming in over two decades. (For you botanical historians, the last time that peak blossoming occurred this late or later was in 1993, when the event fell on April 11.)
In 2013 the blossoms were almost as late, hitting their peak on April 9. That was a pretty dramatic change from 2012, when the date fell on March 20. This change was most disconcerting to two groups: tourists trying to plan their trips to DC in advance, and global warming alarmists who trumpeted every earlier-than-expected cherry blossom as yet further proof of global warming. In fact, in a sizzling multi-part blog post series last year, followed by dozens of readers, we charted peak blossom dates against global warming data. We even had graphs. (See Adam Sandberg, Peak Bloom Is Here – DC’s Global Warming Canary Lands with Frost on its Feet, April 15, 2013.)
White House Science adviser John Holdren made some ridiculous and baseless claims about the “polar vortex” being tied to climate change in a hastily produced “never let a good crisis go to waste” style video on YouTube. Readers may recall our January 8th WUWT story:
Phil Jones’ plan to hide from FOIA
Eric Worrall writes:
Anyone shocked by Mann’s broad claims of academic exemption from freedom of information, due to the “proprietary nature” of his work, should consider the following Climategate email.
Climategate Email 1106338806.txt says:
Supreme Court of VA sides with University, secrecy, and Mann. The previously claimed destruction of Mann emails now to begin.
In this appeal, we consider whether the Circuit Court of Prince William County (“trial court”) erred by denying a request for disclosure of certain documents under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (“VFOIA”), Code § 2.2-3700 et seq., and whether a public body may impose charges for the cost of reviewing documents under the statutory exclusions.1
130934 American Tradition Inst. v. Rector and Visitors 04/17/2014
Some WUWT readers may remember this classic TV commercial:
Josh writes:
It looks like Lew & crew want to continue to debate the merits of his paper.
H/t and many thanks to Jo Nova for the ‘flushes itself’ idea.
I present, with help from Josh, the Lew-D-Bol Man: Continue reading
No smear psychological categorization mission is too offbeat for Lew. Now he’s on about “leakage”. Try to stifle the images that conjures up while thinking about your choice of preventative antiemetics.
s mac says: in WUWT Tips and Notes:
Anthony, there is a YouTube video (link below) of Lewandowsky giving a talk at the AGU Chapman conference, and its very revealing and your readers would enjoy, he’s equal parts clown, bully, and circus performer.
He’s desperately trying to find a footprint for what he does – categorize the pigeonhole people and surmise their intentions, motivations — and find a place for it (and himself) in the “save the world” ethos of climate change activists. Video follows:
Odd Tilts Could Make More Worlds Habitable
Pivoting planets that lean one way and then change orientation within a short geological time period might be surprisingly habitable, according to new modeling by NASA and university scientists affiliated with the NASA Astrobiology Institute.
The climate effects generated on these wobbling worlds could prevent them from turning into glacier-covered ice lockers, even if those planets are somewhat far from their stars. And with some water remaining liquid on the surface long-term, such planets could maintain favorable conditions for life.
By Paul C. Knappenberger and Patrick J. Michaels
Center for the Study of Science, Cato Institute
Within the U.S. federal government (and governments around the world), the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is given authority when it comes to climate change opinion.
This isn’t a good idea.
Here perhaps is the clearest example yet. By the time you get to the end of this post, we think you may be convinced that the IPCC does not seek to tell the truth—the truth being that it has overstated the case for climate worry in in its previous reports. The “consensus of scientists” instead prefers to obfuscate.
UN report’s fatal flaws destroy credibility of WGII and WGIII findings
Guest essay by Larry Hamlin
The UN IPCC AR5 latest climate assessment process comprising WGI, WGII and WGIII reports is complete. This process includes many hundreds of authors and reviewers, consideration of thousands of papers and ten of thousands of pages of reports, associated technical summaries and appendices. Yet amazingly with all this extraordinary expenditure time, effort and expense the report itself documents a monumental failure which has infected the process with fatal technical and procedural flaws which destroy the credibility of the WGII and WGIII findings.
The genesis of the fatal technical and procedural flaws are contained in the WGI report which documents the failure of the climate model global temperature projections to agree with observed global temperature measurements.
Remote. Cold. Rugged. Those three adjectives capture the essence of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. Another word—perhaps more applicable than anywhere else on Earth—is “fiery.”
Of the roughly 1,550 volcanoes that have erupted in the recent geologic past, 113 are found on Kamchatka. Forty Kamchatkan volcanoes are “active,” either erupting now or capable of erupting on short notice. The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured activity at five of them during a single satellite pass on April 14, 2014.
Imagery follows.
At the blog “Open Virginia Law” they are discussing the Mann case and potential impacts, as a new session results will be published from the Supreme Court of Virginia, and it’s likely the Mann/UVa case is one of them.
Insiders tell me that even if Mann/UVa loses, they’ll likely take a on a new position and file a claim of First Amendment right to academic freedom prohibiting release of the ClimateGate and HockeyStick emails, and surely will again encourage Mann to join, each claiming the right rests with them. With Mann, it’s all about delaying the inevitable, unless of course somebody like the hero of Climategate “FOIA” decides to take matters into their own hands and stop this abuse of the legal system and FOIA law by making an email dump. I don’t underestimate that possibility.
Here’s the situation:
Climate change’s looming impact on Virginia’s FOIA
to help keep the www.surfacestations.org project going.
