Facepalm! Gore's "dirty energy = dirty weather" claims about the US are laughable in the context of other countries

Al Gore, is his usual incompetent persona, is bloviating weapons grade nonsense again.

A few prior examples: On TV, Earth’s core is millions of degrees, in AIT, snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro will gone due to global warming, except the snows are growing, and Gore’s 24  hours of Climate Reality “high school science” that is so solid it has to be faked in post production.

Gore’s got a new schtick, he is now complaining about “dirty energy” making “dirty weather”.

From the Daily Caller there’s this:

Former Vice President Al Gore showed that he isn’t giving up on sounding the alarm on global warming and its catastrophic consequences in an appearance on Current TV’s “The War Room with Jennifer Granholm” on Thursday.

Gore, who owns CurrentTV and appeared alongside former Obama administration “green jobs czar” Van Jones, explained that “dirty energy and dirty money” are thwarting a green economy. And that, according to the former vice president, is behind “dirty weather” due to “extreme climate events.”

“Let me add if I could briefly,” Gore said, “As Van said, it’s the intersection of dirty energy and dirty money. And we can’t forget it’s creating dirty weather because the extreme climate events that the scientific community has been telling us are connected to global warming are getting worse. We had 12 events last year here in the U.S. that cost more than a billion dollars that were connected to climate. And it’s getting worse. And now, we have this extensive drought in big areas of the country, dramatic floods, stronger storms — completely consistent with what people have been predicting.”

I just want to grab him by the collar and Three Stooges style, slap some sense into him  –  Nyuck Nyuck Nyuck!

Gore’s claims about floods, storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, or any aspect of weather aren’t supported no matter how you look at it. I could go on and on, but this post right here says it all:

Why it seems that severe weather is “getting worse” when the data shows otherwise – a historical perspective

Bouziotas et al. presented a paper at the EGU (PDF) and concluded:

Analysis of trends and of aggregated time series on climatic (30-year) scale does not indicate consistent trends worldwide. Despite common perception, in general, the detected trends are more negative (less intense floods in most recent years) than positive. Similarly, Svensson et al. (2005) and Di Baldassarre et al. (2010) did not find systematical change neither in flood increasing or decreasing numbers nor change in flood magnitudes in their analysis.

Be sure to follow the link and read the entire essay if you have not already.

Al is unable to separate the signal from the noise, because he himself is a noise generator. His detector is swamped. That, and its the next phase of keeping his gravy train alive with the help of the Rommulans and the McKibbenites. Get people to fear the weather and you’ve got a powerful tool to control people. They’ve been successful at spreading this disinformation, for example:

Interestingly, almost all of those hits in the first several pages talk about the USA and its “dirty energy”. Gore himself focuses on the USA and its “dirty energy”, ignoring the rest of the world, because that’s where he wants to change policy in his profit favor.

But if “dirty energy = dirty weather” places like this should have terrible catastrophic weather, right?

No, that’s not the result of a volcanic eruption. Here’s another:

Yes, that’s snow under that soot. Nothing says Christmas like black snow. Have you guessed where this is yet?

You’re getting warmer:

Yep. Russia. Specifically Prokopevsk. Prokopevsk is a coal mining city where boiler houses work all year around. It shows. Source: http://englishrussia.com/2012/04/09/dirty-dirty-prokopevsk/ There are many more shocking photos there.

So let’s look for severe “dirty” weather connections in and around Prokopevsk. Should be easy to find right? Surely, as ex-Rommulan Brad Johnson (who made Vermin Supreme a household name with climate followers) asserts, there has to be divine payback for such dirty sins:

So, I searched for the obvious posited connection being pushed by Gore, Romm, McKibben, and Johnson. There were only a few results:

Of of them was this one, from Rommulan correspondent Dr. Jeff Masters, who I thought sure would be making a strong connection between dirty Prokopevsk and severe weather:

No such luck, it turned out to be an off-topic comment about some explosions heard in Prokopevsk:

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2035&page=4

And none of the other 234 results panned out either, there just doesn’t seem to be severe weather in Prokopevsk that I can find. But Al says “dirty energy” equals “dirty weather” in the context of severe weather, so unless dirty snow is severe weather, there seems to be none there. So I thought to myself, maybe I’m searching wrong, if severe weather is happening in that area due to the “dirtiness” it might be better for an image based search. Surely there would be pictures of divine weather retribution like Brad Johnson says.

Nope. Just 13 images, none about severe weather in that area.

Of course all this is tongue in cheek, and just as ridiculous as the claims that Al Gore makes, or Romm makes, or McKibben makes. But, it does underscore one very important point.

Due to environmental regulations in the USA, you won’t find dirty snow of that scope, breadth, and magnitude in any USA city caused by coal-fired power plants. I’ve looked.

I grew up in a Midwestern town fueled by coal, we had coal furnace in our basement (like the house in the classic movie A Christmas Story), we had coal furnace at school, and a coal-fired power plant generating electricity in our town. Even before the first EPA regulations of the 70’s, our town never looked like that in winter. I’ve been unable to find any USA city today in the shadow of a coal-fired power plant that looks as bad as those scenes in Prokopevsk in the winter. If there was, you can be sure the Gores, Rommulans, and McKibbenites would be sure to blast it everywhere.

But we have art to help visualize the problem. Gotta love the coal stains on the tops of the cooling towers. Obviously the artist has no idea about what cooling towers emit. Hint – it isn’t soot filled smoke.

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Read more: ‘No Globes’ Fill Up With Dirty Coal When You Shake Them | Inhabitat – Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building

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In the USA, environmental regulation have done the job, but the enviros always want more.  Even the best environmental regulations in the world aren’t enough for them. When they succeed in shutting down every coal-fired power plant in the USA they’ll go after something else, probably natural gas fired power plants

One final note, I’ve been puzzling over this perennial hotspot in GISS over Russia for some time. From GISS, NOAA, GHCN and the odd Russian temperature anomaly – “It’s all pipes!”

As most readers know by now, the problematic GISTEMP global temperature anomaly plot for October is heavily weighted by temperatures from weather stations in Russia.

GISTEMP 11-12-08

From that post:

…Posters at Watts Up have commented on the ongoing consistently high anomalous temperatures from Russia. I have noticed this too.  In light of the erroneously posted data for October, I took a look at the monthly NCDC climate reports back to January 2007.  By my eyeball estimate the results from Russia are almost all on the high side. .  Some I classified as very highs are massively high.  Of the 21 months reported, only 2 appeared to be below average.

Category 2007 2008 (9 months)

Very high                     6                        4

High                            3                        1

Average                      2                        3

Low                            0                        1

Very Low                    1                        0

…

I did find a study they posted that seems to point to a significant warm temperature anomaly in Russia during winters between 1961 to 1998:

Fig. 1. Linear trend coefficient (days/10 years) in the series of days with abnormally high air temperatures in winter (December-February), 1961-1998.

From the Russian study they write:

For the winter period 1961-1998, most of the stations under considerations exhibit a tendency for fewer minimum temperature extremes. Maximum (in absolute value) coefficients of the linear trend were obtained in the south of the country and in eastern Yakutia.

…

Like in the USA, weather stations tend to be distributed according to population density, with the more populated western portion of Russia having more weather stations than the less populated eastern areas such as Siberia. To illustrate this, here is a plot of Russian Weather Station locations from the University of Melbourne:

With dark, dirty winter albedoes like we’ve seen in scenes in Prokopevsk in the winter, I wonder if the temperature anomaly in Russia isn’t driven by soot on the ground?

I have not been able to locate a map of Russia’s coal-fired power plants, but if anyone knows of one, I’d be interested if you can leave a comment.