Weekend Open Thread

NYTimes stirring the pot…..
Posted today….. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/us/ties-to-corporate-cash-for-climate-change-researcher-Wei-Hock-Soon.html
Does anyone ever look this hard at the funding for the most active Climate Change supporting scientists?

We on the skeptic side have had a very lucky break. Mother Nature has not cooperated with the climate alarmists. There is a long term warming trend since the Little Ice Age that will continue into the foreseeable future. The alarmist painted themselves in a corner when they claimed that humans were responsible for virtually 100% of the global warming and that natural variance was negligible. The global temperature rise hiatus will end one day. If we skeptics cannot convince people that the science is not settled now while the computer projections/predictions are so totally wrong, we sure will not be able to when the temperature resumes its upward climb.
I would like to ask the readers here if they think the climate scientists alarmist, the IPCC, the mainstream media, and Al Gore are just mistaken, or are they motivated by political or financial gain, or are they just communist that would like to make energy much more expensive to free western countries and redistribute the wealth from developed countries to 3rd world dictators.
thank you

I read this interview of Freeman Dyson. It truly is ridiculous. There’s a pic of icebergs and the caption;
“Climate conflict: Professor Dyson’s naysaying over scenes like this has made him into a controversial figure”
is worth reading the exchange. The last email of Dr. Dyson says “I decided I have no wish to continue this discussion. Your last message just repeats the same old party line that we have many good reasons to distrust”

I’m doing a “submit a story” for WUWT that Anthony doesn’t know about yet and will probably take a few weeks more to hash through.
Deals with the new “Next Generation Science Standards” for K-12 education in US that 11 states have adopted to supplement Common Core. It has some frightening implications – one of which is anthropogenic climate change beginning in Kindergarten and escalating through 12th. Included are the use of models to make decisions and judge values in K-5th grade.
Even scarier:
“Leaders of the effort said that teachers may well wind up covering fewer subjects, but digging more deeply into the ones they do cover. In some cases, traditional classes like biology and chemistry may disappear entirely from high schools, replaced by courses that use a case-study method to teach science in a more holistic way”.
I won’t spoil it further except I plan to include efforts and reactions to similar educational “reforms” in UK and possibly Oz.
Beat me up here or I’ll just finish the discovery, ship it, and Anthony can choose me as a “useful punching bag” when he needs a break.
Cheers

OK…….sorry…for going soooo far off topic but after years of seeing the picture for “Open Thread”….has anyone else noticed the wrapping of thread” C ” and thread ” B” on left rope ” D” are opposite?
OCD much? Sorry.

I throw this one up occasionally but have never managed to spark much of a discussion.
I have a theory that the cost of anything in dollars is usually a pretty good estimate of the energy that has gone into producing it.
Gold is expensive because it requires a lot of energy intensive discovery and processing.
Having worked in agriculture it is clear to me that Food = Diesel.
A wind mill requires a lot of mined materials and a lot of hi-tech fabrication.
Some people have no problem with subsidizing renewables but for me this is just an admission of failure. An admission that they absorb more energy than they produce.’
Any thoughts?

Climate Change Destroyed Ancient Human Civilizations
Cooler climates have been associated with the deterioration/destruction of human civilizations, and are much more associated with earlier deaths in modern times than is global warming.
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http://link.springer.com/article/10.1134%2FS0016793213080227
Deep solar activity minima, sharp climate changes, and their impact on ancient civilizations
It is shown that, over the past ∼10000 years (the Holocene), deep Maunder type solar minima have been accompanied by sharp climate changes. These minima occurred every 2300–2400 years. It has been established experimentally that, at ca 4.0 ka BP, there occurred a global change in the structure of atmospheric circulation, which coincided in time with the discharge of glacial masses from Greenland to North Atlantic and a solar activity minimum. The climate changes that took place at ca 4.0 ka BP [4,000 years before present] and the deep solar activity minimum that occurred at ca 2.5 ka BP [2,500 years before present] affected the development of human society, leading to the degradation and destruction of a number of ancient civilizations.
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http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040618211006707
The Tavoliere salt-marsh appears to have contracted during the arid/warm phases associated to maxima of solar activity and to have expanded during the wet/cold phases of solar minima. This coastal area, characterized by a very flat topography and arid climate, appears to have been very sensitive to even minor hydrological and climate changes. Changes of solar activity, determining extensive environmental transformations, were also possibly responsible for the abandonment of the human coastal settlements of one of the most important Neolithic archaeological districts of Italy.
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http://www.academia.edu/1411970/The_Influence_of_Climatic_Change_on_the_Late_Bronze_Age_Collapse_and_the_Greek_Dark_Ages
Mediterranean Sea surface temperatures cooled rapidly during the Late Bronze Age, limiting freshwater flux into the atmosphere and thus reducing precipitation over land. These climatic changes could have affected Palatial centers that were dependent upon high levels of agricultural productivity. Declines in agricultural production would have made higher-density populations in Palatial centers unsustainable. The Greek Dark Ages that followed occurred during prolonged arid conditions that lasted until the Roman Warm Period.
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http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2007.01498.x/abstract
The projected increase of atmospheric CO2 concentration ([CO2]) is expected to increase rice yield, but little is known of the effects of [CO2] at low temperature, which is the major constraint to growing rice in cool climates. The results suggest that yield gain due to elevated [CO2] can be reduced by low temperature.
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http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935114003661
Seasonal patterns in mortality have been recognised for decades, with a marked excess of deaths in winter, yet our understanding of the causes of this phenomenon is not yet complete. Research has shown that low and high temperatures are associated with increased mortality independently of season; however, the impact of unseasonal weather on mortality has been less studied. In this study, we aimed to determine if unseasonal patterns in weather were associated with unseasonal patterns in mortality. We obtained daily temperature, humidity and mortality data from 1988 to 2009 for five major Australian cities with a range of climates. We split the seasonal patterns in temperature, humidity and mortality into their stationary and non-stationary parts. A stationary seasonal pattern is consistent from year-to-year, and a non-stationary pattern varies from year-to-year. We used Poisson regression to investigate associations between unseasonal weather and an unusual number of deaths. We found that deaths rates in Australia were 20–30% higher in winter than summer. The seasonal pattern of mortality was non-stationary, with much larger peaks in some winters. Winters that were colder or drier than a typical winter had significantly increased death risks in most cities. Conversely summers that were warmer or more humid than average showed no increase in death risks. Better understanding the occurrence and cause of seasonal variations in mortality will help with disease prevention and save lives.
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http://www.pnas.org/content/112/3/702
In the middle-to-late Holocene [~4,000 years ago], Earth’s monsoonal regions experienced catastrophic precipitation decreases that produced green to desert state shifts. Resulting hydrologic regime change negatively impacted water availability and Neolithic cultures. Whereas mid-Holocene drying is commonly attributed to slow insolation reduction and subsequent nonlinear vegetation–atmosphere feedbacks that produce threshold conditions, evidence of trigger events initiating state switching has remained elusive. Here we document a threshold event ca. 4,200 years ago in the Hunshandake Sandy Lands of Inner Mongolia, northern China, associated with groundwater capture by the Xilamulun River. This process initiated a sudden and irreversible region-wide hydrologic event that exacerbated the desertification of the Hunshandake, resulting in post-Humid Period mass migration of northern China’s Neolithic cultures. The Hunshandake remains arid and is unlikely, even with massive rehabilitation efforts, to revert back to green conditions.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/weather/11382808/Winter-death-toll-to-exceed-40000.html
The cold weather death toll this winter is expected to top 40,000, the highest number for 15 years. From the beginning of December until January 16, there were 8,800 more deaths than average of 25,000, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The rate soared by 33 per cent in the week up until January 16, when there were almost 15,000 deaths, as the bitter cold snap took hold. An additional 3,000 deaths are expected this week as temperatures plunge to their coldest of the winter so far.
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