Global Warming/Climate Change Super Thread

[Brad Sallows]

Lies.  It's a pack of lies.  The science was settled last year.

 

[ModlrMike]

Interesting. There's historical reference that points to the Romans considering Britain as a good grape/wine region. That would not be considered the case now, with the possible exception of Devon and Cornwall.

 

[PMedMoe]

Interesting. There's historical reference that points to the Romans considering Britain as a good grape/wine region. That would not be considered the case now, with the possible exception of Devon and Cornwall.

And Newfoundland was called Vinland by the Norse....although, that could also mean "meadow or pasture land".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinland

 

[ModlrMike]

And Newfoundland was called Vinland by the Norse....although, that could also mean "meadow or pasture land".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinland

Yes, and I doubt they would have called it Greenland if it wasn't.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Yes, and I doubt they would have called it Greenland if it wasn't.

Recently I read that now that the Greenland ice cap is receding (melting) archaeologists are able to find the remains of farmsteads and settlements that have been covered for 600 years. The Greenland coast was, once, very green, for several miles inland and was good, productive farmland. It was the Greenland Inuit (known as Skræling) to the Scandinavians) who drove the Europeans away, not the encroaching weather/ice cap which came later.

 

[Infanteer]

So wait a minute, you're telling me that all the melting ice up north and south is at levels that have occured previously in recorded history and that the world didn't end then?  Well isn't that something!

 

[GAP]

I'm still waiting for the big flip.....that puts Canada at the equator......

 

[Brad Sallows]

>all the melting ice up north and south is at levels that have occured previously in recorded history

To be more precise, retreating glaciers all over the globe - not just the polar caps - reveal signs of human habitation in their debris fields.

 

[jollyjacktar]

Not so fast, Al Gore...

Tree-rings prove climate was WARMER in Roman and Medieval times than it is now - and world has been cooling for 2,000 years

Study of semi-fossilised trees gives accurate climate reading back to 138BC

German researchers used data from tree rings – a key indicator of past climate – to claim the world has been on a ‘long-term cooling trend’ for two millennia until the global warming of the twentieth century.  This cooling was punctuated by a couple of warm spells.

These are the Medieval Warm Period, which is well known, but also a period during the toga-wearing Roman times when temperatures were apparently 1 deg C warmer than now.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2171973/Tree-ring-study-proves-climate-WARMER-Roman-Medieval-times-modern-industrial-age.html#ixzz20MSlldZU

 

[Haletown]

Well this is gong to hurt a tad . .  .

"This is a sorry and sobering story of how a combination of
unreflective environmental fundamentalism, a massive
feeding-frenzy by corporate rent-seekers, and political
hubris has the makings of an economic disaster for a
province already in serious fiscal difficulties.
Unfortunately, this sorry story does not end here. The
environmental assessment processes put in place under the
Green Energy Act to review industrial wind turbine projects
located in many rural communities throughout Ontario
reflects similar administrative deficiencies and is inflicting
substantial environmental costs and health risks on these
communities without effective evaluation."

http://probeinternational.org/library/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/TrebilcockGreen.pdf



When he says  "taxpayer dollars  that have been dissipated"  he think means they were flushed down the Great Greenie Global Warming Fear Mongering and Fund Raising Scam's toilet.

Have to feel sorry for Ontario . . .  just a world of greenie hurt coming down the tracks.

 

[aesop081]

Have to feel sorry for Ontario . . .

I live in Ontario and i wouldn't feel sorry for this place. Ontarians voted McSquinty in and then re-ellected him.

Self-inflicted wound.

 

[a_majoor]

Oh, so many people are saying "Bring it", but I rather doubt that the threatened lawsuit will ever come to pass. There is a process known as "discovery" which promises to be highly embarrasing to Mann and the University:

http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=43626

UnManned
by Rand Simberg on July 23, 2012 at 9:42 am

No, the post title is not a reference to a type of space vehicle.

So, last weekend, at The Corner, Mark Steyn semi-approvingly linked to my Open Market piece in which I compared the Michael Mann investigation at Penn State to the Jerry Sandusky cover up (Note: CEI has since deleted the specific references to Sandusky as “inappropriate” — I disagree, but that is their prerogative).

This morning, I got a query from Andrew Restuccia at Politico, who is doing a story on the fact that Mann is threatening National Review with a lawsuit if it doesn’t delete the Corner post and apologize.


Hi Rand.

I’m writing a short story on Michael Mann’s criticism of the National Review and CEI for comparing Penn State’s investigation of “climate gate” to the university’s investigation of Jerry Sandusky. As you probably know, Mann has asked National Review to retract its post and apologize, even threatening legal action.

The National Review post quoted heavily from a July 13 post you wrote on CEI’s Open Market blog. It appears that the reference to Mann being the “Jerry Sandusky of climate science” has since been removed. Do you have any comment on Mann’s criticism of the story? Why were those lines removed from the initial story? Just wanted to give you an opportunity to respond.

My response to him:


Andrew–

I don’t know why the lines were removed, other than the reason stated — that in retrospect CEI apparently considered them “inappropriate.” I would note that even before they were removed (by CEI, not me, as is their right, it being their web site), I made clear that my Sandusky comparison was to the fact that the Penn State administration covered up Mann’s behavior in a similar manner, not in the behavior itself, and I explicitly wrote (as one can presumably still see in the Steyn Corner post) that neither I or anyone was accusing him of child molestation.

In any event, if he does take legal action, a) he has already made himself a public figure (and used to enjoy it, until his unscientific proclivities became public) and b) even if he weren’t, neither I, nor Mark Steyn or anyone else have written anything actionable or false, as far as I know. But discovery should be entertaining if he proceeds (the University of Virginia might not be very happy about it), and likely to the detriment of his climate “science.” And after what Mark Steyn did to the speech police in Canada, I would certainly not want to take him on in court.

I think he’s just blowing smoke in hopes of getting a cheap “apology.” I guess if he does decide to come after me, I’ll crowd source a legal defense fund, or find someone to take it on pro bono. I suspect I’ll have no shortage of support.

Note that I am speaking entirely for myself, not CEI. I have not discussed this with anyone at CEI. I don’t know whether Ivan [Osorio, CEI editor] has anything to add.

Interestingly, he seems much more upset about the accusations of scientific fraud than about the Sandusky comparison (the latter is almost an afterthought in the lawyer’s letter). But does he really want to litigate the hockey stick in a court of law? Does he in fact want to dig into any of his unscientific behavior in a venue in which he will be under oath, and he won’t have sympathetic colleagues covering for him? Does he really want those emails to be read aloud in court? And has he talked to the University of Virginia? Even if they continue to fight the FOIA, how will they fight a subpoena for the missing emails in a civil lawsuit?

If this goes forward, discovery will be very interesting, and very entertaining. I suspect that Peter Sinclair will end up choking on his popcorn.

I do think he’s bluffing. And though I haven’t gotten a response from him, I’m guessing that Mark will call his bluff.

By the way, the usual suspects are outraged. For example: Phil Plait and Charles Johnson.

Of course, my piece was nothing compared to what John O’Sullivan did (check out the graphic). I wonder if he’ll be getting a letter from Mann’s lawyer, too?

[Update mid afternoon]

Ever since Instapundit linked to this post, my server has been slammed. I don’t know if it was a denial of service attack, or just a popular post, but I’ve disabled comments for now.

Here is the piece at Politico on the situation.

If you want to discuss this topic, go to this post instead.

Mann is also involved in a lawsuit in Canada, where he sued a Canadian Climatologist, but is now running into difficulty since he is not providing the evidence demanded by the discovery process here:

http://johnosullivan.wordpress.com/2012/07/17/official-probe-shows-climategate-whitewash-link-to-sandusky-child-sex-case/

But while arguments over PSU’s hidden “Climategate” emails will rage anew in the U.S., across the Canadian border in the Supreme Court of British Columbia Mann is close to losing another legal battle on this issue. Mann is yet again stonewalling a court over showing his hidden “dirty laundry” of dodgy data.

But such incessant secrecy won’t save Mann.  Judge Freeh’s damning report may persuade his Canadian counterpart that Mann’s libel suit against Canadian climatologist, Dr. Tim Ball is likely vexatious and premised on a cover up. Freeh’s findings will thus make it harder for Mann to dodge a Canadian Supreme Court requirement to hand over all his disputed “dirty laundry”. If Mann won’t comply he faces punitive legal sanctions. Leaked emails proved Mann was an influential figure among climatologists accused of fixing global warming records to win lucrative government research grants worth millions. In particular, evidence reveals a statistical “trick…to hide the decline” in reliability of proxy data in Mann’s research. And Mann is certainly ahead of his peers in arrogance because he’s the only climate scientist to boast on Facebook that he “shared the Nobel Peace Prize with other IPCC authors in 2007.”

 

[Haletown]

A perfect example ofneco fear mongering.

Screamimg headlines today that Greenland is melting,  blah, blah, blah.

Seth Bornstein, a noted Eco hysteria peddler does no fact checking but echo chambers a dubious report.

Meanwhile, the great Grrenland melt isn't actually happening . .  .  Probably a data/satellite error.

Because the webcam shows what is really happening.


http://www.summitcamp.org/status/webcam/

Doesn't look like Lake Greenland now does it?

 

[Haletown]

A remarkable interview.  From Global Warming hero to major disappointment in one simple NPR video. 

http://tinyurl.com/8jo4wwq

"“But that doesn’t mean that we’re seeing increased wildfires. It doesn’t mean we’re seeing increased tornadoes. We’re not, we’re not. Yes, the temperature’s going up, yes it’s greenhouse gases. But to exaggerate it, by bringing in all these other things, I think, tends to mislead the public. And when they learn that they’re wrong, when in 2006 there are no hurricanes hitting the U.S. despite predictions, they tend to become somewhat cynical about science. I think that’s really unfortunate."

"is it fair to say that if we don’t take any steps to reduce emissions, we are going to have more superstorms like Katrina?

Richard Muller: Oh, no. No, no. First, you have to recognise that according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami, the number of hurricanes has been going down. The next thing you need to know is that Katrina was not a superstorm, it was only a Category 3 when it hit New Orleans. Just happened to be the first Category 3 that hit New Orleans in decades.  And they were unprepared for it"

etc  . . .  the interviewers were not prepared for his skewering of many of their eco religious pieties.

Let's hope they do get Mikey Mann to do a joint interview . . . although I doubt he would dare enter into a public debate with Muller. 

 

[Haletown]

So everyone knows Mikey Mann,  famous inventor of the Hockey Stick Climate Graph.  Seems he is a little bit upset, well very upset with a Mark Steyn story published n the National Review that mocks him.

So Mikey gets his lawyer to send a threatening letter to the National Review.

The response from the NR lawyers is priceless.

http://www2.nationalreview.com/pdf/2012-08-22_National_Review_Response_Letter.pdf

We can only hope this lawsuit proceeds because Discovery is going to be delicious.

Entire story over at WUWT


http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/22/best-michael-mann-headline-evah/#more-69741

 

[a_majoor]

Rand Simberg and Canadian climatologist Dr Tim Ball have also received SLAPP from the author of the Hockey Stick graph (see upthread), but are fighting for legal discovery as part of their defense.

Mann is stonewalling the judges and refusing to release the demanded information, which should result in the cases being thrown out and Mann being cited for contempt as a minimum. Everyone who gets threatened by Mann is being targetted by a SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) in order to silence the opposition, but it is happily backfiring against him.

 

[Haletown]

What happens when Public Policy falls prey to the fear mongering eco greenie crowd . . .

"To put it in context, the Global Adjustment — the pot where subsidies for wind and solar are temporarily placed before billing ratepayers — for the 12 months ended Aug. 31, 2009, totalled $2.98-billion. For the 12 months ended August 31 this year, the Global Adjustment had grown to $6.2-billion, a jump of over $3.2-billion or 107% in three years.

If one couples that with the drop in revenue for OPG of $554-million in the six months ended June 30, 2012 (clean hydro has been displaced by wind and solar) compared to June 30, 2009, the raw costs in dollars required to support FIT and MicroFIT programs are in excess of $4-billion annually, with only 2,000 MW of wind and 400 MW of solar up and running. The more wind and solar Ontario gets under the FIT program, the bigger the costs become.

The province claims 20,000 jobs have been created, most of which would be in construction. At current costs, that works out to a cost per job of $200,000 annually and growing. The price has been high, and it’s still rising. But will FIT prove to be useful? Will it achieve its objectives, which are allegedly intended to reduce carbon emissions? No evidence exists that any carbon emissions have been reduced as a result of the FIT program, despite the City of Toronto’s claims to be cutting carbon emissions at the absurd cost of $2,600 per tonne.

So happy FIT anniversary, Ontario. But forget the champagne. We’re out of cash."

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/09/19/ontarios-power-trip-happy-fit-day/


Truly have to feel sorry for Ontario Tax and Rate payers.  Be generous with the lube because you are truly being screwed over.

 

[GAP]

Global warming: the heat’s back on
Protecting the ozone layer means the next step must be the control of damaging HFCs
Article Link
By Geoffrey Lean 14 Sep 2012

It was an extraordinary triumph of old technology over new, of basic science over space-age wizardry and – 25 years ago tomorrow – it led to a planet-saving pact, one of the most successful treaties ever agreed.

Back in 1983, Dr Joe Farman, a diffident British geophysicist then running a couple of research stations in Antarctica, spotted something that made him go “nearly off my rocker”. Routine measurements he had been taking on a 25-year-old machine swathed in a quilt showed that half the ozone, high in the stratosphere 15 to 50 kilometres above the earth, appeared to have vanished.

It seemed incredible, since a Nasa satellite was busily circling the globe, taking 140,000 ozone readings a day and reporting nothing much out of the ordinary. Thinking that his ancient contraption might have finally gone awry, Farman replaced it with a new one in 1984. But it showed even less of the stuff overhead.

With great daring, he published his findings, even though one of his paper’s referees described them as “impossible”. Nasa was provoked to review its records – only to find that its satellite had indeed made similar measurements, but that its software had automatically disregarded them as unreliable before they could be seen.

The discovery of the “ozone hole” caused alarm, because a thinly scattered stratospheric layer of the blue-tinged gas is all that protects terrestrial life from lethal ultraviolet solar rays. For more than a decade, some scientists had worried that CFCs, used in a huge range of products from foams to aerosol cans, were eroding it – and, sure enough, observations soon showed they were to blame.
More on link

 

[a_majoor]

When the solutions are so much worse than the problems they are supposed to "solve":

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9559656/Germanys-wind-power-chaos-should-be-a-warning-to-the-UK.html

Germany's wind power chaos should be a warning to the UK
Germany has gone further down the 'renewables' path than any country in the world, and now it's paying the price

By Christopher Booker

7:00PM BST 22 Sep 2012

On Friday, September 14, just before 10am, Britain’s 3,500 wind turbines broke all records by briefly supplying just over four gigawatts (GW) of electricity to the national grid. Three hours later, in Germany, that country’s 23,000 wind turbines and millions of solar panels similarly achieved an unprecedented output of 31GW. But the responses to these events in the two countries could not have been in starker contrast.

In Britain, the wind industry proclaimed a triumph. Maria McCaffery, the CEO of RenewableUK, crowed that “this record high shows that wind energy is providing a reliable, secure supply of electricity to an ever-growing number of British homes and businesses” and that “this bountiful free resource will help drive down energy bills”. But in Germany, the news was greeted with dismay, for reasons which merit serious attention here in Britain.

Germany is way ahead of us on the very path our politicians want us to follow – and the problems it has encountered as a result are big news there. In fact, Germany is being horribly caught out by precisely the same delusion about renewable energy that our own politicians have fallen for. Like all enthusiasts for “free, clean, renewable electricity”, they overlook the fatal implications of the fact that wind speeds and sunlight constantly vary. They are taken in by the wind industry’s trick of vastly exaggerating the usefulness of wind farms by talking in terms of their “capacity”, hiding the fact that their actual output will waver between 100 per cent of capacity and zero. In Britain it averages around 25 per cent; in Germany it is lower, just 17 per cent.

The more a country depends on such sources of energy, the more there will arise – as Germany is discovering – two massive technical problems. One is that it becomes incredibly difficult to maintain a consistent supply of power to the grid, when that wildly fluctuating renewable output has to be balanced by input from conventional power stations. The other is that, to keep that back-up constantly available can require fossil-fuel power plants to run much of the time very inefficiently and expensively (incidentally chucking out so much more “carbon” than normal that it negates any supposed CO2 savings from the wind).

Both these problems have come home to roost in Germany in a big way, because it has gone more aggressively down the renewables route than any other country in the world. Having poured hundreds of billions of euros in subsidies into wind and solar power, making its electricity bills almost the highest in Europe, the picture that Germany presents is, on paper, almost everything the most rabid greenie could want. Last year, its wind turbines already had 29GW of capacity, equivalent to a quarter of Germany’s average electricity demand. But because these turbines are even less efficient than our own, their actual output averaged only 5GW, and most of the rest had to come from grown-up power stations, ready to supply up to 29GW at any time and then switch off as the wind picked up again.

Now the problem for the German grid has become even worse. Thanks to a flood of subsidies unleashed by Angela Merkel’s government, renewable capacity has risen still further (solar, for instance, by 43 per cent). This makes it so difficult to keep the grid balanced that it is permanently at risk of power failures. (When the power to one Hamburg aluminium factory failed recently, for only a fraction of a second, it shut down the plant, causing serious damage.) Energy-intensive industries are having to install their own generators, or are looking to leave Germany altogether.

In fact, a mighty battle is now developing in Germany between green fantasists and practical realists. Because renewable energy must by law have priority in supplying the grid, the owners of conventional power stations, finding they have to run plants unprofitably, are so angry that they are threatening to close many of them down. The government response, astonishingly, has been to propose a new law forcing them to continue running their plants at a loss.

Meanwhile, firms such as RWE and E.on are going flat out to build 16 new coal-fired and 15 new gas-fired power stations by 2020, with a combined output equivalent to some 38 per cent of Germany’s electricity needs. None of these will be required to have “carbon capture and storage” (CCS), which is just an empty pipedream. This makes nonsense of any pretence that Germany will meet its EU target for reducing CO2 emissions (and Mrs Merkel’s equally fanciful goal of producing 35 per cent of electricity from renewables).

In brief, Germany’s renewables drive is turning out to be a disaster. This should particularly concern us because our Government, with its plan to build 30,000 turbines, to meet our EU target of sourcing 32 per cent of our electricity from renewables by 2020, is hell-bent on the same path. But our own “big six” electricity companies, including RWE and E.on, are told that they cannot build any replacements for our coal-fired stations (many soon to be closed under EU rules) which last week were supplying more than 40 per cent of our power – unless they are fitted with that make-believe CCS. A similar threat hangs over plans to build new gas-fired plants of the type that will be essential to provide up to 100 per cent back-up for those useless windmills.

Everything about the battle now raging in Germany applies equally to us here in Britain – except that we have only fantasists such as Ed Davey in charge of our energy policy. Unless the realists stage a counter-coup very fast, we are in deep trouble.

Only warmists could pass this A-level

While Michael Gove tries valiantly to remedy our dysfunctional exam system he might take a look at some recent papers, such as that set last June for A-level General Studies students by our leading exam body, AQA. Candidates were asked to discuss 11 pages of “source material” on the subject of climate change. Sources ranged from a report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to The Guardian, all shamelessly promoting global warming alarmism. One document from the Met Office solemnly predicted that “even if global temperatures only rise by 2 degrees C, 30-40 per cent of species could face extinction”. A graph from the US Environmental Protection Agency showed temperatures having soared in the past 100 years by 1.4 degrees – exactly twice the generally accepted figure.

The only hint that anyone might question such beliefs was an article by Louise Gray from The Daily Telegraph, which quoted that tireless campaigner for the warmist cause, Bob Ward of the Grantham Institute, dismissing all sceptics as “a remnant group of dinosaurs” who “misunderstood the point of science”.

If it were still a purpose of education to teach people to examine evidence and think rationally, any bright A-level candidate might have had a field day, showing how all this “source material” was no more than vacuous, one-sided propaganda. But today one fears they would have been marked down so severely for not coming up with the desired answers that they would have been among the tiny handful of candidates given an unequivocal “fail”.

Since there is simply no economical means of storing vast quantities of electrical energy to balance the grid (by storing renewable energy when it is produced and releasing it when it is needed), any place that puts a large stock into renewables is asking for trouble.

 

[AliG]

So... Full halt and reverse? Or do the sensible thing and learn / adapt from this? Increase research in large power storage to solve the problem. I suspect that there will be good returns to whomever finds solutions to transient large power storage that does not involve carbon at the end of the manufacturing process.