Global Warming

Here is how global warming is working out, as described by Tom Harris and Dr Madhav Khandekar at PJMedia:

  • CONUS: third-coldest Decembers and Januaries (that’s 2013 and 2014) in 30 years averaged over the contiguous 48 States; temperatures plummeting to −10°C in Atlanta, −26°C in Chicago, for instance
  • CONUS again: 59% of the contiguous 48 States was snow-covered, first time in 10 years, on 17 Dec
  • North East India: unusually severe snow and −10°C temperatures without home heating
  • Most of India, generally: 2°C-5°C colder than usual
  • Cairo: first snowfall in over a century
  • Jerusalem: fiercest snowstorm in 20 years
  • Berlin: March 2013 was the coldest in 100 years. In the same month, low temperature records were set UK generally: March 2013 had record lows throughout

Even the cold areas of the planet were colder:

  • Antarctica:
    • Record low temperatures
    • Sea ice more extensive than at any time in the modern-day record
  • Arctic:
    • summer sea ice increased by 2.4 million square km in 2013 compared to 2012
    • largest year-to-year increase since satellite records began

Orwellian warming, maybe….

Look! Shiny!

President Barack Obama was in California at the end of last week, touting “executive actions” (no need of an impudent Congress, he) for spending money to “help” the state fight its drought problem.  Among his promised expenditures were $100 million in assistance for livestock producers, $60 million in food-bank funding for families affected by the drought, and $15 million for areas nationwide most severely harmed by dry conditions.  Don’t worry about how all of this will be paid for: Obama just got a new checkbook from Congress, of course he still has money in the bank.

Then he segued to our climate “problem.”  Shiny!

He repeated his call for $1 billion (that new checkbook, again) for “climate resilience,” supported by his Assistant for Science and Technology, John Holdren, who averred

Weather practically everywhere is being influenced by climate change.

(We need an Assistant to the President to say something any first grader understands?)

You bet climate and changing climate influences weather—that’s what climate change does—it alters the conditions within which weather occurs.  And the sun is, indeed, warming over its lifetime, and within that, it’s presently undergoing a quiescent period, as measured by its current sunspot cycle, of historic proportions—rather like its quiescent period prior to and during the Little Ice Age.

But, shiny!

Obama has made climate change a centerpiece of his second-term agenda, tapping the Environmental Protection Agency to limit carbon emissions from power plants….

Obama recently launched the creation of “climate hubs” to study how volatile weather conditions are affecting the agriculture industry.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Obama would pledge the “federal government will do all that it can” to help farmers and livestock producers and that he would act “rather than wait for congressional action.”

Never mind climate “models” that can’t simultaneously predict the past and the present, we should believe them anyway.  Never mind cherry-picked tree ring data, falsified NASA historical data, substitution of data from an Australian coastal station for a failed station 700 miles away in the Australian interior.  Never mind atmospheric CO2 data that demonstrate that increased levels follow global warming rather than precede it, thus confirming the increasing health of the planet from burgeoning life.

Look at all of that, anyway, and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain talking about Obamacare, failed jobs and economic policies, a stagnant “recovery,” or failed foreign policies that have us feared by our friends and held in contempt by our enemies.

It’s shiny….

Climate Change, Again

A couple of graphs are highly illustrative, from an article titled, appropriately enough, When Did Global Warming Begin? at Watts Up With That?

This graph, generated from ice core data collected at two sites in Antarctica, shows temperature changes over the last 450,000 years.  It’s interesting that there have been four sharp rises in temperature prior to the latest one, and each of them has been at least as sharp as the latest one.  The latest one also appears to have flattened out at roughly the same levels as, or a bit lower than, those four.

Now see this graph, generated from ice core data collected in Greenland.

The graph axes are a bit hard to read: on the upper graph, the left axis is Air Temperature (oC) at the Summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet, the right axis is Approximate Global Temperature Anomaly (oC); on the lower graph, the left axis is Atmosphere CO2 (ppm—parts per million), the X-axis for both graphs is Years before Now.

In spite of the CO2 panic-mongering, it’s pretty clear that a CO2 rise has been occurring for the last 7,000 years, and that rise is completely unrelated to the warming/cooling spates that have been occurring over the same interval (and the preceding decrease in CO2 levels is similarly unrelated to temperature in that preceding period).  In fact, since the temperature peak some 3,500 years ago, successive temperature peaks have been decreasing, even while atmospheric CO2 continues to rise.  Some pollutant.

It doesn’t appear very much like humans are impacting Earth’s climate in any significant way, even though we can impact our ecology quite significantly (see the expansion of the Sahara, apparently due to overgrazing, for instance).  But climate mongering is an enormous money machine for the climate panickers, far more so than ecology ever has been.

The Evils of Fracking

It seems that fracking, that heinous technology used for getting hard-to-reach natural gas and oil out of the very deep underground, far from polluting our water, saves it, especially where natural gas-based electricity generating plants are concerned.  According to a University of Texas study published in Environmental Research Letters,

Even though exploration for natural gas through hydraulic fracturing requires significant water consumption in Texas, the new consumption is easily offset by the overall water efficiencies of shifting electricity generation from coal to natural gas.  The researchers estimate that water saved by shifting a power plant from coal to natural gas is 25 to 50 times as great as the amount of water used in hydraulic fracturing to extract the natural gas.

Natural gas-fired power plants use about two-thirds less water than coal-fired plants to cool the generators.  The switch to natural gas-based electricity generation, made commercially feasible by fracking, thus reduces water use by the plants significantly.  Aside from reducing water consumption in and of itself, and reducing costs for producers and consumers of electricity, this yields another, longer-term outcome.  Senior Research Scientist at UT’s Bureau of Economic Geology, said,

The bottom line is that hydraulic fracturing, by boosting natural gas production and moving the state from water-intensive coal technologies, makes our electric power system more drought resilient.

Bad fracking.  Bad.

Can’t Happen Here

Enquiries by the Daily Mail have revealed:

  • Four of the nine-person Climate Change Committee, the official watchdog that dictates green energy policy, are, or were until very recently, being paid by firms that benefit from committee decisions.
  • A new breed of lucrative green investment funds, which were set up to expand windfarm energy, are in practice a means of taking green levies paid by hard-pressed consumers and handing them to City investors and financiers.
  • £3.8 billion of taxpayers’ money funds the new Green Investment Bank, set up by the Department of Business and Skills. One of its biggest deals involved energy giant SSE selling windfarms to one of the new green funds, Greencoat Wind.  The Green Investment Bank’s chairman, Lord Smith of Kelvin, is also chairman of SSE.  The bank says it ‘provided expertise’ to enable BIS to take a £50 million stake in Greencoat, which helped fund the SSE sale.
  • The same bank’s chief executive, Shaun Kingsbury, is one of the UK’s highest-paid public sector employees.  His £325,000 salary is more than twice the Prime Minister’s.
  • Firms lobbying for renewables can virtually guarantee access to key Government policy-makers, because they are staffed by former very senior officials—a striking example of Whitehall’s ‘revolving door’.

The Daily Mail identifies specific players in the Green Charade at the link.

 

h/t Power Line