In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, a question of should be the top three concerns for the Federal government was asked. Those identifying as Democrats list climate change as one of their top three.
That would be laughable if it weren’t so sad. King Canute couldn’t stop the tides. Do Democrats really think they can stop the sun?
Some of you may recall the Democratic Congressman from Arizona, Raul Grijalva, and his assault on the integrity of scientists and others who have the impudence to question his and his Left’s Orthodoxy on anthropogenic global warming. One of his assault victims was Dr Willie Soon, of the Solar and Stellar Physics (SSP) Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Soon has released a statement regarding this assault and its implications. In part, he says,
I am saddened and appalled by this effort, not only because of the personal hurt it causes me and my family and friends, but also because of the damage it does to the integrity of the scientific process. I am willing to debate the substance of my research and competing views of climate change with anyone, anytime, anywhere. It is a shame that those who disagree with me resolutely decline all public debate and stoop instead to underhanded and unscientific ad hominem tactics.
…
I regret deeply that the attacks on me now appear to have spilled over onto other scientists who have dared to question the degree to which human activities might be causing dangerous global warming, a topic that ought rightly be the subject of rigorous open debate, not personal attack. I similarly regret the terrible message this pillorying sends young researchers about the costs of questioning widely accepted “truths.”…I challenge all parties involved to focus on real scientific issues for the betterment of humanity.
Put up or shut up, guys. Of what are you so terrified, that you refuse to debate matters of science? Other than your understanding that you have no case, I mean.
h/t Power Line
It’s precipitating global warmth in the Middle East.
Snow fell Wednesday across the Middle East as a powerful winter storm swept through the region, forcing Syrians who have fled their country’s civil war to huddle for warmth in refugee camps.
And
Near the town of Anjar, [Lebanon,] men used brooms and sticks to try to clear the heavy snow from the tops of refugee tents, fearing the weight might cause the shelters to collapse.
And
Palestinian authorities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip declared a state of emergency over the storm.
And
Snow accumulated in the Golan Heights and northern Israel. Schools across Jerusalem closed ahead of a forecast warning of 10 inches (25 centimeters) of snowfall.
Hmm….
Watts Up With That has a summary article and graph on this; the basic article is on the other side of a link in the summary. It’s typically academic in its language, but it’s well worth a layman’s time in slogging through. Here’s the graph (which is a construction of Watts’; it’s not in the linked-to article):
Northern Europe summer (June, July, August) temperature reconstruction. Data shown in °C with respect to the 1961-1990 mean. Adapted from Esper et al. (2014).
The black lines are individual data points, and the grey shading smoothes the data. The green line represents the center of the grey shading, and the red line approximates a regression line showing the long-term rate of cooling over these 2,000 years. All the representations show the same thing: it was warmer in northern Europe 2,000 years ago, during the time of the Roman Empire, than it is today.
The take away for me, though, is what’s represented by the black lines and the grey shading. Compare those to the alleged warming trend of the last 100 years—and its stagnation over the last 20 years (fully a fifth of those 100 years).
Now show that that recent “trend” is distinguishable from the noise level apparent in the data and their first smoothing, the grey shade.
…about climate change. In a paper, Atmospheric controls on northeast Pacific temperature variability and change, 1900–2012, released last Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, roughly translated for us laymen by the AP, authors Jim Johnstone, at the time of his research with the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington, and Nathan Mantua, research scientist with the NOAA Fisheries Service in Santa Cruz, CA, found that northeast Pacific (that’s abeam the US) ocean warming since 1900 correlates better with naturally occurring wind pattern changes than with any pattern of human greenhouse gas injection into the atmosphere. According to Johnstone,
What we found was the somewhat surprising degree to which the winds can explain all the wiggles in the temperature curve. So clearly, there are other factors stronger than the greenhouse forcing that is affecting those temperatures[.]
Also damaging to the climate panic-mongers’ case were these facts:
[O]ne steep ocean warming period from 1920 to 1940 predates the big increases in greenhouse gases, and an ocean cooling period from 1998 to 2013 came while global average temperatures were at or near all-time highs.
Of course the climate pseudo-science folks demur.
They pointed out that the study sees a correlation but did not do the rigorous statistical and computer analysis to show that the cause of the wind changes were natural—the kind of analysis done when scientists attribute weather extremes to global warming.
This would be the same computer analysis—computer modeling—that has found itself unable to predict, simultaneously, the past and the present, and which predictions of the future have been wildly variable and heavily dependent on the specific values assigned to a myriad of model inputs.
The abstract is here; the full article is behind the PNAS‘ login wall.