Tag Archives: climate

“Climate” Again

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Texas and California are in the middle of droughts. This is, of course, due to man-caused climate change. Or is it? Watts Up With That has a couple of graphs that bear on the matter.

This one gives one idea of the history of droughts and wet periods over the last, oh, say, 1,200 years:NorthAmericaDroughtGrid

The dots in the upper part of the figure give the locations at which measurements were taken. The lower part gives the time history of wet vs dry for the time frame indicated; the dotted lines flanking the solid black line give the error range for the measurements. The shaded yellow area to the right indicates the (limited) time frame of interest to our climate panic mongers. The average dryness for an earlier period (notice that it’s outside the time of interest to our mongers) is shown by the solid red line, and the average wetness is shown by the blue line that’s partially obscured by the yellow shading.

This graph gives a clearer indication of wet and dry periods, including that long time frame so studiously ignored by our mongers. The graph points up California’s strait because Watt’s article was centered on all the nonsense California’s Democrats are spouting about their drought. It pretty much speaks for itself.200YrCaliforniaDrought

The graph’s small text may be hard to read; it says

Evidence from tree rings shows that drought was historically much more widespread in the American West than now, while the 20th century was wetter than normal. Percentage of the West affected by drought from 800 AD to 2000.

Hmm….

Gina “Joe” McCarthy

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…is at it again. Operating carefully in the proverbial dead of night, burying its new rule in the 80,000 page Federal Register and unadorned by any other announcement,

The Environmental Protection Agency has quietly floated a rule claiming authority to bypass the courts and unilaterally garnish paychecks of those accused of violating its rules….

The EPA also has fast-tracked passage of this rule in an effort to get it into effect before anyone knows it’s there. Until it’s applied. The EPA has justified the fast-tracking by claiming, with an absolutely straight face, that this isn’t a “significant regulatory action.”

On top of that, Gina “Joe” doesn’t feel any need to explain herself.

EPA officials did not respond to repeated questions by The Washington Times about why they thought it was necessary to garnish people’s wages.

The explanation she’s reluctant to say out loud, though, clearly is, “Courts? We don’t need no courts! I don’t have to take you into any stinkin’ courts!”

Global Warming

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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!

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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

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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.