by Michael Rollins, The Oregonian, Friday April 18, 2008, 1:08 PM [here]
The big question on everybody’s mind as they watch their natural gas bills go up and shiver at assorted baseball games and soccer matches this Saturday and Sunday? How cold is it anyway?
Pretty darn cold, at least in terms of the record book.
The record low high temperature for April 19 is 47 degrees, set in 1961. The forecast for Saturday calls for a high of 48. The record low for that date is 31, set in 1982. Tonight’s forecast calls for an overnight low of 36 and 33 Saturday night.
The record low high April 20 temperature is 42 set in 1963. The forecast for Sunday calls for a high of 49. The record low for April 20 is 33 degrees, set in 1975.
Before we break away, the record high for Saturday was 80 in 1956 and for Sunday, 84 in 1956. Hmmm. Sounds like a nice April back then.
Admin note: It is currently snowing here at W.I.S.E. World Headquarters in the Willamette Valley. Daffodils, irises, and cherry, peach, pear, and apple blossoms appear to be withering due to repeated drenches of snow, sleet, hail, and freezing rain. The blooms were already two weeks later than average. The global cooling so much desired by knee jerk liberal boneheads and urban yokels swimming in dumbfounding gullibility is here. Hip hip hooray.
April 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
by The Oregonian and The Associated Press, Saturday April 19, 2008, 7:21 AM
Light snow fell overnight at higher Portland-area elevations and forecasters say the region should brace for low temperatures and possibly more snow through the weekend.
The Portland area is expected to approach record cold for the date, with a high of 48 anticipated today, one degree short of the record low high temperature for this day. [more]
April 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
Listing posted on Solar Science blog [here]
Another week of excitement as the second solar cycle 24 spot appeared…and then disappeared just as rapidly.
I can’t help feeling that with an unprecedented amount of high technology monitoring the Sun with ever higher resolution, the criteria by which a sunspot is defined has become radically weakened to such an extent that it all becomes meaningless.
On Climate Audit commenters noted that the criteria for naming hurricanes had become so weakened that practically any frontal wave in the Eastern Atlantic that persisted for more than a few hours got a name (the so-called “Tiny Tims” of the hurricane season).
So it appears to be with sunspots and Solar Cycle 24. … [more]
April 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
By Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post
Listing posted on ICECAP [here]
Kim Dabelstein Petersen. She (or he?) is an editor at Wikipedia. What does she edit? Reams and reams of global warming pages. I started checking them. In every instance I checked, she defended those warning of catastrophe and deprecated those who believe the science is not settled. I investigated further. Others had tried to correct her interpretations and had the same experience as I—no sooner did they make their corrections than she pounced, preventing Wikipedia readers from reading anyone’s views but her own. When they protested plaintively, she wore them down and snuffed them out.
By patrolling Wikipedia pages and ensuring that her spin reigns supreme over all climate change pages, she has made of Wikipedia a propaganda vehicle for global warming alarmists. But unlike government propaganda, its source is not self-evident. We don’t suspend belief when we read Wikipedia, as we do when we read literature from an organization with an agenda, because Wikipedia benefits from the Internet’s cachet of making information free and democratic. This Big Brother enforces its views with a mouse.
While I’ve been writing this column, the Naomi Oreskes page has changed 10 times. Since I first tried to correct the distortions on the page, it has changed 28 times. If you have read a climate change article on Wikipedia—or on any controversial subject that may have its own Kim Dabelstein Petersen—beware. Wikipedia is in the hands of the zealots.
April 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
Listing posted on Tom Nelson Blogspot [here]
Only a lonely quartet of governors showed up (and even Arnold Schwarzenegger was late):
Joining Rell and Schwarzenegger in signing the declaration on the stage in Woolsey Hall were Govs. Jon Corzine of New Jersey and Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas.
Note that all 50 governors were invited, and careful weasel wording earlier this week suggested that as many as 10 governors would participate.
This event was supposed to convince us that U.S. state governors care deeply about global warming; to any thinking person, this event indicates just the opposite.
April 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
Listing posted on Tom Nelson Blogspot [here]
ABC and the Washington Post polled Americans about the most important issue to them in the upcoming elections. The economy ranked #1 with 41%, Iraq #2 with 18%, Health Care #3 with 7%, Terrorism/National Security #4 with 5%, Immigration and Ethics followed with 4%, Education and Morals with 2%, Environment and Global Warming continue to receive a 0%.
April 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
By PATRICK MICHAELS, Wall Street Journal, April 18, 2008
President George W. Bush has just announced his goal to stabilize greenhouse-gas emissions by 2025. To get there, he proposes new fuel-economy standards for autos, and lower emissions from power plants built in the next 10 to 15 years.
Pending legislation in the Senate from Joe Lieberman and John Warner would cut emissions even further – by 66% by 2050. No one has a clue how to do this. Because there is no substitute technology to achieve these massive reductions, we’ll just have to get by with less energy.
Compared to a year ago, gasoline consumption has dropped only 0.5% at current prices. So imagine how expensive it would be to reduce overall emissions by 66%.
The earth’s paltry warming trend, 0.31 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the mid-1970s, isn’t enough to scare people into poverty. And even that 0.31 degree figure is suspect.
For years, records from surface thermometers showed a global warming trend beginning in the late 1970s. But temperatures sensed by satellites and weather balloons displayed no concurrent warming. …
Then it was discovered that our orbiting satellites have a few faults. The sensors don’t last very long and are continually being supplanted by replacement orbiters. The instruments are calibrated against each other, so if one is off, so is the whole record. Frank Wentz, a consulting atmospheric scientist from California, discovered that the satellites also drift a bit in their orbits, which induces additional bias in their readings. The net result? A warming trend appears where before there was none. …
There have been six major revisions in the warming figures in recent years, all in the same direction. So it’s like flipping a coin six times and getting tails each time. The chance of that occurring is 0.016, or less than one in 50. That doesn’t mean that these revisions are all hooey, but the probability that they would all go in one direction on the merits is pretty darned small.
The removal of weather-balloon data because poor nations don’t do a good job of minding their weather instruments deserves more investigation… For example, weather stations are supposed to be a standard white color. If they darken from lack of maintenance, temperatures read higher than they actually are. After adjusting for such effects, as much as half of the warming in the U.N.’s land-based record vanishes. Because about 70% of earth’s surface is water, this could mean a reduction of as much as 15% in the global warming trend.
Another interesting thing happens to the U.N.’s data when it’s adjusted for the non-climatic factors. The frequency of very warm months is lowered, to the point at which it matches the satellite data, which show fewer very hot months. That’s a pretty good sign that there are fundamental problems with the surface temperature history. …
But every climatologist must know that Greenland’s last decade was no warmer than several decades in the early and mid-20th century. In fact, the period from 1970-1995 was the coldest one since the late 19th century, meaning that Greenland’s ice anomalously expanded right about the time climate change scientists decided to look at it. …
This prompts the ultimate question: Why is the news on global warming always bad? Perhaps because there’s little incentive to look at things the other way. If you do, you’re liable to be pilloried by your colleagues. If global warming isn’t such a threat, who needs all that funding? Who needs the army of policy wonks crawling around the world with bold plans to stop climate change? … [more]
April 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
By Bob Zybach, Opinion, Eugene Register Guard
For Oregonians with a strong interest in doing something about global warming and climate change, the logical starting point is our forests. That is where most of the carbon is, and where the most immediate and profound actions can take place to affect statewide carbon dioxide emissions.
Here are five practices that can be implemented within a few months or years. These practices would achieve dramatic results in Oregon’s efforts to address this issue: 1) Prevent forest fires by rapid response and 2) by mechanical thinning to reduce ladder fuels, 3) by salvaging dead trees, 4) by planting new trees and 5) by creating log banks. … [more]
April 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News, Latest Forest News
From ICECAP [here]: If anyone would bother to look at the actual data instead of just pronouncements in the media from NOAA or GISS, they would not be surprised at all by these findings. Here is a plot of actual monthly temperatures and the trends from the Hadley global data set (HADCRUT3v) and University of Alabama satellite derived lower tropospheric temperatures covering the same period as the robots measured ocean heat content. Like the robots they show a downtrend (cooling).
It is also worth noting that Roger Pielke Sr. [here] has advocated ocean heat content as a better measure of the global changes in temperatures than surface station based trends. Work by Roger and Anthony Watts at surfacestations.org have identified major issues with the land stations. In this case the ocean heat content agrees with the land stations, so the cooling over the past 5 years is very likely real. 5 years does not a long term trend make but it does call into question claims the warming is accelerating and that immediate action is required.
March 19, 2008 | 1 Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren’t quite understanding what their robots are telling them.
This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.
In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.
“There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant,” Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. “Global warming doesn’t mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming.” … [more]
All derisive comments welcome.
March 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
A new study has found that California wildfires emit more greenhouse gases than previously believed largely through the post-fire decay of dead wood, a finding that is raising questions about how effective the state’s forests are at storing carbon and slowing global warming.
The study by Thomas Bonnicksen, a retired forestry professor at Texas A&M University, found that four major wildfires – from the Fountain fire near Redding in 1992 to the Angora blaze at Lake Tahoe last year – are responsible for the release of 38 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, far more than the 2 million tons the state estimates that fires produce on average each year.
“Up until now, we have not fully appreciated the magnitude of the impact of wildfires on climate change,” Bonnicksen said. “This is a very important part of the problem.”
His study, which is not peer-reviewed and has been found lacking by some, is one of a flurry of reports that have begun to explore the critical role that forests play in regulating carbon dioxide, the principal atmospheric gas responsible for global warming. Traditionally, forests have been viewed as green reservoirs of landlocked carbon, soaking up and storing CO2 from the atmosphere in their leaves, needles, roots and soil.
Bonnicksen’s study casts that view into question. Forests today are so overcrowded with spindly, unhealthy trees – partly the result of decades of fire suppression – that as they burn and decay they are turning into an actual source of greenhouse gas pollution.
His study, for example, estimates emissions from just one blaze alone last year, the Moonlight fire in Plumas County, at more than 19.6 million tons, three-quarters of which are expected to occur over the next century as trees killed by the fire decay. That much carbon is roughly equivalent to the emissions from 3.6 million cars for a year.
Overall, California fires are producing so much CO2, he said, that they will defeat the state’s pioneering efforts to respond to climate change by reducing emissions elsewhere.
“No matter what anybody does in California to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as long as these forests are burning, they are wasting their time,” Bonnicksen said. … [more]
For the full text of Dr. Bonnicksen’s reports, see W.I.S.E. Forest and Fire Science [here]
March 15, 2008 | 1 Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News, Latest Fire News, Latest Forest News
A Guest Post by Neil McCann
I like to fondly think of myself as “a scientist”. I have a Bachelor of Environmental Science (Australian Environmental Studies). I like to think “scientifically”, and this is the first letter I’ve ever written – -just to establish that I’m not a total nutter or media/Internet blog junkie. I feel compelled to speak out about the current green/greenhouse obsession –- in the vein that silly ideas can take on a life of their own when other people do and say nothing.
To the greenhouse/global warming advocates: I am an unbeliever! I find it astounding that the only significant source of heat on the planet, in fact in the entire solar system, is completely ignored or unspokenly assumed to be static and unchanging, and that a minor gas making up a very small percentage of Earth’s atmosphere is declared definitely responsible for a less than 1% temperature change over the last 100 years.
The southern oceans of earth are documented as showing a temperature increase of 0.01 percent. It’s not science to assume C02 is definitely the culprit (human knowledge is littered with false correlations –- it is only a correlation between temperature and CO2, and correlation is definitely not causation), and that the sun, a fantastically enormous ball of fire that I can feel directly on my skin, that must and does vary (think solar flares) is definitely not. That isn’t science, it’s ideology.
Let’s be honest, it’s still only a theory. There is NOT universal agreement, and that’s a fact. Many scientists heavily dispute both the theory and the underlying data. Approximately 20,000 people with science degrees and/or post graduate qualifications recently signed a petition from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, a nonprofit, non-corporate funded research institute entirely disputing the global warming thesis. Not 50, 100, or 2000, but 20,000. Most people have never heard of OISM; it gets no airtime.
It’s quite possibly a classic chicken and egg -– which came first? — situation. When you boil a kettle, heat comes first, and then comes steam/gas. It’s counterintuitive to reverse this dynamic, as greenhouse believers do, i.e., that instead, add gas first and this causes the temperature to rise. Think about it, if the oceans are warmed, they then release, among other things, CO2. This is primary school physics. The earth is not a greenhouse anyway. It’s an open, not a closed system.
Read more
March 12, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
By Mike Surbrugg, CNHI News Service, Midwest City Sun [here]
SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — Jim Gerrish, a grazing land consultant, recently spoke at a forage conference in Springfield and offered several perspectives for cattle producers and farmers.
Cattle operations in countries that make more use of forages have positive returns despite low prices and they are not hurt by the rising corn prices linked to ethanol production, he said. Gerrish also predicted that in three years ethanol production will collapse.
A former University of Missouri forage scientist, Gerrish said ethanol requires more energy to produce than it provides, is less efficient than unleaded gasoline, hurts the environment by using more land to grow corn and hurts the agricultural economy.
Cattle producers also can buy expensive equipment to make labor more efficient and still lose money making hay, he said. His challenge is not to work hard, but to work smart. Doing this enables some successful ranches in the West to use one employee to care for up to 800 cows by letting cattle eat grass.
“We need cows that work for us, not us for them. Too many cows have an addiction to corn,” Gerrish said.
Functional livestock on any size farm or ranch harvest the grass, spread manure on the land and have calves without help, he said.
“They are your employees. Leave them alone to do their jobs. Let them eat grass. They’re ruminants,” he said.
Maximum use of grass helps the environment, provides a healthier food for consumers and can improve farm income.
“Market your product, your story about your farm and your sincerity. Be honest and believable and look your customers in the eye and tell them how you raise animals and how they are processed,” he said.
March 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
by Julie Kay Smithson
We are noticing a decided absence of “global warming”. In fact, we’ve just had the most snow ever recorded in a 24-hour period in this part of Ohio, 15.4 inches, PLUS the most snow ever recorded here in one snowstorm, 21.4 inches.
There are some amazing drifts, some of them four to five feet high, and many of them on the local roads. Fifteen counties, including my own, Madison County, are under Level 3, which means the roads are closed to all but emergency personnel. Another 18 counties are Level 2, for a total of 33 counties, in the middle of Ohio that got slam-dunked by Ole Man Winter!
Read more
March 10, 2008 | 3 Comments | Topic: Latest Climate News
By Marc Sheppard, The American Thinker [here]
If you rely solely on the mainstream media to keep informed, you may not have heard that the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change concluded in New York City on Tuesday. And if you have heard anything — this being primarily a forum of skeptics — it was likely of a last gasp effort by “flat-Earthers” sponsored by right-wingers in the pockets of big-oil to breathe life into their dying warming denial agenda. Well, having just returned from the 3 day event, I’m happy to report that the struggle against the ravages of warming alarmism is not only alive, but healthier than ever.
Granting a long overdue forum to noted dissenting scientists, economists and policy experts from around the world, the Heartland Institute-sponsored symposium at the Marriott Marquis offered welcomed reasoned analysis as alternative to last December’s hysterical circus which was Bali. It also served as the perfect launch point for a long-awaited un-IPCC report — Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate: Summary for Policymakers of the Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change [here].
Compiling the work of over 20 prominent fellow researchers, editor Fred Singer’s NIPCC report distinguishes itself from the recent IPCC Fourth Assessment (AR4) and its predecessors in that it was not pre-programmed to “support the hypotheses of anthropogenic warming (AGW) and the control of greenhouse gases.” Instead, the nearly 50 page document is a non-political authoritative rebuttal to the multi-government controlled IPCC’s “errors and outright falsehoods” regarding warming’s measurement, likely drivers, and overall impact.
And its ultimate conclusion of “natural causes and a moderate warming trend with beneficial effects for humanity and wildlife” set the perfect framework for speakers and panelists - many of whom contributed to the NIPCC — to elaborate on the summit’s “Global warming is not a crisis” theme. … [more]
March 10, 2008 | 2 Comments | Topic: Latest Climate News
