Michaelyya/contrarian-claims huggingface dataset:
Is flooding becoming more common in Europe as a result of global warming? Well not according to a recent study in the publication New Scientist, which examined this issue and found such claims to be awash in hype. According to scientists at the University of Leipzig in Germany and Reading University in the U.K., the historical record dating back over 1,000 years indicates no statistical upward trend of note, even when factoring in the devastating floods that left cities from Prague to Dresden awash with high water in 2002. While flooding hasn't increased, the study says, damage claims have. But this is because of changes in land use near rivers, not global warming. So it seems the claims linking flooding and global climate change are all wet indeed.
In terms of severity and geographic extent, the 2000-4 drought in the West exceeded such legendary events as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. While that drought saw intervening years of normal rainfall, the years of the turn-of-the-century drought were consecutive. More seriously still, long-term climate records from tree-ring chronologies show that this drought was the most severe event of its kind in the western United States in the past 800 years. Though there have been many extreme droughts over the last 1,200 years, only three other events have been of similar magnitude, all during periods of megadroughts.
More to the point, unilateral action will not mitigate climate change. The U.S. is only a small fraction of total emissions. Even if all of the Annex I countries of the Kyoto Protocol agreed to binding constraints, they would account for less than half of the world?s total emissions, and a far smaller fraction of the expected growth in emissions between now and 2100. To act unilaterally, or even in conjunction with the rest of the developed world, would mean paying the full measure of mitigating climate change while receiving only a fraction of its benefit.
They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?
Heading back to the EPA's Description of Likelihood Table (above) we find that instead of "very likely," probably the most apropos descriptor is found a couple of lines down, the one that encompasses a 33 to 66% probabilityor "about as likely as not."
The miners? union accepts, and at times supports, the primary reason for EPA carbon-dioxide regulations; namely, fears of dangerous man-made climate change.
If you strip away the ex-socialist workers party policy threads that infiltrated the Greens platform and look at what they want for the natural environment, it can make appealing reading.
It is well known thatnighttimesurface temperatures have risen over the last century. This is primarily due to the Urban Heat Island effect. Asphalt, heaters, air conditioners, irrigation they all keepnighttimetemperatures up.
Sherman next admitted that yes, the stations showed a slight end-to-end drop over the time theyve run. That was nice to see. But he then argued the very brief temperature uptick in 2011-2012 means the long-term temperature trend may end up oscillating while remaining rather flat rather than being one of long-term cooling. OK, that may or may not turn out to be the case, but where did I claim that Shermans admitted 10-year cooling portends a longer-term cooling trend? Which part of Of course, 10 years is hardly enough to establish a long-term trend was Sherman incapable of understanding? Moreover, even if a long-term oscillating temperature stagnation does indeed occur, that would also support my larger argument that the temperature data contradict claims of accelerating warming.
Lewis Deane on October 5, 2013 at 1:35 am
"Interestingly," as Appelhans et al . conclude, "the enhanced vulnerability of mussels seems to be neutralized by the decreased consumption of the predators under high acidification." And they say that "these results illustrate that different stress effects on interacting species may not only enhance but also buffer community level effects," further emphasizing that "when stress effects are similar (and weak) on interacting species, biotic interactions may remain unaffected."
In his earlier movies, Emmerich recognized the need for conflict in a story: In Independence Day there were aliens to fight; in Godzilla a giant lizard; in The Patriot, redcoats. Who are the heroes of The Day After Tomorrow up against? An angry Mother Nature revolting to point out the folly of men (to paraphrase Blue Oyster Cult on the protagonist of an earlier Emmerich flick). A short list of such follies might include driving SUVs and failing to endorse the Kyoto Protocol.
Because a few days ago, the Arctic team saw the carbon footprints of the local landlord, a male polar bear whose private territory they have violated, they may want to watch the video above to improve their mood. ;-)
Would federal investment in renewable energy technologies make Kyoto feasible and affordable? Not even remotely, says Mills. Just to meet 30% of the expected growth in U.S. electricity demand over the next 20 years, wind and solar power would have to expand output 37,000-fold! No combination of tax preferences, outright subsidies, or Apollo-style R&D; programs could accomplish such a miracle. Kyoto can't be "done smart."
"For Gilly and many other Frenchmen and women, social benefits such as long vacations, state-subsidized health care and early retirement are more than just luxuries: They're seen as a birthright an essential part of the identity of today's France "
The following is reported in a United Mine Workers of America/Bituminous Coal Operators Assn. climate change briefing paper, From Rio to Kyoto, 1997: "A 1996 U.S. EPA study concluded that massive life-style changes such as requiring new vehicles to achieve 63 mpg by 2010 and retrofitting existing homes with state-of-the-art appliances and other energy-saving technologies would not allow the U.S. to reduce emissions below 1990 levels.
either the frequency of tropical or extratropical cyclones over the North Atlantic are projected to appreciably change due to climate change, nor have there been indications of a change in their statistical behavior over this region in recent decades, Hoerling told environmental writer Andrew Revkin.
Sure, there are corners of the Earth that have gotten colder, and some that haven't changed much. There are also some places that have warmed much more than the global average. Overall, though, all lines of evidence point in the same direction: warming.
Australias antarctic runway melting I4U News
Referring to the pleading submitted by the 300 petitioners, he responded that "This letter shows that hundreds of respected scientists and experts agree that NOAA's efforts to alter historical temperature data deserve serious scrutiny."
El Nio: A warming of parts of the tropical Pacific indicates that an El Nio may be building. Although largely ignored by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), El Nios and the opposite La Nias apparently have a significant impact on global temperatures, hence global warming. Strong El Nios warm, La Nias cool. The great temperature spike in 1998 was from a super El Nio. Physicist Donn Rapp has a lucid historical explanation on Climate Etc. Some alarmists are calling for a strong El Nio, as it would restart global warming. Based on the historic data, Joe Bastardi of WeatherBELL Analytics asserts that if it materializes, it will not be strong.
Studies involving 28 million weather balloons, thousands of satellite recordings, 3,000 ocean buoys, temperature recordings from 50 sites in the US and a 1,000 years of temperature proxies suggest that the Global Climate Models overestimate positive feedback and are based on poor assumptions. Observations suggest lower values for climate sensitivity whether we study long-term humidity, upper tropospheric temperature trends, outgoing long wave radiation, cloud cover changes, or the changes in the heat content of the vast oceans.
A kind reader from Holland has sent me this short but informative extract from the German Manual of Global Climatic Geo-Engineering
Please note that articles not linked easily or summarized here are reproduced in the Articles Section of the full TWTW that can be found on the web site under the date of the TWTW.
Leaked United Nations report reveals the world's temperature hasn't risen for the last 15 years
Second, a ???clean energy standard?? (CES), like the failed Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill,is just another way of?? skinning the cat ,??as President Obama put it. A CES is another way to ???bankrupt?? coal power plants and cause electricity rates to ??? necessarily skyrocket .?? Obama??s CES proposal aims at almost exactly the same mix of electricity fuels that the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill would have created. A CES resembles a Soviet-style production quota and would probably be less efficient than cap-and-trade. Why should Republicans andBlue Dog Democrats who oppose cap-and-trade feel obliged to support something even worse?
This is a stunning finding in and of itself, to be sure, but heres the Drinking the Kool-Aid part: These findings may provide further support for recent guideline revisions with even lower LDL goals and for developing effective treatments to raise HDL.
An even better solution might be to build some new power plants, for example nuclear ones.
Iain Murray, Senior Fellow, International Policy
b) Asian women working full-time earned only about 3% less per week ($841) than the average full-time male worker ($871) in 2014.
"Verizon Communications Inc. on Thursday filed a legal challenge to new federal regulations that prohibit broadband providers from interfering with Internet traffic flowing over their networks."
One of the most interesting, if unsurprising, findings of the Prosperity Index is that higher-income countries have diminishing returns to life satisfaction (see figure 1). In crude terms, this means that if you live in one of the poorest nations on earth, an increase in income is vitally important to improved prosperity, so driving growth is a critical ambition for those living in such regions. In wealthier parts of the world, however, greater secur-ity, better governance, and personal freedom are more important to life satisfaction than are small increases in wealth. In the figure, one can see that a hypothetical increase in income from $3,000 to $6,000 would increase life satisfaction much more than an increase in income from $23,000 to $26,000 would.
COMPARISONS OF HOVMOLLER DIAGRAMS OF THIS YEAR (TO DATE) WITH 1982
Sam Karnick, Chris Monckton, provide some push back to warmer claims
Voters made their preference clear: Republicans won more seats, and with bigger majorities, than anyone predicted.
caused by factors (as food or a traumatic factor) or an agent (as a disease-producing organism) from outside the organism or system.
On the military side, the importance of the maritime dimension begins with the fact that, for all the talk about airlift capabilities, 90 percent of military lift remains sealift. But what is more noteworthy about the post-Cold War period is the fact that the decline of "maritime domain awareness" within the Atlantic Alliance took place precisely at the time when globalization was significantly increasing the importance of the maritime dimension on the commercial side (85 percent of world trade volume and 60 percent of oil and gas travels by sea) and of maritime security, all too often confused with and reduced to maritime safety.
Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump introduces his wife Melania during the opening session of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S., July 18, 2016. REUTERS/Rick Wilking
The Zeit also tells the story of how Mann once received a letter containing white powder, how he got a threatening e-mail, and that today his life is no longer how it once was . The underlying message Die Zeit conveys here is that climate scientists are being hounded, tormented and persecuted by a ruthless, industry funded mob.
Latour: I agree the K-T diagram shows what you say. I said CO 2 and you said atmosphere. Atmosphere is only 400 ppmv CO 2 , so they are different. My statement stands. I said if CO 2 absorbs incoming and emits in all directions, it would cool the surface. Since you did not take exception, I am glad we agree again. I suspect you do not know the difference between radiation intensity given by S-B Equation and radiant heat transfer from a hot body to cooler surroundings, given by the law of radiant energy transfer. Just because they have same units, w/m 2 does not mean they are the same phenomenon. This is a source of your confusion.
One such study states: High-resolution records from Antarctic ice cores show that carbon dioxide concentrations increased by 80 to 100 parts per million by volume 600 +/- 400 years after the warming of the last three deglaciations. Despite strongly decreasing temperatures, high carbon dioxide concentrations can be sustained for thousands of years during glaciations; The last part goes to the unanswered question that with the onset of an ice age, why do temperatures fall when carbon dioxide levels remain high? CO2 concentrations are not the control knob of climate the Climate Establishment asserts. Please see: Ice Core Records of Atmospheric CO2 Around the Last Three Glacial Terminations, By Hubertus Fischer, et al. Science, 1999, http://www.climate.unibe.ch/~hfischer/Publications files/fischer99sci.pdf
After the United Nations conference on global warming in Kyoto in early December 1997, the researchers went into the field again with another national survey, conducted between Dec. 20, 1997, and Feb. 13, 1998. The surveys, which enabled researchers to look at how opinions changed during a period of heightened attention to the issue, were funded by the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and were sponsored by Resources for the Future.
By James Owen, National Geographic News, Jul 31, 2015
The eight Spanish researchers report that "no apparent pH-driven effects were observed in the skeletal growth rate, micro-density and porosity of both species compared to control conditions after six months of exposure," which results they say "are in accordance with two previous mid-term studies assessing the effects of OA on these same species, where no differences were observed after 6 months in L. pertusa (Form and Riebesell, 2012) or 9 months of exposure in L. pertusa and M. oculata (Maier et al ., 2013)."
Cap and trade schemes around the world aren't working.
Schwartz (2012) : This study derived TCR by zero-intercept regressions of changes, from the 18961901 mean, in observed global surface temperature on corresponding changes in forcing, up to 2009, based on forcing histories used in historical model simulations. The mean change in forcing up to 1990 (pre the Mount Pinatubu eruption) per the five datasets used to derive the TCR range is close to the best estimate of the forcing change per AR5. The studys TCR range is 0.851.9C, with a median estimate of 1.3C.
About 1.3 billion people in the world have no electricity, Lewis said, so energy should be made more plentiful and available.
Recently, Felix began crying when his mom went to pack his lunch in a resealable plastic bag. When asked what the trouble was, Felix told his parents that his kindergarten class had had a draw for a stuffed toy, but that he had been excluded from the contest because his teacher had found a plastic sandwich bag in his lunch kit. So he pleaded with his mom not to make him an enviro-criminal again.
CHURCHVILLE, VA?The cable network MSNBC is warning that the world food chain ?has been stretched to the limit? by rising world demand and a series of crop failures in several countries. The TV network?s warning is premature. The U.S., in fact, could ease the current global food price spike with one administrative action?limiting the amount of U.S. corn that gets turned into corn ethanol.
New Material Posted on the CO2 Science Web site 8 January 14 January 2015
Earlier this week, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), Ranking Member of the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee,released a 123 page document containing McCarthys responses to hundreds of questionson a wide range of issues.In todays post, I comment on McCarthys responses to Sen. Vitters questions about fuel switching. In Part 2 of this series, I will comment on McCarthys responses regarding the administrations motor vehicle program.
In the month after the EPA environmental quality report was issued, controversy about the Soon-Baliunas study grew, with climate change activists mounting an extraordinary campaign to discredit their work and pressure the journal that published it to rescind its endorsement of the work. The newly appointed editor in chief of the journal resigned, although his decision seems to have been driven more by internal management issues than over principled or practical objections to the Soon-Baliunas study. But activists seized upon this as evidence that the intersection of science and politics had driven him from his post. Lost in the furor was any serious examination of the merits or flaws of the study itself. Once again, controversy succeeded in overshadowing science.
And Lino Graglia is a great man indeed, and recognized as one of the con law experts of all time.
On the lack of warming over the last 15 years, Brnnimann admits that they were unusual, blaming it on the unexpected lack of strong El Nino events in the tropical Pacific . Yet he claims that this and the unusually cold European wintersover the last few years do not refute the CO2 greenhouse gas effect .However Brnnimann is forced to concede:
Corals have survived such warmth and worse many times in the past, including the Medieval Warm Period, Roman Warm Period, Holocene Optimum, as well as throughout numerous similar periods during a number of prior interglacial periods; and there is no reason to believe they cannot do it again, if the need arises.
The U.S. is the worlds most endowed energy country, followed by Russia, Saudi Arabia, and China. At current consumption rates, we have hundreds of years of domestic oil and gas, and thousands of years of coal.
Meteorologically this is sheer absurdity. For more than 100 years we have known that the atmospheric circulation is subject to unpredictable cyclic fluctuations. Simply said: the atmospheric pressure gradient between the Azores and Iceland changes chaotically over the years, which in Europe leads to a series of warmer or colder winters. It has nothing to do with polar ice melt, climate change, and absolutely nothing to do with CO2. Why do climate catastrophists, who claim they can foresee the climate 100 years in advance, always come up with such explanations after the fact?
The First Amendment shields Americans engaged in corporate lobbying and making donations, and even groups that misinform the public about important issues are afforded this protection. In Pfizer v. Giles (1994), a federal appeals court ruled that the maker of an asbestos product could not be held liable for joining and financially supporting a trade association that represented makers of asbestos products, even though that association allegedly "disseminated misleading information about the danger of asbestos in schools directly to" the plaintiffs, where "at least some" of the association's "activities were constitutionally protected."
Whereas estimates of "future actual" emissions are based on mechanical analysis of the modification being made and actual emission records, the "potential to emit" is based on hypothetical projections of the modification's impact on a plant's overall efficiency, reliability, and output. A modification that reduces emissions may nevertheless be scored as increasing the emitter's PTE if it allows the facility to run longer or at a higher capacity. EPA uses the unrealistic forecast that modified facilities would operate at full capacity for 24 hours a day, seven days a week 8,760 hours a year. Hence, even small improvements in efficiency can generate large increases in PTE relative to current emissions.
USFS surveys provided more damning evidence that would lead to rejecting the CBDs lawsuits. The benchmark for wildlife abundance and distribution in California had been Joseph Grinnells surveys from the early 1900s. Contrary to global warming theory, the USFS survey found many new active pika colonies several hundred meters lower than Grinnell had documented. In total, 19% of the currently known populations are at lower elevations than ever documented by any study during the cooler 1900s. Further north in the Columbia River Gorge, another independent researcher also found pikas at much lower elevations, surviving at temperatures much higher than the models had predicted.
Milloy got wind of what was going on. He and four other experts sought and received an unprecedented opportunity to testify before the NAS on August 24. Their presentations and other information used in this article can be found here, here and here. Will their efforts bring change? Time will tell.
Goodbye Dear Old Friend, We'll Always Miss You
Even the New York Times seems to view this effort as constitutionally dubious. "Many legal experts have questioned whether the actions and statements by Exxon Mobil can be construed as criminal and outside the protections of the First Amendment," wrote John Schwartz of the Times.
I have always fulfilled my duties as well as I could and as my strengths allowed me, in agreement with my opinion that similar activities can't be done at a "50% capacity"...
In fact, German CO2 emissions have been rising for two years in a row as coal is experiencing a renaissance. But CO2 emissions in the EU as a whole are likely to rise because of increased coal burning at power stations. The revelation has embarrassed the German government and dumbfounded the public, which cannot understand how a nation that has expanded renewable energy more than any other country is building 20 coal-fired power stations.
elected. He responded by pointing to his new comprehensive policy guidebook,
Here Id like to point out another curiosity: while the dewpoint temperature has increased in step with air temperature at 12Z (around 6 a.m.), it has increased much less so at other times of the day, and even decreased slightly at 21Z (around 3 p.m.), during the period 1973-2012:
According tothe Director of the German Marine Museum in Stralsund, Harald Benke, inthis n-tv report here :
Much like other anti-Semites, he would claim that he wasn't one he was just an anti-Zionist, everyone was told. Good try but my suspicion isn't quite gone (although I made a different conclusion 5 years ago).
Since 2008, in the western part of Texas, fully 10 percent of the time wind operators paid the electrical grid to take their electricity.
Here is an interesting interview of Barron while he was director of NCAR, on climate modeling. I tried to find any congressional testimony on climate change, I spotted one in 2001 . As far as I can tell, Barron has not been very visible in the public or scientific debate on climate change over the past decade.
The more-than-reasonable underlying assumption for the next 50 to 100 years is that technology progress will continue, even accelerate as it has over the past century. But exactly what technologies lurk below the radar screen, soon to emerge? What will flower and dominate new products and services? Hindsight will make picking the impactful inventions easy. Likely many will emerge from things like genetic engineering, quantum computing, single-atom-thick grapheme materials, cloud computing (the emerging knowledge, never mind phone, exchange), remote-piloted vehicles, holographic storage, and meta-materials.