Now that the most absurd but potentially catastrophic junk science in human history is unraveling and we are preparing to declare victory over gorebull warbling we can devote more attention to neglected junk.
Taking Liberty -- How Private Property is being Abolished in America
Click here to jump straight to the global warming (a.k.a. "climate change", "global weirding", "people are icky, nasty, weather-breaking critters"... ) section if you so desire.Feel free to post your opinions over on the forum (self-register for your free account if you haven't already done so).
Cap-And-Trade Death Clock
The new U.S. Congress will be installed January 3, 2011, at which point U.S. Cap-And-Trade will die:
The Medicare Bureaucracy: Ready To Disrupt Seniors’ Drug Coverage
“If you like your health care plan you can keep it.” This was a mantra from President Obama throughout the health care debate. The President also promised that his health care overhaul would not affect seniors’ benefits.
But, despite all the promises, a new report from Avalere Health shows that, in addition to the upheaval caused by Obamacare, the Medicare bureaucracy is taking administrative steps to change the Medicare drug program that will have adverse impact on seniors’ choices. Millions of seniors will have to switch their prescription drug plans due to changes within Medicare. Avalere is a private research firm founded by a former budget official from the Clinton Administration.
Its analysis shows that more than 3 million seniors—roughly 20 percent of those enrolled in stand-alone drug plans—won’t be able to keep their current plan. According to the AP’s Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, some of seniors’ drug plans will be eliminated as “Medicare tries to winnow down duplicative and confusing coverage, in order to offer consumers more meaningful choices.” Continue reading... (The Foundry)
Side Effects: Future of Private Insurance Rests in Secretary Sebelius’ Hands
Obamacare requires insurers to meet a federally-specified medical loss ratio. That is, they must spend a certain percentage of premiums on medical expenses. The remainder can be used to cover administrative costs and, if there’s anything left, profits. But if insurers don’t shell out enough in medical losses to meet the requirement, they’ll have to rebate the difference to policyholders
The idea is to limit insurers’ profits and create incentives to reduce administrative costs. But it’s not as clear cut as it sounds. After all, what exactly counts as a medical expense? Continue reading... (The Foundry)
Indirect eco-death? Bottled water company sued in Ind. worker's death
The family of a woman who died after a pallet of bottled water fell on her at a Kroger store in central Indiana is suing the water bottler, arguing a new eco-friendly
bottle design might have contributed to the accident.
The lawsuit filed by the husband of 32-year-old Lori Keen is pending in federal court in Indianapolis. It says that Nestle Waters North America's new bottles used less
plastic and couldn't support as much weight as previous bottles.
Keen was fatally injured March 15 when a 4,100-pound pallet of bottled water fell on her in the warehouse of a Kroger store in Franklin. The lawsuit seeks unspecified
damages.
Nestle Waters spokeswoman Jane Lazgin said Wednesday the company was still reviewing the circumstances of the accident. (AP)
Strip
danger drug from food tins, says Choice
ALARMING levels of the toxic chemical BPA are lurking in tinned foods including popular baby brands, a study claims.
Consumer advocate Choice is demanding Bisphenol A be stripped from all tinned foods fed to infants and toddlers after conducting tests on a range of common products.
The "gender bending" substance, widely used in plastics and to stop food and drink tins and cans rusting, has been linked by some animal studies to infertility,
cancers, heart disease, attention deficit disorder, and other health risks. (Karen Collier, Herald Sun)
Drugs? Australia's food watchdog says there is no proof of danger drugs in food
UPDATE 11.10am: THERE is no scientific evidence to suggest food packaged in cans which contain Bisphenol A (BPA) is harmful, the Australian Food and Grocery Council
says.
It comes after the Herald Sun reported a study that found alarming levels of the toxic chemical BPA was lurking in tinned foods including popular baby brands.
The chemical is used to make polycarbonate plastic and is also found in epoxy resins used to line cans to prevent corrosion. (Karen Collier, Herald Sun)
China to vaccinate 100 million children to fight measles
HONG KONG - Nearly 100 million children in China will be vaccinated against measles this month to help eliminate the disease, a leading cause of avoidable death and
disability in developing countries, the WHO said on Wednesday.
There were more than 52,000 cases of measles in China in 2009. Although most people recover from the highly contagious viral disease, some suffer serious complications
like blindness, encephalitis, severe diarrhea, pneumonia and ear infections.
Michael O'Leary, the World Health Organisation's representative in China, said China's measles cases made up 86 percent of all cases in the western Pacific.
"Vaccinating every child, even those who have been vaccinated in the past, is essential in stopping the virus with a wall of immunity in the population," he
said in a statement. (Reuters)
Too little sleep bad for teenagers' diets: study
Teenagers who sleep less than eight hours a night on weeknights eat more fatty foods and snacks than those who get more than eight hours of sleep a night, U.S.
researchers said on Wednesday.
They said getting too little sleep can result in chronic changes in the diet that can increase the risk of obesity, especially in girls. (Reuters)
BMI Is a Fatheaded Obesity Tool
Britain’s “fat” surveillance of schoolchildren has once again backfired. The Sun reported last week that a
perfectly healthy-sized girl is refusing to eat after the government told her parents that she’s “overweight.” The key problem is the British health
authorities’ use of a measure called the “Body Mass Index” (BMI) to classify kids as fat, underweight, or
healthy. Parents are receiving warning letters if their kids fall on the "overweight" end of the spectrum. Our main criticism of the BMI is its inaccuracy as an
obesity-measuring tool, and a number
of similar gaffes this summer make us wonder how much longer it will be in widespread use. Fortuitously, The New York Times analyzed some
of the BMI scale’s limitations yesterday:
For children and the elderly, body mass values can be especially misleading because the relationship of lean body mass to height changes as they get older …
If you fall into the “healthy weight” or “underweight” range, you can easily be lulled into a false sense of security. But thinness is not necessarily healthy—recall the 97-pound weakling from the Charles Atlas ads of yore. A low B.M.I. could be indicative of malnutrition, anorexia, cancer or a wasting disease. On the other hand, if you are an athlete or body builder, your B.M.I. could mistakenly put you in the range for overweight or obese.
Those worried about a high BMI should be sure to get both cardiovascular and weight-resistance workouts, the Times notes. And what better complement to that advice than new research showing that a genetic predisposition to obesity can be largely offset by getting a healthy dose of physical activity? As epidemiologists struggle to accurately classify data, and governments labor to accurately classify kids, the obesity solution seems to be as obvious as ever: Eat in moderation, and move your body often. (Consumer Freedom)
The don't say? Study: Exercise Can Counteract Obesity Genes
Some families, alas, are fatter than others. But for dieters continually at war with their genes, there's good news in a study published in this week's PLoS Medicine: they can burn off 40% of their genetic predisposition to obesity by exercising. (Time)
Study shows human activity may have boosted shellfish size
In a counter-intuitive finding, new research from North Carolina State University shows that a species of shellfish widely consumed in the Pacific over the past 3,000
years has actually increased in size, despite—and possibly because of—increased human activity in the area.
“What we’ve found indicates that human activity does not necessarily mean that there is going to be a negative impact on a species—even a species that people relied
on as a major food source,” says Dr. Scott Fitzpatrick, associate professor of sociology and anthropology at NC State and co-author of the study. “The trends we see
in the archaeological record in regard to animal remains are not always what one would expect.” (R&D Mag)
EPA Disapproves Parts Of Texas Permit Program
The Environmental Protection Agency said on Tuesday it had disapproved parts of Texas' program for permitting new industrial pollution sources.
The action will not affect permits at the state's refineries, in which Texas leads the nation.
EPA has been wrestling with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to end the use of a single permit for a plant with multiple pollution sources, instead of a
permit for each pollution source at a plant as is done in most states.
The dispute has triggered a lawsuit by the Texas attorney general against the EPA. (Reuters)
Hand wringer... Bold action is needed to protect the diversity of life on Earth
Instead of spending taxpayers' money propping up factory farms, UK government should support planet-friendly farming (Guardian)
Question of the day: Exactly how much daylight is there between the population control rantings of Discovery Channel Channel gunman James Lee and the writings of Obama science advisor John Holdren? (Green Hell)
September 1, 2010 – 7:21 pm
By Silvia Santacruz
Chevron won’t kowtow to environmental activists’ tactics and gives them a taste of their own medicine
Global companies rarely fight back when environmentalists accuse them of polluting in developing countries. They often prefer to fund such
NGOs in the belief they are buying peace, or to accept a market cap beating.
Publicly traded companies are accountable to investors, financial regulators, and stock exchanges, and consequently scrutinize every PR step. However, one American firm
— Chevron — is not only fearless of green campaigners’ tactics, it is giving them a taste of their own medicine. In the process, it may also highlight the problems
with government ownership of natural resources, including eco-disasters, that environmentalist activists blithely ignore.
Chevron, which merged with Texaco in 2001, is striking back against director Joe Berlinger’s biased and misleading documentary, Crude.
Read More
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
(The Unites States Constitution, Amendment 2 - Right to Bear Arms. Ratified 12/15/1791.)
The first ten Amendments collectively are commonly known as the Bill of Rights.
Desperate Greens Make Desperate Claims
by Steven Milloy
September 1, 2010, Human Events
As the chances of a cap-and-trade bill recede in the 111th Congress, expect the increasingly desperate greens to amp up their gloom-and-doom rhetoric—as they already have.
Amid Al Gore’s recent concession speech to his zombie followers, for example, he apparently couldn’t help himself from linking every recent bad weather event he could think of with global warming—from floods in Nashville and Pakistan to the recent heat wave and forest fires in Russia.
Before that, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) took the opportunity of an ongoing East Coast heat wave to proclaim the current decade to be the hottest on record and to proclaim that global warming is “undeniable.” (Green Hell)
Speak of the devil: Alarmist scientists issue call for scary scenarios at AGU conference
Global warming alarmist scientists Steve Sherwood (University of New South Wales) and Matthew Huber (Purdue University) have asked colleagues to develop scary scenarios for their session at the December 13-14, 2010 meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). (Green Hell)
Post-Carbon Left Enviro Blues (Why the Senate rejected cap-and-trade)
by Robert Michaels
September 1, 2010
Everyone knows that our industries contain a large collection of minds that are almost indecently fertile. Name the business and you can see lots of people who were quick to spot the growth possibilities in climate policy, whether they were financial, political or technological. The semiconductor industry turned sand into wealth, and we were going to do the same with the world’s exhalations.
And now it’s as good as over. Only the problem is that those of us who were smart enough to get into carbon on the ground floor refuse to acknowledge what is becoming more obvious by the hour.
The great bulk of groups that call themselves “nonprofit” and “nonpartisan”are little more than shills for environmentalists and Democrats. But here is an unusual one: the Breakthrough Institute.
“Breakthrough” is usually a word reserved for psychotherapy, but the Breakthrough Institute is green with an attitude. It has managed to separate itself from the other carbon controllers, thanks to a sense of realism about both technological issues and political reality. Co-founder Michael Shellenberger recently appeared in the Washington Post and pretty much set the world straight about why the Senate finally dropped cap and trade and a national renewable quota, and what it all means.
He says that the usual explanations for the change generally fail. Republicans aren’t to blame, because they needed and got enough Democrats to also reject the policies. Environmentalists in fact made massive efforts and didn’t change a single vote. The administration pushed it hard and also failed to influence marginal votes.
And you can’t blame business, because as Shellenberger points out, cap and trade “arguably had more industry support than any other environmental policy in history.” A protégé of Ken Lay, James E. Rogers, once at Enron and now head of Duke Energy, for example, got the electric utility industry to the table and behind cap-and-trade. [Read more →] (MasterResource)
Bad climate bill belongs in limbo
Will a lame duck Congress pass cap-and-trade?
Judging from recent news, it might try. But, more likely, all the sound and fury will end up signifying its usual nothing. And it leaves the preferred option, where
Congress punts the problem to the EPA, very much alive. (Patrick J. Michaels, Detroit News)
<chuckle> Stern warning for climate sceptics
ONE of the world's leading climate change experts, Sir Nicholas Stern, has warned that countries such as Australia will face future trade barriers unless they move to a low-carbon economy. (The Age)
Stern is an economist now described as "one of the world's leading climate change experts". Well, why not, railway engineers are similarly described, I suppose. On the other hand other economists pilloried Sterns economic analysis for its wild assumptions and bizarre discount rates. Everyone is a climate expert provided they claim looming disaster from human enterprise.
This is more serious: Shockwave sent through mining heartland after ALP-Greens alliance
LABOR'S alliance with the Greens has sent a shockwave through Australia's mining heartland.
From the coalfields of the NSW Illawarra to Queensland's Bowen Basin, the pact has sparked fears among workers and bosses that the industry will come under attack through
the introduction of an emissions trading scheme and possible changes to Labor's mining tax.
Senior mining executives warned that the Labor-Greens alliance had the potential to reignite the advertising war with the government because of perceptions in the
industry that the Greens' policies were anti-mining.
Queensland miner Ross Robinson has a warning for Labor: "Go too green and give up any hope of winning back the Queensland seats lost at the election."
A 30-year veteran of the industry, the machine operator says it is the new taxes - the carbon "tax" and the resources rent tax - that have his colleagues
talking, despite their political leanings.
"It's quite often talked about," he said. "A big majority of the miners are dead against it. Labor lost Dawson and Flynn and they're both mining areas - it
says a lot." (Rosanne Barrett and Sallie Don, The Australian)
Although in the longer term this is a political reality check that will shake all but the most airheaded of the urban latte set out of their illusion socialism is of some value. Australia's mining resources are all that insulated the country from recent overseas financial shocks and even most urbanites know it. The overt watermelon coalition seems to have surprised a few -- wasn't "right wing propaganda" after all.
Really? IPCC's Rajendra Pachauri is damaging the world
The IPCC's head should quit to avoid harming the global warming cause further, says Geoffrey Lean. (TDT)
Actually I think he's about the best friend skeptics have. Certainly he's slowing the headlong rush to destroy the global economy on the basis of pure climate superstition.
It is eight years since, in a review of The Skeptical Environmentalist, that Number Watch warned that its author was not only far from being a sceptic, but for one who lectures in statistics has a remarkably loose conception of statistical significance. Though bombarded (literally) as an apostate, he has always been an adherent of the true religion. Furthermore, at a conference, your bending author publicly accused him of sailing under false colours, to which he made no reply. Thus it is no surprise that he has now reversed his position on the only vestige of scepticism to which he could legitimately lay claim; namely that spending billions of dollars on combating climate change is a game not worth the candle. What does it matter what you say, as long as you sell books? (Number Watch)
Bjørn Lomborg wants to waste trillions for AGW
Bjørn
Lomborg has labeled himself a skeptic when he wrote The
Skeptical Environmentalist back in 2001.
Although he wouldn't say the same thing as the genuine skeptics among us (and the mailing list in which I am included wouldn't quite consider Lomborg "one of
us"), his opinions were also far enough from the alarmist orthodoxy.
The fearmongers began to hate him - which was quite an achievement given their being progressive radicals and his being a left-wing gay. Well, some of them may be
controlled by hormones and they may be driven up the wall as soon as they see the word "skeptic". ;-) In 2002, Scientific American has organized a
gigantic witch hunt against Lomborg. It was described e.g. in Michael Crichton's speech Aliens Cause Global
Warming.
It would also be remarkable to note that in 2004, Rajendra Pachauri
has compared Bjørn Lomborg to Adolf Hitler. It would be remarkable if Pachauri were not mentally ill which makes such pronouncements rather unremarkable.
» Don't Stop Reading » (The Reference Frame)
But Lomborg was always a Warmist…
The ecotard media – led, naturally enough, by the Guardian – has been making great play of “Skeptical Environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg’s apparent Damascene
conversion. Where once Lomborg was a card-carrying evil climate-change denier he is now an ardent worshipper at the Church of Al Gore, supposedly.
This is a great story – and works, provided you haven’t read a word of Bjorn Lomborg and don’t know anything about his views or his background. If you do, it looks
very much like a pathetic little spoiler designed to distract attention from the IAC’s reasonably damning report on the IPCC. (James Delingpole)
Skeptical Environmentalist - Still Skeptical of Carbon Rationing - Never Skeptical of Warming
Yesterday, the Guardian ran a puzzling article claiming that Bjorn Lomborg, the self-described Skeptical Environmentalist, has now accepted that man-made global warming is a problem. The subtext being that if this prominent climate change skeptic has come over to the side of alarmism, then surely everyone else must too. (Ronald Bailey, Reason)
Three More Outrageously False Statements from NOAA
Makes one wonder if their recent climate announcements are politically influenced. (Art Horn, PJM)
Another Day, Another Dollar - CFC's and the UN
Written by Dennis Ambler
The CFC story is a parallel for the CO2 story and was another EPA “cause celebre”. Claims of dramatic changes to the atmosphere were made; time was running out, the world was in danger and it could only be saved by “Global Action”.
Read more... (SPPI)
Financing Said Vital For World Climate Change Deal
A global fund to help poorer countries switch to green industrial technology is vital in any new international pact to battle global warming, Switzerland's top climate change negotiator said on Wednesday. (Reuters)
Good, it's doomed then.
Eye-roller: 'Climate migrants' projected to flood U.S.
Climate change in Latin America — and the accompanying drought, flooding and desertification — is likely to drive increased illegal migration across the Mexico-U.S. border in coming years, according to a report. (Washington Times)
The ol' rope-a-dope: Warmer Temperatures In China To Reduce Crop Yields
With the climate set to get warmer from greenhouse gases, Chinese scientists predicted on Thursday that freshwater for agriculture will shrink further in China,
reducing crop yields in the years ahead.
In a paper published in Nature, they said the temperature in China had gone up by 1.2 degrees Celsius since 1960 and will increase by another 1 to 5 degrees Celsius by
2100. (Reuters)
Gotta admire the way the Chinese keep themselves positioned to play victim and rake in "conscience money" from gullible Westerners.
September 1, 2010 – 7:17 pm
By Julian Morris
Millions are suffering and thousands have died from flooding in Pakistan and China. An extraordinary heat wave in Russia sparked fires
causing dreadful pollution and wiping out swaths of the wheat crop. Are these weather-related disasters caused by global warming? Do they portend worse catastrophes?
Should Pakistan get more aid?
In its most recent report, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) asserts that as the world becomes warmer, “flood magnitude and frequency are
likely to increase in most regions.” This seems plausible: A warmer world is also likely to be a wetter world, as more water evaporates from the oceans into the
atmosphere. But, although recent rainstorms put out some of the fires, Russia has a drought.
The IPCC also claims that droughts too are more likely in a warmer world — and that they have become more frequent since the 1970s, partly because of reduced
precipitation. In fact, the number of droughts reached a low point between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s with no statistically significant increase in droughts since the
1950s. It seems a stretch to blame the Russian drought on global warming.
Read More
Quarter of the way in, we are perhaps further from holding back the warming tide than when we began. But there is still time (Andrew Simms, Guardian)
The IPCC, Tipping Points, and Why Global Warming Must Remain Uncertain
Now that I have opened the political Pandora’s Box, I might as well continue getting some of this off my chest.
Some people think that I hurt my scientific credibility by revealing my political views from time to time. Well, I don’t like politicians exploiting and ultimately destroying public faith in my scientific discipline (climate science) for their own political and financial gain.
We scientists will be sorry we ever allowed ourselves to be manipulated by powerful people who transformed what was a theoretical possibility for climate scientists, into a near certainty for public consumption.
While I firmly believe that the ultimate motivation behind the IPCC’s existence is not at all what they advertise it to be, I must admit the United Nations still has the upper hand: the theoretical possibility of catastrophic global warming (aka ‘climate change’).
As a scientist, I must admit that warming of 4 deg. C or more this century is theoretically possible. But it’s a little like concerns that the Large Hadron Collider will cause the Earth to be swallowed by a black hole when it is switched on.
Unlike particle physicists, climate researchers currently have no way to objectively determine the probability of dramatic changes like climate tipping points. At least when particle physicists talk probabilities, they are talking about real probabilities, based upon real observable events which are repeatable. The IPCC’s probabilities regarding one-of-a-kind events with uncertain causes (e.g. warming in the last 50 years) are no more than measures of their faith expressed in pseudo-scientific jargon.
And the people who write the Summary for Policymakers for the IPCC reports are masters at wordsmithing their documents to convey maximum alarm without resorting to outright falsehoods. How clever.
The fact that catastrophic warming will remain a possibility indefinitely allows the U.N. to continue its propaganda campaign.
Living is Risky
Modern fears of global warming and other perceived dangers to the consumer support my claim that our society is more risk adverse than any in history.
The very existence of the Precautionary Principle shows that even though every one of us weighs risks against benefits in every decision we make on a daily basis, some people can still dream up totally illogical reasons why humanity should stop doing this or that.
Never in history have so many advocates with so little common sense held so much influence over so selfish a political class who were elected by so gullible a public for such irrelevant reasons.
Living is risky. Get over it.
I’m sure that the IPCC’s embattled Grand Poobah, Rajendra Pachauri, flies in airplanes even though they might crash, crosses streets even though he might get run
over, eats food even though he might choke to death, and writes vapid steamy
romance novels even though he might be ridiculed.
Obviously, Pachauri weighs risks against benefits in his own life, as do we all. Please don’t insult our intelligence by demanding that we dismantle all coal-fired
power plants and replace them with a million bird Cuisinarts (aka
windmills).
Political Versus Climatic Tipping Points
We are endlessly fascinated by tipping points. The movie Day After Tomorrow involved a mini-Ice Age forming in a matter of days as a result of your SUV getting together with other SUVs after work and drinking too much at the local Exxon watering hole.
Scientists and engineers think of tipping points in terms of nonlinear relationships. A given forcing results in a certain response, but beyond a certain level of forcing the response grows dramatically. The future behavior of nonlinear systems is notoriously difficult to forecast.
The climate system is a nonlinear system. This doesn’t necessarily mean it has tipping points, but it sure doesn’t exclude the possibility either.
As long as people like James Hansen believe that the Ice Ages were the greatly amplified response to a weak forcing, they will be able to claim that our climate system has experienced tipping points in the past. No matter how long we go without significant warming, influential people like Hansen will still claim that it is only a matter of time before Mother Nature decides she has had enough, and turns the oven up from “warm” to “broil”.
As a result, there will always remain some science that can be used to justify the work of the IPCC.
The Future of the IPCC
The IPCC is now at a tipping point. Will its self-destruct? Probably not. Dramatic organizational changes will be instituted, and at some point success will be declared. The IPCC will be refocused, leaner, meaner, more transparent, more open to the views of the deniers…er…I mean skeptics.
But the ultimate purpose of the IPCC will remain unchanged: to cherry pick and misuse climate science in order to eventually control humanity’s access to energy.
So, in order to put the IPCC out of its misery, it will take more than to just point out its selective use of facts and its biased science. Its demise will have to be the result of political pressure related to its biased political agenda.
And at least in the U.S., the current indications are that the citizens have had just about as much as they can take from those whose (arguable) good intentions force others to pay for paving that proverbial road to hell. (Roy W. Spencer)
There is an important research contribution that reports on a natural and human climate forcing that has a direct and indirect effect on tropical cyclones, as well as other climate effects such as radiative forcing. The paper is
Amato T. Evan and Sujoy Mukhopadhyay, 2010: African dust over the northern tropical Atlantic: 1955–2008. Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology 2010 ; e-View doi: 10.1175/2010JAMC2485.1
African dust results both from natural landscapes but also land that has been degraded by overgrazing as in the Sahel region of Africa.
The abstract reads
“African dust outbreaks are the result of complex interactions between the land, atmosphere, and oceans, and only recently has a large body of work began to emerge that aims to understand the controls on -and impacts of- African dust. At the same time, long-term records of dust outbreaks are either inferred from visibility data from weather stations, or confined to a few in-situ observational sites. Satellites provide the best opportunity for studying the large-scale characteristics of dust storms, but reliable records of dust are generally on the scale of a decade or less. Here we develop a simple model for using modern and historical data from meteorological satellites, in conjunction with a proxy record for atmospheric dust, to extend satellite-retrieved dust optical depth over the northern tropical Atlantic form 1955–2008. The resultant 54-year record of dust has a spatial resolution of 1° and a monthly temporal resolution. From analysis of the historical dust data, monthly tropical northern Atlantic dust cover is bimodal, has a strong annual cycle, peaked in the early 1980s, and shows minimums in dustiness during the beginning and end of our record. We use these dust optical depth estimates to calculate radiative forcing and heating rates from the surface through the top of the atmosphere over the last half-century. Radiative transfer simulations show a large net negative dust forcing from the surface through the top of the atmosphere, also with a distinct annual cycle, and mean tropical Atlantic monthly values of the surface forcing range from −3 to −9Wm−2. Since the surface forcing is roughly three-times larger in magnitude than the top of the atmosphere forcing, there is also a positive heating rate of the mid-troposphere by dust.”
Amato also has a forecast each year for the dust expected for the hurricane season at Atlantic Dust Products. The June 1 2010 forecast reads
“There is reason to believe that African dust outbreaks may both directly and indirectly impact Atlantic hurricane genesis and intensification. As such, a summertime forecast of Atlantic dust cover may be a useful aid in predicting seasonal hurricane activity. Here I present a qualitative forecast of Atlantic main development region (MDR) dust cover for the 2010 hurricane season (July–November). Based on persistence in dust, and Sahelian rainfall anomalies during the previous year, MDR dust cover during the 2010 hurricane season will be near-normal to one standard deviation below-average (relative to 1982–2009). This is not to say that one month will not show anomalously high or low dust values, or that particularly strong dust outbreaks (or prolonged periods of no dust) won’t occur, but that averaged over the hurricane season dustiness will be near to below average.
Along with this report I am making available online an updated data set of tropical northern Atlantic dust optical depth that spans the period of January 1982 through May 2010.
The report starts with the text
“There is a wealth of recent publications making the case for either direct or indirect influences of African dust outbreaks on Atlantic tropical cyclones. Here I refer the reader to the following papers for further reading on this topic: Dunion and Velden (2004), Dunion and Marron (2009), Evan et al. (2006a, 2008), Wong and Desser (2005), and Wong et al. (2009).”
This study continues to add to the important papers and reports that document that climate variability and change are dominated by regional climate forcings and feedbacks, NOT a global average surface temperature trend. (Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science)
On the Debunking of Spencer’s Feedback Ideas: An Appeal to Physical Scientists Everywhere
I am seeing increasing chatter about one or more papers that will (or already have) debunked my ideas on feedbacks in the climate system.
Yet, I cannot remember a climate issue of which I have ever been so certain.
I understand that most people interested in the climate debate will simply believe what their favorite science pundits at RealClimate tell them to believe, which is fine, and I can’t do anything about that.
But for those who want to investigate for themselves, I recommend reading only our latest and most comprehensive paper in Journal of Geophysical Research. It takes you from the very basics of feedback estimation — which I found I had to include because even the experts in the field apparently did not understand them — and for the first time explains why satellite observations of the climate system behave the way they do.
No one has ever done this before to anywhere near the level of detail we do.
[Unfortunately, our 2008 paper in Journal of Climate, I now realize, had insufficient evidence to make the case we were trying to make in 2008. I believe our claims were correct, but the evidence we presented could not unequivocally support those claims. Only after finishing our most recent 2010 paper did I realize the insufficiency of that previous work on the subject.]
Then, once you think you understand the main points we make in the new JGR paper, read any other critiques or criticisms that catch your fancy.
As a teaser, one of the clear conclusions the new paper supports is this: The only times that there is clear evidence of feedback in global satellite data, that feedback is strongly negative.
All I ask is that you evaluate whether anyone can come up with a better explanation than what we have given for the structures we see in the satellite observations of natural climate variations. Do not settle for others’ vague arm-waving dismissals based upon preconceived notions or what others have told them.
You engineers and scientists from other fields are capable of understanding this, and I am appealing to you to bring fresh eyes to a field where the research establishment has become hopelessly inbred and too beholden to special interests to see that which is staring them in the face.
This is the main reason why I wrote The Great Global Warming Blunder…the evidence is simple enough for the science-savvy public to understand. But the experts do not see the evidence because they refuse to open their eyes. (Roy W. Spencer)
Greenland's prime minister lambasts Greenpeace for raiding Arctic oil rig
Kuupik Kleist claims environmental campaigners are damaging country's economy by occupy drilling platform (Guardian)
Greenpeace - the energy deniers
Greenpeace is in the news for shutting down an oil exploration rig off the coast of Greenland. In what is an act of trespass if not outright piracy, activists have
climbed onto the rig in an effort to cease all activity. This stunt is just the latest attempt by Greenpeace to deny the modern world the energy it needs.
The world currently runs on a combination of fossil fuels - coal, natural gas and oil account for almost 87% of global energy, with nuclear and hydroelectric providing
another 6% each. Renewable energy sources - solar, wind and tidal account for just 1% of today’s global energy.
Greenpeace and other green groups oppose all fossil fuels and nuclear power. That’s 93% of all power used in the world that Greenpeace wants shut down and replaced with
immature and inefficient renewable technologies. It’s a pipe dream, an impossible Utopia that Greenpeace chooses to pursue as they rage against our modern way of life.
The math does not add up, there is no simple way to convert the world away from fossil fuels with today’s green technology. (Paul Wornham, Examiner)
Military Study Warns of a Potentially Drastic Oil Crisis
A study by a German military think tank has analyzed how "peak oil" might change the global economy. The internal draft document -- leaked on the Internet --
shows for the first time how carefully the German government has considered a potential energy crisis.
The term "peak oil" is used by energy experts to refer to a point in time when global oil reserves pass their zenith and production gradually begins to decline.
This would result in a permanent supply crisis -- and fear of it can trigger turbulence in commodity markets and on stock exchanges.
The issue is so politically explosive that it's remarkable when an institution like the Bundeswehr, the German military, uses the term "peak oil" at all. But a
military study currently circulating on the German blogosphere goes further. (Spiegel)
The hype over biofuels has pretty much died down. While they’re acknowledged as being an important part of the shift away from fossil fuels, they are not a solution in and of themselves. However, a report from the Renewable Fuels Agency (RFA) on the use of biofuels in the UK reveals a worrying trend. (The Engineer)
Iowa is to corn ethanol what Saudi Arabia is to oil. At present Iowa has the capacity to produce 3.5 billion gallons of ethanol per year, which is 26% of the nation’s total. This is of course due to the large amount of corn production in Iowa, enabled by ample rainfall and rich topsoil. [Read More] (Robert Rapier, ET)
