“Modern seas unprecedented”: An insult to geology and sea level research

JoNova (Australia)
Is the latest sea-level rise unusual? Kurt Lambeck said it was, based on his version of the Holocene seas, calculated with modeled crustal movements (to try to guess the rises and falls of the beaches where the sea levels were changing). Obedient science reporters broadcast his message to the world without asking a single hard question. But when the error bars are 2 meters wide and the dating estimates range over hundreds of years, I thought it beyond silly to think we could estimate 100-year average sea level rises in the time of Moses. Nils-Axel Mörner agrees, and shows data below from 50 years of research which demonstrates that sea levels are always oscillating, and that in Europe, the US, the Indian Ocean past changes are larger than the current ones. Nils has published nearly 600 papers on observations of sea-levels around the world. He calls the Lambeck paper an “insult” to geologists and sea-level researchers.  — Jo"

‘I am sceptical humans are causing global warming’: Buzz Aldrin says more research - and less politics - is needed

Daily Mail

This inevitably leads to questions about our own planet - for example, are humans causing global warming that will render our world uninhabitable?

‘In the news today I hear about the large solar flares, which is an indication of the power of the sun to influence Earth and our climate,’ Dr Aldrin said.

‘My first inclination is to be a bit sceptical about the claims that human-produced carbon dioxide is the direct contributor to global warming.

‘And if there is that doubt, then I think an unbiased non-politically motivated group of people worldwide, representing us instead of creating taxes like the carbon tax, should examine the output of different nations that might contribute to the very large cycles of warming and cooling that have taken place long before we started to have humans producing emissions.

‘In a short period of time it appears to some people [that humans are] the cause of global warming - which is now called climate change - [but] climate change has certainly existed over time.’

Watch Apollo Astronaut Walt Cunningham blast global warming

CFACT
Col. Cunningham: “Models are not data… I’m here to encourage everyone to look at the data themselves, not just buy what they’re told.  I find that my standards for science are more important to me than anything else, and I hate to see them being depreciated by the alarmists’ claims today.  Politics and the media and what have you have allowed us now to be facing one of the biggest scientific hoaxes in history.  That’s what’s being pushed on us.”

The Present EU Economic Problem (and the Incipient USA One)

E M Smith
So having electricity ‘skyrocket’ and forcing folks to ‘decarbonize’ by taking more (paid / costly) transit and buying yet more expensive electricity (to replace the wood or coal or gas stove) just means there is that much LESS left over to buy, oh, I don’t know, maybe cars and shoes and bread… that causes demand to drop…  "

Analysis shows the "missing heat" has gone to space & less "heat trapping" from increased greenhouse gases

The Hockey Schtick
A post today from Kiwi Thinker examines recent trends in the greenhouse effect from satellite data since 1979 and shows, opposite of warmist claims, that the greenhouse effect and "heat-trapping" of the atmosphere has steadily decreased along with the increase in greenhouse gas levels. The author concludes from this empirical NOAA data,

1. The "missing heat" has gone back to space as it always has...via outgoing longwave infrared radiation.

2. And more importantly, the greenhouse effect is not increasing as per IPCC dogma.

Thus, Trenberth's "missing heat," which only exists in falsified climate models, is not present in the atmosphere or oceans, and is now past Alpha Centauri located 4.3 light years away, i.e. it's not "in the pipeline" and is never coming back.

The analysis supports that of Dr. Noor van Andel, who unfortunately passed away three years ago, finding that IR radiation to space increased over the past 62 years, the exact opposite of the predictions of CAGW theory and computer models.   "

Cooling the global warming panic

Washington Times
The case against carbon dioxide — the stuff we breathe out and plants breathe in — has never been weaker. The climate doom criers insist that CO2, as a “greenhouse gas,” causes planetary temperatures to rise. According to the measurements of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, global average carbon dioxide levels are currently higher than ever, up 8 percent since 1998. So why have we been in a “pause” in global warming for the past two decades if CO2 and temperatures are directly linked?

Britain Announces Emergency Measures To Prevent Winter Blackouts

WUWT
From the GWPF: Cold Winter Could Cause Britain’s Lights To Go Out
Emergency measures to prevent blackouts this winter have been unveiled by National Grid after Britain’s spare power capacity fell to just 4 per cent.
–Emily Gosden, The Daily Telegraph, 27 October 2014
The capacity crunch has been predicted for about seven years. Everyone seems to have seen this coming – except the people in charge.
–Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 10 June 2014  ........."

Lack of wind or nuclear problems 'could wipe out UK's spare power capacity'

Telegraph

A cold and windless day could result in households’ lights being dimmed this winter, despite new emergency measures to prevent blackouts, experts have warned.

Britain’s spare capacity – the safety buffer between electricity supplies and peak demand – has fallen to just 4 per cent, the lowest level in seven years, following a series of power plant fires and closures, analysis from National Grid revealed.

Ministers on Tuesday insisted there would be no blackouts, thanks to emergency measures to bolster the margin back up to 6 per cent – higher than last year - by paying three power plants millions of pounds to guarantee their availability and paying factories to switch off during times of peak demand.

But experts cast doubt on those assurances."

Yes Virginia (and everyone else) there is an El Niño coming

WUWT
I am a bit surprised at some of the waffling in the meteorological community on the ENSO event ( then again, maybe it is I who will be surprised).  Its evolving . I stated on our weatherbell.com site at the start of the month to get ready for the drop in the SOI  that would allow the warmer sub surface water to come up and its like clockwork, its coming. Look at the SOI this month, and notice how over the last 15 days, alot of double digit negatives have shown up  after a period that was basically a wash. I don’t know why there is all the hand wringing with this event."

We waste more heat than we pay for to keep homes warm

Christopher Booker, Telegraph

When the BBC website last week reported the EU’s latest wholly unrealisable plan to achieve a 40 per cent cut in our CO₂ emissions within 16 years – Ed Davey, who is interviewed in today’s paper, actually wanted 50 per cent – it was inevitably illustrated with one of those pictures of cooling towers. They were belching what readers might imagine were clouds of smoke and nasty, “polluting” CO₂. But in reality, what emerges from those cooling towers is steam, given off by heat from the gas that drives the turbines – and all that colossal amount of heat literally goes up the chimney.

I heard no more startling fact last week than the finding of a new study, to be published next month, showing that the heat we waste in this way is “very significantly” more than all the heat we get from the gas used to warm Britain’s 25 million homes.

So why don’t we save billions of pounds a year by following the example of the countries that use that heat to warm buildings? In Denmark nearly half of its buildings are kept warm by “combined heat and power”, or CHP, piping heat from power stations to whole districts of towns and cities."

The greenies want it both ways about acidic oceans

Christopher Booker, Telegraph
For every scientific paper that pushes this particular long-familiar scare story, another points out that to talk about the oceans turning to acid when their average pH level is still way above 7.0 is just scientific bunkum. But what the warmists also overlook is the science that tells us that when the oceans grow warmer they give off more CO₂ rather than the other way round. So, if the oceans are warming, as the warmists like to claim, they should contain less CO₂, not more. They cannot have it both ways."

I will keep Britain’s lights on, Ed Davey pledges

Telegraph
Those contingency measures, to be set out in full next week, are on both the supply and demand sides of the electricity system. To boost supply, “mothballed” plants could be brought back into use. Generating companies could also be told to “max-generate”, running at full capacity for a short-term surge. New demand-side contingencies are potentially more disruptive. In the event of a sudden shortage of power, big industrial consumers such as factories would be paid to switch on emergency backup generators and produce their own power."
---------------------
Bishop Hill : Lights on factories off

EXPOSED: How a shadowy network funded by foreign millions is making our household energy bills soar - for a low-carbon Britain

Daily Mail

• Shadowy pro-green lobbyists working at every level of the Establishment
• Organisations are channelling tens of millions of pounds into green policies
• Elite lobby group linked to Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the WWF
• Current energy policies shaped by the Green Blob will cost up to £400billion
• If continued, there will be further eye-watering energy bill rises for Britons

Climate change alarmism. Another obsession of an unaccountable elite

David Keighley
Step forward, for example, Graham Stuart, the MP for Beverley and Holderness.
Who?  For those who don’t know, he was elected to his current seat in 2005. Since then he has been working away on a raft of rather predictable local constituency issues, including most recently a lack of a defibrillator in a local village, and in trying to reduce toll charges on the Humber Bridge.  All very commendable.
But said Mr Stuart has a deeper, darker purpose. He is a climate change alarmist zealot – and in that capacity, he was elected global chairman in 2013 of a body called Global International.
I had not heard of it, either.
Turns out (website here) that it has vast resources, is supported by governments throughout the world (including of course the United Kingdom’s ). Its purpose is to create a mass of international legislation – broadly in line with what the EU also wants - that ensures that all the principles of climate change alarmism are incorporated in domestic national legislation throughout the world. And of course – surprise, surprise – Tony Blair had a major hand in consolidating its power, back in 2005 at the Gleneagles G8 summit.
Reading the website turned my stomach. Here is a body that clearly has vast resources – from precisely where it does not condescend to tell us (these bodies never do) – and in train is a vast, multi-layered agenda with one overarching purpose – to ensure that politicians everywhere adopt measures that ensure that the objectives of ‘sustainability’ are foisted upon, whoops – sorry – adopted,  by the peoples of the world."

Secret Post Facto Changes in the IPCC AR5 Report

WUWT
Brandon Shollenberger writes: I thought you might be interested to hear the final version of the IPCC AR5 WGII report has been published, and a number of changes were made between it and the Final Draft people have been using for the last seven months or so.  The only way anyone can find them is by comparing the text in the two versions as the IPCC apparently does not disclose these changes."

Ed Miliband and Baroness Worthington, the most expensive man and woman in Britain’s history

Christopher Booker,Telegraph

Who are potentially the most expensive man and woman in Britain, due over the next 36 years to cost this country £1.3 trillion, equivalent to our entire, ever-swelling National Debt?

The man is Ed Miliband, who in 2008 pushed through the final version of the Climate Change Act. It made us the only country in the world legally committed between now and 2050 to cutting our emissions of CO2 by a staggering 80 per cent. Even then, the Government projected that this would cost us up to £734 billion. The latest figures from the EU and the International Energy Agency suggest that, for Britain to reach this target, it would now cost even more: £1,300 billion.

Less well known, however, is the extraordinary story of how this most expensive Act ever put on the statute book originated in the first place. Google “Bryony Worthington YouTube” and you will see the video of a young climate activist, now known as Baroness Worthington, describing how she first conceived the idea of such a policy when she was campaigns director on climate change for Friends of the Earth."

Climate change forecasts 'exaggerated', ex-environment secretary Owen Paterson claims

Telegraph

The effects of climate change have been "consistently and widely exaggerated" in scientific forecasts, Owen Paterson, the sacked environment secretary, has claimed.

In a speech to climate sceptic think tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) on Wednesday, Mr Paterson will say that there is "considerable uncertainty" over the extent to which carbon dioxide emissions will cause global warming.

"Over the past 35 years, the earth’s atmosphere has warmed nothing like as fast as forecast and over the last 18 years it has not warmed at all, according to some sources," he will say, claiming "many policymakers have still to catch up with the facts".

Mr Paterson argues that the UK should scrap the Climate Change Act, which binds the UK to cutting its greenhouse gas emissions, and pursue an alternative energy strategy."

New paper debunks "acidification" scare, finds warming increases pH

The Hockey Schtick
A paper published today in Climate of the Past reconstructs water pH and temperature from a lake in central Japan over the past 280,000 years and clearly shows that pH increases [becomes more basic or alkaline] due to warmer temperatures, and vice-versa, becomes more acidic [or "acidified" if you prefer] due to cooling temperatures. This finding is the opposite of the false assumptions behind the "ocean acidification" scare, but is compatible with the basic chemistry of Henry's Law and outgassing of CO2 from the oceans with warming. 

Thus, if global warming resumes after the "pause," ocean temperatures will rise along with CO2 outgassing, which will make the oceans more basic, not acidic. You simply cannot have it both ways:

"Either the oceans are getting warmer and the CO2 concentration in seawater is decreasing, which means that ocean acidification from man-made CO2 from the atmosphere is nonsense. 

Or the oceans are getting cooler and the man-made CO2 from the atmosphere is dissolving in those cooler oceans and causing – insignificant – ocean acidification, which means that warming oceans and the associated sea level rises are nonsense. 

Take your pick – REAL SCIENCE says you can’t have both."

In addition, the paper shows that pH of the lake varied over a wide range from ~7.5 to 8.8 simply depending on the temperature of each month of the year. As the "acidification" alarmists like to say, a variation of 1.3 pH units is equivalent to a 1995% change in hydrogen ions due to the logarithmic pH scale, just over a single year! Summer months are of course associated with warmer temperatures and more alkaline, higher pH and winter months associated with colder temperatures and much more "acidified" lower pH values. Note also how pH varies widely over ~7.5 to 8.8 simply dependent on the depth at a given time, because colder deeper waters can hold higher partial pressures of CO2 than the warmer surface waters:   ..."

NOAA Report Destroys Global Warming Link To Extreme Weather

Forbes
Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have demolished claims by global warming activists that global warming caused or worsened many extreme weather events last year.
According to NOAA’s new publication, Explaining Extremes of 2013 from a Climate Perspective, there is no discernible connection between global warming and 2013 extreme weather events such as the California drought, Colorado floods, the UK’s exceptionally cold spring, a South Dakota blizzard, Central Europe floods, a northwestern Europe cyclone, and exceptional snowfall in Europe’s Pyrenees Mountains.
The California drought provides a good example of global warming activists making false and irresponsible claims regarding global warming to deliberately mislead people who aren’t familiar with scientific studies and evidence. The liberal Center for American Progress and its media allies such as the Washington Post, San Jose Mercury News, Associated Press, and others have all published stories claiming global warming caused or worsened the ongoing California drought. Scientists, however, say just the opposite. “[F]or the California drought, which was investigated by three teams from the United States, human factors were found not to have influenced the lack of rainfall,” NOAA reported in an accompanying press release."

I have a computer model

Bishop Hill
I have a computer model, which I use for predicting the weather. The algorithm is fairly straightforward and goes something like this:

It will rain tomorrow.

(Round where I live that's likely to be a pretty effective prediction.)
Anyway, if I run my computer model repeatedly, I find that 100% of the runs give the same result - "It will rain tomorrow". I conclude, therefore, that we can say with 100% confidence that it will rain tomorrow. ............"

Global warming: Can Owen Paterson save us from an unimaginable energy disaster?

Christopher Booker, Telegraph

There is no way of meeting the Climate Change Act's targets, except by closing down Britain's entire economy"

Using 1999 GISS Data, Global Warming Trend Since 1866 Only 0.5°C Per Century!

NoTricksZone
We are told over and over again that the globe has warmed by 0.8°C since 1880 or 1850. Lately we have seen article after paper after publication that states this number in Fahrenheit, 1.44°F, because that sounds larger. But is this number correct? What is it based on?

New paper finds West Antarctic glacier likely melting from geothermal heat below

The Hockey Schtick
A paper published today in Earth and Planetary Science Letters finds evidence that one of the largest glaciers in West Antarctica, the Thwaites Glacier, is primarily melting from below due to geothermal heat flux from volcanoes located along the West Antarctic Volcanic Rift System, i.e. not due to man-made CO2.

CAGW proponents have alleged that West Antarctic glaciers such as such as the Thwaites Glacier and the neighboring Pine Island Glacier are rapidly melting due to man-made greenhouse gases and/or ocean heating, despite observations showing the air temperature in the Antarctic hasn’t risen since 1979, Antarctic sea surface temperatures have fallen since 2006, and ARGO ocean heat content of the Southern Ocean shows no increase at any level of the top 2000 meters since the system was put in place in 2004. The authors find the neighboring Pine Island Glacier also overlies the same volcanic rift system and thus may also be melting from geothermal heat below. 

The West Antarctic Volcanic Rift System is illustrated by JoNova below, and just so happens to correspond to the areas of notable glacier melt and alleged warming. In contrast, East Antarctica, which holds > 80% of Antarctic ice mass and does not have any known underlying volcanoes, is significantly increasing in ice mass. 

The paper joins several others finding geothermal heat largely if not entirely responsible for glacier melt in multiple regions in both Antarctica and Greenland, i.e. not anthropogenic. "

Almost Five Years Since Barack Obama Killed The Space Program

Real Science
It has been nearly five years since President Obama killed the space program. so that the formerly great agency could focus on junk science and CO2 based superstition."

ED: from the comments:

Yes, he did. With a stroke of his pen, Obama flushed the $10+ billion that taxpayers had invested in Constellation to that point. His alternative plan was to let startup space tech companies start over from scratch and propose a better rocket. My father in law was an executive at an aerospace manufacturer at the time, and I asked what he thought about it. He explained that all the other designs that were kicking around had already been evaluated and Constellation was the best around. There was absolutely no rational excuse for flushing that investment.
My father in law said that they see this occasionally during a change of administration. The new guy doesn’t want to carry through the old guy’s project and give him the “credit”, so they flush the old projects and start something the new guy can claim credit for. Obama showed this behavior quite clearly when he announced his “Brain Map” project (with ZERO new revenue earmarked to pay for it).
This kind of egotistical behavior is very harmful to science. Even if the Brain Map is a good idea, Obama doesn’t deserve credit for it. And stamping Obama’s name onto the project then not bringing any new money to the table only ensures that other deserving science goes unfunded.
Obama has been the most anti-science president in US history."

Desperate Warmists Try to Save their Skins by Throwing Alarmist 'Sea Ice' Professor to the Wolves

Breitbart
If ever you've worried about vanishing Arctic ice, the 'expert' almost certainly to blame is a Cambridge professor called Peter Wadhams. For years now, Wadhams has been the go-to doommonger of choice for any newspaper or green pressure group or huckster politician in need of a scare story about why the Arctic sea ice will very soon be a thing of the past, that it's all our fault and that basically we're all doomed. And because he's a professor from a highly respected university who just happens to specialise in studying sea ice and who has led more than 40 expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic people have tended to believe him.  ......Poor Peter Wadhams is being thrown to the wolves not because his science is flawed and unduly alarmist - it's quite obvious that his contemporaries have known this for quite some time - but rather because these unconscionable creeps need a handy sacrificial victim to distract from their corruption, incompetence and malpractice.The many journalists who so credulously reported on his nonsense deserve little credit either. In their eagerness to get a quick attention-grabbing story they not only failed in their basic duty to check the credibility of their sources but also they helped promulgate a myth which formed one of the main pillars of the great global warming narrative."

Bad News for the alarmists: 'Missing Heat' from Non-Existent 'Global Warming' isn't Hiding in the Ocean After All

Brietbart
Using a combination of satellite observations and direct measurements taken by a network of 3,000 floating Argo temperature probes, the NASA team set out to calculate temperature changes and thermal expansion in the deep ocean (below 1.24 miles).
What they have found is that the deep ocean has not warmed measurably since at least 2005.
This unfortunate discovery represents a major problem for the climate alarmists because the "missing heat" supposedly hiding in the deep oceans has long been their favoured explanation as to why there has been no measured "global warming" for the last 18 years."

New paper finds climate sensitivity to CO2 is only 0.43C, about 7 times less than the IPCC claims

The Hockey Schtick
A new paper published in the Open Journal of Atmospheric and Climate Change by renowned professor of physics and expert on spectroscopy Dr. Hermann Harde finds that climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 levels is only about 0.43C, about 7 times less than the IPCC claims, but in line with many other published low estimates of climate sensitivity. 

The paper further establishes that climate sensitivity to tiny changes in solar activity is comparable to that of CO2 and by no means insignificant as the IPCC prefers to claim. "

Global Warming – Even Less Worse Than It Seems

Real Science
Satellite data shows that the Earth hasn’t warmed much since they were launched in the late 1970s. But it is even “less worse” than that. Besides the fact that the start date of 1979 was one of the coldest years on record in the Northern Hemisphere, two volcanic eruptions on the left half of the temperature graph greatly exaggerate the trend, by artificially cooling the past.
The animation below removes those volcanic years except for 1983 – which I very conservatively adjusted upwards for the super El-Nino which occurred that year, but was masked by dust from El Chichon. As you can see, a realistic evaluation of temperature data shows that there has only been a tiny amount of warming since the very cold year of 1979  ......As an extra bonus, in 1975 the National Academy of Sciences showed no warming from 1900 to 1970."

California Drought – Almost As Dry as 1923 and 1976

Sunshine Hours
According to the NOAA, California Precipitation for Sept-Aug  is the 3rd lowest of all time behind 1923/24 and 1976/77.
It must be “Global Warming” caused by CO2 if it is almost as dry as 1923."

Australian summer maximums “warmed” by 200%

JoNova (Australia)
Which causes more summer heatwaves: carbon dioxide or Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) adjustments?
Ken Stewart has analyzed the adjustments used to create the all-new ACORN wonder dataset and compared them with another BOM dataset called AWAP, and finds, extraordinarily, that the trend in average summer maximums has been tripled by adjustments that the BOM imply are neutral.
Since summer maxima are the ones used to generate the most headlines in Australia, I ask again if the Bureau of Meteorology is a scientific agency or a PR group?  Increasing the trend in summer maxima would produce more headlines of hottest ever month, season, heatwave, and weekend.
In this graph Stewart splits the data into months, and compares the trends in maxima in the AWAP and ACORN datasets, across the entire nation. We see that most of the adjustments happen to data from the hottest months of the year, October to March. Even though the measured maxima in February and March are possibly cooler now than they were in the early 1900s, they have been adjusted to show warming trends.
When was the last time you heard the BOM tell you that their “hottest ever” February record depended on adjusting down the past hotter records?   ......We might be worried about “two degrees of warming” but people living in 1926 got two degrees of cooling some 88 years after the fact."

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #152

WUWT
THIS WEEK: By Ken Haapala, Executive Vice President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) "

'Where's the global warming?' Expert says public are growing sceptical of climate change

Express

This week saw the 18th anniversary since the Earth's temperature last rose - something that Dr Benny Peiser, from the Global Warming Policy Forum, says experts are struggling to understand.
He explains that we are now in the midst of a "crisis of credibility" because the global warming - and accompanied 'Doomsday' effects - that we were once warned about has not happened.
Scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) once predicted a temperature rise of 0.2 degrees per decade - but are now baffled by the fact our planet's temperature has not increased for almost two decades."