By Meteorologist Art Horn
Recently I was looking at some graphical temperature data from NASA. I was able to find a graph of United States temperature from 1880 up to 1999. I then went to the NASA GISS site and found the most recent plot of this data. I wanted to compare the two and see if there had been any changes in the trends. Each graph was on a different scale so I had to fit one to the other so they could be compared. After that I saved each image and opened them each in a simple paint program. In this way I could toggle between the two and visually see any changes that might have taken place.
Go here and move your mouse wheel back and forward to toggle between the two
Well it was quite an eye opener! Going back and forth between the images there is a clear cooling the temperatures before 1970 and a clear warming of the temperatures after 1970. It is unmistakable and quite remarkable. Figure one is the temperature data from 1880 to 1999. Figure two shows the most recent plot. I suggest you save each image in your computer then bring them back up in some program that allows you to toggle rapidly back and forth so you can see the changes.
We all know that Dr. James Hansen is one of the worlds most visible global warming alarmists. He is also caretaker of the NASA GISS data. It would appear that he is not happy with the trend of temperature in the United States. It would also appear that he is doing something about it. By adjusting temperatures in the past downward and adjusting more recent temperatures upward we get an amplification (or at least the appearance of one) of the rise in temperature between the late 1970s and the late 1990s.
If these adjustments continue we will eventually have a new "Hockey Stick" graph. The old Hockey Stick has been broken and thrown away by most -- although Dr. Mann is attempting to duct tape it back together again. Now Dr. Hansen is gradually fashioning a new stick by adjusting the United States temperatures more to his liking.
On September 13th , 2008 I wrote a letter to Dr. Hansen's boss at NASA Michael Griffin explaining my dissatisfaction of having Dr. Hansen in charge of the very data that is used to support his alarmist point of view. To date I have not received a reply.
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More crooked Greenie "science"
Text only reproduced below. See the original for graphics
Bill Chameides says "global warming" is still happening. It isn't. As the global temperature graph below shows, all four of the world's major global surface temperature datasets (NASA GISS; RSS; UAH; and Hadley/University of East Anglia) show a decline in temperatures that have now persisted for seven years.
Chameides' graph overleaf appears to have been tampered with to exclude the very rapid cooling that occurred between 2007 (the curve stops in January 2007, when a strong el Nino artificially but temporarily boosted temperatures) and 2008. The fall in temperatures between January 2007 and January 2008, carefully not shown on Chameides' graph, was the greatest January-January fall since records began in 1880. Furthermore, Chameides's graph - instead of presenting a proper five-year running mean - merely cherry-picks certain points on the running-mean graph (which is not itself shown) so as to suggest, falsely, that global temperatures are still rising. This appears a deliberate and less than honest technique, characteristic of the desperation of those who had staked their careers and reputations on their belief in a new religion whose principal tenet - worldwide warming - have been falsified by worldwide cooling.
Chameides' graph appears to have been truncated to exclude the very rapid global cooling from 2007 to 2008. Also, the 5-year running-mean curve has been deleted to allow the blogger to select points that appear - falsely - to show continuously-rising global temperature. The matter can be put in a longer-term perspective by showing the entire satellite record of temperature, right up to date
The UAH graph provides a complete answer to the Chameides' attempt to suggest that "skeptics" are confusing short-term and longer-term temperature changes. The year 2008 will turn out to have been no warmer than 1980 - 28 years ago. This is not a short-run change: the cooling trend set in as far back as late 2001, seven full years ago, and there has been no net warming since 1995 on any measure.
Next, Chameides attempts to suggest that the recent cooling is caused by solar activity. He could well be right - however, if so, by the same token the warming that stopped in 1998 could also have been caused by solar activity - there was, after all, a solar Grand Maximum in the last 70 years of the 20th century, during which the sun was more active and for longer than at almost any previous similar period in the whole of the past 11,400 years.
Scafetta and West (2008) attribute more than two-thirds of the warming of the past 50 years to solar activity - the latest in a series of papers in all parts of the scientific literature that explicitly question the exaggerated estimates of climate sensitivity perpetrated by the IPCC.
Chameides' final, desperate point is that the "green diamonds" he has so carefully selected from the 5-year running-mean graph that he has equally carefully blotted out show continuously-rising temperatures that overlay what he calls the short-term cooling. Not so.
As the first graph above shows, the linear regression not just for the past five years but for the past seven years shows a decisive and continuing cooling. Keenlyside et al. (2008) do not expect a new record year for global temperature to occur until at least 2015. If they are right, then the IPCC's climate-sensitivity estimates must be - as Monckton (2008) finds them to be - prodigious exaggerations. False data will no longer convince any impartial mind to believe in the fantasy of anthropogenic "global warming"
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Climate, coral and the attention-seeking Dane
Can Prof. Hoegh-Guldberg read a textbook?
Once again Hoagy has been on TV and in the news recently moaning piteously at the impending doom of Australia's Great Barrier Reef due to global warming. So I thought the brief history lesson below might explain why he is essentially talking though his anus. The reef has been around for half a million years at least, and is still there despite going through far greater climate upheavals than we have seen in our times.
The excerpt is from World Atlas of Coral Reefs by Mark D. Spalding et. al.
Hoagy is a crook.
The Great Global Warming Swindle
Frontpage Interview's guest today is Martin Durkin, the producer of the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle
FP: Martin Durkin, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Durkin: Thanks so much for having me
FP: What is the science behind global warming theory?
Durkin: Lousy. If you examine the mountain of IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) literature on this, you'll find the vast majority of it concerns the possible (projected) effects of climate change. Most of this is highly suspect and does not address the central question of whether humans are causing the climate to change. The climate has always changed. Climate change is nothing new. The question of whether we are having anything to do about it, of course, rests on the CO2 question.
FP: Ok tell us about CO2.
Durkin: CO2 is a very small gas in the atmosphere. It is vital of course - without it we wouldn't be here. But it's small. It's not at all the most important greenhouse gas, and greenhouse gases themselves, and the `greenhouse effect', form only one small part of the earth's climate system (and not a very well understood part either). There is no correlation between CO2 and temperature on any significant timescale, except where you find, in ice core data, CO2 levels being influenced by temperature levels (there's a time lag between the two phenomena). Even global warmers admit that, for CO2 to make any difference, there would need to be some mechanism to amplify its effect in the atmosphere. No such amplifier has been shown to exist. They haven't even been able to demonstrate how one might work in theory (the trouble is the only conceivable amplifier would be water vapour, and water vapour makes clouds, which are rather famous for their cooling effect - at least the low level ones).
So what are we left with? Temperature has risen, slightly, falteringly and gradually for about 150 years or so (even `warmer' scientists can't claim that this started because of us). The period before this rise has long been known as a `Little Ice Age', from which we are evidently making a welcome recovery. We only started pumping out CO2 properly in the postwar boom, but what did temperatures do? In the postwar period they fell, till about the mid-70s. Then they went up again (just like they did at the beginning of the 20th Century, and then for the past ten years they've more or less flat-lined, decreasing slightly. Where is the evidence that humans are changing the climate? This is nothing but prejudice. It is not serious science.
FP: If the science is so faulty, why does the culture at large rely on it so much? What political underpinnings are involved in this scare? Who profits?
Durkin: There are people who profit, and that is part of the story, but I think not the most important part. I have followed green politics for a while now. I was asked to make a documentary series for Channel 4 in the UK more than a decade ago (they got very cross with me) so I've been sucked into it in a way. It is transparently obvious that the greens sit squarely in the tradition of Romanticism. Like the romantics, they hate industry, love nature, idealise peasant life, they think capitalism is wicked, they think people in modern society lead depraved shallow lives and have forgotten the true value of things, they don't like cars or supermarkets or lots of proles taking cheap long-haul holidays, etc, etc.
FP: What is Romanticism?
Durkin: Romanticism is in essence anti-Capitalist. Not in the sense of traditional Marxism. The Marxists wanted to go forwards not backwards. They wanted to build bigger factories than the capitalists, not folksy medieval craft workshops. No. Romanticism was a kind of reactionary anti-capitalism. And it was the ideology and aesthetic worldview of those people who lost most, or gained least from capitalism. I think it's the same today. In Europe, the toffs (Prince Charles and his gang) are green because they have lost their position in society. The intellectuals - teachers, lecturers, scientists are green because they don't have the status they used to. (Not long ago, a professor would have been someone important, had a big house, maids etc). These days, plumbers make more money.
It's not easy to explain this properly in a few lines, but this I think is the real basis for all those anti-modern green prejudices. They hated all the factories and cars long before global warming came along. The importance of global warming is it linked what otherwise would a have been a disparate bunch of prejudices and gave them some moral impetus. So you can say that scientists profit from global warming (grants etc), but that's the icing on the cake.
You can easily tell that global warming is really a political idea rather than a scientific one. In any gathering in polite society you can tell who will be `pro-global warming' and who will be sceptical, in the same way as you can guess who will hate George Bush, or who will be sympathetic to Sarah Palin. Go into a party of lefties in New York and tell them the science on global warming doesn't stack up. They don't say, `Good Lord, what a relief, I thought we were in for it.' Instead they get very cross with you. They're terribly attached to their apocalypse and don't take kindly to people rocking the boat.
FP: So tell us how you have rocked the boat and what reactions you have received for doing so.
Durkin: It started more than ten years ago when Sara Ramsden, who was head of science programmes at Channel 4 in the UK, asked me to make a documentary series exploring the scientific basis for environmentalist arguments. The result was a thing called `Against Nature'. The series argued that there was no rational basis for the green attack on industrial society (which is getting cleaner rather than dirtier, in which forests have long been expanding rather than contracting, etc.) or for their loathing and fear of population increases in the developing world, the spectre of `resource depletion' etc. In short the scare stories were without scientific foundation. They were aesthetic or political rather than rational.
This upset the greens to no end. Then another head of science programmes at Channel 4, a chap called Charles Furneaux, invited me to make a feature-length film about genetic modification. This was in the middle of the green scare about `Frankenstein food'. Once again, we found there was no scientific basis whatsoever for the scare (everyone knew there wasn't, but no-one seemed to be saying it, at least not on TV). They didn't like this film either.
Then another head of science at Channel 4, Hamish Mykura, suggested I make another feature-length film on global warming. Hamish knew I considered global warming to be yet another daft green scare - perhaps the mother of all green scares.
FP: And it was easy to rock the boat on global warming?
Durkin: Very easy. You just look at the science. It's not there. All the data we have (real life data) contradicts their absurd models. But there was something else that upset them. They like to depict anyone who disagrees with them as corrupt. It was quite obvious in the film that this was nothing more than a very unpleasant attempt at censorship. Worse than this, they like to pose as radicals, with the best interests of poor people at heart. What we did in the film was to mention the fact that a very large section of the world's population still does not enjoy the benefits of electricity. And we described in simple terms what this meant. These people burn wood or dried dung in their homes to cook their food. They have no artificial light or heat in their homes (huts). Their wretched fires give off horrific amounts of smoke and eat up fuel (trees). When it gets dark they must sleep. When it gets cold they shiver (it gets cold in Africa too you know). And of course no electricity also means there are no fancy things like water purification plants.
The death toll from the resulting smoke and bad water is horrendous. With malaria (shall we get into the successful green campaign against DDT?), these are among the biggest causes of death in the world. Several million children under five die each year from dysentery and respiratory diseases, many millions of women too (who do the cooking), all for want of something we in the West take for granted. (No electricity also means you use up a lot of trees - upsetting if you're one of those nasty people who rate trees over humans. Indeed, it's the first world where the forests are expanding so rapidly - which the greens always forget to mention).
Getting electricity is a matter of life and death for about a third of the world's population. Africa has coal and oil, but the greens say these must be left untouched. This is barbaric. To try to restrict the world's poorest people to using the most expensive and unreliable forms of electrical generation (wind and solar) is effectively to tell them they can't have electricity. I have filmed quite a bit in poor countries. The problems they face are obvious and upsetting. This more than anything makes me feel angry at the green movement. They kill people, they keep them in misery. This, as much as the sober assessment of global warming theory, rocked the boat. The greens have hated me ever since Against Nature. It doesn't bother me at all. I regard them as the lowest of the low.
FP: There seems to be a mental illness of some kind, associated with the leftist vision in general. They almost don't care about reality at all, but only their political faith. The moment one cause is discredited they just move on to the next. How do you diagnose it? It's a hatred of one's own society, a hatred of oneself, or what? I know you have already labelled anti-capitalism as one ingredient, but please expand on the mindset here a bit.
Durkin: I remember being young and foolish and a leftie. Reality was always a problem. Communist countries were clearly dreadful. The working class was obviously a heck of lot better off (instead of poorer) and they were not convinced by the arguments of middle-class Marxist-types (very sensibly). In fact the working class has always been a huge let-down to the left . as it is now to the greens.
Capitalism had delivered on a truly spectacular scale. This called for a bit of fancy footwork in theory terms. Hence reviving `alienation' as a theme (Marcuse's `One-Dimentional Man' etc). Yes, we were all richer and healthier and more educated etc under capitalism, but we were more spiritually shallow. This drove the Marxists into the Romantic camp. Peasants are `whole', whereas industrial workers are alienated from their `true selves'. It also led to post-structuralism. If Reason told us that capitalism had been a resounding success, then reason itself must be suspect. Rationalism was `just another narrative'. The overuse and misuse of the term `narrative' reflects the heavy influence of muddle-headed English professors in this process. The left had lost the argument, so logical argument itself was to be attacked.
It does not upset the left, or the greens at all, that they are proved wrong again and again and again. They are motivated by things other than Reason. Sadly, this is true also of people who, professionally, are meant to be intellectuals.
Capitalism has delivered a decent education to very large numbers for the first time in human history -- despite the state being so incompetent in this area. The market value of intellectuals -- especially post-structuralist English critics -- is not high. No wonder they're not fond of the market. Academic scientists too, I find, are often left-leaning, and you can see this in the complexion of support for `global warming'.
I think we have a battle on our hands. An intellectual and moral battle -- there is a lot at stake. And, sadly, too few of us recognise it, or understand where the battle-lines are drawn. To fight for the values of the enlightenment properly -- the interlocking values of Freedom, Reason and Progress -- we need to understand fully why they are so desperately important. We also need to understand properly the character and nature of the opposition. The waters are muddy at the moment. We need make them clear.
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Alarmists Still Heated Even As World Cools
It's been a bad year for global warming alarmists. Record cold periods and snowfalls are occurring around the globe. The hell that the radicals have promised is freezing over
As the British House of Commons debated a climate-change bill that pledged the United Kingdom to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050, London was hit by its first October snow since 1922. Apparently Mother Nature wasn't paying attention. The British people, however, are paying attention - to reality. A poll found that 60% of them doubt the claims that global warming is both man-made and urgent.
Elsewhere, the Swiss lowlands last month received the most snow for any October since records began. Zurich got 20 centimeters, breaking the record of 14 centimeters set in 1939. Ocala, Fla., experienced its second-lowest October temperature since 1850. October temperatures fell to record lows in Oregon as well. On Oct. 10, Boise, Idaho, got the earliest snow in its history - 1.7 inches. That beat the old record by seven-tenths of an inch and one day on the calendar.
In the Southern Hemisphere, where winter was winding down, Durban, South Africa, had its coldest September night in history in the middle of the month. Some regions of the country had unusual late-winter snows. A month earlier, New Zealand officials reported that Mount Ruapehu had its largest snow base ever. At the top of the world, the International Arctic Research Center reported last month, there was 29% more Arctic sea ice this year than last.
None of this matters, of course, to the warming zealots. It doesn't matter if it's too dry or too wet, too hot or too cold. All of it, they say, is caused by global warming. We believe, however, as do many reputable scientists, that the warming and cooling of the Earth is a natural phenomenon dictated by forces beyond our control, from ocean currents to solar activity.
The latest warming trend, which appears to have ended in 1998, is the result of the end of the Little Ice Age, which extended from roughly the 16th century to the 19th. During that period, Muir Glacier in Alaska filled Glacier Bay. In fact, when the first Russian explorers arrived in Alaska in the 1740s, there was no Glacier Bay - just a wall of ice where the entrance would be. As the Earth warmed, long before SUVs roamed the globe, Alaska's glaciers also warmed and began to recede, starting in the 1800s.
All that may be changing. During the winter and summer of 2007-2008, unusually large amounts of winter snow were followed by unusually cold temperatures in June, July and August. "In June, I was surprised to see snow still at sea level in Prince William Sound," says U.S. Geological Survey glaciologist Bruce Molnia. "On the Juneau Icefield, there was still 20 feet of new snow on the surface of the Taku Glacier in late July." It was the worst summer he'd seen in two decades. As the Anchorage Daily News reports, "Never before in the history of a research project dating back to 1946 had the Juneau Icefield witnessed the kind if snow buildup that came this year. It was similar on a lot of other glaciers too." It's been "a long time on most glaciers," Molnia says, "where they've actually had positive mass balance."
In other words, more snow is falling in the winter than melts in the summer, making the glaciers thicker in the middle. Glaciers can appear to be shrinking even as they are growing. Photos taken from ships can record receding edges even as mass is building inland. When they get thick enough, the weight forces the glacier to advance. The U.S. may owe its ascension to a global power on the global warming that began with the end of the Little Ice Age, which almost doomed the American Revolution. George Washington's famous winter at Valley Forge was part of that natural phenomenon.
As the climate warmed from 1800 to 1900, the U.S. tripled in size, spreading westward to straddle a continent. The population of the windy and very cold trading post known as Chicago grew from 4,000 in 1800 to 1.5 million by 1900, sitting on a great lake carved by glaciers long since receded. Due to a decline in solar activity and other factors, the Earth is cooling and has been since 1998. And a peer-reviewed study published in April by Nature predicts the world will continue cooling at least through 2015. Now, if only we could get the warming alarmists to face facts and cool it as well.
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Another nasty one for the peak oilers
North Dakota and Montana have an estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in an area known as the Bakken Formation.
A U.S. Geological Survey assessment, released April 10, shows a 25-fold increase in the amount of oil that can be recovered compared to the agency's 1995 estimate of 151 million barrels of oil.
Technically recoverable oil resources are those producible using currently available technology and industry practices. USGS is the only provider of publicly available estimates of undiscovered technically recoverable oil and gas resources. New geologic models applied to the Bakken Formation, advances in drilling and production technologies, and recent oil discoveries have resulted in these substantially larger technically recoverable oil volumes. About 105 million barrels of oil were produced from the Bakken Formation by the end of 2007.
The USGS Bakken study was undertaken as part of a nationwide project assessing domestic petroleum basins using standardized methodology and protocol as required by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 2000.
The Bakken Formation estimate is larger than all other current USGS oil assessments of the lower 48 states and is the largest "continuous" oil accumulation ever assessed by the USGS. A "continuous" oil accumulation means that the oil resource is dispersed throughout a geologic formation rather than existing as discrete, localized occurrences. The next largest "continuous" oil accumulation in the U.S. is in the Austin Chalk of Texas and Louisiana, with an undiscovered estimate of 1.0 billions of barrels of technically recoverable oil.
"It is clear that the Bakken formation contains a significant amount of oil - the question is how much of that oil is recoverable using today's technology?" said Senator Byron Dorgan, of North Dakota. "To get an answer to this important question, I requested that the U.S. Geological Survey complete this study, which will provide an up-to-date estimate on the amount of technically recoverable oil resources in the Bakken Shale formation."
The USGS estimate of 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil has a mean value of 3.65 billion barrels. Scientists conducted detailed studies in stratigraphy and structural geology and the modeling of petroleum geochemistry. They also combined their findings with historical exploration and production analyses to determine the undiscovered, technically recoverable oil estimates.
USGS worked with the North Dakota Geological Survey, a number of petroleum industry companies and independents, universities and other experts to develop a geological understanding of the Bakken Formation. These groups provided critical information and feedback on geological and engineering concepts important to building the geologic and production models used in the assessment.
Five continuous assessment units (AU) were identified and assessed in the Bakken Formation of North Dakota and Montana - the Elm Coulee-Billings Nose AU, the Central Basin-Poplar Dome AU, the Nesson-Little Knife Structural AU, the Eastern Expulsion Threshold AU, and the Northwest Expulsion Threshold AU.
At the time of the assessment, a limited number of wells have produced oil from three of the assessments units in Central Basin-Poplar Dome, Eastern Expulsion Threshold, and Northwest Expulsion Threshold. The Elm Coulee oil field in Montana, discovered in 2000, has produced about 65 million barrels of the 105 million barrels of oil recovered from the Bakken Formation.
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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