NC Media Watch

Humans caused 120% Arctic warming without CO2.

Russ Steele

I was wondering about this non CO2 warming, but did not get around to posting with all the Christmas prep and grand kids coming for a visit. Thanks to Tom Nelson's Blog for this post. 

Settled science?: If dark carbon causes 94 percent of Arctic warming, and if contrails account for another 15-20%, how much is caused by natural variability and trace amounts of CO2?

Yet Another Human Climate Warming Effect In The Arctic – Aircraft Contrails « Climate Science: Roger Pielke Sr.

...an article in Scientific American by David Biello based on a study by Charlie Zender, a climate physicist at the University of California, Irvine stated

““…. on snow—even at concentrations below five parts per billion—such dark carbon triggers melting, and may be responsible for as much as 94 percent of Arctic warming”.

Now we have yet another human climate forcing that was reported by Rex Dalton of Nature News in the article how aircraft emissions contribute to warming – Aviation contributes up to one-fifth of warming in some areas of the Arctic.

The article includes the text

“The first analysis of emissions from commercial airline flights shows that they are responsible for 4–8% of surface global warming since surface air temperature records began in 1850 — equivalent to a temperature increase of 0.03–0.06 °C overall.

The analysis, by atmospheric scientists at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, also shows that in the Arctic, aircraft vapour trails produced 15–20% of warming.”

As the Climategate screw turns, a warmer reviews his position.

Russ Steele

A regular reader who often commented here was always citing Real Climate as an authoritative source. However, I found the RC authors biased, refusing to answer the tough questions, often denigrating the questioner. This was not now science was done. Here is how Real Climate helped turn a warming believer into a climate change skeptic.

From Global Warming Believer To Skeptic By: Bradley Fikes, December 21st, 2009, NCTimes.com blog

A few years ago, I accepted global warming theory with few doubts. I wrote several columns for this paper condemning what I thought were unfair attacks by skeptics and defending the climate scientists.

Boy, was I naive.

Since the Climategate emails and documents revealed active collusion to thwart skeptics and even outright fraud, I’ve been trying to correct the record of my earlier foolishness. In one of those columns, I even wrote: “And see Real Climate (www.realclimate.org) for global warming science without the political spin.”

In fact, Real Climate was and is nothing more than the house organ of global warming activists, concerned more with politics than with science.

My mistake was assuming only the purest of motives of the global warming alarmists, while assuming the worst of the skeptics. In fact, the soi-disant moralists of the global warming movement can also exploit their agenda for profit.

Climategate jolted me into confronting the massive fraud and deception by top global warming scientists, who were in a position to twist the peer-review process in their favor, and did so shamelessly.

More lumps of coal for Christmas

Russ Steele

Here is the Chilling Effect's latest carton. Enjoy!

Actions speak louder than words

Russ Steele

The Instapunit, Glenn Reynolds, have some thought on actions taken by Senator Dianne Feinstein to remove options for reducing carbon emissions.

HOW IMPORTANT IS CONTROLLING CARBON EMISSIONS? NOT VERY. Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation in Congress on Monday to protect a million acres of the Mojave Desert in California by scuttling some 13 big solar plants and wind farms planned for the region. I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like a crisis.

The story is in the New York Times.

Another stake in the heart of CO2 warming consensus

Study shows CFCs, cosmic rays major culprits for global warming

WATERLOO, Ont. (Monday, Dec. 21, 2009) - Cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), both already implicated in depleting the Earth's ozone layer, are also responsible for changes in the global climate, a University of Waterloo scientist reports in a new peer-reviewed paper.

In his paper, Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, shows how CFCs - compounds once widely used as refrigerants - and cosmic rays - energy particles originating in outer space - are mostly to blame for climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. His paper, derived from observations of satellite, ground-based and balloon measurements as well as an innovative use of an established mechanism, was published online in the prestigious journal Physics Reports.

"My findings do not agree with the climate models that conventionally thought that greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, are the major culprits for the global warming seen in the late 20th century," Lu said. "Instead, the observed data show that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays most likely caused both the Antarctic ozone hole and global warming. These findings are totally unexpected and striking, as I was focused on studying the mechanism for the formation of the ozone hole, rather than global warming."

Full Report here. Paper is on line here.

Mother Nature is not nice

Russ Steele

I have written often that our climate is controlled by Mother Nature, and she could give a rats tush about what we humans are doing on this planet. Howard Bloom provides some perspective on Mother Nature in his Wall Street Journal article.

       
Climate Change Is Nature's Way  By Howard Bloom, Wall Street Journal

Climate change activists are right. We are in for walloping shifts in the planet's climate. Catastrophic shifts. But the activists are wrong about the reason. Very wrong. And the prescription for a solution—a $27 trillion solution—is likely to be even more wrong. Why?

Climate change is not the fault of man. It's Mother Nature's way. And sucking greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is too limited a solution. We have to be prepared for fire or ice, for fry or freeze. We have to be prepared for change.

We've been deceived by a stroke of luck. In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis, man the inventor of the city, we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages. And in the 120,000 years since we emerged in our current physiological shape as Homo sapiens, we've lived through 20 sudden global warmings. In most of those, temperatures have shot up by as much as 18 degrees within a mere 20 years.

All this took place without smokestacks and tailpipes. All this took place without the desecration of nature by modern man.

Fox News Global Warming ... or a Lot of Hot Air? - Update

Russ Steele

I watched the Fox News special last night and found it rather balanced, however the key players on the warmer side were absent, Fox had to settle for some proxy defenders of the warmers emails and actions to subvert the peer review process. As Anthony Watts writes the Phil Jones and Michael Mann ducked requests for interviews. Anthony has the video:

Video: McIntyre-McKittrick on Fox News Global Warming Special – Mann chickens out

All six parts of the hour-long special aired during prime time Sunday night on Fox News featuring Steve McIntyre and Ross McKittrick are now online below. Both Phil Jones and Michael Mann ducked requests for interviews. I can perhaps understand Jones situation, since he has not been giving other interviews, but in Mann’s case he’s been on a media blitz writing op-eds for the Washington Post and giving interviews to dozens more. His bias, (or perhaps cowardice) is showing. If his work is so “robust”, why not defend himself  in this venue?

The segments by Bjorn Lomborg were most interesting. Rather than spend trillions of dollars to try and control the climate, our money could be spent more effectively to improve peoples lives now, not in 20 to 50 years in a failed attempt to save the planet from a fake climate disaster.

I am interested readers views on the special. Please post a comment.

Climatology Peer Review Reconstruction

 Russ Steele

The American Thinker has an interesting article on how the peer review process failed,  by Douglas and Christy, two authors of an important paper that show CO2 observations did not match the models which may have overestimated the CO2 sensitivity by a factor of 2 - 4. Fascinating read, on how the team of scientists conspired to insure their religious views on climate change could not be tainted or challenged by observational facts.  Protecting their previous constructed climate change hoax became more important than the climate change science.

This is why examination of the CRU email are important they reveal the weakness of peer review, when the reviewer are your buddies.

A Climatology Conspiracy?
By David H. Douglass and John R. Christy

The CRU e-mails have revealed how the normal conventions of the peer review process appear to have been compromised by a team* of global warming scientists, with the willing cooperation of the editor of the International Journal of Climatology (IJC), Glenn McGregor. The team spent nearly a year preparing and publishing a paper that attempted to rebut a previously published paper in IJC by Douglass, Christy, Pearson, and Singer (DCPS). The DCPS paper, reviewed and accepted in the traditional manner, had shown that the IPCC models that predicted significant "global warming" in fact largely disagreed with the observational data.

We will let the reader judge whether this team effort, revealed in dozens of e-mails and taking nearly a year, involves inappropriate behavior, including (a) unusual cooperation between authors and editor, (b) misstatement of known facts, (c) character assassination, (d) avoidance of traditional scientific give-and-take, (e) using confidential information, (f) misrepresentation (or misunderstanding) of the scientific question posed by DCPS, (g) withholding data, and more.

Global Warming ... or a Lot of Hot Air?

Fox News is running a one-hour special on climate tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern Time tonight, 6 p.m. Pacific Time. Global Warming ... or a Lot of Hot Air? will be hosted by Bret Baier.

This preview from the Fox Web Site:

The global warming debate appears as polarized as you can get: One side fears environmental ruin unless we quickly cut carbon emissions even if that severely disrupts our way of life. The other predicts economic ruin from trillion-dollar plans to re-order the global economy and redistribute the world's wealth.

As world leaders gathered at the Copenhagen conference on climate change, the controversy grew even hotter: Leaked e-mails cast doubt on the integrity of leading scientists; a cap-and-trade bill stalled in the Senate, and the Obama administration threatened an end-run around Congress.

Fox News unpacks this complicated, but hugely important story. It includes interviews with top United Nations climate officials, researchers who upset the global warming consensus and the U.S. lawmakers fighting it out on Capitol Hill.

Steve McIntyre will be one of the researchers interviewed. It was Steve that first question the validity of the "hockey stick" graphic and underlying math and science. According to the leaked email he scared the crap out of the CRU climate fraud team. Steve writes this morning at Climate Audit.

They [Fox] were extremely well prepared for the interview to say the least, even being acquainted with as small a nuance of the debate as the Starbucks Hypothesis. I suspect that I’m going to look pretty weary in the interview – I was in the process of going through the Climategate Letters, which are discourging even for third party readers.

I think that the producers are trying to make the show more nuanced than the usual effort in this field (on either side). Not an easy task.

For those readers that do not have cable or satellite TV, you can view this special on the Internet at hulu,  details here.

What happened in Copenhagen - the good, the bad and the ugly

Russ Steele

The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley offers up a  Copenhagen recap on the SPPI Blog this morning. It is the best summary that I can find so far.

The White House spinmeisters spun, and their official press release proclaimed, with more than usual fatuity, that President Obama had “salvaged” a deal at Copenhagen in bilateral talks with China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, which had established a negotiating bloc.

The plainly-declared common position of these four developing nations had been the one beacon of clarity and common sense at the foggy fortnight of posturing and gibbering in the ghastly Copenhagen conference center.

This is what the Forthright Four asked for:
Point 1. No compulsory limits on carbon emissions.
Point 2. No emissions reductions at all unless the West paid for them.
Point 3. No international monitoring of any emissions reductions not paid for by the West.
Point 4. No use of “global warming” as an excuse to impose protectionist trade restrictions on countries that did not cut their carbon emissions.

After President Obama’s dramatic intervention to save the deal, this is what the Forthright Four got:
Point 1. No compulsory limits on carbon emissions.
Point 2. No emissions reductions at all unless the West paid for them.
Point 3. No international monitoring of any emissions reductions not paid for by the West.
Point 4. No use of “global warming” as an excuse to impose protectionist trade restrictions on countries that did not cut their carbon emissions.

The good news is the eco-Nazis’ attempt at global bureaucratic coup d’etat failed. The bad news is that the failure in Copenhagen will strengthen Governor Schwarzenegger's argument that climate change solutions should be regional, starting with California. The ugly is he will now redouble his efforts to kill our economy with more eco-regulations, including a cap and trade tax bill to fund the creation of green jobs. Jobs that will go away once Californian voters discover what most of the nation already knows - human caused global warming is an unscientific hoax.