NC Media Watch

Over e-mail transom: PG&E -- Rent seeking for climate change.

 Russ Steele
 
I am always surprised what comes over the e-mail transom everyday. Here is the latest from PG&E wanting to raise my bill $5.00 a month to prevent climate change.  I thought they had raised my bill enough already to pay for my SmartMeter and to pay for their transition to CARB mandated renewable energy. 

Join your neighbors in the fight against climate change.
Did you know that every time you watch TV, turn on a light or heat your home, greenhouse gases (GHG) are emitted into the atmosphere? The ClimateSmart program is an easy way to balance out your home's GHG emissions. Join the 30,000 customers who've enrolled in the program and have helped reduce carbon emissions equivalent to taking 74,000 cars off of the road for one year!
 
Go carbon neutral for about the cost of a cup of coffee.
When you join the ClimateSmart program, a tax-deductible donation will be added to your PG&E bill based on your home's energy use that month. For less than $5 a month, your contributions to the program will help reduce GHG emissions through environmental conservation, restoration and protection projects right here in California.

Here is how much global warming we have had in California in the last 80 years:


Are you willing to pay an additional $60 dollars a year on your utility bill to reduce the warming shown in the above chart?  This is just another attempt to get you to pay for grants to environmental groups who can then sue you and your company for emitting to much CO2. It is also for grants to buy CFL lights so that organizations line the APPLE Center for Sustainable Living can hand them out so we can all save the planet from global warming. But, from the above graphic you can see how much California has really warmed. How much are you willing to pay to reduce that warming?

Exit Question: Are you going to become a member of PG&E's ClimateSmart Program?

Record snow fall at Boreal Ski Resort

Russ Steele

In March Boreal, just west of Donner Pass on I-80, reecieved 217 inches of snow. This brings the season snow fall to 762 inches (56 feet). The previous record was 662 inches in 1994/95. The season normal is about 400 inches.  The current base in between 275 and 375 inches. (20-30 feet)

The 1st of April snow survey is only days away, it will be interesting to see if the water content is also a Sierra record.

Here is the NOAA Snow Water Equivalent Map.


H/T ICECAP.

What happended to Union's Sustainable Living Blog?

Russ Steele

I was surfing through The Union's Blogs and discovered that the last entry on this blog was in August of 2010. 




Where are all the A.P.P.E.L people and their sustainable living ideas? 

Why do we RV? (Corrected)

Russ Steele

Ellen and I are often asked by our non-RVing friends why we RV and some times it is hard to explain.  One of our favorite RV destination is the Salmon River in Idaho.  The beauty is awesome and when you have your own bed, refrigerator, stove and comfortable chair with you; and can stay as long as you like to watch the sun rise and sun set in places like Stanley Idaho, and visiting the mining towns of yesteryear and marveling at the technical achievements of our ancestors you might catch the bug.  Ellen and have visited most of the places in this video of Custer County Idaho. If you do not have a clue as to way we RV at the end of this video, you are not going to be a good candidate for RVing.

H/T to an Idaho friend for the video.

EU Left is determained to destroy Europe's economy

Russ Steele

Found this on Drudge, published in the UK Telegraph

The European Commission on Monday unveiled a "single European transport area" aimed at enforcing "a profound shift in transport patterns for passengers" by 2050.

The plan also envisages an end to cheap holiday flights from Britain to southern Europe with a target that over 50 per cent of all journeys above 186 miles should be by rail.

Top of the EU's list to cut climate change emissions is a target of "zero" for the number of petrol and diesel-driven cars and lorries in the EU's future cities.

Siim Kallas, the EU transport commission, insisted that Brussels directives and new taxation of fuel would be used to force people out of their cars and onto "alternative" means of transport.

"That means no more conventionally fuelled cars in our city centres," he said. "Action will follow, legislation, real action to change behaviour."

Exit Question: Is San Francisco next?

Ah yes, another climate change study based on a computer model.

Russ Steele

Now it is the boreal forest of Alaska and Canada that have attracted the attention of rent seeking scientist with a computer model -- Shift in Northern Forests Could Increase Global Warming.  The article is in the Scientific American, which used to be a real science magazine and now it a propaganda organ for the environmental left.  You can read the article for yourself, but here are the paragraphs that attracted my attention.

The researchers used a climate model to assess the impact if evergreens continued their march northward at the expense of leaf-dropping larch. The Russian boreal forest sits over a tremendous repository of carbon-rich but frozen soil. As the forest cover changes, the permafrost begins to thaw, potentially releasing huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the scientist said.

"Such changes in that vast region have the potential to affect areas outside that region," said Jacquelyn Shuman, a post-doctoral researcher at the university and the study's lead author.

In Alaska, similarly transformative changes are already underway. Shorter, drier winters and severe weather are taking a toll on the forest, Juday said. In late November, in what should be the depth of winter, Fairbanks had three days of rain that later froze, snapping limbs and downing trees.

"You talk to people down in Canada, where the temperate forest meets the southern limit of the boreal forest, and they say that's nothing new," Juday [a forestry professor at the University of Alaska], said. "But the boreal forest is not adapted to that. (Trees) just get devastated when that happens."

For the last thirty year I have been living on a Banner Mountain ridge and this winter we have seen the worst damage to our black oaks in 30 years, first an early snow storm in November and now a late snow storm in March. the first winter in 30 years we had to hire a tree climbers to take down the widow maker, not once but twice.

I guess it was due to global warming and the oak had not learned to adjust to the change in the computer models. Or, it could be that we are having an La Niña winter.  And, I think that maybe the Fairbanks rain and freeze could be attributed to an La Niña winter as well. Note, the real observers "down in Canada" said it was "nothing new" in the boreal forest.  It was only a problem in those nasty computer models run by Jacquelyn Shuman and Glenn Juday.

One of the wonderful things about computer models is thay can produce almost any desired result. Now if they could just figure out how to clean up all those broken trees in my yard!

The US Census of California is most revealing

Russ Steele

Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner, writing at Rasmussen Reports has some thoughts in the California Census facts in a much longer article here.

Coastal California, in contrast, has had a vast inflow of immigrants and a similarly vast outflow of Americans. High housing costs, exacerbated by no-growth policies and environmental restrictions, have made modest homes unaffordable to middle class families who don't want to live in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods or commute 50 miles to work.

California for the first time in its history grew only microscopically faster than the nation as a whole (10 percent to 9.7 percent). Metro Los Angeles and San Francisco increasingly resemble Mexico City and Sao Paulo, with a large affluent upper class, a vast proletariat and a huge income gap in between. [Emphasis added]

I have written about the loss of middle class American and business leaving the state multiple times, many of them from the metro areas along the Coast. Huntington Labs came to Nevada County, others just left the state. However, that is not what I thought about when reading the above paragraph.

I found it interesting that many of our current state executive leaders came from the affluent upper classes in San Francisco and Los Angles, or in Jerry Brown's case just across the bay in Oakland, but he is part of this elite class in the Bay Area. Our AG Kamala D. Harris and Lieutenant Governor of California Gavin Newsome came from San Francisco. Mary Nichols of CARB and Secretary of State Debra Bowen from Los Angles. 

Exit Question: Can these affluent upper class leaders really understand the needs of middle class California, they have not demonstrated it yet? 

Global Warming is dead last

Russ Steele

Gallop has the details in Water Issues Worry Americans Most, Global Warming Least


Global warming and urban sprawl were both down 12 points from March 2001.  I am hoping blogs like this one, Watts Up With That, Climate Depot and others, who are exposing the efforts of rent seeking scientists and a compliant press to distort climate change facts, are making a difference in the public's perception.

Japan's earthquake, tsunami, reactor damage and human error

Russ Steele

It is becoming truely hard to sort out all the crap we are getting in the press on the nuclear reactor damage in Japan.  If you feel you are being overcome by the misinformation cloud, I recommend reading this guest post by Professor Kiminori Itoh at Roger Pielke's Climate Science blog on the vunerability of the destroyed nuclear power plant here. 

Sea Level rise not accelerating according to peer reviewed study

Russ Steele

I have written about the lack of sea level rise multiple times on this blog starting with this article on a Pacific Institute study of Bay Area Sea Level Rise for the California Energy Commission's Climate Change Center Report Series.

The Pacific Institute conducted a study of sea level rise and it's impact on the Bay Area. They were to evaluate the risk of future sea level rise on the California coast and the San Francisco Bay. The study was published as part of the California Energy Commission's Climate Change Center Report Series. This series is to provide California citizens ready access to climate change research.

I found the Pacific Institute report writers had truncated the data, since the full data set did not support their position of accelerating sea level rise. This resulted in a heated exchange with one of the authors Dr. Peter Glick.  I could not find any evidence of any acceleration in sea level rise, in fact is was decelerating.   But, I was blown off since I did not have a PHd and a peer reviewed analysis. How we have some peer reviewed evidence there is no sea-level acceleration.

Sea-Level Acceleration Based on U.S. Tide Gauges and Extensions of Previous Global-Gauge Analyses

Abstract:
Without sea-level acceleration, the 20th-century sea-level trend of 1.7 mm/y would produce a rise of only approximately 0.15 m from 2010 to 2100; therefore, sea-level acceleration is a critical component of projected sea-level rise. To determine this acceleration, we analyze monthly-averaged records for 57 U.S. tide gauges in the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) data base that have lengths of 60–156 years. Least-squares quadratic analysis of each of the 57 records are performed to quantify accelerations, and 25 gauge records having data spanning from 1930 to 2010 are analyzed. In both cases we obtain small average sea-level decelerations. To compare these results with worldwide data, we extend the analysis of Douglas (1992) by an additional 25 years and analyze revised data of Church and White (2006) from 1930 to 2007 and also obtain small sea-level decelerations similar to those we obtain from U.S. gauge records.

This paper is being discussed at Watts Up With That, with links to the full report.

I found this comment by David Archibald at WUWT most interesting. Is the current data inconsistent with the all the global warming mantra?

On the subject of sea level, the University of Colorado sea level people have not updated the data on their site. The last data point is 2010.7415 which is in July last year, over seven months ago. Perhaps the data since then is inconvenient, or perhaps the Colorado people have just lost interest. Could someone else please get the Jason data and make it publicly available.

Exit Question: Is sea-level rise a real threat to California, or is it just a global warming scare by rent seeking scientist looking for more research funding?