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Newsletter (August 28, 2009)
In this issue
Featured- The Elusive Surface Air Temperature
- Sahara Desert Greening Due to Climate Change?
- Audio: Nicene Council Interviews Cornwall's Beisner
Debate- Bookshelf: The Canaan Creed
- The Energy Foundation's Rubbish Research
Science- Ocean Temperatures: The New Bluff in Climate Alarmism
- Two Studies Challenge Notion of Rise in Atlantic Storms
Economics- An Analysis of the Dismal Theorem
- 'Peak Oil' Is a Waste of Energy
- EU Cap-and-Trade System Provides Cautionary Tale
Meet the Critics: Richard S. Courtney & Gerd-Rainer Weber
Briefly Noted
Featuredby Vincent R. Gray
Founder, New Zealand Climate Science Coalition; Author, The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of 'Climate Change 2001'
NZ Climate Truth Newsletter, August 18, 2009
It is admitted, by Jim Hansen, no less, that measuring surface temperature is impossible. Let me quote him once more . . .
Q. What exactly do you mean by SAT?
A. I doubt that there is a general agreement how to answer this question. Even at the same location, the temperature near the ground may be very different from the temperature 5 ft above the ground and different again from 10ft or 50ft above the ground. Particularly in the presence of vegetation (say in a rain forest) the temperature above the vegetation may be very different from the temperature below the top of the vegetation. A reasonable suggestion might be to use the average temperature of the first 50ft of air either above ground or on top of the vegetation. To measure SAT we have to agree on what it is and, as far as I know, no such standard has been adopted. I cannot imagine that a weather station would build a 50ft stack of thermometers to be able to find the true SAT at its location.
Q. What do we mean by daily SAT?
A. Again, there is no universally accepted correct answer. Should we note the temperature every 6 hours and report the mean, should we do it every two hours, hourly, have a machine record it every second, or simply take the average of the highest and lowest temperature of the day? On some days the various methods may lead to drastically different results.
Q. What SAT do the local media report?
A. The media report the reading of one particular thermometer of a nearby weather station. This temperature may be very different from the true SAT even at that location and has certainly nothing to do with the true regional SAT. To measure the true regional SAT we would have to use many 50ft stacks of thermometers distributed evenly over the whole region, an obvious practical impossibility.” . . . . . . Despite this, the IPCC and the climate scientists use a processed version of surface temperature measurements as their main argument that the "globe" is warming, and they ascribe the current cooling as a mere episode before the inevitable later warming, for which we are to be saddled with very expensive measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
There is overwhelming evidence that the very slight warming (0.7ºC over 100 years) of their compilation is caused by urban and human development over the period. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by James Owen
National Geographic News, July 31, 2009
Desertification, drought, and despair—that's what global warming has in store for much of Africa. Or so we hear.
Emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent.
Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall. . . .
Read the rest.
Related item:
Carbon Dioxide and Global Warming
by Craig D. Idso and Keith E. Idso
Chairman, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change; Co-author, NIPCC's Climate Change Reconsidered (C. Idso); Vice President, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change (K. Idso)
Back to top Interview of E. Calvin Beisner by Jerry Johnson
National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation (Beisner); Host, Nicene Council Internet Radio Broadcast (Johnson)
August 22, 2009
Listen to the interview here (direct MP3 link).Back to top Debateby J. Scott Olmsted
Editor in Chief, American Hunter
September, 2009
"If God be for us who can be against us?" The Apostle Paul wrote those words in his letter to the church at Rome (Romans 8:31); it's not hard to envision them as the tacit heart of The Canaan Creed, a novel by L.P. Hoffman that weaves together an intricate tale about environmentalism gone awry.
A native of Wyoming, L.P. Hoffman has helped organize a grassroots environmental group near Yellowstone National Park. Her husband served as deputy assistant secretary of the Interior for Fish and Wildlife and Parks, and she has witnessed radical environmentalism firsthand. It is her hope this novel will spark everyone who reads it to embrace cooperative conservation. . . .
Read the rest.
Read another review of the novel The Canaan Creed here, watch its trailer here, and visit its official site where you can buy it here.Back to top by Paul Chesser
Director, Climate Strategies Watch; Scholar, John Locke Foundation; Correspondent, Heartland Institute
GlobalWarming.org, August 6, 2009
What a global warming alarmist beast the Energy Foundation is. For example, according to its 333-page (thanks to hundreds of grant awards to a seemingly infinite dependency class of environmentalist nonprofits) tax return for 2007 (the most recent available on Guidestar), EF has a bottomless well of funds to draw from: $68,907,029 in revenues (including $1.36 million in investment income); $53,600,903 in expenses — heck, they’re so rich, they even gave the Rockefellers money. Take that, big oil!
So how does EF get its money? . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Scienceby David Evans
Director, Science Speak
Science & Public Policy Institute, July 21, 2009
- Air temperatures have been falling for years. Satellites show that 1998 was the warmest recent year and that a cooling trend started in 2002. Even the land-based thermometer data, which is corrupted by artificial heating sources close to 89% of its thermometers and which is heavily “corrected”, now shows a cooling trend developing from 2006.
- The alarmists recently switched to ocean temperature to measure global warming.
- The alarmists claim the world is still warming, that heat is building up in the oceans, and that the ocean temperature is rising and rising fast. These claims implicitly depend on a time period to say what a “trend” is, because temperatures fluctuate. The alarmists provide the context by showing trends of 20 to 50 years. This is a clever trick to reframe the debate, and essential to their case.
- Ocean temperatures have only been measured properly from mid 2003, when the Argo network became operational. Over 3,000 Argo floats cover all the world’s oceans. They dive down to measure temperatures, then resurface to radio back the information. The previous XBT system did not monitor huge areas of ocean, did not go as deep, and was much less accurate.
- Ocean temperatures are dropping slightly. The Argo data shows that the oceans have been cooling slightly since mid 2003. Our best data, from satellites and Argo, shows that the air and oceans have not warmed for at least five years. The world is now cooling slightly, so there is no heat accumulating. Some natural cooling force is currently stronger than the warming due to human emissions.
- Short-term trends contradict the alarmist claims. Our best data, from satellites and Argo, shows that the air and oceans have not warmed for at least five years. The world is now cooling slightly, so there is no heat accumulating. Some natural cooling force is currently stronger than the warming due to human emissions.
- Long-term trends contradict the alarmist claims. The world has been recovering from the little ice age, warming at a steady trend rate since 1750 with alternate warming and cooling oscillations of about 30 years. The pattern suggests we have just finished the last warming, and have entered a cooling period until about 2030.
- The latest alarmist claims are a bluff. The alarmist claims only appear credible if trends shorter than 10 years or longer than 50 years are ignored. But it will take time to inform the public and politicians that the alarmist’s claims are baseless. With the US climate bill now being debated and the Copenhagen climate conference coming up in December 2009, they only need to make the public believe their schtick for a few months.
- Problems with alarmist graphs of ocean heat. They omit Argo data by stopping in 2003, or contradict it by showing ocean warming continuing through 2006.
Read the rest.
Related item:
Sea Level Budget Over 2003-2008
by A. Cazenave, K. Dominh, S. Guinehut, E. Berthier, W. Llovel, G. Ramillien, M. Ablain, G. Larnicol
Global and Planetary Change, 2008
Back to top by Cornelia Dean
Science Editor, New York Times
August 12, 2009
Since the mid-1990s, hurricanes and tropical storms have struck the Atlantic Ocean with unusual frequency — or have they? Two new studies suggest that the situation may not be so clear.
One, by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, suggests that the high number of storms reported these days may reflect improved observation and analysis techniques, not a meteorological change for the worse. The second, by researchers at Pennsylvania State University and elsewhere, suggests that there were as many storms a thousand years ago, when Atlantic Ocean waters were unusually warm, as today. . . .
Read the rest.
Related items:
Recent Atlantic Hurricane Activity Might Have Been Highest in 1000 Years
by Brett Anderson
Senior Meteorologist, AccuWeather
August 20, 2009
Historical Analysis Looks for Storm Activity Trends
by Eric Berger
Reporter, Houston Chronicle
August 12, 2009
Chris Landsea to Michael Man et al.
by Christopher Landsea
Science and Operations Officer, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Hurricane Center, National Weather ServiceBack to top Economicsby William D. Nordhaus
Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies, Yale University; Researcher, National Bureau of Economic Research; Senior Advisor, Brookings Panel on Economic Activity; Board Member, Congressional Budget Office Panel of Economic Experts; Author, A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies
January 16, 2009
In a series of papers, Martin Weitzman has proposed a Dismal Theorem. The general idea is that, under limited conditions concerning the structure of uncertainty and preferences, society has an indefinitely large expected loss from high-consequence, low-probability events. Under such conditions, standard economic analysis cannot be applied. The present study is intended to put the Dismal Theorem in context and examine the range of its applicability, with an application to catastrophic climate change. I conclude that Weitzman makes an important point about selection of distributions in the analysis of decision-making under uncertainty. However, the conditions necessary for the Dismal Theorem to hold are limited and do not apply to a wide range of potential uncertain scenarios. . . .
Read the rest (PDF).Back to top by Michael Lynch
Energy Consultant; Former Director, Asian Energy and Security, Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
New York Times, August 24, 2009
Remember “peak oil”? It’s the theory that geological scarcity will at some point make it impossible for global petroleum production to avoid falling, heralding the end of the oil age and, potentially, economic catastrophe. Well, just when we thought that the collapse in oil prices since last summer had put an end to such talk, along comes Fatih Birol, the top economist at the International Energy Agency, to insist that we’ll reach the peak moment in 10 years, a decade sooner than most previous predictions (although a few ardent pessimists believe the moment of no return has already come and gone). . . .
. . . for the most part the peak-oil crowd rests its case on three major claims: that the world is discovering only one barrel for every three or four produced; that political instability in oil-producing countries puts us at an unprecedented risk of having the spigots turned off; and that we have already used half of the two trillion barrels of oil that the earth contained.
Let’s take the rate-of-discovery argument first: it is a statement that reflects ignorance of industry terminology. When a new field is found, it is given a size estimate that indicates how much is thought to be recoverable at that point in time. But as years pass, the estimate is almost always revised upward, either because more pockets of oil are found in the field or because new technology makes it possible to extract oil that was previously unreachable. Yet because petroleum geologists don’t report that additional recoverable oil as “newly discovered,” the peak oil advocates tend to ignore it. In truth, the combination of new discoveries and revisions to size estimates of older fields has been keeping pace with production for many years. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Joseph R. Mason
Professor of Banking, Louisiana State University
Roll Call, August 3, 2009
. . . In order to successfully mitigate the effects of global warming, the White House and Congress must first assess the ability of government policy, regulator responsibility and market mechanisms to deliver a stable carbon price. Stability and predictability are critical to success. If U.S. businesses and consumers aren’t able to predict carbon prices with a reasonable degree of confidence well ahead of time, there’s little incentive to invest in new technologies or to switch to more energy-efficient products and services.
Any analysis should start by looking abroad. The European Union carbon market demonstrates serious problems with price stability under a cap-and-trade policy. In Europe, unscrupulous companies and hedge funds have been cashing in ETS carbon credits — valuable allowances that the government gave them for free. As a result, the price of carbon has dropped almost 75 percent in recent months to the lowest prices on record. And volatility has spiked to levels only seen in May 2005, when the EU’s first annual official report confirmed a 45-million-ton surplus of carbon allocations over actual carbon emissions for the year. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Meet the CriticsHave you ever been at a loss for words when challenged by the alarmist's claim of scientific "consensus," or that dissenting scientists are unqualified? Not only does consensus prove nothing, but the very idea of "consensus" among scientists on catastrophic manmade climate change is simply unfounded. A 2008 Senate Environment and Public Works Minority Report documents dissension around the world:More Than 700 International Scientists Dissent
Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims Two notable critics are:
Richard S. Courtney
Independent consultant on environmental issues and contributing editor of CoalTrans International and Energy & Environment, scientist Richard S. Courtney is a technical advisor to several members of Parliament, having been called by the same as an expert witness, and is a founding member of the European Science and Environment Forum. "No convincing evidence for anthropogenic global warming has been discovered. And recent global climate behavior is not consistent with anthropogenic global warming model predictions," says Courtney, an expert peer reviewer for the IPCC. "Global temperature has not increased since 1998 because, while the northern hemisphere has warmed, the southern hemisphere has cooled. Global warming was supposed to actually be global, not hemispheric." A few articles by Courtney, along with his 2008 ICCC speech Limits to Existing Quantitative Understanding of the Past, Present, and Future Changes to Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration, are Global Warming: How It All Began, 'Renewable Energy Technologies Can't Hack It in the Market Place, Climate Fear-Mongering to Get Worse, and Biofuels: a Solution Worse Than the Problem They Try to Address.
Gerd-Rainer Weber, Ph.D.
Scientist for the German Coal Mining Association and member of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow's board, meteorologist Gerd Weber is an independent researcher and frequent speaker on climate issues and is responsible for scientific research, policy analysis, and consulting. Author of Global Warming: The Rest of the Story, Weber insists that "There is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change." "If you think weather forecasting is bad, you should try climate forecasting," he says elsewhere. "To presume that computer models can actually predict global climate to the year 2100 means we are basing our energy and economic policies--to say nothing of our children's futures--on a wild gamble." A couple of Weber's presentations are Inconsistencies in IPCC Predictions, delivered at the 2008 ICCC, and Key Elements of European Emission Trading Directive Implementation, delivered at AEI's Return to Rio.Back to top Briefly NotedEPA Whistleblower Exposes Agenda's Fatal Flaw
Evan Mills's Response to My Critique of the Grid Outage Chart
NY Times Blames Heat on Humans but Cold on Nature
Climate Bill's Still-Unanswered Questions
Mayors Push Senators for Energy Block Grant, Climate Change Legislation
E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., National Spokesman
Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, http://www.cornwallalliance.org/
Information in this newsletter is for scholarly and educational use only and may not be copied or reproduced for any other purposes without prior permission of the copyright holders.
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