Category Archives: Climate Change

On the Importamce of Relative

This from the local news here in Raleigh:

Raleigh, N.C. — A blast of arctic air that could push temperatures down to the teens in some spots around the Triangle will arrive by midweek.

The frigid blanket, which is moving into the United States from Canada, already wrapped around the northernmost part of the country on Saturday, causing a dramatic drop in the mercury.

“We keep seeing those temperatures go down with every passing hour,” WRAL meteorologist Aimee Wilmoth said late Saturday.

The arctic blast will have the same effect when it reaches North Carolina on Tuesday…

The forecast for the week?

The highs are never below freezing; most are above 45.  None of the lows are cold enough to allow for good conditions while organizing a game of pond hockey.

In fact. the lowest low is fully 40 degrees higher than the temperatures I endured while waiting for the bus at the bus stop.

How many people can honestly say they know what 20 below feels like?

It’s Hard To Be A Global Warming Alarmist

 

The religion of apocalyptic climate change has entered into it’s Crusade stage, and it’s ugly: Via  Via

Tens of millions of pounds of UK aid money have been spent on a programme that has forcibly sterilised Indian women and men, the Observer has learned. Many have died as a result of botched operations, while others have been left bleeding and in agony. A number of pregnant women selected for sterilisation suffered miscarriages and lost their babies.

The UK agreed to give India £166m to fund the programme, despite allegations that the money would be used to sterilise the poor in an attempt to curb the country’s burgeoning population of 1.2 billion people.

Sterilisation has been mired in controversy for years. With officials and doctors paid a bonus for every operation, poor and little-educated men and women in rural areas are routinely rounded up and sterilised without having a chance to object. Activists say some are told they are going to health camps for operations that will improve their general wellbeing and only discover the truth after going under the knife.

Court documents filed in India earlier this month claim that many victims have been left in pain, with little or no aftercare. Across the country, there have been numerous reports of deaths and of pregnant women suffering miscarriages after being selected for sterilisation without being warned that they would lose their unborn babies.

Yet a working paper published by the UK’s Department for International Development in 2010 cited the need to fight climate change as one of the key reasons for pressing ahead with such programmes. The document argued that reducing population numbers would cut greenhouse gases, although it warned that there were “complex human rights and ethical issues” involved in forced population control.

So, to be clear, we have a religion that believes the world is undergoing dramatic warming due to significant positive feedback loops which can only be prevented by building wind energy that only contributes to the problem and that thinks involuntary sterilizations are an okay measure to take.

I thought shutting down coal plants was bad.

An Inconvenient Truth: Delicious Irony

We’ve all heard the complain from the left; Oil is going to kill us – we need to shift to alternative forms of energy.

And so we begin to experiment with things like wind, solar and geothermal.  And we find out that these things, at least right now, aren’t economically viable as a replacement to fossil fuels; oil, natural gas and coal.  In certain applications these technologies have value, but they will never be able to provide the energy to say, lift an airliner off the ground.

Undeterred, the movement has advanced an agenda that has Obama shutting down the coal industry all while subsidizing bankrupt solar companies.

It doesn’t work.

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I Made A Mistake

In the debate on global warming and it’s impact on climate change, the left has successfully framed the position such that you are either a believer in catastrophic climate change that requires dramatic and immediate economic damage in order to save the world from literal existence or you are a denier who believes man walked with the dinosaur.

I happen to take the very real and legitimate position that :

  1. CO2 is a green house gas.
  2. Green house gases cause temperatures to rise.
  3. Man contributes to an increase in CO2.
  4. The world is warmer than it might otherwise be.

I do NOT ascribe to the belief in the positive feedback models that are necessary to create the catastrophe that the alarmists envision.

And now there is one more of me in the world.

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Global Warming And The Missing Heat

I’ve moved back and forth on the whole Global Warming thing for a number of years.  I remember sitting in an office cafeteria 13 years ago reading an article in the Minneapolis paper.  They were talking about how the pine forest of northern Minnesota would turn into prairie with a simple 1 or 2 degree change in the global temperature.

I bought it.

Then as the years moved on, I began to listen to wailing from the Left and, combined with their “solutions” came to the conclusion the whole thing was a “hoax”.  The Left isn’t interested in saving the planet anymore than BP is.  Rather, the Left is interested in using the phenomenon as a platform to continue policies that involve more and more taxation combined with more and more distribution.  Morals and ethics through legislation.  Never mind the fact that a 2% vig isn’t bad either.

Now, however, I’ve come to accept a couple of things:

  1. Literally, the world’s temperature is getting warmer
  2. This would be true had man never existed
  3. CO2 is a green house gas that contributes to increase heat
  4. Man is contributing to increased levels of CO2 and therefore, the earth is warmer than it otherwise might be.
  5. This man made warmth is minimal and has little to no significant impact on the affects of natural warming.

I think that if sat down, coffee in hand, most people would accept that position.  The only reason that people would completely deny the fact that we’re warming is because the Left has made it a binary proposition:

  1. You are a denier who ignores science and thinks that dinosaurs roamed the earth 700-800 years ago.
  2. You are “all-in” and think that we need to tax the economy into the stone age, you know, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Anyway, every now and then little bits of data come floating by that support this position of mine.  For me.  In my own way.  And the Coyote does an AWESOME job of explaining those bits:

It is possible for the theory that the climate has a high sensitivity to CO2 (ie that a doubling of CO2 concentrations will lead to global temperature increases of 2.5C or higher) to be correct while still having ten years of flat to declining surface temperatures.  That is because Earth’s great surface heat reservoir is the oceans, not the atmosphere, and so the extra heat from the greenhouse effect could be going into the oceans rather than into near-surface air.

However, it is NOT possible, as least as we (and by “we” I mean everyone, skeptics and alarmists alike) understand the climate, for CO2 to be holding a lot of extra heat and it not show up either in surface temperatures or ocean heat content.  The greenhouse effect does not turn off — its effects may be masked in the chaotic weather systems, perhaps for years, but if the climate sensitivity to CO2 is really as high as the IPCC says, there has to be new heat going somewhere.

Here, the Coyote quotes a study from Jo Nova:

In short, though, we have seen no rise in measured ocean heat content since we started measuring with technology dedicated to the task.  This means, if those who believe the climate has a high sensitivity to CO2 are right, something like 50,000 quintillion joules of energy have gone missing since 2003.  This is the “missing heat”, and though climate scientists sometimes discuss it in private, they almost never do so in public.  Ocean heat is the dinosaur bone fossil that the creationists simply don’t want to acknowledge.

See, in order to maintain the hysteria, sell books and movies, the alarmists have to create models that fit their narrative.  They create a system that describes the climate in such a way as to show their story has been and will continue to be, right.

But the data doesn’t support it.