The US Fish and Wildlife service, another agency that seems ripe for pruning, has decided that it’s okay for greenies to kill rare Condors.

Rare meaning 226 left in the wild, many the product of an expensive government program to prevent extinction.

Federal wildlife officials took the unprecedented step Friday of telling private companies that they will not be prosecuted for inadvertently harassing or even killing endangered California condors.

In a decision swiftly condemned by conservationists and wildlife advocates, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said operators of Terra-Gen Power’s wind farm in the Tehachapi Mountains will not be prosecuted if their turbines accidentally kill a condor during the expected 30-year life span of the project.

So windmills have a license to kill. Contrast that to US Fish and Wildlife’s decision regarding hunting not-so-endangered species in Texas.

Daily Caller

A court case filed by one animal rights group may cause three endangered species to become extinct.

The three species of African antelope — the scimitar-horned oryx, the addax and the dama gazelle — are already nearly extinct in their native Africa. But they are thriving on the plains of Texas, mostly on ranches where hunters pay thousands of dollars for the privilege of hunting them.

For decades this practice has meant roughly 10 percent of the herd on any given ranch is culled annually, with the proceeds allowing the ranchers to continue to feed and breed these animals.

But animal rights activists generally oppose all hunting, including hunts on exotic game ranches. They have successfully sued to have it stopped, and now the ranchers are faced with a dilemma: How do they continue to support animals which they have no economic reason to keep, but are prohibited from killing?

Since 2005 an exemption to the Endangered Species Act has allowed ranchers to raise the three species, and hunters to stalk them, without a special permit. In all, Texas ranchers had about 1,800 of the animals in 2004. With the exemption in place, those numbers swelled to more than 17,000 by 2011.

CBS News aired a “60 Minutes” feature story about the controversy on Jan. 29. Priscilla Feral, president of the animal rights group Friends of Animals, told correspondent Lara Logan that she has waged a seven-year legal battle to get the exemption overturned.

Feral won. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced a new regulation, scheduled to go into effect on April 4.

On that date, the agency says, “the three antelope species will be treated the same as all other captive-bred endangered species in the United States.

Got that? The hunting ranches kept rare species alive without federal grants or intervention. Now a busybody uses the federal government to end hunting because it offends her sensibilities.

Hear this, Obama: “…voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems…”

Yes, we’re talking about you and yours.

For the first time since written weather history began in Arkansas (1819), snow has fallen in the month of May. This snow has set records for the latest snowfall and latest measurable snowfall in the state.

The previous latest snowfall ever recorded was on April 30, 1903 at Harrison, Gravette and Fayetteville. This was not measurable.

The previous latest measurable snowfall was 0.2 inches at Corning on April 24, 1910.

Below is a list of snowfall measurements from National Weather Service cooperative observer stations through specified times on Friday morning.

Three twits self identify

A House resolution sponsored by representative Barbara Lee (D, Calif.) and cosponsored by House members including Keith Ellison (D, Minn.) and Carolyn Maloney (D, N.Y.) is pushing Congress to acknowledge the “disparate impact of climate change on women” and adopt “gender-sensitive frameworks” to address environmental change.

The resolution argues that climate change may have a particularly dire impact on women. Climate change, it says, exacerbates food scarcity, and “Food insecure women with limited socioeconomic resources may be vulnerable to situations such as sex work, transactional sex, and early marriage that put them at risk for HIV, STIs, unplanned pregnancy, and poor reproductive health.”

Representative Lee told The Hill: ”My resolution will affirm the commitment to include and empower women in economic development planning and international climate change policies and practices. This will help communities adapt to climate impacts, and embark on a path towards clean and sustainable development.”

Scientist Judith Curry testified today at the House Subcommittee on Environment. Here is the transcript of her opening statement.

I would like to thank the Subcommittee for the opportunity to offer testimony this morning. My name is Judith Curry, I’m Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. For the past 30 years, I’ve conducted research on topics that include climate feedback processes in the Arctic, the role of clouds and aerosols in the climate system, and the impact of climate change on hurricanes.

As President of a small company Climate Forecast Applications Network, I have worked with decision makers on climate impact assessments and using short-term climate forecasts to support adaptive management.

I’m also proprietor of the weblog Climate Etc. For the past several years, I’ve been promoting dialogue across the full spectrum of beliefs and opinion on the climate debate. I’ve learned about the complex reasons that intelligent, educated and well-informed people disagree on the subject of climate change, as well as tactics used by both sides to try to gain political advantage in the debate.

Through my company, I’ve learned about the complexity of different decisions that depend on weather and climate information. I’ve learned the importance of careful determination and communication of forecast uncertainty, and the added challenges associated with predicting extreme weather events. I have found that the worst prediction outcome is a prediction issued with a high level of confidence that turns out to be wrong; a close second is missing the possibility of an extreme event.

If all other things remain equal, it is clear that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will warm the planet. However the real difficulty is that nothing remains equal, and reliable prediction of the impact of carbon dioxide on the climate requires that we better understand natural climate variability.

My written testimony summarizes the evidence for, and against, the hypothesis that humans are playing a dominant role in global warming. I’ll make no attempt to summarize this evidence in my brief comments this morning.  I will state that there are major uncertainties in many of the key observational data sets, particularly before 1980.

There are also major uncertainties in climate models, particularly with regards to the treatments of clouds and the multidecadal ocean oscillations.

The prospect of increased frequency or severity of extreme weather in a warmer climate is potentially the most serious near term impact of climate change. A recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found limited observational evidence for worsening of most types of extreme (more…)

Anthony Watts

Twelve States (Texas, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina and South Dakota) today filed a petition to have the Supreme Court review the D.C. Circuit’s decision not to strike down EPA’s climate regulations.

The States argue that the Congress never intended for the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases. The Clean Air Act was designed in 1970, in order to fight smog. The law’s tools and mechanisms are totally inappropriate for regulating greenhouse gas emissions, which are much more prevalent than the pollutants that cause smog.

The full petition is here: http://www.globalwarming.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/States-GHG-petition.pdf

Do you think this will make California rethink its carbon trading scheme? Think again.

FOR YEARS, European leaders have flaunted their unwavering commitment to fighting climate change — and chastised the United States for lagging behind. But last week brought yet more confirmation that the continent has become a green-energy basket case. Instead of a model for the world to emulate, Europe has become a model of what not to do.

The centerpiece of the European Union’s climate plan — indeed, the only major climate policy that acts across all member countries — is a slowly declining continent-wide cap on emissions. By allowing companies to buy, sell and bank permits to pollute under that cap, the program puts a price on European carbon dioxide emissions. Designed properly, the scheme should encourage companies and consumers to reduce the carbon-intensity of the goods they purchase and invest in cleaner alternatives.

But the Europeans didn’t design the policy properly. For a variety of reasons that E.U. officials should have anticipated, the market for carbon permits has all but collapsed. And in a Tuesday vote, the European Parliament rejected a slapdash rescue plan.

If the continent wants to rediscover its ambition on climate change, individual member states will probably have to do it on their own. But European governments have proved themselves to be incompetent central planners, counter-productive and wary of thinking pragmatically.

Germany is irrationally shutting its nuclear power plants — which produce lots of steady, reliable electricity and no carbon dioxide emissions — and promising that renewables will somehow pick up the slack. Perversely, that approach has led power companies to ramp up coal burning, the dirtiest fossil fuel, in a country that has also lavished its public money on the solar industry. Spain, too, has over-invested in expensive renewables. To its credit, France hasn’t decided to shutter its nuclear plants, but it is one of many countries that refuse to open up natural gas reserves, a resource that could help wean the continent off coal.

Britain is comparatively better, developing its own carbon-pricing program and permitting gas development. But that hasn’t kept Europe’s carbon emissions from notching up in the last few years — even as those of the United States have decreased.

Only a few years ago, it would have been outrageous to claim that the United States would ever be on a better emissions trajectory than Europe. Yet it is now burning less coal even asEurope burns more. That partially reflects the fact that the United States is only now taking steps mandating greater fuel efficiency for cars. But it is also the result of a practical embrace of natural gas and the continued use of nuclear power.

The United States consequently has the opportunity to turn itself into the world leader in fighting climate change, a role it has long shied from. To lock in its progress, U.S. policymakers must learn from Europe’s dysfunction. That means putting a price on carbon emissions that is simple, predictable, aggressive and comprehensive, and then getting out of the way.

Sometimes you just have to laugh.

English researchers say that climate-warming greenhouse gasses will probably increase so-called clear-air turbulence along major air routes. Such turbulence is caused by columns of vertically moving air and is difficult to avoid because it cannot be spotted by pilots, satellites or radar.

Using climate change models and jet stream data, study authors examined the possible effects on the North Atlantic flight corridor during  winter months. They calculated that the chances of encountering significant turbulence will increase between 40% and 170%. They also predict that the average strength of turbulence will increase between 10% and 40%.

Wow, that’s pretty specific: 40 to 170%.

How sure are they of their science?

Williams, and co-author Manoj Joshi, a climatologist at the University of East Anglia, note that the behavior and mechanics of air turbulence are still not fully understood.

So basically they’re guessing.

Huh? The science is settled so everything should already have been explained. Oops!

Reuters

Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions.

Often focused on century-long trends, most climate models failed to predict that the temperature rise would slow, starting around 2000. Scientists are now intent on figuring out the causes and determining whether the respite will be brief or a more lasting phenomenon.

Getting this right is essential for the short and long-term planning of governments and businesses ranging from energy to construction, from agriculture to insurance. Many scientists say they expect a revival of warming in coming years.

Theories for the pause include that deep oceans have taken up more heat with the result that the surface is cooler than expected, that industrial pollution in Asia or clouds are blocking the sun, or that greenhouse gases trap less heat than previously believed.

The change may be a result of an observed decline in heat-trapping water vapor in the high atmosphere, for unknown reasons. It could be a combination of factors or some as yet unknown natural variations, scientists say.

Weak economic growth and the pause in warming is undermining governments’ willingness to make a rapid billion-dollar shift from fossil fuels. Almost 200 governments have agreed to work out a plan by the end of 2015 to combat global warming.

“The climate system is not quite so simple as people thought,” said Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician and author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” who estimates that moderate warming will be beneficial for crop growth and human health.

Some experts say their trust in climate science has declined because of the many uncertainties. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (more…)

Progressives are always busy saving the world or saving us from ourselves. Or both. Stridency never seems to tire them.

The bleat goes on.

Stanley Kurtz:

A sad and at times bizarre story out of Vassar shows how profoundly troubled America’s colleges now are. The campus fossil-fuel divestment campaign that’s swept across the nation over the past few months has intensified the atmosphere of leftist indoctrination now typical of many schools, turning classic notions of education as the free exchange of ideas into a distant memory. In the blink of an eye, fossil fuel producers have been turned into the equivalent of apartheid enforcers, while the Occupy movement has risen from the dead to become a free-ranging campus mob.

Our harrowing tale of political correctness run amuck will show Vassar’s fossil-fuel divestment campaign stoking a climate of fear that touches not only conservative students, but even moderates, who dare not draw the ire of this new campus crusade.

Yet a climate of political intimidation was present at Vassar well before the advent of the divestment movement, and it’s worth attending to that background before turning to today’s divestment debate.

Consider a September 2012 opinion piece by sophomore Luka Ladan in Vassar’s student paper, The Miscellany News. Ladan tells of election-year political science classes that regularly devolve into snickering sessions aimed at Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and other Republican candidates. Professors take the lead, teaming up with liberal students to mock Republicans and anyone else who leans right. The Vassar students I’ve contacted (some afraid to speak for attribution) largely confirm this picture. Sophomore computer science major Jarret Holtz, told me, “I don’t feel that [conservative students at Vassar] are able to freely express their views at all.”

How could they be, when Vassar has found semi-official ways of engaging in partisan politics. Take Vassar’s “College Committee on Sustainability” (CCS), part of the school’s official structure of governance. About a week before the 2012 election, the CCS website pointed to the upcoming vote and told students to educate themselves on the issues by following the news. CCS then suggested that students consult three leftist sources of national news and opinion (no other national sources were provided), Grist,Mother Jones, and Aljazeera. Following-up just before election day, CCS remindedstudents about these outlets and urged them to vote. CCS did add that it was not the place of Vassar’s sustainability committee to endorse particular candidates. Yet given its recommendations for reading, few can doubt which political party this official arm of the college was supporting.

Vassar’s fossil-fuel divestment movement is a product of this thoroughly politicized campus atmosphere, where students feign boldness by inching just a bit to the left of the school’s semi-official political posture…

Fraser Nelson in the UK Telegraph on how expensive “green” energy kills:

…In Britain, we still do. Each year, an official estimate is made of the “excess winter mortality” – that is, the number of people dying of cold-related illnesses. Last winter was relatively mild, and still 24,000 perished. The indications are that this winter, which has dragged on so long and with such brutality, will claim 30,000 lives, making it one of the biggest killers in the country. And still, no one seems upset.

Somewhere between the release of the 1984 Band Aid single and Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, political attention shifted away from such problems. The idea of people (especially old people) dying in their homes from conditions with which we are all familiar now seems relatively boring. Much political attention is still focused on global warming, and while schemes to help Britain prepare for the cold are being cut, the overseas aid budget is being vastly expanded. Saving elderly British lives has somehow become the least fashionable cause in politics.

The reaction to the 2003 heatwave was extraordinary. It was blamed for 2,000 deaths, and taken as a warning that Britain was horribly unprepared for the coming era of snowless winters and barbecue summers. The government’s chief scientific officer, Sir David King, later declared that climate change was “more serious even than the threat of terrorism” in terms of the number of lives that could be lost. Such language is never used about the cold, which kills at least 10 times as many people every winter. Before long, every political party had signed up to the green agenda.

Since Sir David’s exhortations, some 250,000 Brits have died from the cold, and 10,000 from the heat. It is horribly clear that we have been focusing on the wrong enemy. Instead of making sure energy was affordable, ministers have been trying to make it more expensive, with carbon price floors and emissions trading schemes. Fuel prices have doubled over seven years, forcing millions to choose between heat and food – and government has found itself a major part of the problem.

This is slowly beginning to dawn on Ed Davey, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. He has tried to point the finger at energy companies, but his own department let the truth slip out in the small print of a report released on Wednesday. The average annual fuel bill is expected to have risen by £76 by 2020, it says. But take out Davey’s hidden taxes (carbon price floor, emissions trading scheme, etc) and we’d be paying an average £123 less. His department has been trying to make homes cheaper to heat, and in a saner world this would be his only remit: to secure not the greenest energy, but the most affordable energy.

By now, the Energy Secretary will also have realised another inconvenient truth – that, for Britain, global warming is likely to save far more lives then it threatens. Delve deep enough into the Government’s forecasts, and they speculate that global warming will lead to 6,000 fewer deaths a year, on average, by the end of the decade. This is the supposed threat facing us: children would be less likely to have snow to play in at Christmas, but more likely to have grandparents to visit over Easter. Not a bad trade-off. The greatest uncertainty is whether global warming, which has stalled since 1998, will arrive quickly enough to make a difference.

Last month a big story broke in AGW world. A new study claimed to have determined that the earth’s temperature rose more than any other time in 11,300 years.

Such precision should raise doubts, but it was duly covered by the mainstream media:

We’re screwed: 11,000 years’ worth of ­climate data prove it. It’s among the most compelling bits of proof out there that human beings are behind global warming, and as such has become a target on Mann’s back for climate denialists looking to draw a bead on scientists. — The Atlantic, March 9th

Global Temperatures Highest in 4,000 Years The modern rise that has recreated the temperatures of 5,000 years ago is occurring at an exceedingly rapid clip on a geological time scale, appearing in graphs in the new paper as a sharp vertical spike. — Justin Gillis, New York Times, March 7th

Study: Recent heat spike unlike anything in 11,000 years “Rapid” head spike unlike anything in 11,000 years. Research released Thursday in the journal Science uses fossils of tiny marine organisms to reconstruct global temperatures …. It shows how the globe for several thousands of years was cooling until an unprecedented reversal in the 20th century. — Seth Borenstein, The Associated Press, March 7th

True face of climate’s hockey stick graph revealed The rate of warming in the last 150 years is unlike anything that happened in at least 11,000 years, says Michael Mann of the Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who was not involved in Marcott’s study. — Michael Marshall, New Scientist magazine, March 7th

True or false? False writes Ross McKitrick in Canada’s Financial Post.

…The new, and startling, feature of the Marcott graph was at the very end: Their data showed a remarkable uptick that implied that, during the 20th century, our climate swung from nearly the coldest conditions over the past 11,500 years to nearly the warmest. Specifically, their analysis showed that in under 100 years we’ve had more warming than previously took thousands of years to occur, in the process undoing 5,000 years’ worth of cooling.

This uptick became the focus of considerable excitement, as well as scrutiny. One of the first questions was how it was derived. Marcott had finished his PhD thesis at Oregon State University in 2011 and his dissertation is online. The Science paper is derived from the fourth chapter, which uses the same 73 proxy records and seemingly identical methods. But there is no uptick in that chart, nor does the abstract to his thesis mention such a ­finding.

Stephen McIntyre of climateaudit.org began examining the details of the Marcott et al. work, and by March 16 he had made a remarkable discovery. The 73 proxies were all collected by previous researchers, of which 31 are derived from alkenones, an organic compound produced by phytoplankton that settles in layers on ocean floors, and has chemical properties that correlate to temperature. When a core is drilled out, the layers need to be dated. If done accurately, the researcher could then interpret the alkenone layer at, say, 50 cm below the surface, to imply (for example) the ocean temperature averaged 0.1 degrees above normal over several centuries about 1,200 years ago. The tops of cores represent the data closest in time to the present, but this layer is often disturbed by the drilling process. So the original researchers take care to date the core-top to where the information begins to become useful.

According to the scientists who originally published the alkenone series, the core tops varied in age from nearly the present to over a thousand years ago. Fewer than 10 of the original proxies had values for the 20th century. Had Marcott et al. used the end dates as calculated by the specialists who compiled the original data, there would have been no 20th-century uptick in their graph, as indeed was the case in Marcott’s PhD thesis. But Marcott et al. redated a number of core tops, changing the mix of proxies that contribute to the closing value, and this created the uptick at the end of their graph. Far from being a feature of the proxy data, it was an artifact of arbitrarily redating the underlying cores.

Worse, the article did not disclose this step. In their online supplementary information the authors said they had assumed the core tops were dated to the present “unless otherwise noted in the original publication.” In other words, they claimed to be relying on the original dating, even while they had redated the cores in a way that strongly influenced their results.

So the authors of the study used imprecise measures to produce a supposedly precise gauge of global warming–one that conveniently supported the alarmist view.

They got called on it by AGW skeptic Steve McIntyre. They admitted:

“The 20th-century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.”

Oh? The “big news” about the last 11,300 years was based on useless data.

Now you tell us! The 20th-century uptick was the focus of worldwide media attention, during which the authors made very strong claims about the implications of their findings regarding 20th-century warming. Yet at no point did they mention the fact that the 20th century portion of their proxy reconstruction is garbage.

The Economist:

OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”

Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise. Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models (see chart 1). If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.

The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean global warming is a delusion. Flat though they are, temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th. But the puzzle does need explaining.

The mismatch might mean that—for some unexplained reason—there has been a temporary lag between more carbon dioxide and higher temperatures in 2000-10. Or it might be that the 1990s, when temperatures were rising fast, was the anomalous period. Or, as an increasing body of research is suggesting, it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before. This possibility, if true, could have profound significance both for climate science and for environmental and social policy.

Oh, my. How can “settled science” be so full of maybes.

Read the whole thing.

Watch and learn.

James Delingpole writes about the man who calls himself FOIA. FOIA just released the password that opens up even more emails from the Warmers.

FOIA – the anonymous leaker who brought the Climategate and Climategate II emails to light has emerged briefly from the shadows. He has released to selected parties (not me) the password to the cache of Climategate II emails in the hope that someone will have the time and energy to sift through them in search of exciting new revelations about the ongoing “Climate Change” scam. No doubt we’ll hear much more in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I think it’s worth dwelling on some of the clues he offers as to his identity and motivation. (I’m assuming it is a “he”, btw).

Here, via Bishop Hill, is the relevant passage.

That’s right; no conspiracy, no paid hackers, no Big Oil.  The Republicans didn’t plot this.  USA politics is alien to me, neither am I from the UK.  There is life outside the Anglo-American sphere.

If someone is still wondering why anyone would take these risks, or sees only a breach of privacy here, a few words…

The first glimpses I got behind the scenes did little to  garner my trust in the state of climate science — on the contrary.  I found myself in front of a choice that just might have a global impact.

Briefly put, when I had to balance the interests of my own safety, privacy\career of a few scientists, and the well-being of billions of people living in the coming several decades, the first two weren’t the decisive concern.

It was me or nobody, now or never.  Combination of several rather improbable prerequisites just wouldn’t occur again for anyone else in the foreseeable future.  The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen.  Later on it could be too late.

Most would agree that climate science has already directed where humanity puts its capability, innovation, mental and material “might”.  The scale will grow ever grander in the coming decades if things go according to script.  We’re dealing with $trillions and potentially drastic influence on practically everyone.

Wealth of the surrounding society tends to draw the major brushstrokes of a newborn’s future life.  It makes a huge difference whether humanity uses its assets to achieve progress, or whether it strives to stop and reverse it, essentially sacrificing the less fortunate to the climate gods.

We can’t pour trillions in this massive hole-digging-and-filling-up endeavor and pretend it’s not away from something and someone else.

If the economy of a region, a country, a city, etc.  deteriorates, what happens among the poorest? Does that usually improve their prospects? No, they will take the hardest hit.  No amount of magical climate thinking can turn this one upside-down.

It’s easy for many of us in the western world to accept a tiny green inconvenience and then wallow in that righteous feeling, surrounded by our “clean” technology and energy that is only slightly more expensive if adequately subsidized.

Those millions and billions already struggling with malnutrition, sickness, violence, illiteracy, etc.  don’t have that luxury.  The price of “climate protection” with its cumulative and collateral effects is bound to destroy and debilitate in great numbers, for decades and generations.

Conversely, a “game-changer” could have a beneficial effect encompassing a similar scope.

If I had a chance to accomplish even a fraction of that, I’d have to try.  I couldn’t morally afford inaction.  Even if I risked everything, would never get personal compensation, and could probably never talk about it with anyone.

I took what I deemed the most defensible course of action, and would do it again (although with slight alterations — trying to publish something truthful on RealClimate was clearly too grandiose of a plan .

Even if I have it all wrong and these scientists had some good reason to mislead us (instead of making a strong case with real data) I think disseminating the truth is still the safest bet by far.

Big thanks to Steve and Anthony and many others.  My contribution would never have happened without your work (whether or not you agree with the views stated).

Oh, one more thing.  I was surprised to learn from a “progressive” blog, corroborated by a renowned “scientist”, that the releases were part of a coordinated campaign receiving vast amounts of secret funding from shady energy industry groups.

I wasn’t aware of the arrangement but warmly welcome their decision to support my project.  For that end I opened a bitcoin address: 1HHQ36qbsgGZWLPmiUjYHxQUPJ6EQXVJFS.

Rings true to me. It’s certainly why I’m in this game – the cause, not (laughs bitterly) the money – and it gels with everything I argued inWatermelons. Many terrible things have resulted from the great climate scam – the debasement of the scientific method, the corruption, the rent-seeking, the greed, the lies, the blighted careers, the malfeasance, the dissemination of ignorance, the waste, the environmental damage – but the worst thing by far is the human misery it has engendered.

I hope one day that FOIA’s true identity can be revealed so that he can be properly applauded and rewarded for his signal service to mankind. He is a true hero, who deserves to go on the same roll of honour as Norman Borlaug, Julian Simon and Steve McIntyre: people who put truth, integrity and the human race first and ideology second. Unlike the misanthropic greenies who do exactly the opposite.

Meanwhile, the fear of radiation caused Germany and others to radically curtail their nuclear power generation. Thus we have people with “green” sensibilities, moving away from the one reliable power source that does not emit carbon.

And they fancy themselves the “reality-based community.”

Robert Peter Gale & Eric Lax at Bloomberg News

It is two years since Japan’s 9.0- magnitude earthquake, one so powerful it shifted the position of the Earth’s figure axis by as much as 6 inches and moved Honshu, Japan’s main island, 8 feet eastward. The tsunami generated by the earthquake obliterated towns, drowned almost 20,000 people and left more than 300,000 homeless. Everyone living within 15 miles of Fukushima was evacuated; many are still in temporary housing. Some will never be able to return home.

More than 300,000 buildings were destroyed and another million damaged, including four reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on the northeast coast. The earthquake caused the immediate shutdown of this and three other nuclear-power facilities.

Since the earthquake, a powerful movement gained momentum to halt Japan’s use of nuclear energy, which provided 30 percent of the country’s electricity. The last of 54 nuclear reactors was shut down in May 2012. Two facilities were restarted in June 2012; 52 remain shut. Japan has therefore had to increase its imports of natural gas, low-sulfur crude oil and fuel oil at a substantial economic and environmental cost. Seventy-five percent of the country’s electricity now comes from fossil fuels.

Accustomed to large trade surpluses, Japan, in 2012, had a record $78 billion trade deficit, thanks to increased energy imports and a drop in exports as Japanese goods became more expensive to produce.

Radiation Threat

And what of the lasting threat from radiation? Remarkably, outside the immediate area of Fukushima, this is hardly a problem at all. Although the crippled nuclear reactors themselves still pose a danger, no one, including personnel who worked in the buildings, died fromradiation exposure. Most experts agree that future health risks from the released radiation, notably radioactive iodine-131 and cesiums-134 and – 137, are extremely small and likely to be undetectable.

Even considering the upper boundary of estimated effects, there is unlikely to be any detectable increase in cancers in Japan, Asia or the world except close to the facility, according to a World Health Organization report. There will almost certainly be no increase in birth defects or genetic abnormalities from radiation.

Bjorn Lomborg

Electric cars are promoted as the chic harbinger of an environmentally benign future. Ads assure us of “zero emissions,” and President Obama has promised a million on the road by 2015. With sales for 2012 coming in at about 50,000, that million-car figure is a pipe dream. Consumers remain wary of the cars’ limited range, higher price and the logistics of battery-charging. But for those who do own an electric car, at least there is the consolation that it’s truly green, right? Not really.

For proponents such as the actor and activist Leonardo DiCaprio, the main argument is that their electric cars—whether it’s a $100,000 Fisker Karma (Mr. DiCaprio’s ride) or a $28,000 Nissan Leaf—don’t contribute to global warming. And, sure, electric cars don’t emit carbon-dioxide on the road. But the energy used for their manufacture and continual battery charges certainly does—far more than most people realize.

A 2012 comprehensive life-cycle analysis in Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that almost half the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an electric car come from the energy used to produce the car, especially the battery. The mining of lithium, for instance, is a less than green activity. By contrast, the manufacture of a gas-powered car accounts for 17% of its lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions. When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission. The amount for making a conventional car: 14,000 pounds….

This sounds scary:

Global temperatures are warmer than at any time in at least 4,000 years, scientists reported Thursday, and over the coming decades are likely to surpass levels not seen on the planet since before the last ice age.

But wait, there’s more!

In the new research, scheduled for publication on Friday in the journal Science, Shaun Marcott, an earth scientist at Oregon State University, and his colleagues compiled the most meticulous reconstruction yet of global temperatures over the past 11,300 years, virtually the entire Holocene. They used indicators like the distribution of microscopic, temperature-sensitive ocean creatures to determine past climate.

Like previous such efforts, the method gives only an approximation. Michael E. Mann, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University who is an expert in the relevant techniques but was not involved in the new research, said the authors had made conservative data choices in their analysis.

Approximation? That’s enough to “settle” science?

But here’s the good part: if humans are indeed warming the earth, that’s preventing another ice age.

It suggests that changes in the amount and distribution of incoming sunlight, caused by wobbles in the earth’s orbit, contributed to a sharp temperature rise in the early Holocene.

The climate then stabilized at relatively warm temperatures about 10,000 years ago, hitting a plateau that lasted for roughly 5,000 years, the paper shows. After that, shifts of incoming sunshine prompted a long, slow cooling trend.

The cooling was interrupted, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, by a fairly brief spike during the Middle Ages, known as the Medieval Warm Period. (It was then that the Vikings settled Greenland, dying out there when the climate cooled again.)

Scientists say that if natural factors were still governing the climate, the Northern Hemisphere would probably be destined to freeze over again in several thousand years. “We were on this downward slope, presumably going back toward another ice age,” Dr. Marcott said.

Instead, scientists believe the enormous increase in greenhouse gases caused by industrialization will almost certainly prevent that.

Whew!

John Coleman, co-founder of the Weather Channel, with a post at Watts Up with That?

Was July 2012 the hottest July in United States history? Was the last 12 months period the warmest ever? NOAA,the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, says “Yes”. The agency released a map and statement in early August stating without reservation that July 2012 and the last 12 months were the hottest ever. The national media gave the report a “headline play” as we say in the media business. And, many of the media stories linked this hot weather with global warming.

However, skeptical scientists have produced studies that show that the last 15 years have seen a cooling in the United States. This is the NOAA NCDC Climate at a Glance US annual mean temperature trend the last 15 years.

No doubt it has been very, very hot and very, very dry. But if you check the facts behind these reports the claims are not all that certain. Consider this; the data behind the NOAA claims shows the average temperature in July 2012 was only 2/10ths of one degree warmer than July 1936. And there are several papers posted on the internet that claim that if the temperatures and the means of processing the data had not been “adjusted” several times in the past 50 years, 1934 would still be the warmest year ever, considerably warmer that the last 12 months.

I conclude that while there is some basis for the NOAA record warmth position, those who challenge NOAA’s claims also make good cases. And it seems to me that while the recent hot, dry weather is clearly out of the ordinary, as it stands for now, it is not the sort of extreme event that might prove global warming. And, any connection between the hot, dry weather and warming caused by the activities of mankind remains totally unproven.

It’s a long, meaty p0st, well worth your time. One more excerpt:

…There were no actual thermometers until after 1724 when a man named Fahrenheit made the very first one. All temperature data before that is calculated using such methods as analyzing tree rings and ice cores. While the scientists who do that work are certain that they produce accurate data, there are all sorts of issues such as what type of tree rings to use, the geographic distribution of the trees, how to figure the temperature since other issues such as the amount and time of rainfall also influence the tree’s growth. And ice cores are clearly only in the polar regions and mountain glaciers, and don’t represent the entire world temperature pattern. I can accept basic trends from these systems, but I have trouble believing they produce temperature records with the accuracy of greater than ±2 or 3 degrees.

As for the thermometer, the early ones were crude; tubes of colored mercury were stapled onto wooden backboards with degree markers printed on them. How accurate a temperature reading can you get from looking at something like that? I conclude that you should not regard those readings to be accurate within a tenth of a degree. And actually I am skeptical of even ±one degree…

Secretary of State John Kerry gave his first major foreign policy speech today. In his address, delivered at the University of Virginia, he discussed tackling climate change.

“We as a nation must have the foresight and courage to make the investments necessary to safeguard the most sacred trust we keep for our children and grandchildren: an environment not ravaged by rising seas, deadly superstorms, devastating droughts, and the other hallmarks of a dramatically changing climate,” said Kerry, according to prepared remarks.

Yes, we want to leave our kids with healthy environment. But what will it matter if we leave them broke? Consider:

• ridiculous college debt
• high real estate prices
• fewer job opportunities that pay less
• the burden of paying for Baby Boomers in retirement
• trillions in nation debt accrued now that they will be forced to pay off

Yeah, what about that?

Here’s another Obama “Green economy” bust. A federal grant to a Michigan battery plant, supposed to produce 440 jobs, instead sits idle while the staff plays board games.

Seriously.

The Obama administration’s electric car efforts took another hit on Wednesday after a federal inspection found a South Korean advanced battery maker never scaled up U.S. production despite receiving $142 million in federal grants.

A Holland, Mich., factory owned by LG Chem Ltd., 051910.SE +0.50% part of LG Corp., 003550.SE -0.48% was half-funded by a government grant and estimated to add some 440 jobs building battery cells for General Motors Co.’s GM +0.13% Chevrolet Volt and other vehicles.

When demand for the plant’s batteries didn’t meet expectations, the company filled orders with cells made at a factory in South Korea, leaving the Michigan plant largely idle, according to the report by the Department of Energy’s Inspector General, Gregory Friedman.

LG Chem said in a statement that production delays at the Michigan facility were “market-driven,” adding that it is “developing specific plans for the start of production.” The company said it regretted that it applied for reimbursement for “employment costs that were not allowed” under its U.S. grant.

“Market-driven” is euphemism for nobody wanted the damn things, except President Progressive who thinks he’s a big thinker.

The inspector general said that to avoid layoffs at the factory LG Chem paid idle workers $1.6 million in the third quarter of last year, about half of which was covered by its U.S. grant, even though there was nothing for them to do. The workers played board games, watched movies, and volunteered at local animal shelters during regular work hours, Mr. Friedman said. LG Chem has since paid back the government’s share of those charges.

Dr. Hubert H. Lamb is a big time warmist, a director of the Climate Research Unit  at the University of East Anglia. That’s the Brit university that spawned ClimateGate.

As global warming predictions fail to materialize, warmists have taken to suggest that “abnormal” weather is caused by increased atmospheric CO2, put there by us human climate sinners.

I don’t know if Lamb is making that case, but in 1977 he certainly set the issue straight.

HT: Real Science

Jason Samenow in the Washington Post:

To educate viewers on the science of the recent mega-blizzard that socked New England, MSNBC’s Craig Melvin brought onto his program noted “science guy” Bill Nye . What followed was the one of the most flawed discussions of meteorology I’ve ever seen on a national network.

In likening the blizzard and hurricane Sandy, Nye implies both storms originated off the coast from Africa, which is wrong. Sandy formed in the Caribbean (not from an African wave) and the blizzard formed off the Mid-Atlantic coast (from the merger of two North American disturbances).

Nye then draws an absurd comparison between East Coast storms and West Coast storms in an attempt to equate them.

“If you live on the West Coast … that same type of storm is called a Sou’wester,” Nye says. “If you go to the sailboat store you can get a Nor’easter hat in New England but it’s a Sou’wester hat in Seattle.”

Hurricane Sandy has also been “linked” to climate change by witless journalists and scientific scoundrels.

Note that when Sandy made landfall, it was no longer a hurricane. It was a “super storm” because:

• it coincided with a very high tide, thus exacerbating the storm surge. This is astronomy, not climate change.
• the billions in damage (“super” damages?) were a function of the millions of people who live where the storm landed. Again, that’s not climate, it’s urbanization and the law of averages

Have hurricanes become more intense of late? No. The US has not had a category 3 hurricane make landfall in eight years, the longest stretch since 1990.

More killer tornadoes? No.

More floods? Again, no.

…is scientific integrity among warmists.

As global temperatures held steady for the past 16 years, warmists shifted from talk of global warming to climate change.

Clever, because climate is always changing, as is the weather. And it allows hack scientists with a financial and political agenda, to snooker the public by conflating weather events with climate change.

They tell us that weather has become more extreme of late. Not true.

From the journal Nature

…Here we show that the previously reported increase in global drought is overestimated because the PDSI uses a simplified model of potential evaporation⁷ that responds only to changes in temperature and thus responds incorrectly to global warming in recent decades.

More realistic calculations, based on the underlying physical principles⁸ that take into account changes in available energy, humidity and wind speed, suggest that there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years. The results have implications for how we interpret the impact of global warming on the hydrological cycle and its extremes, and may help to explain why palaeoclimate drought reconstructions based on tree-ring data diverge from the PDSI-based drought record in recent years

To be fair, the beginning of that paragraph still predicts drought to increase.

Jim Geraghty:

CNN anchor Deb Feyerick to Bill Nye the Science Guy: “Talk about something else that’s falling from the sky and that is an asteroid. What’s coming our way? Is this an effect of, perhaps, of global warming or is this just some meteoric occasion?”

Asteroids! They’re attracted to our warming planet just like moths to a flame, I tell you!

She sounds as dim as the grocery bagger.

UPDATE:

Here’s the video. Before the asteroid, she blamed the blizzard (cold weather) on climate change, formerly known as global warming.

My wife overheard this conversation yesterday at the local supermarket. The grocery bagger held up one of those thin plastic bags used for produce.

Bagger Girl: “Where do these bags come from, trees?”

The checker grunted something non-committal.

Customer: “No, they come from oil. Lots of things come from oil, plastic, cosmetics, paint…”

Bagger Girl: “I wish I had an oil vein. Then I’d be rich.”

Whew. Perhaps the poor thing had heard that not using bags saved trees.

If you’re a believer in man-made global warming, this will be heresy.

By that, I mean actually greener, not politically correct.

Matt Ridley writes:

Satellites confirm that green vegetation is increasing

Did you know that the Earth is getting greener, quite literally? Satellites are now confirming that the amount of green vegetation on the planet has been increasing for three decades. This will be news to those accustomed to alarming tales about deforestation, overdevelopment and ecosystem destruction.

This possibility was first suspected in 1985 by Charles Keeling, the scientist whose meticulous record of the content of the air atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii first alerted the world to the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Mr. Keeling’s famous curve showed not only a year-by-year increase in carbon dioxide levels but a season-by-season oscillation in the concentration.

During summers in the Northern Hemisphere, the Earth breathes in carbon dioxide as green plants (most of which are north of the equator) absorb the gas and turn it into carbohydrate. In the northern winter, the Earth breathes the gas out again, as the summer’s leaves rot.

Mr. Keeling and colleagues noticed that the depth of the breathing had increased in Hawaii by 20% [by 1995] since the 1960s: The Earth was taking in more carbon dioxide each northern summer and giving out more each winter. Since the inhalation is done by green leaves, they reasoned, the amount of greenery on the planet must be growing larger. In the 1980s forest biologists started to report striking increases in the growth rates of trees and the density of forests: in Douglas firs in British Columbia, Scots pines in Finland, bristlecone pines in Colorado and even tropical rain forests.

Around the same time, a NASA scientist named Compton Tucker found that he could map global vegetation changes by calculating a “Normalized Difference Vegetation Index” (NDVI) from the data produced by a satellite sensor. The data (more…)

Scientists stick to facts. Politicians use gimmicks, stunts and misinformation to advance their cause.

When you see a supposed climate scientist conflating weather with climate, say using hurricane Sandy as a warning about man-made global warming, you should doubt his truthfulness.

In this clip, we see Tim Wirth, one of the early warming alarmists, laugh about how they worked on the gullibility of the public and press.