Don’t Believe ‘Hottest-Year’ Hype

By Larry Bell | Monday, 14 Mar 2016 07:51 AM

NOAA and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have histories of tweaking global data and abbreviating recorded timelines to make the past colder in order to have recent temperatures appear remarkably warmer.

In January they rolled out a “hottest year ever” press briefing to report an allegedly dramatic warming trend purportedly based upon 57 years of radiosonde (balloon) records. Strangely, their presentation graph only showed the last 37 years dating back to 1979. Data going back another 22 years to 1957 would have revealed a very different trend line.

As reported by Real Science, radiosonde recordings in the Earth’s atmosphere show no overall warming since the late 1950s. And whereas NOAA’s surface station records indicate about one degree of warming between 1979 and 2010, far more accurate radiosonde and satellite measurements show little warming.

Global temperatures cooled from the late 1950s to the ’60s, and have since risen and fallen with as much pre-1979 cooling as post-1979 warming over the past half century.

Satellite records which date back only to 1979 show that 1998, a major El Niño year, was far warmer than 2015, which experienced an even stronger El Niño that had been expected to influence at least equally high temperatures.

In fact even the year 2010 (which was followed by four years of cooling) was warmer.

Those 18 years after 1998 were relatively flat until last year despite much ballyhooed “record high” atmospheric CO2 levels. The 2015 El Niño is now rapidly dissipating, likely to be soon followed by a cooling La Niña.

Alabama’s State Climatologist and University of Alabama Earth Science Center Director John Christy explained reasons for temperature recording conflicts and uncertainties to the House Science Committee last month.

He emphasized that satellite and radiosonde measurements, which tend to be quite consistent with one another, afford much more accurate and coherent gauges of global temperatures than surface networks.

Christy observed that significant land-based temperature contamination errors result from local “heat island effects” caused by urban developments and careless placement of recording instruments near heat sources such as structures and air conditioner exhausts.

Ocean surface measurements are also unreliable. He pointed out that water temperature trends at a depth of 1 meter “do not track well with those of air temperature just above the water [3 meters], even when both are measured on the same buoy over 20 years.” With regard to determining any human CO2 influences, “it is difficult to adjust for these contaminating factors to extract a pure data set for greenhouse detection because often the non-climatic influence comes along very gradually just as it is expected of the response to the enhanced greenhouse effect.”

As for theoretical computer models which project sharply climbing temperatures, actual atmospheric measurements have shown no such trend whatsoever.

Christy told the House Committee that “The models overwarm the atmosphere by a factor of about 2.5, indicating that the current [greenhouse] theory is at odds with the facts.” This discrepancy “is not a short-term specially-selected episode, but represents the past 37 years.” He reminded the audience that “This is also the period with the highest concentration of greenhouse gases, and thus, the period in which the response should be of the largest magnitude.”

Many will remember a previous “climate crisis” media scare in the 1960s and late ’70s when “leading scientists” were predicting an arrival of the next ice age.

Since 2011, NOAA has creatively revised that original temperature record to make that big chill go away altogether. They aren’t alone in cooking the books. NASA’s GISS, a small surface temperature modeling shop operating out of a midtown Manhattan office building has become a leading player in the political agenda-driven climate scare business.

The next time you hear a feverish declaration that the most recent day, month, year or decade is “the hottest on record,” perhaps consider “since when?” Are they referring to the brief period since satellites first provided the most reliable data? Do they mean since the time a spotty and haphazard global network of mercury thermometer surface stations was established in the late 1800s?

In any case, don’t expect alarmists to cite evidence taken from proxy records including ice cores drilled in Greenland and Antarctica indicating that temperatures were warmer over most of the past 10,000 years . . . or that agricultural records show the climate was as warm or warmer 2,000 years ago during the Roman warm period and again 1,000 years ago during the Medieval warm period.

Also, don’t anticipate any mention that our planet is still warming its way out of the “little ice age” which lasted from about 1300 to 1850. Periods before the Industrial Revolution brought CO2-belching smokestacks and SUVs somehow don’t seem to count.

Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA) and the graduate program in space architecture. He is the author of “Scared Witless: Prophets and Profits of Climate Doom”(2015) and “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax” (2012). 

 

Germany’s Wind Power Meltdown

Posted: March 28, 2016 by tallbloke in Energy, government, greenblob, Incompetence, solar system dynamics, wind

turbine-failRepost from Stop These Things

The Germans went into wind power harder and faster than anyone else – and the cost of doing so is catching up with a vengeance.

The subsidies have been colossal and the impacts on the electricity market chaotic.

Some 800,000 German homes have been disconnected from the grid – victims of what is euphemistically called “fuel poverty”. Power starved Germans, instead of freezing, grabbed their axes and tramped into their forests to improve their sense of energy security – although foresters apparently take the view that this self-help measure is nothing more than blatant timber theft (see our post here).

German manufacturers – and other energy intensive industries – faced with escalating power bills are packing up and heading to the USA – where power prices are 1/3 of Germany’s (see our posts here and hereand here). And the “green” dream of creating thousands of jobs in the wind industry has turned out to be just that: a dream (see our post here).

Those in charge of Germany’s power grid have stepped up calls for an end to the lunacy of trying to absorb a wholly weather dependent generation source into what was never designed to deal with the chaos presented on a daily basis:

Germany’s Wind Power Debacle Escalates: Nation’s Grid on the Brink of Collapse

The economics are so bizarre, that you’d think its “Energiewende” policy had been put together by the GDR’s ‘brains trust’, before the Berlin Wall took its tumble in 1989.

In Germany, around €100 billion has already been burnt on renewable subsidies; currently the green energy levy costs €56 million every day. And, the level of subsidy for wind and solar sees Germans paying €20 billion a year for power that gets sold on the power exchange for around €2 billion.

Squandering €18 billion a year on power – which Germans have in abundance from meaningful sources – has them asking the fair and reasonable question: just how much power are they getting for the €billions that they’ve thrown – and continue to throw at wind and solar? The answer – at a piddling 3.3% – is: NOT MUCH.

For Germans, that would all be miserable enough, except that – contrary to the purported environmental purpose of their Energiewende – CO2 emissions are rising, not falling as promised and predicted.

If “saving” the planet is – as we are repeatedly told – all about reducing man-made emissions of an odourless, colourless, naturally occurring trace gas, essential for all life on earth – then German energy/environmental policy has manifestly failed. And what an expensive failure it is.

Explaining The Extreme Weather Events That Did Not Happen

MARCH 17, 2016

By Paul Homewood 

image_thumb67

https://www2.ametsoc.org/ams/index.cfm/publications/bulletin-of-the-american-meteorological-society-bams/explaining-extreme-events-from-a-climate-perspective/

Unable to persuade the public that a slightly warmer world is a bad thing, the climate establishment has turned to peddling the myth that global warming is leading to more extreme weather.

There have been a number of studies which have attempted to connect the two. Even then, as I showed with the above AMS attempt a few months ago, most extreme events cannot be linked, and those that are claimed to be are extremely tenuous.

Of course, weather is an impossibly complex affair, and it is inevitable that some weather events may be made more likely or more intense in a warmer world. But, equally, the opposite is also true – that some events are less likely. Naturally, we never hear the absence of extreme weather analysed in this way by the likes of the AMS or Met Office.

So, I invite them to have a go at these examples:

Hurricanes

US land falling hurricanes have been at record low levels in recent years, and it is now more than ten years since a major hurricane hit.

image

image

http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/All_U.S._Hurricanes.html

Tornadoes

There has been a long term decline in both the number of tornadoes, and particularly, the frequency of stronger ones.

image_thumb54

image_thumb55

Droughts

Droughts were much more commonplace, prolonged and severe prior to the 1970s.

mudltigraph

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/us/110/0/pdsi/ytd/12/1895-2016?base_prd=true&firstbaseyear=1901&lastbaseyear=2000

Summer Heatwaves

There has been a marked absence of extreme heatwaves in recent years, and nothing approaches the run of intensely hot summers in the 1930s.

mulstigraph

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/us/110/0/tmax/3/8/1895-2016?base_prd=true&firstbaseyear=1901&lastbaseyear=2000

Bitter Winters

According to NOAA’s albeit highly adjusted data, extremely cold winters are a thing of the past in the US.

multigramph

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/us/110/0/tmin/3/2/1895-2016?base_prd=true&firstbaseyear=1901&lastbaseyear=2000

Precipitation

As with drought indicators, US rainfall has tended to be greater since the pre 1970 period.

There is no indication, however, of precipitation becoming more extreme since then. The wettest year was 1973.

multigrapph

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/us/110/0/pcp/ytd/12/1895-2016?base_prd=true&firstbaseyear=1901&lastbaseyear=2000

Regional Precipitation Extremes

National totals can, of course, cover up regional imbalances.The NOAA chart below shows the balance of extremely wet and dry areas. As with PDSI, very dry areas are much less common, while the area of very wet weather is stable.

(NOAA’s graph is not well presented; although it says “December”, it is in fact for all months since 1895. Each bar represents a single month)

multigraph

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/uspa/?area=wet-dry&month=0&submitted=View