Barack Obama: Call Out the ‘Deniers’ on my Little List

It’s getting ugly in the United States. Honourable members of the house of representatives and the senate are being labelled by the President as ‘Deniers’. His official website now carries a blacklist of names and quotes, with tweet buttons alongside. When you click one a ready prepared tweet pops up for you to send to the named ‘Denier’ – like this:

So, what heinous denialism has Robert Aderholt been engaging in to deserve being hounded in this way at the President’s request? Well, the quote selected by the President’s team is as follows:

Günther Oettinger: Unfair energy subsidy to German business

From Der Speigel

The audience was small and exclusive, which helps explain why little has emerged thus far of what European Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger said at the Hotel Stanhope in Brussels on May 6. It was enough to cause something of a stir among his listeners.

For the European Commission and for Competition Commissioner Joaquín Almunia, Oettinger said during a dinner event, it is clear that price concessions for energy-intensive companies in Germany amount to an inadmissible subsidy. In the best-case scenario, he said, the Commission would ban such subsidies. But, he added, the worst case could see Brussels demanding that such companies pay back the money they had saved as a result of the discounts they have received.

Competitors and neighboring countries had filed an official complaint about these benefits with the European Commission, prompting the EU competition authority to launch an investigation. The German commissioner had sought to assure industry representatives that the process was only just beginning and that the outcome remained unclear.

That, though, seems to only have been partly accurate, which helps explain the current agitation. The scenario Oettinger outlined at the Brussels dinner is a horrifying one for parts of German industry and for the government in Berlin. The prospect of having to repay several billion euros is certainly a daunting one. Even worse, though, is that the competitiveness of entire industrial sectors would be put at risk. Also at stake is the Renewable Energies Act (EEG), a central component of Berlin’s shift away from nuclear power and toward green energy, also known as the Energiewende.

Since 2000, Germany has used the EEG to promote the expansion of renewable forms of energy. To ensure that the construction of expensive solar and wind farms is worthwhile for private individuals and investors, they receive a guarantee that the electricity they produce will be purchased at a fixed price for a period of several years.

Steve Milloy: EPA still hiding junk-science raw data after 20 years

Here we go again. Expensive statutes and rules based on unavailable data.

President Obama’s nominee to head up the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Gina McCarthy, is awaiting a confirmation vote. Senate Republicans may still filibuster. The agency’s reliance on “secret science,” long a concern for the role it has played in EPA’s decisions, is finally emerging.

She almost didn’t make it out of the Environment and Public Works committee. Wisconsin Republican Sen. John Barrasso spoke on behalf of the Senate GOP regarding why they were boycotting her nomination, saying “What we’re simply requesting is access to the scientific data and reasoning behind the justification for expensive new rules…”

Anchor ice and the heat flux through water

In recent days I have been chasing information in old archives.

Many strange things have turned up. Here is one of them, a page as PDF as found by a search engine but alas the wonder of hashing, discovering the document from whence it came is a tangle of mystery.

Here are a few words copy typed from image

Anchor ice never forms under a cloudy sky either by day or night, no matter how severe the weather, but it forms very rapidly under a clear sky at night. Anchor ice is readily melted off under a bright sun.

…

Thus the loosening of the anchor ice under bright sun is simple enough from the fact that water is transparent to heat-waves up to 1u.

It then goes on to point out that water is “exceedingly opaque” to longer heat rays and therefore a bit of a problem arises over how long wave gets out to space to freeze the bottom water in the first place.

Water being what it is, ice floats. Wonder how long before Rog goes, hang on a minute.

155Myr Fossil could be Avian or Avian fore-runner

Sciencenews brings us this fab fossil found in China’s Tiaojishan formation:

Breaking: ConDem Coalition going ahead with Royal Mail Sellout

From the New York Times:

LONDON – Britain is preparing to privatize Royal Mail, the country’s postal service, whose origins date to 1516 and the carrying of post for Henry VIII and the Tudor court.

The government said on Wednesday that it had appointed Goldman Sachs and UBS as the lead banks to manage a planned initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange later this year. Barclays and Bank of America Merrill Lynch will also work on the sale. The planned offering could value Royal Mail at about £3 billion ($4.5 billion), according to some analysts.

Tim Yeo: About Turn – Straight Face

Heh, Tim ‘Trougher’ Yeo seems to be backpedalling furiously. “Did I say Global Warming is nearly all human caused? What I meant, of course, is that it could mostly be ‘natural phases'”. H/T @Sourmanarti.  From the Telegraph:

He’s having a Giraffe

The chairman of the Commons Energy and Climate Change committee Tim Yeo MP said he accepts the earth’s temperature is increasing but said “natural phases” may be to blame.

Such a suggestion sits at odds with the scientific consensus. One recent [bogus] survey of 12,000 academic papers on climate change found 97 per cent [of 32% of the biased sample] agree human activities are causing the planet to warm.

Mr Yeo, an environment minister under John Major, is one of the Conservative Party’s strongest advocates of radical action to cut carbon emissions. His comments are significant as he was one of the first senior figures to urge the party to take the issue of environmental change seriously.

He insisted such action is “prudent” given the threat climate change poses to living standards worldwide. But, he said, human action is merely a “possible cause”.

Asked on Tuesday night whether it was better to take action to mitigate the effects of climate change than to prevent it in the first place, he said: “The first thing to say is it does not represent any threat to the survival of the planet. None at all. The planet has survived much bigger changes than any climate change that is happening now.

60 Years ago Today: Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Summited Everest

It was a remarkable feat of organisation, courage and endurance. These two adventurers captured the imaginations of a generation.

In 1953, a ninth British expedition, led by John Hunt, returned to Nepal. Hunt selected two climbing pairs to attempt to reach the summit. The first pair (Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans) came within 100 m (330 ft) of the summit on 26 May 1953, but turned back after running into oxygen problems. As planned, their work in route finding and breaking trail and their caches of extra oxygen were of great aid to the following pair. Two days later, the expedition made its second and final assault on the summit with its second climbing pair, the New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, a Nepali sherpa climber from Darjeeling, India. They reached the summit at 11:30 am local time on 29 May 1953 via the South Col Route. At the time, both acknowledged it as a team effort by the whole expedition, but Tenzing revealed a few years later that Hillary had put his foot on the summit first.^[26] They paused at the summit to take photographs and buried a few sweets and a small cross in the snow before descending.

News of the expedition’s success reached London on the morning of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, 2 June. Returning to Kathmandu a few days later, Hunt (a Briton) and Hillary (a New Zealander) discovered that they had been promptly knighted in the Order of the British Empire, a KBE, for the ascent. Tenzing, a Nepali sherpa who was a citizen of India, was granted the George Medal by the UK. Hunt was ultimately made a life peer in Britain, while Hillary became a founding member of the Order of New Zealand. Hillary and Tenzing are also nationally recognized in Nepal, where annual ceremonies in schools and offices celebrate their accomplishment.^[27]

Chris de Freitas: Rebuttal of Jim Salinger’s wild Alarmist Claims in the NZ Herald

From the New Zealand Herald

Several aspects of Jim Salinger’s op-ed “Climate hurtling towards a hothouse Earth” (Herald 24/5/13) are quite misleading.

It is true most climate scientists would agree that rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to fossil fuel use could affect global climate. The basic physics is there to support this view. But there is no evidence that the putative change would be large or damaging. Output from computer models is not evidence unless model performance has been validated. So far, it has not.

The so-called evidence of minor human-caused climatic change can also be attributed to causes or processes other than those related to the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

What is rarely mentioned by climate alarmists is the incontrovertible fact that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere has an ever-decreasing effect on global temperature. To illustrate this, compare covering a glass window with very thin paint. The first coat of paint cuts out some light, the second some more; but each subsequent coat has an ever decreasing effect on light shining through.

Ed Davey: Committing Britain to unilateral cuts in GHG emission of 40% by 2030

From EUactiv:

Under the new proposals, to be unveiled by climate and energy secretary Ed Davey today (27 May), the UK would call on the EU to commit to carbon dioxide reductions of 40% by 2030, compared with 1990 levels, rising to 50% if other countries join in with more stringent targets on emissions. World governments are engaged in negotiations on a global climate change deal to replace the Kyoto protocol, with a new agreement to take effect by 2020. The proposals would make the UK the first country to set out its stance on emissions cuts before the next round of talks, in November.

Davey said: “The UK is a global leader in tackling climate change … That is why we will argue for an EU-wide binding emissions reductions target of 50% by 2030 in the context of an ambitious global climate deal and even a unilateral EU 40% target without a global deal.

“This 2030 target is ambitious, but it is achievable and necessary if we are to limit climate change to manageable proportions.”

Power station conversion from coal to woodchip is not sustainable

From the Wall Street Journal

WINDSOR, N.C.—Loggers here are clear-cutting a wetland forest with decades-old trees.

The U.S. logging industry is seeing a rejuvenation, thanks in part of Europe’s efforts to seek out green fuel and move away from coal. Ianthe Dugan explains. Photo: Getty Images.

Behind the move: an environmental push.

The push isn’t in North Carolina but in Europe, where governments are trying to reduce fossil-fuel use and carbon-dioxide emissions. Under pressure, some of the Continent’s coal-burning power plants are switching to wood.

But Europe doesn’t have enough forests to chop for fuel, and in those it does have, many restrictions apply. So Europe’s power plants are devouring wood from the U.S., where forests are bigger and restrictions fewer.

Uh oh, the Met Office has set the cat amongst the pigeons

This is a big story which will be ignored by the BBC

Watts Up With That?

Excerpt from Bishop Hill (plus a cartoon from Josh) showing that the claim of a statistically significant temperature rise can’t be supported, and the Met office is ducking parliamentary questions: (h/t Randy Hughes)

Met Office admits claims of significant temperature rise untenable

This is a guest post by Doug Keenan.

It has been widely claimed that the increase in global temperatures since the late 1800s is too large to be reasonably attributed to natural random variation. Moreover, that claim is arguably the biggest reason for concern about global warming. The basis for the claim has recently been discussed in the UK Parliament. It turns out that the claim has no basis, and scientists at the Met Office have been trying to cover that up.

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Persistence of atmospheric dust, Novarupta, Mt Katmai eruption 1912

Remains of Mt Katmai, Katmai Caldera taken from the air.
Image courtesy Pam McPherson (enhanced TNC)

The most massive volcanic eruption of the 20th century came during June 1912 in Alaska, explosive, heard 1,500 miles away. A good deal of the mountain vanished.

Mt Katmai is one of several peaks making up the Novarupta.

Doug Proctor: The rough and smooth of data as seen from afar

Doug writes he is not a computer man. Well Doug a computer is just a robot, a tool following our instructions, exactly, to err is human, jolly good idea too because Artificial Intelligence is and has been a dead end, damagingly so. The reason is simple enough, it is without what Doug uses, his eyes, and brain, he goes places does and experiences, reacts to changes. It’s actually the noise, the randomness which breaks a precise binary way, always identical to variation and difference, no discovery.

The genetics of reproduction is doubly random, part tried and tested, part variation. Double because a second stage kicks in, won’t go into this here.

Clone. Loved on battlefields, find the weakness, hey look, they are predictable, all the same.

At the same time eg. humans are all the same.

Follow the same path, sheep, guidance and that I am trying to avoid.

Doug writes: –

The smoothing in data seems to be asked only after the compilation is questioned: the spaghetti graphs that arrived after Mann was questioned, remember, showed that what we thought (were shown) as a simple trend was, in fact, a mess with a huge variability that disappeared after statistical fiddling. (Or appeared to disappear for promotional purposes) I don’t know any-more about the ice core data, or the CO2 data.

Anger at windfarm ripoff. Owners name own price for not generating

You couldn’t make it up. From the Herald

CALLS have been made for the UK Government to close an “embarrassing” loophole that allows some wind-farm operators to name their own price as compensation for not operating.The issue has been raised by the regulator Ofgem, but the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) confirmed the loophole exists but will not name the exempted companies.The revelation will intensify criticism of a system that effectively makes consumers pay millions for generators not to generate.

Thermal radiation balance at Chilbolton Observatory

Figure 1

Since mid February 2013 I have been capturing high time resolution data from the Chilbolton Observatory web site, done for the previous day. This is processed from .PNG files into numeric data here. [1]

Data exists for about 23 hours a day at a few minutes between samples, data currently amounts to about 56,000 readings.

Steve Tobias: Rediscovering the solar dynamo

I sat down for an hour with Steve Tobias a couple of years ago and told him about some of the correlations we’ve been finding between planetary and solar inertial motion, and solar activity levels. He listened attentively, but I don’t think I made too much of an impression. This press release heralds a new paper published in Nature by Tobias and Fausto Cattaneo.

Researchers at the Universities of Leeds and Chicago have uncovered an important mechanism behind the generation of astrophysical magnetic fields such as that of the Sun.

Scientists have known since the 18th century that the Sun regularly oscillates between periods of high and low solar activity in an 11-year cycle, but have been unable to fully explain how this cycle is generated.

Fursday Fun: Conservative party insult generator

From thepoke.co.uk offers a handy insult generator for when you run out of ‘swivel eyed loons’ or ‘fruitcakes and clowns’ epithets to keep you laughing.

Christine Lagarde: expected to be formally charged in connection with a £270million fraud

From the Mail, news that International Monetary Fund Director Christine Lagarde is about to be “Roasted toasted, fried and grilled” by the courts:

The head of the International Monetary Fund appeared in court today where she is expected to be formally charged in connection with a £270million fraud and embezzlement case.

Christine Lagarde’s humiliation is not only a massive personal blow which could lead to her resignation, but one which will plunge the world’s banking system into further ignominy.

The clearly nervous 57-year-old said nothing to reporters as she entered the Court of Justice of the Republic, a special tribunal set up to judge the conduct of France’s government ministers,  shortly after 8.30am.

Lagarde faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in jail if found guilty of the very serious charges.

It was when she was President Nicolas Sarkozy’s finance minister that she is said to have authorised a 270 million pounds payout to one of his prominent supporters, so abusing her government position.

The money went to Bernard Tapie, a convicted football match fixer and tax dodger who supported Lagarde and Sarkozy’s UMP party.

Canadian health professionals speak out about wind turbines

STOP THESE THINGS

Earlier, STT published a list of health professionals who are concerned about the impact of wind turbines on people’s health. To complement this we would like to share with you the excellent documentary by CBC Wind Rush that can be watched in full here (42.11).

Recently, the European Platform against Windfarms (EPAW) have produced an edited version of this documentary (14.16) focusing on the opinions of various health professionals about the impact of wind turbines on humans. It is well worth watching.

This is what they have said:

• Dr Hazel Lynn, from the local medical service, talks about the increase in the number of health issues
• Dr Michael Nisselbalm (Radiologist) on his survey on the quality of life of people living near turbines
• Dr Alec Salt (Hearing researcher, Washington University Medical School) on safe setbacks from turbines
• Dr Michael Nisselbalm (Radiologist) on how the rhythm of the noise impacts human…

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