Hotter than a heatwave in hell !

… and other amusing tales from the lunatic fringe of warmist fantasy.

Desert landscape
[image credit: Wikipedia]

Former Telegraph columnist James Delingpole enjoys himself at the expense of the hapless, or hopeless, Smithsonian Institute’s irrational fears for the future.

Melting golfers, refugees by the million – or is it billion? – it’s all here.

Somebody somewhere might even believe it, but probably not. Unmissable!

‘The Smithsonian Institution – established in 1846 “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge” – has weighed into the debate on climate change. And the news is grim.’

Full story here:
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/04/30/Soon-it-may-be-too-hot-to-play-a-round-of-golf-and-other-Smithsonian-climate-scare-stories

Australian camels reprieved – not climate polluters

Aussie feral camel

Not much anyway, according to a bizarre ‘study’. Can you believe this stuff?

‘Our results suggest that the methane emission of Australia’s feral camels corresponds only to 1 to 2% of the methane amount produced by the countries’ domestic ruminants and that calculations of greenhouse gas budgets of countries with large camelid populations based on equations developed for ruminants are generally overestimating the actual levels.’

Just when you might have thought reality couldn’t be left any further behind by ‘greenhouse gas’ obsessives…

Paper: ‘Methane Emission by Camelids’

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0094363

An alternative metric to assess global warming

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‘The ocean…is by far the dominant reservoir of climate system heat changes’.

An exclusive from Climate Etc.

Climate Etc.

by Roger A. Pielke Sr., Richard T. McNider, and John Christy

The thing we’ve all forgotten is the heat storage of the ocean – it’s a thousand times greater than the atmosphere and the surface.  – James Lovelock

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Russia eyes Eastern Ukraine’s massive shale gas fields

Eastern Ukraine
[image credit: BBC News]

Is this what’s really going on at the Russia-facing end of Ukraine?
The report below claims it is ‘the true goal of Russia’s special operation’.

‘The total area of the shale gas deposit is almost 8 thousand square kilometers. Experts point out that the gas deposits in this land can bring revolutionary changes not only to Ukraine’s energetics, but of the whole Europe.’

On the streets it’s getting uglier by the day.

Full report: http://www.charter97.org/en/news/2014/4/28/96514/

29/04/14: Ukraine crisis: Pro-Russia activists seize Luhansk HQ

30/04/14: Ukraine ‘on full combat alert’ against possible Russia invasion

2/05/14: Ukraine pilot killed in Sloviansk military operation

2/05/14: Dozens killed in Odessa fire amid clashes

In The End, Their Credibility Will Melt Away Quite Suddenly

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Sounds like a ‘tipping point’ 🙂

Real Science

In 2007, leading experts said that the Arctic will be ice-free by 2013, and that it will all melt away quite suddenly.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Arctic summers ice-free ‘by 2013’

The green circle below shows the date of that prediction. Since then, the average Arctic sea ice area has grown by more than two million km². There has been no trend for 10 years

iphone.anomaly.arctic.png (512×412)

These climate experts talk very confidently about things they understand nothing about, it gets repeated by useful idiots in the press, and then they both get paid to drag civilization back to the dark ages..

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Alaskan ice too thick for polar bears

Fancy a fish supper?

Another twist in the ‘climate change’ saga.

‘Polar Bears Face Threats to Survival Thanks to Too Much Ice’
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2014/04/28/polar-bears-face-problems-thanks-to-too-much-ice-n1830450

The bi-polar seesaw – what’s happening?

Balancing act

A 2010 paper by University College London (UCL) reported:
‘Evidence from ice-core and marine records for the last glacial period and climate models has supported this bipolar seesaw process, but the extent to which its operation is affected by climate conditions and the hydrological cycle remains unclear. This new study, published in February’s Nature Geoscience, shows that the bipolar see-saw was a feature of the penultimate glacial period, but that its operation was also modified by the background climate state.’

http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/about-the-department/news/news-archive-2010/february-2010/the-hydrological-cycle-and-the-bi-polar-climate-see-saw

Now a new paper on this topic has appeared.

Germany cracking under the strain of renewable energy

Not-so-sunny Germany

Pierre Gosselin’s ‘NoTricksZone’ reports (link below) how the wheels are coming off Germany’s mega-expensive charge into renewable energy.

The economic and logistical strains of the rush out of nuclear energy, and into wind and solar power, are finally coming to a head.

Even the Vice Chancellor of the country is ready to throw the towel in.

For some at the top of politics, the penny may have finally dropped.
Sanity at last?

More here:
http://notrickszone.com/2014/04/27/angela-merkels-vice-chancellor-stuns-declares-germanys-energiewende-to-be-on-the-verge-of-failure/

Ex-NASA science expert blasts global warming theory

‘And another thing…’

Breitbart London reports:

‘A former NASA scientist has described global warming as “nonsense”, dismissing the theory of man-made climate change as “an unsubstantiated hypothesis” and saying that it is “absolutely stupid” to blame the recent UK floods on human activity.’

Oh dear, Dame Slingo of the MetO won’t like that.

And there’s more…

Rainfall 1766 onwards

Since oldbrew nicely points at Paul Homewood I am taking the opportunity to add a quick post.

I am very close to posting an article on the 17 rainfall data series from 1910 onwards, been working on this since January, took half hour to drop in the long Met Office England and Wales time series 1766 onwards.

I post an output without much explanation.

If you want to really look the PDF is much better provided you know how to magnify, you can zoom in on the timeseries plot. No actual markers, keeps the file size down.

met-office-1766 (PDF 84kB)

Holding Slingo To Account

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We should be getting used to this by now…

The UK Met Office embarrasses itself yet again.

Sound analysis from Paul Homewood.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-26084625

Back in February, Julia Slingo, the Met Office’s Chief Scientist, was reported by the BBC, when discussing the recent wet winter, as saying:

“The UK had seen the most exceptional period of rainfall in 248 years….

We have records going back to 1766 and we have nothing like this. We have seen some exceptional weather. We can’t say it is unprecedented but it is exceptional.

There was no definitive answer to what caused the storms, but all the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change”

I pointed out at the time that these statements simply were not supported by the data, and asked the Met Office to justify them. (Remember that this report was on 9th February, so she only had Dec/Jan data to go on). After three attempts on their part to sidetrack the issue, they have totally failed to back…

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California tries to shut the door on IKEA

Not an IKEA chair

The LA Business Journal reports:
‘Environmentalists Cite Global Warming to Block Burbank Ikea’
http://www.labusinessjournal.com/news/2014/apr/23/global-warming-lawsuit-hits-burbank-ikea/

Much-needed good-quality jobs for local workers? Yep.
Solar panels on the roof? Yep.
Rolling out the welcome mat for a successful retail enterprise? Nope.
What do they get instead? A lawsuit.

Critic of official climate science tackles…er, sceptics

CO2 chart
[image credit: Wikipedia]

Well-known climate expert and global warming sceptic (apologies for the cliche) Dr Roy Spencer has by his own admission stirred up a hornet’s nest here.

It’s a list of ‘skeptical arguments’ (US spelling) that he considers to be erroneous. Without further ado: enjoy (?).

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/04/skeptical-arguments-that-dont-hold-water/

Update: some Talkshop commenters seriously question nos. 6 and 7 on the list.

Shale gas or snail gas for the UK?

Shale gas geology

Dr Benny Peiser reports on the tortuous processes facing shale gas explorers in the UK.

‘In Texas, it takes seven days to get a permission for hydraulic fracturing of shale. In Britain, the wait has been going on for a whopping seven years’
http://www.thegwpf.org/benny-peiser-how-britain-is-wasting-its-real-shale-potential/

While we might not want a seven day approval period on a fairly crowded island, seven years seems a bit ludicrous.
No wonder some drilling firms have given up on the idea.

Government inertia may be rattled by the Ukraine crisis, as Dr Peiser suggests.
But will anything change apart from the rhetoric?

Sunspots 2014: March another record-breaking month

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Where next for sunspots? These magnetic phenomena may be dancing to a tune, but we’re still not sure what it is.

Inform The Pundits!

NASA: April 16th, 2012 prominence

Another new solar sunspot record peak of 73.2 was set for Cycle 24 last month. It smashed the old 68.9 record peak set the previous month.

In a big surprise, it’s over six spots higher than the first sunspot peak set in early 2012 and will probably go up. A secondary peak that much above the first is almost unheard of.

The new sunspot peak is unusual for two conflicting reasons:

1. The secondary peak is higher than the first
2. Current physics suggests the solar cycle should be weakening

Conflicting signals coming from the sun muddles how it might affect earth’s future climate. A more active sun will have a warming effect. A less active sun, predicted by most solar physicists, will have a cooling effect.

The sun hasn’t decided what it wants to do yet.

The Royal Observatory of Belgium’s Solar Information Data Center (SIDC)…

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Latest start ever for Great Lakes after Great Freeze

Satellite view of the Great Lakes
[image credit: Wikipedia]

There’s never been a winter quite like it on the Great Lakes, but unlike lurid headlines about melting ice in the Arctic (remember those?) this story gets only modest matter-of-fact coverage in the international media.
No prizes for guessing why.

‘An extremely cold winter left most of Lake Superior frozen over’
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/shipping-season-begins-today-marking-latest-start-ever-1.2616792

Any amount of convoluted excuses and upside down logic may be put forward as a smokescreen by ‘warmists’ but the fact is, it was a historically cold winter in that region.

Facebook vs Climate Models

Storm clouds arriving
[image credit: Wikipedia]

A line from a GWPF report illustrates one of the many problems faced by the UN IPCC in its efforts to understand the world’s climate(s):
‘Facebook has over fifty times more lines of code than climate models.’

http://www.thegwpf.org/models-behaving-badly/

Having no way of verifying that, we’ll have to take their word for it, but it’s probably not that surprising. Facebook would be out of business if its code consistently failed to work as expected, but no such problem for climate models it seems.

I name that asteroid ‘Mine’

Gold pan

It sounds like an April fool’s gag, but no:
‘Details have been emerging of the plan by billionaire entrepreneurs to mine asteroids for their resources.’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17827347

They claim:
“We’re in this for decades. But it’s not a charity. And we’ll make money from the beginning.”

B-b-but what about all that CO2 from rocket fuel burning?
Tut-tut 😉

A raspberry for Earth Day

Earth Day

Dr Roy Spencer has a pop at Earth Day here — enjoy.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/04/some-earth-day-cartoons/

More about Dr Spencer: http://www.drroyspencer.com/about/

Stand and deliver: UK energy consumers face robbery – again

Another binge of overpriced, over-hyped and underwhelming power projects is about to be launched on hapless UK energy consumers. Part-time power generation rules.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-27121801

‘The eight projects will all receive one of the government’s Contracts for Difference (CfDs), which effectively guarantee prices for renewable energy suppliers.’

‘These could cost up to £1bn each year in subsidies.’

Somehow these subsidies will cost bill payers ‘only’ 2% extra on their bills, claims Energy Secretary Ed Davey. The only other source of subsidy is the taxpayer, so you lose either way if you’re in the UK.

One small bit of relief though: ‘electricity producer Drax said it had started legal proceedings against the government over a decision not to support the conversion of one of its coal-burning units to biomass under the scheme.’

A chunk of forest somewhere in the States has been spared the axe, for now at least.

http://www.standard.co.uk/business/business-news/diving-drax-to-take-legal-action-after-subsidy-blow-9277732.html