Przemek Skwirczynski: UKIP gets Tories to go Polish on gas, to all our benefit

Friends of Poland in UKIP chairman  Przemek Skwirczynski writes an excellent piece at the commentator:

Przemek Skwirczynski: UKIP gets Tories to go Polish on gas, to all our benefit

As a Pole, loyal to the UK, and therefore to the cause of freedom and original thinking, before joining UKIP over a year ago I perceived it to be the real Conservative grassroots, if not a kind of think tank for open minded people of whatever origin. By now it is obvious that UKIP serves as both grassroots and a think tank in one for both the Tories and Labour.

Whatever policies it comes up with get snapped up by either of the less imaginative mainstream parties.

One of such policies was outlined during UKIP’s September 2013 conference, where the party’s energy spokesman Roger Helmer MEP set out the clean energy case for shale gas (compared to other fossil fuels) but also pointed to what should be done with the gas revenues.

Using Norway as an example, Roger Helmer suggested that the UK should create a sovereign wealth fund through which it could reinvest the profits from fracking, as opposed to spending them on current consumption as was done with the North Sea oil revenues.

BBC Bias: Spends £519,000 on campaigning climate ‘survey’ while gagging sceptical voices

Excerpts from David Rose’s Mail on Sunday article, plus a couple of tweets from Richard Betts:

BBC spends £500k to ask 33,000 Asians 5,000 miles from UK what they think of climate change: Corporation savaged for ‘astonishing’ campaign survey on global warming
David Rose – Sun 29th June 2014

The BBC has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money asking 33,000 people in Asian countries how climate change is affecting them.

The £519,000 campaigning survey by little-known BBC Media Action is designed to persuade the world to adopt more hard-line policies to combat global warming.

It was immediately condemned yesterday as a flagrant abuse of the Corporation’s rules on impartiality and ‘a spectacular waste of money’ by a top academic expert.

Every year, BBC Media Action gets £22.2 million from the taxpayer via the Foreign Office and Department for International Development.

BBC Media Action has a £40 million annual budget, and the proportion not funded by the taxpayer is paid  by the European Union, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the US government.

More News On USHCN Temperature Adjustments

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Paul Homewood now finds that even the adjustments have been adjusted over the last couple of years. The temperature record is in a mess.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

1) First I have had a comment accusing me of lying. Will the accuser, who cowardly goes under the name “anonymous”, note that further accusations of lying will be earn him a ban.

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2.5/

The top line highlighted is USHCN Station Code 415429, which, as can be confirmed here, is Luling, Texas.

Such moronic comments, not to mention inclusion of the mandatory “cherry picking” and “denier”, rather sum up just weak some alarmist arguments have become.

2) Kansas

Returning to yesterday’s topic of adjustments in Kansas, I have plotted the annual adjustments for TOBS (Time of Observation Bias) at one of the stations there, Ashland.

They are downloaded from USHCN’s website here.

Currently, 0.3F is being added to actual temperatures, whilst back in 1934, for instance, 1.1F was deducted. This makes a net adjustment of 1.4F.

This figure is way above NOAA’s previously published figure…

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Just How Bad Is The USHCN Data Tampering?

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Ohhh dear. Steve Goddard has found a big divergence between real and ‘estimated’ data in USHCN temperature ‘dataset’.

Real Climate Science

According to the USHCN V1 docs, they were done adjusting after 1990.

ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif (650×502)

According to the V2 specs, they use the same TOBS algorithm as in V1. So it seems safe to assume that stations with no missing data after 1990 need no adjustments.

1990 was also the year when they started exponentially losing station data, and started doing a lot of infilling.

So I did an experiment. I calculated the post-1990 measured temperatures for all stations with no missing data, and the post 1990 temperatures for all of the fabricated data. The fake data is diverging from the real station data at a phenomenal 5.3 degrees per century.

That huge spike in temperatures after 1990 which NCDC shows (and  I asked you to bookmark last night) is almost entirely due to fake data. Unbelievable.

I’ve been talking about the discontinuity after 1990 for a long time, and there you…

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Luning presentation: geological view on solar dominance

Pierre L. Gosselin provides an English overview of a video presentation in German given by Dr. Sebastian Lüning, a geologist and co-author of the book “The Neglected Sun

This is a geological context that unfortunately is lost on many people like physicists who believe their formulae more than they believe the true facts.

Pierre mentions “All graphics cropped from Lüning’s presentation with permission.” so I won’t copy them here.

http://notrickszone.com/2014/06/29/german-geologist-ipcc-models-a-failure-have-no-chance-of-success-sees-possible-0-2c-of-cooling-by-2020

Robinson and Catling model closely matches data for Titan’s atmosphere

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Here’s an interesting post originally published at Verity Jones’ excellent blog ‘Digging in the Clay’, from Peter Morecambe, AKA Galloping Camel. He has found a model which reproduces atmospheric profiles well, rather than just surface temperature and an approximate profile to the 100mb level.

Digging in the Clay

Posted by Peter Morcombe, April 2014

“Climate Science” is a strange discipline that makes all kinds of claims that lack any valid mathematical basis. For example, the Arrhenius hypothesis:

“The selective absorption of the atmosphere is……………..not exerted by the chief mass of the air, but in a high degree by aqueous vapor and carbonic acid, which are present in the air in small quantities.”

I write about “Climate Science” because it is used to justify a political agenda that aims to “mitigate” CO2 regardless of negative impacts on billions of people. Even though most “Climate Scientists” get their pay checks from governments they are reluctant to engage with members of the public who express doubt about the need to reduce the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.

Before making a post I reach out to experts in the field. For example, Tom Peterson (GHCN), Albert Klein Tank (KNMI), Richard Alley (Penn…

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Wikipedia’s humourless climate mafia are trying to get the Gore Effect page deleted again

A few years ago, I started a wikipedia page on the Gore Effect; the uncanny phenomenon which unleashes snow, hail, torrential rain, icy winds and sleet on the venues where Al Gore is speaking about global warming. The instances are too numerous to list. My page got deleted within a few months by the usual suspects. But it was reborn when another wiki user put up a much more detailed and better referenced version, and I thought it unassailable. But no, the usual suspects are at it again:

Maybe big Al has been armtwisting Jimmy Wales with the promise of a big donation on condition it goes. Who knows.

Contributor ‘Aussie’ notes this morning that the Gore Effect continues undiminished:

Venus surface temp correctly predicted from lapse rate in 1967 – but is it the whole story?

I came across this paper today while searching for the heat capacity of Venus near surface atmosphere, which is actually an ocean-like (in thermodynamic terms) supercritical fluid. It presages Harry Dale Huffman’s ‘rediscovery’ of the lapse rate calculation by four decades. Another paper, much more recent, (Bolmatov et al 2013) contains some theory which raises yet more questions about the reasons for Venus’ high surface temperature. So, greenhouse due to radiative proerties of co2 as Sagan claimed, lapse rate due to gravity and pressure as Nikolov and Zeller maintain, or the thermal properties of supercritical fluids and geothermal energy having a hard time escaping the lower atmosphere? Let the debate recommence!

Vulcão Russo: Klyuchevskaya Sopka

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Great images! H/T to Pam Sutherland

Cansei de Procurar

Acho vulcões lindos e apavorantes!

Achei esse especialmente interessante

Ee ainda está ativo! Última erupção foi em 2010, mas deu sinal de vida também em 2012 e 2013.

Parece tão solitário em meio ao terreno.

E olha a formação das nuvens ao redor dele!

Enfim, perigoso mas lindo! Para quem gosta é um lugar bem inusitado para se visitar e não parece ser comum nos guias…rs

Obs: Interessante que nome de vulcões parecem sempre impossíveis de serem ditos… deve ser para parecerem mais grandiosos! Ou pq os que acho mais bonitos não estão aqui no Brasil… pq será?…rs

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Space Tourism: Successful test flight of 1/10 scale helium ballon to 100,000ft

Gizmag has a report on a successful test flight by World View Enterprises of their 1/10 scale model of the real thing. Can I have a go please:

Massive Temperature Adjustments At Luling, Texas

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Ohhh. Dear. Paul homewood finds the same sort of Shenanigans going on in Texas as Roger Andrews found in Australia. Several degrees added to temperature records…

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

As most will be aware, Steve Goddard has been running a series of posts about the large and unexplained adjustments being made to the US temperature record by NOAA.

For instance, his latest post is here.

So, I thought it might be worth looking in more detail at a few stations, to see what is going on. In Steve’s post, mentioned above, he links to the USHCN Final dataset for monthly temperatures, making the point that approx 40% of these monthly readings are “estimated”, as there is no raw data.

From this dataset, I picked the one at the top of the list, (which appears to be totally random), Station number 415429, which is Luling, Texas.

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/ushcn_v2.5_monthly/monthly

(The file can be opened by Zip File).

Taking last year as an example, we can see that ten of the twelve months are tagged as “E”, i.e estimated…

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Sad news: Nigel Calder, 1931-2014

Nigel Calder

Nigel Calder, 1931-2014

Date: 27/06/14
The Global Warming Policy Foundation
The science writer Nigel Calder has died, aged 82, after a short illness.

http://www.thegwpf.org/nigel-calder-1931-2014/

[update] Jo Calder has left a comment and provides a link to a lovely family post on Nigel’s blog

I’ve gotta be driftin’ along

What Was Life Like In The Little Ice Age? – Part I

Paul Homewood reviews Brian Fagan’s book on the LIA – Part 1

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

It is widely accepted that the planet has warmed up by a degree or so since the end of the Little Ice Age about 150 years ago. We are regularly told that this increase in temperature has already caused widespread damage to the global environment, from dead polar bears and rising sea levels to extreme weather and famine. The implication is clear – the world was a much better place 200 years ago. But what was it like back then? Were conditions then really better than now?

There is an interesting book out called “The Little Ice Age” which describes life during those times. The author, Brian Fagan, is a Professor of Archaeology and I should add that it is clear from his book that he is a firm believer in AGW. It contains a good deal of useful information. (Everything that follows is based on the book).

A look…

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Does a steep drop in solar activity imply an equally steep drop in temperatures?

David Archibald’s prediction for global average temperature 2014-2025

David Archibald’s post at Quadrant.org.au has stirred some interesting debate here at the talkshop. David predicts an imminent and steep drop in regional temperatures as a result of the slowdown in solar activity seen since the descent of solar cycle 23 in 2003. It’s not the first time he has made such predictions. As Nick Stokes pointed out in discussion, Archibald told the Australian senate committee in 2009 that temperature was about to go down at a scary 0.2C per annum. It didn’t happen. But David says it’s different this time, because a decade has passed since solar cycle 23 dropped towards a long minimum, followed by the weak cycle 24 we are currently in. The decadal lag is implied by David Evan’s new hypothesis which identifies a ‘notch filter’ which points to a cycle-long lag between changes in solar activity and the effect becoming visible in the terrestrial response. David goes on to predict that due to Penn and Livingstone’s prediction of a very low sunspot number in cycle 25, we are headed for drastic cooling.

There are several points on which I disagree with David’s analysis, and I’ll cover them below the break.

Coalition ‘happy’ to meet Clive Palmer’s condition for carbon tax repeal

Updated by co-mod, see end

H/T to Marc Facer for this from Australia:

The Federal Government says it “is happy” to lock in a legal requirement that power companies pass on savings arising from the abolition of the carbon tax.
The move, which would satisfy the only condition laid down by the Palmer United Party for its crucial support to the repeal bill, follows talks between PUP leader Clive Palmer and Prime Minister Tony Abbott this morning.

Environment Minister Greg Hunt has told Parliament it will add to the Government’s efforts to monitor power pricing through the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

“The ACCC will be on the job but we are happy to take the considerations of members of this House and to go even further and to enshrine in legislation guarantees over and above what we already have, so prices will be lower than they would otherwise have been,” he said.

Late yesterday Mr Palmer revealed his party’s position that it would vote with the Coalition in the Senate to repeal the carbon pricing scheme, but only if lower power prices were locked in.

David Archibald: The edge of a cold, deep abyss?

David Archibald has some form for making dire predictions of imminent global cooling. His latest, including a forecast he claims uses David Evans’ ‘Notch delay climate model’  has just been published online at Quadrant.org.au and makes scary reading. At one level, you could be forgiven for thinking that his doom laden prognosis is as alarmist as those of Al Gore or James Hansen. However, it behoves us to remember that unlike the global warming alarmist’s fear of frying, history backs up the existence and dire effects of sudden cooling events. Personally, I think the coming cooling is unlikely to be as sudden or deep as David fears, but I’ll leave my reasoning for that opinion for the comments section. Strap in and read on.

Excerpts from: 

The edge of a cold, deep abyss?
David Archibald 25-6-2014

One of the best predictions of climate ever made (weighted for distance and accuracy) was by two Californian researchers, Leona Libby and Louis Pandolfi.  In 1979, they used tree ring data from redwoods in Kings Canyon to make a remarkably accurate forecast¹.  From a Los Angeles Times interview of that year,

When she and Pandolfi project their curves into the future, they show lower average temperatures from now through the mid-1980s.  “Then,” Dr. Libby added, “we see a warming trend (by about a quarter of 1 degree Fahrenheit) globally to around the year 2000.  And then it will get really cold—if we believe our projections.  This has to be tested.” 

How cold? “Easily one or two degrees,” she replied, “and maybe even three or four degrees.”

H.C. Russell: Periodicity of Good and Bad Seasons – Part 2

Thanks to commenter ‘psc3113’ for finding the concluding part of HC Russells’ paper on a lunar 19 year cycle in drought records, taken from The Queenslander (Brisbane, Qld. : 1866 – 1939)  Saturday 4 July 1896. At the conclusion of the article, the probably cause of the 19 year cycle identified is elucidated.

Periodicity of Good and Bad Seasons
MR. H. C. RUSSELL’S THEORY.
(Continued from last Week.)

Hurricanes Come in Droughts.
I should like it to be clearly understood that I do not mean ordinary hurricanes, which are as much parts of ordinary weather conditions in some parts of the world as our southerly winds are here. What I mean are extraordinary hurricanes, those that come at long intervals to terrify mankind by their power for destruction. These are connected with droughts, and, therefore should be discussed here. I had long since observed that the connection between the two was obvious enough sometimes, and during the past year I was reminded of it very often by the frequent reports of heavy gales met with by ships coming to this port, indicating great atmospheric energy. Then on the 3rd January, 1803, came the hurricane over the Tongan group of islands, and not one of the vessels in the harbour rode out the storm; every one of them was wrecked in the harbour before morning, and the wind was of such exceptional violence that after it was over the islands looked as if they had been bombarded.

Then I turned to storms on this coast, some of which were of terrible violence. And as I write, the 28th ‘May, we have the report of a terrible cyclone in America, by which three of the States, Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana were damaged and the city of St. Louis wrecked. and 1300 people killed by falling buildings, and damage to property caused to the extent, estimated, of twenty million dollars; another fragment of the present D drought.

Update on 2013 article, 777 crash San Fransisco

Since I posted on the crash, an update when the primary crash report is published is reasonable even though this is off the blog normal fare. Engineering types tend to have wide interests

Reuters report

U.S. investigators propose review of flight controls after Asiana crash

By Alwyn Scott and Annika McGinnis

WASHINGTON Tue Jun 24, 2014 10:14pm BST

(Reuters) – U.S. investigators on Tuesday said Boeing Co should consider modifying flight controls on the 777 jetliner in response to an Asiana Airlines crash in San Francisco last July that killed three people and injured more than 180.

The National Transportation Safety Board accepted 30 findings following an 11-month investigation into the July 6, 2013 crash, and made more than two dozen recommendations to the Federal Aviation Administration, the Seoul-based airline, Boeing, firefighters and San Francisco city and county.

Censorious charlatan curtails climate chat

‘Anders’, the proprietor of popular warmist blog ‘and then there’s physics’ issued me with a challenge when I commented on his post about the ‘little ice age recovery‘.

 

“Try doing some actual physics” he said. So I responded:

 

Are the Sun and Moon both acting on El Nino events?

While browsing Ian Wilson’s excellent Astro-Climate Connection blog, I found a graphic showing the coincidence of El Nino with the alignment of the Lunar line of nodes (declination cycle) and line of apse (orbital precession), with the Sun. I’ve taken the liberty of adding my Solar – El Nino hypothesis to it: the proposal is that El Nino tends to be initiated as the cycle starts to decline steeply and initiated again at solar minimum as it ‘bottom’s out’. I’ll reproduce Ian’s accompanying text below the break but to get to the point, here’s  the result: