Paricutin – the volcano in a cornfield

The quiet volcano as it appears today. [credit: Creative Commons / Karla Yannín Alcázar Quintero]

The day a Mexican farmer saw the beginnings of one of the seven natural wonders of the world – at least
according to CNN…

On February 20, 1943, Dionisio Pulido was working in his cornfield just outside the Tarascan Indian village of Paricutin, Mexico. He and his family had spent the day getting ready for the spring sowing by clearing the field of shrubbery, putting it in piles and burning it. At about four in the afternoon, Pulido left his wife and moved to a different field so that he could set fire to a new pile. When he arrived he noticed something strange: on top of a small hill in the field a huge crack, over six feet wide and 150 feet (47m) long, had appeared in the earth. At first Pulido wasn’t concerned, the crack only looked like it was about a foot deep. As he was lighting the pile of branches, however, the sound of thunder rumbled across the field and the ground began to shake.

Death by government diktat

Hatfield Colliery closure speeds up UK exit from deep coal mining

Britain’s Hatfield Colliery will stop producing coal with immediate effect after being unable to sell its coal following the sharp rise in the UK’s carbon tax, Prospect union said on Tuesday.

The closure of the employee-owned mine in South Yorkshire is 14 months earlier than expected. Around 500 employees work at the mine.

In April, Britain’s carbon tax, which charges power producers for each tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) they emit, almost doubled to 18.08 pounds per tonne to encourage utilities to switch fuels, as coal-fired power generation produces almost double the amount of CO2 as gas-fired plants.

“Hatfield has been unable to sell its coal because of the government’s refusal to sponsor coal contracts with generators and the doubling of the UK’s carbon tax,” Prospect negotiator Mike Macdonald said.

— http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/06/30/uk-coal-closure-idUKKCN0PA1FU20150630

UK’s Fracking revolution Kaput, for now

A small earth tremor was felt today as Planning permission was refused for Cuadrilla’s application to drill at Little Plumpton in Lancashire. The cause of the tremor, this time, was all the protesters outside jumping for joy.

What the Media Aren’t Telling You About Climate Change

Daily Media Review cuts through the headlines and scare stories to point out some of the key fallacies and failed assumptions relied upon by the climate change scare industry.

The mainstream media love to lecture us daily about the coming apocalypse as a result of catastrophic climate change, but are we being told the complete story?

More, Grossly Deceptive Reporting From The BBC

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It’s obvious that whatever controls are supposed to be in place to ensure the BBC is ‘impartial’ – admittedly difficult to define, but you know when you’re not seeing it – are not working.

Lancashire CC has been warned it is likely to lose a legal challenge on appeal and will incur costs as a result.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-33211020

The BBC have been up to their tricks again.

A US environmental group has written to Lancashire County Council urging it to refuse permission to allow test drilling for fracking.

The letter, signed by 850 elected officials in New York State, comes days before the council decides whether to approve test drilling at two locations….

Elected Officials to Protect New York – made up of current and former politicians – has written to Lancashire’s councillors asking them to note the findings of a two-year study by New York State Department of Public Health.

In fact, the letter was not signed by “850 elected officials”, but just 10, not all of whom are elected either.

http://www.nyelectedofficials.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/EOPNY-Letter-to-Lancashire.pdf

Many are no more than what we would call parish councillors. For instance, Cooperstown boasts an impressive population of just 1852, yet offers us two trustees to sign.

They have…

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This will cause squealing, 30C+?

French weather forecasters are saying a severe heat wave is coming at the beginning of July, spreading up into France, looks like further so expect 30C+ in England.

Classic conditions of extensive high pressure, little wind. The Atlantic charts continue to show a confused pattern.

Temperature in Fahrenheit, US Navy. Contrary to the French forecasters this points to an extension from continental Asia. A question of course is whether blocking starts, very difficult to forecast.

https://www.fnmoc.navy.mil/wxmap_cgi/cgi-bin/wxmap_DOD_area.cgi?area=efs_nvg_med&set=EFS

In the past there have been similar heat waves where I’ve noticed a possible connection with solar events. Is this possible? What I have in mind is not the same pattern, that though is formed without seeing The sun has been popping.

Uplifted island: the document of a complete seismic cycle

Sea lions get a lift in Chile
[credit: Daniel Melnick/I.B.Times]

The island Isla Santa María in the south of central Chile is the document of a complete seismic cycle, reports phys.org:

Charles Darwin and his captain Robert Fitzroy witnessed the great earthquake of 1835 in south central Chile. The “Beagle”-Captain’s precise measurements showed an uplift of the island Isla Santa María of 2 to 3 meters after the earthquake. What Darwin and Fitzroy couldn’t know was the fact that 175 years later nearly at the same position such a strong earthquake would recur.

MET Office: Little ice age ahead – re-arrange deck chairs now!

Via Benny Peiser at the GWPF

Image courtesy of CartoonsbyJosh.com

Britain could be on the verge of a mini Ice Age as the Sun enters a cooler phase, the Met Office warned yesterday. The last big chill was felt hundreds of years ago when Frost Fairs were held on the frozen River Thames. However the Met Office said the new freeze will not be enough to cancel out the effects of global warming. Met Office’s Hadley Centre, which looks at long term forecasts, said there was a 15-20 per cent chance that we could match the temperatures last seen in 1645-1715 – sometimes called the Little Ice Age – when the River Thames froze over. –Colin Fernandez, Daily Mail, 24 June 2015

Dutch deathcap

Dutch court orders state to slash carbon emissions
Activists welcome decision to order Netherlands to slash greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25 percent by 2020.A Dutch court has ordered the state to slash greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25 percent by 2020, after a group of citizens took their government to court.

Climate activists in the packed courtroom clapped and cheered as presiding Judge Hans Hofhuis read the ruling on Wednesday.

“The court orders the state to reduce the overall volume of greenhouse gas emissions in such a way that they are at least 25 percent less in 2020 compared to 1990,” Hofhuis said.

— Al Jazeera

Well if they will get involved with stupidity, politicians well get bums bitten.

A squint at Met Office HadNMAT2

Given 28 gridded datasets and a variety of novel things to try, I be flummoxed. Try this

The new dataset kid on the block, seems to have appeared 6th June is Met Office Hadley Centre HadNMAT V2, nighttime marine air temperature. Grided at 5 degrees.

Figure 1, an experimental plot from data generated by alpha software. So far as I know this is correct. The main graphic is a hovmoller plot intending to show how the contribution to a global temperature computation has varied spatial with time.

Active volcanoes on Venus, heat gets out how?

Michele dropped a link on Suggestions, here is the story

After the end of the ESA Venus mission rapidly changing hotspots are found in IR images, after earlier noticing large changes in Sulpur levels.Why now?

I’m not keen on ESA PR, doesn’t even link the GRL paper so I’ll add a good blog link afterwards.

Title Brightness changes in Ganiki Chasma
Released 18/06/2015 2:00 pm
Copyright From E. Shalygin et al (2015)

18 June 2015

ESA’s Venus Express has found the best evidence yet for active volcanism on Earth’s neighbour planet.

Seeing the planet’s surface is extremely difficult due to its thick atmosphere, but radar observations by previous missions to Venus have revealed it as a world covered in volcanoes and ancient lava flows.

Venus is almost exactly the same size as Earth and has a similar bulk composition, so is likely to have an internal heat source, perhaps due to radioactive heating. This heat has to escape somehow, and one possibility is that it does so in the form of volcanic eruptions.

Some models of planetary evolution suggest that Venus was resurfaced in a cataclysmic flood of lava around half a billion years ago. But whether Venus is active today has remained a hot topic in planetary science.
— ESA

The Tories must seize the chance to rethink climate change policy – Telegraph

Paul is seeing stirring in the swamp.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

Are we finally seeing the first signs of commonsense from the MSM, regarding climate change?
Apart from the likes of Booker, Dellers and Rose, there has been little more then the odd whinge about energy bills.

Enter Fraser Nelson of the Spectator, who starts:

When Benedictine monks first arrived to restore Pluscarden Abbey, a beautiful ruin in northeast Scotland, they faced a battle against the elements. It had no roof, let alone heating, and even when restored to its medieval glory it cost a fortune to keep warm. But when I visited last month, I learned that a miracle has happened. A biomass boiler has arrived, tucked away next to the organ, with a subsidy scheme that turns cost into profit. For every £1 spent in woodchip, the monks receive £4 in subsidy. The Lord works in mysterious ways, but nothing is more mysterious than the financing of green energy.

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Hadcrut4 data coverage

I’ll give the Met Office / Hadley / CRU some due, at least there are signs of actual data.

What-if a list of the dataset grid cells with data from the start Jan 1850 to current is computed? Where are these and what does the data look like?

Figure 1, A fragment in time of the entire consistent Hadcrut 4 gridded data, weighted data as per computing a global mean.

This suggests the reputed bad winters during WWII. Computing the global equivalent would need the weighted mean completing, sum and then divide by the sum of weights. Unweighted (not shown) is similar except the winter 1944 has a hot peak, ie. largely a polar matter. There again without global data is any of this valid?

Like a foghorn calling out for its mate

I come across stuff, often in places definitely not for public consumption, too PC, too twitchy about reality. Rog and oldbrew seem to be away so I’d better write something.

I’d never heard of James Mickens, whom it seems wrote a blog on the Microsoft research site. Written about a year ago.

This is my last column! Thanks for reading, and thanks for all of the support :-). never forget that when you are alone, I am with you, and when you are with someone else, I am also with you, because I think that I am better than that other person and I have lengthy opinions about why this is true.

And then a piece entitled To Wash It All Away. (link to PDF)

The first part of the article will raise some chuckles whether actually true or not, how reality has a way of bighty things, you want to do that, oh well.

The Pope has spoken

The climate Comms event of, at least this week, has arrived early due to a leak. The Vatican has released its view on the state of the planet. Much anticipated by some on both sides of the debate, the leak will no doubt leave the usual suspects scrambling to spin the Encyclical for all it is worth.

“A crime against nature is a crime against ourselves and a sin against God”

High-tech solar projects fail to deliver – MarketWatch

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‘Just too expensive.’ Who knew?

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

H/t David Dohbro

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/high-tech-solar-projects-fail-to-deliver-2015-06-13

Another bright idea bites the dust!!

If you look back at history, you will see that it is littered with ideas that failed. It is of course the successful we are all benefitting from now.

What is different is that in those days it was not governments who picked the winners and losers.

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Why Phi? – a triple conjunction comparison

[image credit: imagineeringezine.com]

Only two questions are needed here:

(1) What is the period of a Jupiter(J)-Saturn(S)-Earth(E) (JSE) triple conjunction?
JSE = 21 J-S or 382 J-E or 403 S-E conjunctions (21+382 = 403) in 417.166 years (as an average or mean value).

(2) What is the period of a Jupiter(J)-Saturn(S)-Venus(V) (JSV) triple conjunction?
JSV = 13 J-S or 398 J-V or 411 S-V conjunctions (13+398 = 411) in 258.245 years (as an average or mean value).

Since JSV = 13 J-S and JSE = 21 J-S, the ratio of JSV:JSE is 13:21 exactly (in theory).

As these are consecutive Fibonacci numbers, the ratio is almost 1:Phi or the golden ratio.
Golden ratio: relationship to Fibonacci sequence

Guardian confuses science with religion yet again

[credit: Wikipedia]

More pseudo-religious climate nonsense in Thursday’s Guardian:

Quote: ‘James Inhofe, infamous for tossing a snowball across the Senate floor to demonstrate ‘the greatest hoax ever perpetrated against the American people’, says Pope Francis should ‘stay with his job’ during a pitch to fellow unbelievers‘

The Guardian report later says: ‘In the world outside, anticipation was building for the pope to deliver his much-awaited encyclical next week, when he is expected to cast climate change as a moral issue.’

NASA releases dataset of global climate change predictions up to 2100

NASA ‘global warming satellite’ (their description)
[credit: NASA]

Two choices: whether to laugh or cry at the latest fortune-telling exercise from NASA’s warming-obsessed spin-doctors. Climate models are famed for their predictive inadequacy – incompetence even – so this looks exactly like an exercise in futility.

NASA has released a dataset setting out how rainfall and temperature patterns are likely to change in the coming decades, Gizmag reports. The data covers 21 climate models, mapping how our environment could change due to growing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Atmospheric convection – what does it mean?

[credit: NASA]

A few weeks ago we put up a post to discuss the role of convection in the Earth’s atmosphere:
Beginner’s guide to convection cells

The introduction, linked to a short video, said:
‘When you warm air, it rises. Cool air will sink. This process of convection can lead to flows in the atmosphere, in a manner that we can illustrate [see video] on a small scale. Warm and cool air in a fish tank rise and fall; this motion is made visible by adding fog. Ultimately, the motion leads to a convection cell, with air rising, moving to the side, falling, and moving back. This heat-driven motion of air moves heat around in the atmosphere. It is also responsible for making the wind blow.’

That may have seemed straightforward to some, but a few hundred comments later controversy continues, so we’re starting a new post using this website for reference : Lapse Rate, Moisture, Clouds and Thunderstorms