California votes to extend cap-and-trade climate law to 2030

Dogma rules in California when it comes to supposed climate issues, as harmless and life-giving trace gas carbon dioxide continues to be treated by the government there as a ‘pollutant’.

California legislators have voted to extend a law to cut carbon emissions, weeks after President Donald Trump said the US would withdraw from the Paris climate accord, reports BBC News.

The policy, which requires firms to purchase permits to release pollutants, will be extended to the year 2030. California Governor Jerry Brown said Republicans and Democrats had taken “courageous action” with the move. The US state aims to cut greenhouse gases by 40% from 1990 levels by 2030.

Impact of Paris Climate Accord and why Trump was right to dump it

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On any other topic than climate, even the idea of spending so much money for so little, if any, measurable benefit would be laughed out of sight without more ado.

wryheat

The much touted Paris Climate Accord aims at worldwide reduction of carbon dioxide emissions in order to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. This goal is purely arbitrary and based not upon any physical evidence, but upon the unproven assumption that carbon dioxide emissions play a significant role in global warming. What the Paris Accord really does is to transfer trillions of dollars from industrialized countries, mainly the US, to the sticky-fingered United Nations and to developing nations. It has a very minimal effect on global warming.

Several studies estimate the actual effects of the Accord. The most recent is from Bjorn Lomborg, published in the peer-reviewed journal, Global Policy (read full paper). Here is the paper abstract:

This article investigates the temperature reduction impact of major climate policy proposals implemented by 2030, using the standard MAGICC climate model [developed at the National…

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Brexit Costs: EU Commissioner Proposes EU-Wide Climate Tax

Taxing the weather – EU member states may have to cough up climate dues as part of the cost of supporting the seemingly insatiable Brussels bureaucratic machine.

Due to Brexit and other new commitments, the EU will soon be short of € 25 billion, reports The GWPF.

EU Budget Commissioner Günther Oettinger, therefore, wants to introduce new revenues for the EU in form of a climate tax.

In addition, he wants to take Brexit as an opportunity to remove not only Britain’s EU rebate but similar discounts for other EU member states.
“When the British leave, the rebate negotiated by Maggie Thatcher falls away; I want to use this opportunity to cancel all discounts, including those for Denmark and Germany,” Oettinger told SPIEGEL.

“After the departure of the British, we are likely to be short of at least € 10 billion a year,” he said. “I can imagine that half of this sum can be saved, and the remaining members will divide the other half among themselves,” the EU Commissioner said.

Germany, for example, receives a discount on the additional costs incurred as a result of the British discount.

Researchers uncover a natural cause for early 20th century Arctic warming

Arctic Ocean

Scientists have surprised themselves by noticing multi-decadal natural variability in the Arctic, and discovering some of its effects, as Phys.org reports. More than a hint of cyclical warming and cooling is implied, although they try to downplay it.

Is a warmer Arctic a canary of global warming? Since the 1970s the northern polar region has warmed faster than global averages by a factor or two or more, in a process of ‘Arctic amplification’ which is linked to a drastic reduction in sea ice.

But then how to explain a similar rapid warming that occurred during the early 20th century, when the effects of greenhouse gases were considerably weaker than today? And what can we prove about the period, given the scarcity of usable data and observations prior to the 1950s?

Now scientists from Kyoto University and UC San Diego have discovered that this phenomenon occurred when the warming phase—’interdecadal variability mode’—of both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans coincided.

Paris climate commitment ‘crippling’ to US growth: White House

Decision time looks to be nearing on this issue, as Phys.org reports. Place your bets.

US compliance with its commitments under the Paris Agreement on climate change would be “crippling” to growth, the White House said Friday.

During his election campaign, avowed climate sceptic Donald Trump promised to exit the 2015 UN pact on limiting global warming.

But Trump has now said he will make a decision after returning to Washington following the G7 summit in Sicily which starts Friday, at the end of his international tour.

Alan Carlin: A particularly lunatic week for climate alarmism

The Climate Industrial Complex (CIC) cannot be accused of thinking small, as Carlin Economics and Science explains.

At the state level, the approval of California bill SB52 by both houses of the state legislature means carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions must be lowered to levels 40% below levels measured in 1990.

This is expected to necessitate the development of massive numbers of new regulations and policies that will allow the state government to control and dictate virtually every aspect of Californians’ lives in the opinion of one observer, including:

UK braced for drought after ‘excessively dry’ April

Credit: BBC / Met Office

Contrasting weather situations for the UK and the US, post El Niño. Even the wettest place in England is ‘bone dry’.

There are fears the UK could be braced for widespread drought this summer after “excessively dry conditions”, says ITV News.

The Environment Agency said the UK saw just 35% of its normal rainfall in April and farmers have been warned crops could fail.The unusual weather spell follows the driest winter since 1995-1996.

Minette Batters, Deputy President of the National Farmers’ Union, told ITV News: “I think many of my farming colleagues in East Anglia, in the south east are seeing excessively dry conditions.”

Farmer James Winslade told ITV News: “Arable farmers, grass farmers, dairy farmers – it doesn’t make any difference. They’re all worried. They’ve all cut grass earlier than they normally would have done and we haven’t had the rain to get the grass and crops growing back”.

New Study Confirms: The Warming ‘Pause’ Is Real And Revealing

Credit: concernusa.org

GWPF Science Editor Dr David Whitehouse takes a close look at some recent developments in the long-running global temperature ‘pause’ controversy.

A new paper has been published in the Analysis section of Nature called Reconciling controversies about the ‘global warming hiatus.’ It confirms that the ‘hiatus’ or ‘pause’ is real. It is also rather revealing.

It attempts to explain the ‘Pause’ by looking into what is known about climate variability. They say that four years after the release of the IPCC AR5 report, which contained much about the ‘hiatus’ it is time to see what can be learned.

One could be a little sarcastic in saying why would Nature devote seven of its desirable pages to an event that some vehemently say never existed and maintain its existence has been disproved long ago.

Now, however, as the El Nino spike of the past few years levels off, analysing the ‘pause’ seems to be coming back into fashion.

Antarctic Peninsula ice more stable than thought

Credit: coolantarctica.com

Another alleged climate alarm looks more like a damp squib, undermined by new research.

Glacier flow at the southern Antarctic Peninsula has increased since the 1990s, but a new study has found the change to be only a third of what was recently reported, says Phys.org.

An international team of researchers, led by the UK Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds, are the first to map the change in ice speed. The team collated measurements recorded by five different satellites to track changes in the speed of more than 30 glaciers since 1992.

The findings, published today in Geophysical Research Letters, represent the first detailed assessment of changing glacier flow in Western Palmer Land—the southwestern corner of the Antarctic Peninsula.

How Team Trump plans to kill Obama’s Paris climate deal by declaring it a treaty

Signatories (light green) and parties (orange) to the Paris Agreement [credit: Wikipedia]

H/T GWPF / Washington Times

It may be a bit of a legal minefield but it would put an extra element of democracy into the current situation.

As President Trump’s top advisers prepare to hash out a final policy on the Paris climate agreement dumped onto their laps by President Obama, another option has hit the table: Declare the deal a treaty and send it to the Senate to be killed.

The treaty option could emerge as the middle ground in the increasingly tense battle between “remainers” on the one hand, who say the president should abide by Mr. Obama’s global warming deal, and the Paris agreement’s detractors, who say Mr. Trump would be breaking a key campaign promise if he doesn’t withdraw from the pact.

Mr. Trump’s principal advisers are slated to meet Thursday to hash out a final set of recommendations for the president, with several deadlines looming next month.

Steven Koonin: A ‘Red Team’ exercise would strengthen climate science

H/T GWPF

Put the ‘consensus’ to a test, and improve public understanding, through an open, adversarial process, says Steven Koonin in the Wall Street Journal.
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Tomorrow’s March for Science will draw many thousands in support of evidence-based policy making and against the politicization of science.

A concrete step toward those worthy goals would be to convene a “Red Team/Blue Team” process for climate science, one of the most important and contentious issues of our age.

The national-security community pioneered the “Red Team” methodology to test assumptions and analyses, identify risks, and reduce—or at least understand—uncertainties.

Unusually large swarm of icebergs blocking shipping lanes

Icebergs in the North Atlantic [image credit:
maritime-executive.com]

H/T Paul Vaughan
Whether admittedly stronger than usual winds have led to more iceberg material and/or some of the ‘normal’ icebergs have broken up into smaller ones, is not clear, perhaps not known. A record 953 icebergs were observed in April 1984.

More than 400 icebergs have drifted into the North Atlantic shipping lanes over the past week in an unusually large swarm for this early in the season, forcing vessels to slow to a crawl or take detours of hundreds of kilometres, reports CTV News (via AP).

Experts are attributing it to uncommonly strong counter-clockwise winds that are drawing the icebergs south, and perhaps also global warming, which is accelerating the process by which chunks of the Greenland ice sheet break off and float away.

As of Monday, there were about 450 icebergs near the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, up from 37 a week earlier, according to the U.S. Coast Guard’s International Ice Patrol in New London, Connecticut. Those kinds of numbers are usually not seen until late May or early June. The average for this time of year is about 80.

How Political Lunacy Sabotaged Australia’s Once Reliable & Affordable Power Supply

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You couldn’t make it up. Insisting on spending a fortune when much cheaper and better options are available makes no sense, but climate obsessives plough on regardless.

STOP THESE THINGS

If what Australia’s political brains trust has done to its once reliable and affordable power supply had been done by external agents, it would have been branded an act of terrorism.

The so-called ‘wind power capital’ of Australia, South Australia has become an international laughing stock: statewide blackouts, routine load shedding and rocketing power prices might be enough, you would think, to make its Labor government see sense.

Far from it, it is now looking to spend $150 million on a giant battery that will return power to the grid and ‘power’ SA for all of four minutes and to set up somewhere between 200 and 250 MW of diesel generation capacity to keep the lights on, whenever the wind stops blowing.

The absurdity of throwing $550 million at a perfectly avoidable problem, when Jay Weatherill had the option of paying a mere $30 million to Alinta to keep its…

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The World’s First State Of The Climate Survey Based on Observations Only

Image credit: garrisoninstitute.org

Needless to say Dr Ole Humlum’s survey is unlikely to be popular in climate alarm circles.

London, 22 March: A report on the State of the Climate in 2016 which is based exclusively on observations rather than climate models is published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). 

Compiled by Dr Ole Humlum, Professor of Physical Geography at the University Centre in Svalbard (Norway), the new climate survey is in sharp contrast to the habitual alarmism of other reports that are mainly based on computer modelling and climate predictions.

Among the key findings of the survey are:

How the recent El Niño saved climate models

Credit: livescience.com

Once the El Niño crutch is kicked away, what have climate models got left in terms of warming apart from ‘the pause’? Not a lot, according to this analysis.
H/T GWPF

El Ninos can be used to make computer climate models look better than they are, for a short time at least, says Dr. David Whitehouse.

The message one is trying to get across when communicating science can depend much on what one doesn’t say. Leaving something vital out can make all the difference and when it’s done it can make scientists look like politicians, although not sophisticated ones.

As an example of what I mean consider the El Niño phenomenon – a short-term oceanographic weather event. The El Niño can be used to make computer climate models look better than they are, for a short time at least.

UK biomass: £450m lost over failed green power programme

The biomass problem, or fallacy, is well-known and media like The Times are finally catching up.

Britain is wasting hundreds of millions of pounds subsidising power stations to burn American wood pellets that do more harm to the climate than the coal they replaced, a study has found.

Chopping down trees and transporting wood across the Atlantic Ocean to feed power stations produces more greenhouse gases than much cheaper coal, according to the report.

It blames the rush to meet EU renewable energy targets, which resulted in ministers making the false assumption that burning trees was carbon-neutral.

GWPF: Computer predictions of climate alarm are flawed

Image credit: relativelyinteresting.com

Results so far from climate models are very unconvincing, despite huge resources of manpower and technology.

London, 21 February: Claims that the planet is threatened by man-made global warming are based on science that is based on inadequate computer modelling. That is the conclusion of a new briefing paper published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).   

The report’s author, eminent American climatologist Professor Judith Curry, explains that climate alarm depends on highly complex computer simulations of the Earth’s climate. 

But although scientists have expended decades of effort developing them, these simulations still have to be “tuned” to get them to match the real climate. This makes them essentially useless for trying to find out what is causing changes in the climate and unreliable for making predictions about what will happen in the future. 

Vahrenholt rails against the ‘climate priests’

‘The donkey goes on to the ice until it breaks’ – German proverb [image credit: evwind.es]

Grasping the nettle of reporting the views of leading German climate sceptic Professor Fritz Vahrenholt, PEI magazine airs several awkward issues arising from Germany’s ambitious – he says reckless – energy policies.

At a mid-January meeting in parliament buildings in London, Professor Fritz Vahrenholt provided a very detailed monologue on the motivations behind Germany’s energy transition, and why he feels it’s misguided and potentially disastrous, writes Diarmid Williams.

Had the lecture been delivered by somebody from the coal power sector, they might have been written off as a ‘climate denier’, but given Vahrenholt’s background and pedigree as a backer of renewable energy, he is not so easily dismissed and his position must cause some unease for those so adamant that climate change is man-made.

Michael Reagan: Climate alarmists will miss California’s drought

Image credit: UC Berkeley

The drought ended so dramatically that a state of emergency has been declared for large parts of California.
H/T GWPF

California’s drought which the New York Times characterized as “unending,” ended. This is good news for everyone other than Al Gore and his depressing band of climate Cassandras.

Well, the rains came after all to California and it was the answer to prayer for many citizens. For others the rain was a splash in the face, so to speak.

California’s seven-year drought came in very handy for climate conspirators. Their heat hysteria convinced gullible legislators that only by seizing control of the economy and tightening the noose of regulation around people’s lives could a weather wipeout be avoided.

It didn’t matter that California is a semi-arid state and periodic droughts are part of the climate package. Past droughts are in the past. The one that was just concluded was here right now and could be used to beat the extreme weather, coming-doom drum.

But now it’s rained on their parade. A drought the warmist New York Times characterized as “unending,” ended.

El Nino to El Nino – no net global warming

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Comparing the actual data to the forecasts of climate models is also embarrassing for those obsessed with climate warming.

wryheat

The Earth experienced two super El Ninos recently: 1997/1998 and 2015/2016. It was expected that 2016 would be the hottest year in the satellite record which begins in 1979. It was, but by only 0.02°C over 1998. That is not statistically significant according to Dr. Roy Spencer, keeper of the UAH satellite system data. (The margin of error is 0.1°C, much larger than the difference between the El Nino years.) The graph above shows the UAH results. A separate satellite analysis by Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) came to the same conclusion.

Satellites measure the temperature of the lower troposphere, the portion of the atmosphere where weather takes place. These measurements give a more realistic picture of global temperature than do surface measurements. Essentially, global temperature now is the same as it was nearly 18 years ago.

The earlier El Nino had a sharp drop off as a strong La…

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