Free Republic

Anthony Watts, Lucia Liljegren , and Michael Tobis have all done a good job blogging about Jeff Masters’ egregious math error. His error was that he claimed that a run of high US temperatures had only a chance of 1 in 1.6 million of being a natural occurrence. Here’s his claim: U.S. heat over the past 13 months: a one in 1.6 million eventEach of the 13 months from June 2011 through June 2012 ranked among the warmest third of their historical distribution for the first time in the 1895 – present record. According to NCDC, the odds of this occurring...

Rings in fossilised pine trees have proven that the world was much warmer than previously thought - and the earth has been slowly COOLING for 2,000 years. Measurements stretching back to 138BC prove that the Earth is slowly cooling due to changes in the distance between the Earth and the sun. The finding may force scientists to rethink current theories of the impact of global warming.

Notwithstanding the latest hysterical claims from the sadly politicized climate scientologists of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), insisting 2011 was somehow "a year of extreme weather," serious investigators at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz have just published a sobering analysis in Nature Climate Change  which reconstructs 2000 years of climate within northern Europe.Utilizing tree-ring density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees in northern Scandinavia, the investigators created a sequence dating back to 138 BC. The density measurements are closely correlated with the summer temperatures in a targeted region on the edge of the Nordic taiga, enabling them to...

Tree rings actually show ... a long-term cooling trend that lasted right up until the Industrial Revolution.... Results suggest the Roman world was 0.6 °C warmer than previously thought.

(CNN) -- The mainland United States, which was largely recovering Monday from a near-nationwide heat wave, has experienced the warmest 12 months since record-keeping began in 1895, a top government science and weather agency announced Monday. The report from the National Climatic Data Center, which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, does not take into account blistering heat from this month, with 2,116 high temperature marks either broken or tied between July 2 and July 8 in communities nationwide.

No, this is not another article about tree rings, hockey sticks, and rewritten history, although that is one tree in the climate forest. A group of scientists dismissed historical evidence and misled the public about temperature trends. Some dismiss their actions as bad science, but the evidence, particularly exposed in the leaked e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), indicate differently. Many, including those claiming to be climate scientists were misled because they were experts on another tree in another part of the forest. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is not studying climatology, but specialists looking at some...

← John Nielsen-Gammon: Skeptics Are Not Deniers Unexplored Possible Climate Balancing Mechanism Posted on July 10, 2012 by Anthony Watts This visible image of a 93 mile wide deep-ocean plankton eddy was taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite ~ 800 km south of South Africa in the Agulhas current. Image: NASA’s Earth Observatory Effect of CO2 levels on phytoplankton.Story submitted by Don Healy This article opens up a whole new vista into the relationship between CO2 levels, oceanic plant growth and the complex relationships that we have yet to learn about in the...

Americans sweltering in the recent record-breaking heatwave may not believe it - but it seems that our ancestors suffered through much hotter summers in times gone by, several of them within the last 2,000 years. Phew, what a scorcher, Marcus. Let's get in the frigidarium A new study measuring temperatures over the past two millennia has concluded that in fact the temperatures seen in the last decade are far from being the hottest in history. A large team of scientists making a comprehensive study of data from tree rings say that in fact global temperatures have been on a...

Full Title:************************************** This is what global cooling really looks like – new tree ring study shows 2000 years of cooling – previous studies underestimated temperatures of Roman and Medieval Warm Periods Since Princeton’s Dr. Michael Oppenheimer conflated weather with climate last week, proclaiming a short lived heat wave as “This is what global warming really looks like” in a media interview, it seems only fair to show what real science rather than what he and Dr. Trenberth’s government funded advocacy looks like. I can’t wait to see how Dr. Michael Mann tries to poo-poo this one. – AnthonyFrom Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz:...

This has already been a summer of record heat in the continental United States. But our sun is not content with just breaking records in the first week of July. It has also been an intense period of solar flares - massive, violent outbursts from the sun that can wreck havoc here on Earth. And it shows no signs of stopping. Even on the surface of the sun, things are heating up. Last week saw several huge solar flares, the biggest of which occurred on Friday, July 6. Labeled an X1.1 class solar flare - the strongest classification used by...

Scientists are increasingly confident that the uptick in heat waves and heavier rainfall is linked to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, posing a heightened risk to the world’s population, according to two reports issued in the past week. On Wednesday, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a 594-page study suggesting that when it comes to weather observations since 1950 there has been a “change in some extremes,” which stem in part from global warming. [text excerpted] But the IPCC team projects that there is a 90 to 100 percent probability that sea level rise “will contribute to upward trends...

Posted on July 9, 2012 by Anthony Watts Lobster plate (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Who says “global warming” doesn’t have some positive value? Well I guess if you are a tofu chomping green that recoils at the thought of eating lobster, you wouldn’t see this in a positive light, but many people do.Miguel Rakiewicz submits this in WUWT Tips and Notes today:Newly abundant and much cheaper lobster thanks to Global Warming. ———————————A story published in The Toronto Star in print on Saturday, 07 July 2012, and on the web on Friday, 06 July 2012, (06 July 2012) http://www.thestar.com/business/article/1223031–lobster-is-now-cheaper-than-cold-cuts-in-some-places-mclobster-anyonereveals that lobster prices have...

Developers targeted 2013 to begin operating a new power plant fueled by the carbon-rich leftover from nearby oil refining in Corpus Christi. The Las Brisas Energy Center will not be ready by then, however, and there are doubts the project will be built at all, making it the latest flash point in a long fight between Texas and the Environmental Protection Agency. The $3 billion project has stalled as the federal government pushes to limit emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases linked to global warming from new power plants. The first-ever rules are expected to bring an end to...

  As I’ve written before, I’ve actually shared the dais with Mr. Van Jones and have been keeping up with him ever since.  Glenn Beck did his best work in discovering that Van Jones has been in leadership of key radical Leninist organizations  including the Ella Baker Center, which sent an appeal to allocate 10% of the new global warming tax (cap and trade) for Van Jones slush fund.  The “SNAP” line is here: African Americans in Los Angeles are nearly twice as likely to die from a heat wave than other Los Angeles residents. HUH?  I’m sure the predominantly...

The collusion of the climate crowd Posted on July 7, 2012 by Anthony Watts Union of Concerned Scientists (Photo credit: Wikipedia) By Christopher C. HornerFirst published in the Washington Examiner, reposted here with permissionNot long ago, the American Tradition Institute initiated a transparency campaign using federal and state freedom of information laws to learn more about how taxpayer-funded academics use their positions to advance a particular agenda. On its face, this should have been welcomed by the Left, which often lays claim to the “transparency” mantle. It is instead causing great angst.Our project would compile the context to the “Climategate” scandal,...

If you thought that in a second term Barack Obama would focus like a laser beam on jobs and the economy, think again: President Obama plans to make climate change his top priority for his second term. No, that's not from The Onion, a humor publication, but the left-leaning New Yorker. What planet does this president live on? 'Obama has an ambitious second-term agenda," wrote Ryan Lizza in this week's New Yorker. "The President has said that the most important policy he could address in his second term is climate change," supposedly to "improve the world." So forget about the...

Twenty years ago, Republican President George Herbert Walker Bush gathered the nations of the world in Rio to confront the challenge of global climate change. Two decades later, the challenge is more real, and the damage of climate change more pervasive, but we are further behind than ever in addressing the issue. With each passing day, the danger and the urgency only grow. Promises of action from both political parties have been replaced by a conspiracy of silence. Conventional wisdom tells us that the chances of Congress acting on this issue is rapidly approaching zero. How dramatic and sad that...

Climate activists scuttle plans for ice-melting protest on Capitol HillBy Ben Geman - 07/07/12 10:59 AM ET A climate advocacy group has canceled plans to unveil an ice sculpture next to the Capitol Saturday that was meant to counter global warming skeptics in Congress, citing concerns it would be insensitive to West Virginia residents still without power. The group 350.org had planned to unveil ice forming the word “hoax?” on a day when Washington, D.C. temperatures are expected to reach almost 105 degrees, which would break the daily record and approach the city’s all-time high. The fast-melting ice would have...

China’s CO2 emission in millions of metric tons from 1980 to 2009:Source, EIA: http://www.eia.gov/countries/img/charts_png/CH_co2con_img.pngFrom Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences: Atmospheric scientists release first “bottom-up” estimates of China’s CO2 emissionsEstimates capitalize on instrumental measurements of CO2 in smokestacks and pollutants in the air by satellites and surface stations Cambridge, Mass. – July 6, 2012 – Atmospheric scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Nanjing University have produced the first “bottom-up” estimates of China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, for 2005 to 2009, and the first statistically rigorous estimates of the uncertainties surrounding China’s CO2 emissions. The...

Colorado Springs, Colo. — Good news: The Waldo Canyon fire, which claimed two lives, forced 32,000 residents (including our family) to flee, and destroyed 347 homes, is now 100 percent contained. Bad news: Radical environmentalists won’t stop blowing hot air about this year’s infernal season across the West.Al Gore slithered out of the political morgue to bemoan nationwide heat records and pimp his new “Climate Reality Project,” which blames global warming for the wildfire outbreak. NBC meteorologist Doug Kammerer asserted: “If we did not have global warming, we wouldn’t see this.” Agriculture Department undersecretary Harris Sherman, who oversees the...