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I decided to do myself something that so far NOAA has refused to do: give a CONUS average temperature for the United States from the new ‘state of the art’ United States Climate Reference Network (USCRN). After spending millions of dollars to put in this new network from 2002 to 2008, they are still giving us data from the old one when they report a U.S. national average temperature. As readers may recall, I have demonstrated that old COOP/USHCN network used to monitor U.S. climate is a mishmash of urban, semi-urban, rural, airport and non-airport stations, some of which are...

Ray Evans writes a review below of  Robert Manne’s essay in The Monthly entitled A Dark Victory: How vested interests defeated climate science. (Forgive me Ray for slipping in one or two thoughts of my own below).   Ray Evans is the secretary of The Lavoisier Group one of the first original skeptical groups in Australia (I’ve put a few notes on that at the base of the article). It was Graham Readfearns review (ABC Drum) that apparently brought the Manne article to Ray’s attention.Dear All,Readfearn’s review was a lamentation of defeat and disappointment. So I immediately bought a copy of The...

Fellow RantPolitical.com blogger Jenny Craig (if that is her real name) asks the question, “Why Do Conservative Wingbags Hate Wind Energy?� Assuming that she is talking about wind power and not harnessing the flatulence of bovine bowel activity, I’m more than willing to help a fellow ranter out by answering her question. God knows SOMEONE needs to school her.She leaps off of Romney’s recent policy position that he wants to do away with wind energy tax incentives. She believes Romney (and by association every member of the GOP) are suddenly disconnected from scientific and economic reality for the following reasons:...

Nicola Scafetta sent me this paper yesterday, and I read it with interest, but I have a number of reservations about it, not the least of which is that it is partially based on the work of Landscheidt and the whole barycentric thing which gets certain people into shouting matches. Figure 9 looks to be interesting, but note that it is in generic units, not temperature, so has no predictive value by itself.Fig. 9. Proposed solar harmonic reconstructions based on four beat frequencies. (Top) Average beat envelope function of the model (Eq. (18)) and (Bottom) the version modulated with a...

CARSON CITY – With U.S. Sen. Harry Reid's 5th annual National Clean Energy Summit set to kick off today in Las Vegas, the debate over alternative energy development and the government's role in its future rages on. The purpose of the day-long event as described on the website is to, “once again bring together clean energy visionaries and leaders, public officials, business executives and entrepreneurs, investors, students, and the media to discuss how to empower the public with tools to promote the clean energy economy; increasing jobs and our energy independence.” But the role of the federal government in the...

Full Title:**********************$1.3 billion in ‘clean energy’ subsidies produce 288 permanent jobs, quadruple cost of electricity in Nevada Reid-sponsored National Clean Energy Summit pushes more subsidies as key to Nevada’s futureLAS VEGAS — As U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid prepares to host his fifth annual National Clean Energy Summit on Aug. 7, a Nevada Journal examination of Nevada’s renewable energy sector shows that over $1.3 billion in federal funds funneled into geothermal, solar and wind projects since 2009 has yielded and is projected to yield just 288 permanent, full-time jobs. That’s an initial cost of over $4.6 million per job.Despite...

Progressive organizations behind White House policy have crafted specific, second term plans for President Obama to transform the U.S. Armed Forces into a social work-style organization designed to combat “global warming,” fight global poverty, remedy “injustice,” bolster the United Nations, and increase “peacekeeping” forces worldwide. The groups, already instrumental in influencing Obama’s first term defense agenda, call for massive, second term slashes to the military budget. The savings are to be used to invest in “sustainable energy” and in fighting worldwide climate change. These schemes and many more are documented in the soon-to-be-released book, Fool Me Twice: Obama’s Shocking Plans...

The president vowed to make climate change a top priority in his second term, suggesting that a major assault on industry is coming if he is re-elected. So before the potential onslaught, some real-world perspective on climate change is essential. First, note that the tool used to both develop future global climate scenarios and to panic the public on meteorological mayhem is atmospheric modeling. Most of my nearly 35 years of professional life has been involved with atmospheric modeling in one... --snip-- What I and so many other air modelers have discovered is that, as impressive as modeling has become,...

The Solyndra scandal took a big step up the ladder today, as ABC News uncovers new evidence that shows fears over a collapse reached all the way into the West Wing. An OMB analyst tried to raise red flags on the Obama administration’s attempt to rescue the now-bankrupt green-tech firm, before the Department of Energy rejected her advice and restructured the loans in March 2011, which illegally subordinated taxpayers in case of default. An e-mail from Kelly Colyar in August 2011 reminded recipients that she had predicted that very scenario — and that White House chief of staff had been...

Climate change has come to New Jersey, according to Environment New Jersey, a statewide environmental advocacy group. The organization released a report Thursday that attributes this year’s extreme weather to global warming. “Certainly, we have a problem on our hands,” said Matt Elliott, a representative from Environment New Jersey. “We need to do everything we can to cut carbon pollution today.”

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Anthony Watts On Wednesday at 10AM ET (7AM PT) the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will conduct a hearing on (take your pick) global warming climate change climate disruption. Dr. John Christy will be there, but it is confirmed that Dr. Richard Muller of BEST will NOT be testifying.  From what I hear it will be webcast, details below.It is called: “Update on the Latest Climate Change Science and Local Adaptation Measures.” You can watch the webcast at http://www.epw.senate.govFull Committee hearing:Update on the Latest Climate Change Science and Local Adaptation Measures.Wednesday, August 1,...

Dems blame weather on climate change By Zack Colman - 08/01/12 01:07 PM ET Droughts, heat waves and other severe weather are being exacerbated by climate change, several Senate Democrats contended at a hearing Wednesday. Democrats on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works held the hearing to call attention to what they said are the risks of climate change highlighted by severe weather this summer. They also sought to blame Republicans for holding up action to prevent or slow global warming. “I think we have to recognize that extreme weather conditions have a severe burden and cost on...

Aug 1 (Reuters Point Carbon) - In an effort to dissuade companies in key industries facing new carbon costs from leaving the state, California is considering giving them millions of dollars worth of additional free greenhouse gas allowances, state's air regulator said on Monday. California's cap-and-trade program seeks to emulate tactics used in the European Union and Australia to address emission "leakage" - a term describing the exodus of employers from a state or country in order to sidestep environmental costs. The California Air Resources Board (ARB), the regulator of the forthcoming program, held a workshop in Sacramento on Monday...

VANITY: I blocked that horrendous tripe called "Current Channel" from my Direct TV Satellite service.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California's electricity sector is more vulnerable to climate change than previously thought, as higher temperatures will impede the state's ability to generate and transmit power while demand for air conditioning rises, a report said Tuesday. The data is part of the latest report released by the California Natural Resources Agency and the California Energy Commission, which are trying to help state and local leaders prepare for life in the hotter, drier California of the future. (Report: http://r.reuters.com/zag79s) Wildlife, agriculture and coastal communities are also at serious risk from climate change, the report said. Sea levels could...

Andrew Revkin asked me to provide comments on this article of his where the National Climatic Data Center was asked to respond to Watts et al 2012:A Closer Look at Climate Studies Promoted Before PublicationHere is what I sent to him:My comments on Thorne’s response are pretty simple.They still refuse to get out of the office, to examine firsthand the condition of the network and try to come up with hands on approaches for dealing with station inhomogeneity, but instead focus of trying to spot patterns in data and massage it. In my view this is the wrong approach and...

From the Harvard University  news service and the what are they smoking department, comes this suggestion that apparently it never was ozone damaging CFC refrigerants at all, it was those nasty thunderstorms wot done it.  They say: “Recent studies have suggested that the number and intensity of such storms are linked to climate changes…which could in turn lead to increased ozone loss and greater levels of harmful UV radiation reaching the Earth’s surface, and potentially higher rates of skin cancer.” I have a pretty hard time believing this one, because, well, it’s like Rube Goldberg machine construct where lots of...

I’m a bit burnt out, so this is a just a few notes to quench some speculations about Steve McIntyre’s role and to help everyone understand what this week has been like.

Billions of years ago, before Earth's atmosphere had oxygen, it periodically possessed a "haze" of organic chemicals including methane, boffins have discovered. During these periods the planet's air was more like that of Titan, ice moon of Saturn, than the stuff we breathe today. "Models have previously suggested that the Earth's early atmosphere could have been warmed by a layer of organic haze," says Dr Aubrey Zerkle of Newcastle uni. "Our geochemical analyses of marine sediments from this time period provide the first evidence for such an atmosphere." According to Zerkle and his colleagues, during the period 2.5 to 2.65...

WASHINGTON – The verdict is in: Global warming is occurring and emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activity are the main cause. This, according to Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at UC Berkeley, MacArthur Fellow and co-founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project..... ....Benjamin D. Santer, a climate researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a lead author of the 1995 U.N. climate report, said he welcomed the involvement of another research group into “detection and attribution” of climate change and its causes. But he also said he found it troubling that Muller claimed such definitive...

Plant owners and operators report to EIA that they expect to retire almost 27 gigawatts (GW) of capacity from 175 coal-fired generators between 2012 and 2016. In 2011, there were 1,387 coal-fired generators in the United States, totaling almost 318 GW. The 27 GW of retiring capacity amounts to 8.5% of total 2011 coal-fired capacity. The coal-fired capacity expected to be retired over the next five years is more than four times greater than retirements performed during the preceding five-year period (6.5 GW). Moreover, based on EIA data, the approximate 9 GW of coal-fired capacity retirements expected to occur in...

It’s all up on Watts Up now. What Anthony Watts and Evan Jones have revealed is breathtaking, a must see. Half of the warming trend has gone. 92% of the artificial rise was due to” erroneous adjustments of well sited stations”. Muller et al used an older siting classification system. The new classification system shows that siting does have a major impact on the data.We always knew thermometers were never meant to be stuck next to air-conditioners. Now we know they shouldn’t be recording global warming near airports either.Go and Visit Watts Up and enjoy! I’ll be posting my own analysis...

Have a look at this chart. It tells you pretty much all you need to know about the much-anticipated scoop by Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That? What it means, in a nutshell, is that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – the US government body in charge of America's temperature record, has systematically exaggerated the extent of late 20th century global warming. In fact, it has doubled it.

PRESS RELEASE Posted on July 29, 2012 by Anthony Watts PRESS RELEASE – July 29th, 2012 12PM PDT – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEA reanalysis of U.S. surface station temperatures has been performed using the recently WMO-approved Siting Classification System devised by METEO-France’s Michel Leroy. The new siting classification more accurately characterizes the quality of the location in terms of monitoring long-term spatially representative surface temperature trends. The new analysis demonstrates that reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward. The paper is the first to use the updated...

The Obama Deception is a hard-hitting film that completely destroys the myth that Barack Obama is working for the best interests of the American people. The Obama phenomenon is a hoax carefully crafted by the captains of the New World Order. He is being pushed as savior in an attempt to con the American people into accepting global slavery. We have reached a critical juncture in the New World Order's plans. It's not about Left or Right: it's about a One World Government. The international banks plan to loot the people of the United States and turn them into slaves...

Strong summer thunderstorms that pump water high into the upper atmosphere pose a threat to the protective ozone layer over the United States, researchers said on Thursday, drawing one of the first links between climate change and ozone loss over populated areas. In a study published online by the journal Science, Harvard University scientists reported that some storms send water vapor miles into the stratosphere — which is normally drier than a desert — and showed how such events could rapidly set off ozone-destroying reactions with chemicals that remain in the atmosphere from CFCs, refrigerant gases that are now banned....

<p>The Greenland ice sheet melted at a faster rate this month than at any other time in recorded history, with virtually the entire ice sheet showing signs of thaw.</p> <p>The rapid melting over just four days was captured by three satellites. It has stunned and alarmed scientists, and deepened fears about the pace and future consequences of climate change.</p>

Atmospheric feedback loops can be rather swift, geologically speakingThe time lag between increased quantities of CO2 reaching or leaving the atmosphere and global temperature change may be far shorter than previously thought, according to a new paper, Tightened constraints on the time-lag between Antarctic temperature and CO2 during the last deglaciation published this week by Climate of the Past.The paper states its claims by suggesting other ice-core-based assessments of the correlation between CO2 prevalence and global temperature use samples from a region of Antarctica where ice accumulates slowly, making conclusions on the age of air bubbles difficult. This new research...

Get ready — for all the fears of extreme weather coming our way — studies of Queensland, Victoria, the whole of SE Australia, New Zealand, and Perth show that either nothing is changing (there have always been bad storms) or possibly, the weather is better now than it used to be. Where is the evidence to support the claims by alarmists that increasing CO2 will make “extreme weather” more common?It’s less windy now across South East Australia than it was in the 1920′s. It’s less stormy on the southern coast of Victoria, and records that go back 7000 years...

Just yesterday the Energy Information Administration (EIA) put out a new study on the major reserves of shale gas and tight oil. Hydraulic fracturing has led energy producers and scientists to completely reassess America’s oil and natural gas reserves. In North Dakota, the Bakken Shale is a huge source of this tight oil; however, it is only the third biggest in the entire country. In North Dakota they have seen unemployment drop to 3 percent due to the large effort to explore oil options in the Bakken Shale. If this is only the third largest source in the country, imagine...

Geoengineering hopes revived as study of iron-fertilized algal blooms shows they deposit carbon in the deep ocean when they die. In the search for methods to limit global warming, it seems that stimulating the growth of algae in the oceans might be an efficient way of removing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere after all. Despite other studies suggesting that this approach was ineffective, a recent analysis of an ocean-fertilization experiment eight years ago in the Southern Ocean indicates that encouraging algal blooms to grow can soak up carbon that is then deposited in the deep ocean as the algae...

I noticed with my morning coffee that Tom Nelson had a Google Trends graph that piqued my interest, so I decided to expand upon it a bit before getting back to work. After looking at my results, the title of this post could just as easily be “off the radar”. Have a look: Source: Google TrendsYou can clearly see when An Inconvenient Truth was released, the 2007 IPCC report and subsequent Nobel prize, and when Climategate occurred. That Gore blip in the summer of 2010 was the “Sex Poodle” episode.Here’s a similar graph with the maximum number of relevant phrases...

ndur Goklany calculated that biofuels policies killed nearly 200,000 people  in 2010 alone. That was before this study showed things may be worse than we suspected. Brazil is the largest sugar cane ethanol producer in the world, but people are burning four times the area of sugar cane plantations than previously realized, and it’s producing far more pollution than they thought. For every unit of energy generated, the ethanol-biofuel use produces a lot less CO2 (plant fertilizer) but more volatile organic compounds (VOC’s), more carbon monoxide, more nitrous oxides, as well as more sulphur dioxides. (See Graph b below).Compared to...

Last week, during an entertaining display of comedic jujitsu about the Obamas’ awkward “kiss cam” moment, Jon Stewart managed to subtly relitigate the 2000 Election, saying that had Al Gore won, the “Earth’s temperature would be maybe a few degrees cooler.” It is tempting - and perhaps comforting - to dismiss Stewart’s snark-infused banter solely as sour grapes, both with a bygone election and President Obama’s failures. That, however, would be a mistake. Stewart’s lightly disguised political commentary reflects a reinvigorated radical environmentalist movement that hopes to leverage the summer heatwave and drought into legislative action on global warming...er, climate...

YOU don’t have to be a climate scientist these days to know that the climate has problems. You just have to step outside. The United States is now enduring its warmest year on record, and the 13 warmest years for the entire planet have all occurred since 1998, according to data that stretches back to 1880. No one day’s weather can be tied to global warming, of course, but more than a decade’s worth of changing weather surely can be, scientists say. Meanwhile, the country often seems to be moving further away from doing something about climate change, with the...

A new study by a University of Michigan professor shows Americans between the ages of 32 and 52 - a group referred to as Generation X - have said they don’t really care when it comes to matters of climate change and the environment. Jon D. Miller directs the Longitudinal Study of American Youth at the U-M Institute for Social Research and released a quarterly report this week. The research has been funded by the National Science Foundation since 1986. Generation X, which consists of people born between the years of the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, apparently cares much...

The proponents of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) believe that CO2, generally accepted as a weak greenhouse gas, is responsible for the gradual rise of global temperatures, commencing with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, circa 1850. Ironically, this purported close correlation is in itself proof positive that the very basis of AGW theory is wrong. I don’t agree. Here is my reasoning: First, I posit that the many climatologists and other scientists who subscribe to AGW also subscribe to the essentials of the scientific method; very briefly, this refers to identifying a problem, gathering relevant data, drawing a hypothesis, followed...

Consistent rain and warm temperatures may have given the Mongols the energy source they needed to conquer Eurasia: grass for their horses (huge amount of grass needed to feed the 10 horses for each Mongol warrior).

First, correcting an error that originated with the blog The Hockey Schtick about not giving appropriate credit. Marcel Crok writes on De staat van het klimaat One of the basic principles of blogging is to give credit when credit is due. I always try to mention the source of my information and most blogs do this using an acronym like h/t (hat tip). This week one of my own blog articles was not referred to as the source for another blog article on The Hockey Schtick. This blog then alerted WUWT? who brought the same news quite loudly and then...

Operation Cabin Q&As (from the Norfolk Police here PDF) The following questions and answers are an abridged version of Norfolk Constabulary’s Operation Cabin media briefing held on Thursday 19 July 2012.How do you know it was an external hack?In outline terms, we know it came via the internet from a number of different IP addresses, in various countries, which may have been proxy servers. The attack was, first of all, into the web server (CRUweb8) in the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the UEA. From there, a link was established to a CRU back-up server (CRUback3).It’s fair to say, the...

German researchers have re-ignited debate over geo-engineering by saying that “seeding” oceans with iron is an effective way to lock up CO2. While the principle behind seeding is simple enough – the iron acts as a fertilizer for phytoplankton, which multiply and consume carbon dioxide as they grow – the topic is fiercely debated. The core of the argument is also simple: it’s probably impossible to predict what other environmental impacts phytoplankton fertilization would have. The researchers, led by Victor Smetacek from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, are reporting the results of a 2004...

Posted on July 19, 2012 by Anthony Watts I’ve never done a double feature before where our Climate Craziness of the Week and Quote of the Week are one and the same. 350.org’s Bill McKibben gets this unique honor.From the what universe does Bill McKibben live in department? While going on about heat waves, he comes up with the ultimate “I don’t understand science” zinger. How long before people stop listening to this guy? I would not have believed he’d be disturbed enough to write this if I hadn’t read it as a direct quote written by his own hand.Hat...

UPDATE: less than 24 hours after posting this, we already have an end of the world prediction naming global warming, see below. New end of the world book treats climate change just like many other end of times worries that have not come to pass. Weston, FL — (SBWIRE) — 07/16/2012 — The end of the world is not going to happen within our lifetimes. That’s the word from Justin Deering, author of The End of the World Delusion: How Doomsayers Endanger Society. “We’re bombarded with end-of-the-world scares practically everywhere you look,” Deering explains. “You hear about it in church, on...

From the told ya so department, comes this recently presented paper at the European Geosciences Union meeting. Authors Steirou and Koutsoyiannis, after taking homogenization errors into account find global warming over the past century was only about one-half [0.42°C] of that claimed by the IPCC [0.7-0.8°C]. ------------------------------------------------ Here’s the part I really like: of 67% of the weather stations examined, questionable adjustments were made to raw data that resulted in: “increased positive trends, decreased negative trends, or changed negative trends to positive,” whereas “the expected proportions would be 1/2 (50%).” And… “homogenation practices used until today are mainly statistical, not...

The head of Iran’s cultural heritage and tourism organization believes that in addition to economic sanctions, the West is launching another kind of “soft war” on the Islamic republic. Speaking at a ceremony to introduce the nation’s new meteorological department chief, Hassan Mousavi, said that he was “suspicious about the drought in the southern part of the country.” He went on to accuse the West as using “technology” to influence the nation’s climate, saying sand storms, droughts, and other extreme weather were the result of an unspecified method of war. … Last year, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused Western countries...

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe. Meteorologists reported that this spring was the warmest...

It’s business as usual at the Petermann glacier, doing what a glacier does, calving ice into the sea. We reported on another chunk in 2010, four Manhattans in size. Borrowing from an oft used media ploy, at this rate, it will be down to ice cube size in ten years. I wonder though, if we’d ever have noticed any of this without MODIS? Keep that in mind when reading the claims.At left An ice island twice the size of Manhattan has calved from Petermann Glacier off northern Greenland. At right, the 2010 calving, with the crack for the new chunk...

Earlier today, certain Congressional Democrats let it be known that their party would be ready and willing to take the country over the coming fiscal cliff if Republicans don’t agree to President Obama’s proposal to hike taxes on the country’s wealthiest earners (but remember: Republicans are ones refusing to cooperate and causing all of this dat gum partisan gridlock!). A top Senate Democrat bluntly warned Monday that her party is prepared to let all the Bush-era tax cuts expire and automatic spending cuts to defense and domestic programs take place at the beginning of next year unless Republicans agree to...

A massive landslide sent tons of rock and debris tumbling more than five miles down a glacier in Alaska, the National Park Service reported in an event that could be yet another sign of a warming world. ocated in a remote area of Glacier Bay National Park, the slide was so big it registered on earthquake monitors as a magnitude 3.4 event. Officials noticed the monitor blip on June 11 but it wasn't until July 2 that a pilot passing over the site took photos that showed just how large it was, Glacier Bay National Park announced on its Facebook...

Heat wave, fires have climate change activists on offensive By Ben Geman - 07/06/12 06:00 AM ET Record-breaking heat across the U.S. and catastrophic wildfires in Colorado are giving environmentalists a rare opening to regain the political offensive on climate change. While scientists caution against chalking up specific weather events to climate change, they say generally that heat waves, wildfires and other extreme weather is expected with increasing frequency and intensity in a warming world. Skeptics of climate change often point to winter blizzards as evidence that the planet is not warming; now those who say climate change is a...