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Now for some bad news: national meteorologists expect the drought to continue or worsen through late summer and early fall in Texas, and ocean patterns are troublingly similar to those during the “drought of record” in the 1950s. Today, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its latest drought forecast. It predicts the drought will persist or intensify in most of Texas from July through October. But there is one exception — in Far West Texas, August and September rains are expected to bring some relief to an area from Midland to El Paso, according to NOAA meteorologist Victor...

Always informative. Always educational. Yes, I know I'm late. I attended an Oath Keeper's meeting yesterday and forgot to do this. Link is to actual video.

Working on some area and latitude calculations for sea ice. many hundreds of on-line references report that the Antarctic continent is 14,000,000 square kilometers: A nice, convenient even round number. That's obviously always been rounded off as one source copies from everybody, or just never measured accurately. Neither seems correct. the NSIRDC tracks sea ice, and they have explicitly written me that their "Antarctic Sea Ice"totals do NOT include the permanent ice shelves around many areas of that continent. Fine, no problem: and it even makes sense: Why should a federal agency track "permanent sea shelves" when they can get...

The Small Business Majority, an advocacy group working to influence public policy, says that small businesses are facing higher costs due to extreme weather conditions, including floods, droughts, blizzards, tornadoes, hurricanes, and a rise in sea level many claim is a result of man-made global warming. “Small businesses are particularly at risk from climate change and the extreme weather events it causes and must take steps to adapt,” the organization said in a new report. … But when CNSNews.com asked the group’s spokeswoman how small businesses can be negatively affected when there has not been any significant global warming for...

Alaska fishing trip ends in tragedy for old high-school pals Three old friends from Montesano High School in Grays Harbor County were on a fishing and camping trip in Alaska when high winds and seas dumped them into the water off Baranoff Island. Only one man made it to shore.

This week, NOAA’s Terra/MODIS satellites detected a massive plume of dust moving off the coast of Africa, born from a storm far inland. This plume, called the Saharan Air Layer (SAL), carries with it a particularly high concentration of dust and dry air that NOAA notes, ‘plays an important role in lessening “cyclogenesis” or the formation of hurricanes.’ Using 18 satellite images from NOAA, we created the following animation to show the recent movement of this air mass off the western coast of Africa.

Here’s a graph showing something about Australian, Chinese and Indian emissions (thanks to Tom Quirk). At a glance you might think we are up there with the best of them (doing our bit to fertilize the flora of the planet, and to regreen the deserts). Alas, the Australian tally (the green triangles) represents the total emissions of Australia. The lines depicting Chinese and Indian emissions just show their annual increases.Chinese annual increases in emissions are larger than the entire Australian output. India is not too far behind. UPDATE: TonyfromOz points out the Y-axis scale  is missing three zero’s. Data source:...

Credit to The Australian for printing both points of view. Published as an Op-Ed today.Carbon credits market is neither free nor worth anything by: Joanne NovaFrom: The Australian July 31, 2013 12:00AM THE paradox du jour: people who like free markets don’t want a carbon market, and the people who don’t trust capitalism want emissions trading. So why are socialists fighting for a carbon market? Because this “market” is a bureaucrat’s wet dream. A free market is the voluntary exchange of goods and services. “Free” means being free to choose to buy or to not buy the product. At...

CSIRO wants to stop methane emissions: but can they get a grant to stop El Nino’s and cap volcanoes?This type of trans-Siberian cow used to emit a lot of methane. Tom Quirk sent me a short note to point out that the big rise in global methane almost certainly was man-made — at least up to the mid 1980′s, but in the last 20 years, the culprit for rising methane appears to be volcanoes and El Ninos. (Note the timing of the spikes in the graph below, as methane pours into the atmosphere some years, but barely changes in...

Always informative. Always entertaining. Link is direct to video. Hope this works better than last week.

An amateur astronomer has become the first person to capture a massive lightning strike ‘into space’ above the British Isles. The atmospheric phenomena, known as sprites, had never been recorded in the UK before an amateur astronomer in East Yorkshire managed to take the photographic first. Richard Kacerek, 33, spotted the sprite – caused by an upward lightning discharge five miles east of Hull – and has sparked excitement in the scientific community with his image. An amateur astronomer has become the first person to capture a massive lightning strike ‘into space’ (pictured) above the British Isles An amateur astronomer...

New data from Greenland ice cores suggest North America may have suffered a large cosmic impact about 12,900 years ago. A layer of platinum is seen in ice of the same age as a known abrupt climate transition, US scientists report. The climate flip has previously been linked to the demise of the North American "Clovis" people. The data seem to back the idea that an impact tipped the climate into a colder phase, a point of current debate. Rapid climate change occurred 12,900 years ago, and it is proposed that this is associated with the extinction of large mammals...

Lake Superior posted its third-straight month of above-normal water-level increases, rising 5.5 inches in July compared to the usual 1.5-inch increase for the month. The International Lake Superior Board of Control reported Wednesday that the big lake is 2.3 inches below its long-term normal and is 6 inches above the level on Aug. 1, 2012. Lake Superior had its second-highest monthly increase in May and rose more than usual in June, thanks to well-above-normal precipitation across much of its watershed. The big lake continues its trend back to normal water levels after several years of below-normal levels.

My dear childhood community of Glendale Oregon and the entire surrounding area is threatened by numerous forest fires. 150 strikes from lightening Friday night started the mess. There's 1500 fire fighters living in tents on the high school grounds and the town only has a few hundred residents. Here's a link http://www.swofire.com/ Prayers would be greatly appreciated all around for not only the residents but for the amazing folks involved with fighting the fires.

Management of Beijing's famous Summer Palace said the damaged heads of several Buddha statues was the work of Mother Nature and history not thugs, CRI reported. The original heads of the Buddha statues on the wall around the Wisdom Sea, which were reported as lost recently, were actually ruined by allied forces ravaging the park a century ago, management said, according to the report. Summer palace affixed news heads to the broken Buddha statues as part of a facelift in 1982 and 2006, but the patched heads all dropped later as they expanded in heat and contracted in cold due...

Always informative, always entertaining.

WOODBRIDGE, Conn. (CBSNewYork) — The town of Woodbridge, Conn., is one of several that has received state grants for a “micro grid” to maintain power to crucial utilities in the event of a storm blackout. As WCBS 880’s reported, restoring power often takes time when outages hit Woodbridge. The rural community is filled with trees and wires. First Selectwoman Ellen Scalettar said having an energy source to provide power to critical town buildings and services will provide the town’s 10,000 residents with a sense of security – knowing that no matter how fierce the storm, central power will be up....

As you squeegee out your basement, replace your blown-off roof tiles, bury your heat-withered tomato crop and think about moving to a house on higher ground, you will be forgiven if you want to step out onto the street, tilt your head toward those odd-shaped clouds massing on the horizon, and scream, “Fix it! And that might be a reasonable request. The weather is broken. To some degree, this is because we broke it: While it is foolish to link any individual extreme-weather event to the larger climate, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the growing frequency and intensity of...

The Zeitgiest is shifting. The unthinkable is now thought, and in public.Politicians go cold as global warming debate loses spark From: The Times    July 23, 2013 12:00AM,   Reprinted in The AustralianSoon will come the time when everyone says “I always knew it was wrong”.Tim Montgomerie notes the great backdown of  Kevin Rudd on the carbon tax and lays out the global carnage in the climate meme:Throughout the world green politicians are presiding over similar climbdowns. From Washington to London, shale gas rather than any renewable technology is seen as the future. Even nations such as Germany and Spain,...

It has been quite entertaining to watch the various explanations coming out to rationalize “the pause” in surface temperatures for the last 16 years. For example, as Jerome Ravetz points out to me in email, The Times Hannah Devlin says the warming has just gone into hiding.But there is a funny thing about that deep ocean warming.As Bob Tisdale wrote: Ever since the NODC released their ocean heat content data for the depths of 0-2000 meters and published Levitus et al (2012), it seems that each time a skeptic writes a blog post or answers a question in an...

 From Dr. Benny Peiser and the GWPFWe Really Don’t Understand Our Climate Something is happening to our sun. If history is anything to go by, the sun’s change of mood could affect us all by cooling the earth and throwing our climate change calculations into disarray. It might even be the case that the earth’s response to low solar activity will overturn many of our assumptions about man’s influence on climate change. Cold not warmth might be our future. We do not know. We must keep watching the sun. –David Whitehouse, Public Service Europe, 24 July 2013Global warming has been...

Posted on July 25, 2013 by Bob Tisdale INTRODUCTIONI’ve received a number of emails and requests to comment on the recently released 3-part report from the UK Met Office titled “The Recent Pause in Global Warming”. See the UKMO webpage here. This is part 1, corresponding to part 1 of the UKMO report.For additional discussions of the UKMO’s papers, see Bishop Hill’s post Your ship is sinking. Will spin help? and Judith Curry’s post UK Met Office on the pause.The UKMO is offering the same old tired excuses. As a result, much of this post discusses topics and presents data...

ARCTIC SUMMER SNOWSTORMBy Joseph D’Aleo CCMRemember a year ago when few days of July ‘warmth’ with strong blocking over Greenland had the media abuzz over some melting?Last July a brief spell of temperatures in the mid 30s had caused some surface slush formation on top of the 1 to 1.5 mile thick Greenland ice. The NASA sensors merely color-coded the phase of the water – ice (white), mixed water and ice (rose) and none (land grey). Rose meant some surface liquid. For Greenland, business as usual, because 150 years ago, there were no satellites to record the event.It quickly refroze...

Full Title: India threatens Wind farms with fines. They must accurately predict the wind a day in advance or else! What the Nanny-State Goddess Giveth… The intermittent power of wind towers plays havoc with electricity grids. Power black outs in India are so bad, they cut off the supply to 600 million or so people for two days last year. To make the grid more stable, an official somewhere decided it would help to have at least one day’s warning of how much electricity will flow from those towers.  (Why not two days I say?)“A directive took effect this week...

Always informative, always entertaining. http://www.weatherbell.com/saturday-summary-july-20-2013

New York. So hot right now, New York. Today, in fact, is going to be even hotter than the past few days. The heat index — a measurement that combines temperature with humidity to represent how hot it actually feels — is expected to reach as high as 108 degrees. But when it gets this hot, not even the heat index can tell the whole story. That story can only be told through the strange happenings throughout the city, as reported on Twitter.

New York. So hot right now, New York. Today, in fact, is going to be even hotter than the past few days. The heat index — a measurement that combines temperature with humidity to represent how hot it actually feels — is expected to reach as high as 108 degrees. But when it gets this hot, not even the heat index can tell the whole story. That story can only be told through the strange happenings throughout the city, as reported on Twitter.

…As I keep saying, it’s not that the media has a problem, the truth is the media IS the problem. If we had accurate and balanced reporting the global warming meme would have crashed and burned long ago, voters would have said “No thanks”; politicians would have wasted less money; scientists would be researching useful things; universities would have to fire professors who can’t reason, and we would all be richer.So when the budget office says our ABC costs us $1 billion, I say No, the cost is measured in national GDP.No wonder most of us have given up...

It also has atmospheric temperatures up to 2,000-degree fahrenheit. And in case you didn’t see it in the headline: Glass Rain! 4,500 MPH winds! This place sounds awesome. NASA discovered the planet, dubbed HD 189733b, in 2005, but recently discovered new facts about its atmosphere with the Hubble telescope. The thing is only 2.9 million miles from its sun, which sounds far, but consider that Earth is 92.9 million miles away from ours. To make matters even more insane, the night temperature can be as much as 500 degrees lower than the day temperature. I’m taking the first commercial spaceflight...

A massive iceberg, larger than the city of Chicago, broke off of Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier on Monday (July 8), and is now floating freely in the Amundsen Sea, according to a team of German scientists. The newborn iceberg measures about 278 square miles (720 square kilometers), and was seen by TerraSAR-X, an earth-observing satellite operated by the German Space Agency (DLR). Scientists with NASA's Operation IceBridgefirst discovered a giant crack in the Pine Island Glacier in October 2011, as they were flying over and surveying the sprawling ice sheet. At that time, the fissure spanned about 15 miles (24...

The next time you're sweating and complaining that this summer is just too hot, consider this fun fact in weather world history: Exactly 100 years ago this week, Death Valley National Park set the hottest temperature ever recorded in the world -- 134 degrees Fahrenheit. At least 140 people showed up to celebrate the anniversary and listen to weather experts discuss the record at Furnace Creek Visitor Center and Museum in the expanse of eastern California desert. While Death Valley's July 10, 1913, recorded temperature now is considered the hottest ever, on September 13, 1922, a temperature reading of 136...

SIERRA VISTA — Southwest Cochise County was hammered by hurricane-level winds and torrential rains after several powerful storm systems moved through the area Tuesday night. Rainfall measuring more than five inches has been reported in the hardest hit areas, mostly contained to an area in and around Palominas, leaving many roadways obstructed. Crews with the Cochise County Highway and Floodplain Department have been working throughout the night to clear roadways quickly before tonight’s anticipated continuation of the storms. “If it rains tonight it’s going to get a whole lot worse,” said Ron Ellis, operations manager for the Highway and Floodplain...

Pine Island Glacier (PIG), the longest and fastest flowing glacier in the Antarctic, has spawned a huge iceberg. The block measures about 720 sq km in area - roughly eight times the size of Manhattan Island in New York. Scientists have been waiting for the PIG to calve since October 2011 when they first noticed a spectacular crack spreading across its surface. Confirmation that the fissure had extended the full width of the glacier was obtained on Monday. It was seen by the German TerraSAR-X satellite. This carries a radar instrument that can detect the surface of the ice stream...

Three women from the feminist activist movement Femen entered a mosque on Södermalm in central Stockholm on Saturday morning, baring their breats and chanting "No sharia" and "Free women". The women entered the main central Stockholm mosque at around 11am on Saturday. Mosque employees called the police who dispatched several units to the scene. Shortly after their arrival they emerged with the still bare-breasted women and walked to a transport vehicle. According to the duty police officer Jonas Svalan the women are now suspected of disorderly conduct due to their nudity and assault for having allegedly shoved somebody. The women...

By Steve GorehamOriginally published in The Washington TimesIn his speech at Georgetown University on Tuesday, President Obama announced, “So today…I’m directing the Environmental Protection Agency to put an end to the limitless dumping of carbon pollution from our power plants and complete new pollution standards for both new and existing power plants.” This is the first proposal in the President’s new climate initiative. The President also called for expanded efforts to use “clean energy” and for the US to lead the world in bold actions to “combat climate change.”For the last decade, an obsession with global warming has dominated...

At the request of the authors, this was converted from a poster displayed at the AGU Science Policy Conference, Washington, June 24-26. – AnthonyBy Paul C. Knappenberger and Patrick J. Michaels Center for the Study of Science, Cato Institute, Washington DCINTRODUCTIONAssessing the consistency between real-world observations and climate model projections is a challenging problem but one that is essential prior to making policy decisions which depend largely on such projections. National and international assessments often mischaracterize the level of consistency between observations and projections. Unfortunately, policymakers are often unaware of this situation, which leaves them vulnerable to developing policies that...

UPDATE: Corrected Figures 2 through 6. UPDATE 2: Corrected the color-coding in the title block of Figure 4. (Thanks to blogger cassandraclub for noticing it.) UPDATE 3: I removed the word Anomalies from Figures 2, 3 and 4. And I’ve added two graphs using BOM data for Australia at the end of the post.INTRODUCTIONIn the wake of the heat wave in Australia last summer, I had promised Jo Nova a post about Australia land surface air temperatures. That email exchange took place a couple of months ago. I began work on it a few days ago, the graphs were...

From the University of Melbourne, where being angry about “weather is not climate” isn’t just a science, it’s a way of life:Human influences through global warming are likely to have played a role in Australia’s recent “angry” hot summer, the hottest in Australia’s observational record, new research has found.  The research led by the University of Melbourne, has shown that global warming increased the chances of Australians experiencing record hot summers such as the summer of 2013, by more than five times.Lead author, Dr Sophie Lewis from the University of Melbourne and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate...

This post was written last night, shortly after I received the document. It is autopublishing at 6AM EDT (3AM PDT) since I’ll hopefully be asleep here in California when the embargo time passes.There were two documents provided to the press: a fact sheet/summary and the full plan. Both are available as PDF’s at the end of this essay. I see a lot of “pie in the sky” language in the plan document, with little in the way of concrete ideas. It seems just another expansion of “big government” bureaucracy with little tangible benefit to the American citizen.This is by no...

Above, May 2013 Aerosol Optical Depth. Uou can see the United States and Europe is relatively clear, while Asia has high amounts of aerosols. Image: NASA Earth ObservatoryFrom the Law of Unintended Consequences and The Clean Air Act, comes this bit of news. Since the 1970′s The Clean Air Act has benefited breathing in many American cities with tangible results (just look at Los Angeles), but it may have had a role in increasing tropical storm activity.This new paper suggests that due to the reduction of aerosols and particulates in the atmosphere might have been the main cause of...

WAPELLO, Iowa -- The winds came to Wapello on Monday. Damages to trees and some roofs were evident around the Wapello area. Probably the most devastating damage hit grain bins in this rural area. Farmers Elevator and Exchange sits along highway 61. They had two grain bins succumb to the high winds. A 200,000 bushel grain bin was totally disintegrated while a second bin of the same size was seriously damaged. The second bin was close to being lifted off of its foundation too.

POSTED in the Satirical Tomes: News that could have been, but wasn’t.Climate modelers announced today that in future they would report everything in Hiroshima-atom-bomb-equivalents, or Habe. The President of Climate-Scientists-Anonymous said the old system of joules was boring, and no one understood what ten-to-the-twenty-two meant anyhow. “We leave that stuff to the computers” he said. “The planet has been building up temperatures at the rate of four Hiroshima bombs of heat every second, and it’s all our fault, say climate scientists.” — Neda Vanovac, Climate change like atom bomb (interviewing John Cook ) … Skeptics said they preferred exponentials, but could...

Huge Texas supercell storm captured in amazing timelapse by photographer who spent four years chasing phenomenon It doesn't take much to be reminded of the power of mother nature, but even at her most ferocious there can still be beauty. A spectacular video was captured by photographer Mike Olbinski near Booker, Texas, after four years of searching for such a stunning supercell thunderstorm.

Oh, joy. Moniz put strong faith in solar power during remarks Monday at a Washington, D.C., conference. That continues the trend set forth by his predecessor, Steven Chu, who was a staunch advocate of the renewable energy source.“I would argue that I believe that the scale and time frame of impact of solar technology, I believe, again, is underestimated,” he said at the U.S. Energy Information Administration-hosted event. “There are many situations today when solar is in fact competitive.”“We are aggressively pursuing this in many dimensions,” he continued. “I think that’s an example of something we will look back on...

It’s not rocket science. If energy costs more, that means we have to make do with less of it, or make do with less of something else. Thus if the government forces everyone to pay more for electricity, companies have less spare cash to employ people. Their margins are tighter, they can’t make and sell as many products. So when we are told the clean energy revolution is creating jobs, is it virtually self-evident that’s a mythical fairy claim.I say “virtually”, because it is theoretical possible it could work, but only if this green power provided some productivity or...

By Christopher Monckton of BrenchleyAs Anthony and others have pointed out, even the New York Times has at last been constrained to admit what Dr. Pachauri of the IPCC was constrained to admit some months ago. There has been no global warming statistically distinguishable from zero for getting on for two decades.The NYT says the absence of warming arises because skeptics cherry-pick 1998, the year of the Great el Niño, as their starting point. However, as Anthony explained yesterday, the stasis goes back farther than that. He says we shall soon be approaching Dr. Ben Santer’s 17-year test: if there...

This is how the AGW panic ends: not with a bang, but with a whimper. The Economist, which (despite a recent decline) remains probably the best news magazine in the English language, now admits that (a) global average temperature has been flat for 15 years even as CO2 levels have been rising rapidly, (b) surface temperatures are at the lowest edge of the range predicted by IPCC climate models, (c) on current trends, they will soon fall clean outside and below the model predictions, (c) estimates of climate sensitivity need revising downwards, and (d) something, probably multiple things, is badly...

Joe Romm must be upset  that NZ greens are ignoring his trademark “hell and high water”.From the New Zealand Business Review (h/t to Bishop Hill):When Jeanette Fitzsimons was co-leader global warming was the greatest-ever threat to the planet. It dwarfed all other environmental worries. It was the granddaddy of them all.…But the shift on global warming with the Greens is significant. We are safe in concluding that they no longer regard global warming as the greatest threat to the planet. It would, I think, merit a mention in a leader’s annual speech to the Greens if it were. A fast-approaching...

IIn history studies of the Great Global Warming Scare, people will ask, is this the bargaining stage or the start of acceptance? Adapting to _ not just fighting _ climate change is taking the heat out of global warming talk Seth Borenstein for The Associated PressWASHINGTON (AP) — Efforts to curb global warming have quietly shifted as greenhouse gases inexorably rise.The conversation is no longer solely about how to save the planet by cutting carbon emissions. It’s becoming more about how to save ourselves from the warming planet’s wild weather. — Newsdaily On the five stages of  grief, this...

Short video (1:55) of a supercell rotating. Absolutely gorgeous... http://www.wimp.com/rotatingsupercell/