Credulous woman believes the doomsters

Leftism sure messes up minds.  A small excerpt below.  An apparently normal woman hesitated for years before getting pregnant because of all the doom that Warmists predict.  She apparently had no natural skepticism so didn't think to doubt the predictions.  So she felt she did not want to bring kids into a world plagued by natural disasters.  And, by the time she allowed her natural instincts to take over, it was pretty late and all she has had so far is a miscarriage.

The article below is very long.  She obviously wrote it to soothe her feelings.  But on the whole I support the decisions of fruitcake women not to have children.  It means that those like them will tend to die out. It's called natural selection


By Madeline Ostrander

The librarian was nondescript in the way that everyone standing behind a counter is, probably in her 30s, with straight, fox-colored hair. When she took my stack of books, I noticed the way her sweater draped over a conspicuous melon-shaped belly, and I felt a tug in my chest and warmth rise in my stomach. It took a moment to recognize this sensation as envy. Then came another feeling: shock. I had never been jealous of any woman for carrying what looked like an uncomfortable load, or for what would come next: the messy, exhausting job of mothering an infant. Something unfamiliar had come over me.

In my late 20s and early 30s, I was terrified of becoming the sort of woman who was “baby crazy,” afraid motherhood would circumscribe my life. I politely admired but didn’t gush over my friends’ new babies. Compared with many women, I was under little pressure to procreate; neither my nor my husband’s parents had ever expressed more than a tentative longing for grandchildren. But six years ago, when I first held my 2-month-old niece, wrapped in a flower-print onesie and murmuring delicious baby noises, I felt a rush of joy, an indescribable feeling of human closeness.

My husband and I had made a home in Seattle for several years, and my friends of childbearing age tended to be writers and activists, scientists and scholars. When considering kids, they weighed not only their desires and finances but the state of the world. Many of them had read grim prognoses of what climate change would do to life on Earth. Even in the restrained language of science, the future holds unprecedented difficulties and disasters. For many people, these problems were an abstraction, but as an environmental journalist, I knew enough to imagine them in front of me. Driving across the bridge to my house, I pictured city beaches drowned by the rising sea. Watching the news, I wondered when the next colossal hurricane would strike the Gulf of Mexico or the mid-Atlantic. These thoughts are not paranoid. According to scientists’ predictions, if society keeps pumping out carbon dioxide at current rates, any child born now could, by midlife, watch Superstorm Sandy–size disasters regularly inundate New York City. She could see the wheat fields of the Great Plains turn to dust and parts of California gripped by decades of drought. She may see world food prices soar and water in the American West become even scarcer. By 2050, when still in her 30s, she could witness global wars waged over food and land. “It does make me wonder if maybe I shouldn’t have kids,” one of my friends whispered to me.

More HERE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick (‏@sarahinscience) makes a brave attempt to prove that  February heat was caused by CO2


There she is.  Isn't she gorgeous?  She looks fairly young -- which may be why she has stepped in where wiser heads have not.  She works in the climate change department of an Australian university.  There's good gravy in global warming for some.

Old campaigners like James Hansen and Michael Mann have claimed the February temperature uptick as a sign of anthropogenic global warming.  They admit that El Nino had something to do with it but just dismiss the El Nino contribution as "minimal" with a wave of the hand.  They don't argue for a particular number, as a real scientist would.

But Sarah has risen to the challenge.  She has attempted to give a figure for the El Nino influence!  And the way she does that is fine in principle.  She takes the rise due to El Nino in 1998 and uses that to reduce the 2016 figure.  So she gives a quarter of one degree as the El Nino contribution -- which still leaves a fair bit of warming available for explanation as caused by a CO2 rise.

Just how your derive the 1998 figure for the influence of El Nino is not totally clearcut.  It depends on what you compare the 1998 figure with.  But I will not cavil about that.  I just want to point out the observed warming COULD NOT have been caused by a CO2 rise.  Why?  Because CO2 did not rise in the relevant period.  Cape Grim shows CO2 levels stuck on 398 ppm for the whole period of late 2015 and early 2016.  Sorry, Sarah!  You should have looked that up.

Now it may not be El Nino only that caused the temperature rise.  There are other possible natural factors that could have had an effect. And Sarah points to one:  The Arctic.  She is enough of a scientist to know that melting sea ice does not raise the water level but she points out that less ice may lead to more heat absorption from the sun.  Fair enough.

But what caused the Arctic melt?  In the absence of a CO2 rise we know it cannot be that.  It was partly El Nino and partly subsurface vulcanism, probably.  A few years back it was  discovered that there was furious underwater volcanic activity in the Arctic, particularly along the Gakkel ridge.  But volcanoes are uneven in their eruptions so they should give rise in random ways to melting in the ice above them.  And that accounts for the uneven pattern of Arctic melting and its lack of synchrony with temperatures elsewhere.  But Warmists act as if the volcanoes cause NO melting.  They need to be that crooked.

And here's some other pesky news 2015 was only the SECOND hottest year on record for Europe.  They must not have got much effect from El Nino -- which is as you expect.  Europe is a long way from the Pacific, where El Nino reigns.  Give up, Sarah!  What you have been taught is WRONG.  You are living off a lie!


Most people know by now that last month was the hottest February since modern records began. It was also the hottest overall month on record, and by the largest margin.

The global average temperature anomaly was 1.35ºC above the 1951–80 average and 1.21ºC above the entire twentieth-century average. For temperatures over land, the deviation almost doubles to a whopping 2.31ºC above the twentieth-century average. Other records broken by February 2016 include the fact that it was the tenth consecutive month in which the global average monthly record was broken and that it completed the hottest three-month period on record (December 2015 to February 2016).

Normally, climate scientists don’t get too anxious over a single month; our blood pressure tends to rise a bit more when record-breaking temperature anomalies are consistently smashed. But February is a special case – not only did it set a new record in an increasingly concerning upwards trend, but the magnitude of the record is terrifying.

So what led to this monster of a month?

First, let’s take a look at the possible influence of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation. The 2015–16 El Niño was one of the earliest and strongest on record, easily comparable to its brother in 1997–98. At the global level, El Niños can cause measurable increases in temperature. We saw this in 1998, in our hottest year on record at the time: thanks to climate change, 1998 would have been a warm year without the El Niño, but the record set would have been smaller.

While the latest El Niño is weakening, its legacy is likely to have had a similar effect on our most recent hottest year on record (2015) and the monster February – increasing the anomaly by just a little bit more than what climate change could achieve on its on. But there is no possible way that an observed El Niño, however strong, could solely explain such a huge monthly temperature deviation. Past El Niños have only intensified global average temperatures by up to 0.25ºC, though the measured influence is usually smaller.

The second factor is the state of the Arctic, where the sea ice extent was more than 7 per cent below the 1981–2010 average, and the ice coverage the smallest since records began in 1979. Over relatively short timescales (monthly-seasonal) a lack of sea ice drives up temperatures. Ocean water is much darker than ice, so radiation from the sun that is normally reflected by the sea ice is absorbed, thus increasing temperatures.

Over longer timescales (years and decades), this sea ice/temperature interaction drives itself – increasing temperatures melt more ice, driving further increases in temperature – through a process known as a positive feedback. Record-low Arctic sea ice during February 2016 and the associated extreme temperatures are consistent with the positive feedback interaction triggered by anthropogenic climate change.

This basic physical interaction drove regional temperatures to well over 11.5ºC warmer than the 1951–80 average. These alarmingly warm conditions were not just confined to the Arctic waters. Because of the influence of sea ice (or the lack of it) on atmospheric circulation, similar temperature extremes were measured well south of the Arctic Circle – over Northern Europe, Russia, Alaska and western Canada.

SOURCE  

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

High school teacher and cheerleading coach, 42, is arrested for 'having a sexual relationship with two students'



A 42-year-old Alabama teacher and cheerleading coach is accused of having a sexual relationship with two students at her school.
Carrie Cabri Witt was charged on Monday with two counts of a school employee engaging in a sex act or deviant sexual intercourse with a student under the age of 19.

Witt teaches history, psychology and social studies at Decatur High School, where she is also a coach for the varsity girls’ golf team and and junior varsity cheerleading.

Witt has been put on administrative leave with pay by Decatur High while the school investigates the situation.

Officials began an investigation on March 17, when the police department received information that a teacher in the Decatur City School system was having a sexual relationship with at least one student.

While interviewing people, investigators discovered a second victim, according to AL.com. The genders of the victims is unknown.

Witt was arrested on Monday after police contacted her at her home and took her to the Decatur Police Department for questioning.

Witt was booked into Decatur City Jail and later transferred to the Morgan County Jail in lieu of $10,000 aggregate bond.

Though the age of consent is 16 in Alabama, a law was passed in 2010 that made it a felony for a school employee to have sex with a student under 19 years old.

SOURCE

The BS never stops:  "New York and London could be underwater within DECADES"

And pigs might fly. It's all just theory -- and all Warmist prophecy has been wrong to date so this will be too.  Note that even Michael Mann does not believe this one

And the theory is extreme.  It starts out: "Researchers claim the initial melting of the great ice sheets will put a cap of relatively fresh water on the ocean surfaces near Antarctica and Greenland"

Maybe so but where is there any evidence of "melting of the great ice sheets"?  It hasn't happened and Antarctic ice is in fact growing

And what's this business about fresh water putting a "cap" on salt water?  Salt diffuses very rapidly in water so any cap would be very temporary -- lasting only a few days at most.  I would like to see any argument or evidence to the contrary.  It's just another implausible theory as far as I can tell but I am open to enlightenment


Most scientists agree that sea levels will rise, but some say it won't happen for centuries.  Now, a new study suggests sea levels will increase several feet over the next 50 years.  It claims the world's coastal cities, including New York and London, could be underwater by the end of the century.

'We're in danger of handing young people a situation that's out of their control,' James E. Hansen, a retired Nasa climate scientist who led the new research, told The New York Times.

The paper was released this morning by a European science journal, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

'Current assessments place emphasis on practical effects such as increasing extremes of heat waves, droughts, heavy rainfall, floods and encroaching seas,' reads the study.

The consequences would include killer storms, the disintegration of large parts of the polar ice sheets and a rise in sea levels that would exceed that worlds coastal cities before the end of this century, claim researchers.

The paper talks about a specific mechanism that will provoke this abrupt climate shift.

Researchers claim the initial melting of the great ice sheets will put a cap of relatively fresh water on the ocean surfaces near Antarctica and Greenland.

This will slow down or even close the system of the ocean currents that provides heat throughout the planet, allowing some of it to escape into space.

The deeper areas of the ocean will experience warming, which will ultimately accelerate the melting of the part of the ice sheet that sits above sea level.

And the extreme temperature difference between the tropics and the poles will produce powerful storms, which will mirror those that happened 120,000 years ago when Earth experienced a natural warming, according to the paper.

Some experts see this paper as a step in the right direction to understanding when the climate experienced sudden, drastic shifts.

But others still remain hesitant about the claims made in the draft paper, released last year, and are still on the fence with the final version. 'Some of the claims in this paper are indeed extraordinary,' said Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University.  'They conflict with the mainstream understanding of climate change to the point where the standard of proof is quite high.'

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Will plants' response to increased CO2 make heatwaves more intense than thought?

The report by Peter Hannam below seemed like a possible real concern if ever we do get global warming.  But I somehow knew that they would have ignored something important so I looked up the underlying journal article -- abstract thereof also reproduced below.  It is all just modelling rubbish.  When Warmist models show predictive skill will be the time to take notice of them.  It hasn't happened yet.

But there is something amusing in the article nonetheless. They seem to base their claims on how an individual leaf stoma reacts to higher CO2 but forget to look at  the whole plant.  That higher CO2 levels will produce bigger plants and hence more stomata seems to be overlooked.  With more stomata the overall water release may remain unchanged.

Warmists are such a laugh!  Junk science all the way.  It's such junk that even a humble social scientist like me can see through it.  And shifty old Peter Hannam swallows it all hook, line and sinker.  He must never ask any questions



Peter Hannam

Heatwaves in the northern hemisphere may become as much as 5 degrees warmer than previously estimated by mid-century because plants' response to higher carbon dioxide levels has been miscalculated, according to new research by Australian scientists.

As atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gas increase, plant stomata – the tiny pores on leaves that open to take in CO2 and let out water vapour – won't need to open as much.

"There's less water vapour being lost so you have a net warming effect," said Jatin Kala, a lecturer from Murdoch University and lead author of the paper that was published Monday in Nature Scientific Reports.

The researchers used data from 314 plant species across 56 field sites to examine how plants responded. Existing climate models had assumed all plants would trade water for carbon in exactly the same way.

Needle-leaf forests, tundra and agricultural land used for crops would likely suffer the biggest temperature increases. Heatwaves from Europe to China were likely to become 3-5 degrees hotter than the already higher base expected from global warming, Dr Kala said.

"These more detailed results are confronting but they help explain why many climate models have consistently underestimated the increase in the intensity of heatwaves and the rise in maximum temperatures when compared to observations."

The results do not necessarily apply to southern hemisphere regions to the same extent. "We don't have an observation of how Australian vegetation will respond to rising CO2," he said.

CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science developed the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS) model used in this study.

SOURCE

Impact of the representation of stomatal conductance on model projections of heatwave intensity

Jatin Kala et al.

Abstract

Stomatal conductance links plant water use and carbon uptake, and is a critical process for the land surface component of climate models. However, stomatal conductance schemes commonly assume that all vegetation with the same photosynthetic pathway use identical plant water use strategies whereas observations indicate otherwise. Here, we implement a new stomatal scheme derived from optimal stomatal theory and constrained by a recent global synthesis of stomatal conductance measurements from 314 species, across 56 field sites. Using this new stomatal scheme, within a global climate model, subtantially increases the intensity of future heatwaves across Northern Eurasia. This indicates that our climate model has previously been under-predicting heatwave intensity. Our results have widespread implications for other climate models, many of which do not account for differences in stomatal water-use across different plant functional types, and hence, are also likely under projecting heatwave intensity in the future.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Dear Naomi revisited

I had a very nice Naomi in my early life -- Naomi Holbeck. I sometimes wonder where she is now.  But the Naomi I want to talk about here is a much less pleasant Naomi:  Naomi Oreskes, one of the many climate frauds.



Something that often gives liars away is that they exaggerate.  They seem to believe Dr. Goebbels' dictum that big lies are more credible than small ones.  The classic example of that is the many elections that various Communist dictators ran in the 20th century.  They would always claim that  they won 98% or thereabouts of the vote.  Nobody believed them of course.

So when Warmists claim that 97% of scientists believe in global warming, historically aware people know how to view that.   It's not even a sophisticated lie.  Some industrious person has put together a list of 97 published rebuttals to John Cook's 97% claim but it was hardly necessary. One wonders how Cook feels to have his work so swingeingly attacked. I suppose he just wears the usual Leftist carapace of Freudian denial.

But the biggest liar of all was Naomi Oreskes. What she claimed in 2004 was TOTALLY unbelievable. In an article in "Science" magazine she claimed to have done a study of the scientific literature on climate change and found that "none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position".  In other words she claimed 100% agreement.  She was less truthful than even a Communist dictator.  There were already known in 2004 some prominent scientists who were vocal climate skeptics such as Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer.  So Oreskes was plainly wrong in claiming that she could find none of them.

The reason I am raking over such old history now is that her work falls neatly into a modern area of scientific concern.  In both the social and biological sciences there has been lately a lot of heartburn about unreplicable results.  Replication is the test of a scientific claim and it is the central reason why academic articles are so turgid.  A believable scientific claim has to go into great detail about how it reached its conclusion so that others can do exactly the same thing to test those conclusions.  If someone repeats exactly what an author did and gets DIFFERENT conclusions, a great lightning bolt falls from the heavens and incinerates the original author.  Just joking!  But the effect is not much less than that.  Nobody believes the original claim any more.

And in recent times there have been many attempts to do such exact replications.  And the results have been terrible.  Around two thirds of established scientific findings in the social and biological sciences have been found to fail replication.  Much of what we thought we knew is false.

And the Oreskes claim failed replication.  Benny Peiser was one of many who found the Oreskes claim laughable but he was the one who put his money where his mouth was and actually made an attempt to replicate the Oreskes procedures.  He got vastly different results.  So by modern scientific standards, the Oreskes findings are wrong and should not be quoted as support for anything.

So if anybody now quotes the Oreskes finding without attaching the word "unreplicable" to it, they thereby show that they are out of step with modern scientific standards.

But Warmists abandoned science long ago, of course.  In their major papers they withheld details that would allow replications of their work.  And when other scientists asked for the withheld details, the Warmists refused point blank to assist.  They branded such reqeusts as "harassment".  Their response actually made replication unnecessary.  It revealed that they themselves knew their work to be fraudulent.

But Naomi has won great honor and glory for her work.  Far from being discredited, she has risen greatly in the world.  She is now a professor at Harvard.  With almost total Leftist control of the media, the bureaucracy and the educational system, the modern world floats on a sea of lies and Naomi is just one of many frauds -- which is why you get Donald Trump, the only prominent figure bold enough to trash completely the Left-led consensus.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Woe is me!


I forgot that it was Earth Hour in Australia on 19th.  You "save the planet" by turning off all your lights for one hour, allegedly.  In my evil planet-destroying way, I normally make a point of turning on every light in the house on Earth hour but missed doing that this time.  I had some lights on but not enough

Another personal gripe I have mentioned a few times concerns the fact that Warmists are having orgasms about the recent rise in average temperature in some places on earth.  This has been translated to give a global average that is higher than usual.  But that higher temperature is NOT global.  How do I know that?  My Crepe Myrtle (botanically "Lagerstroemia") trees tell me that.  Crepe Myrtles produce a great mass of blossom in various colors when they flower and Brisbane people really like flowering trees.  They are everywhere in Brisbane: Jacarandas, Poincianas and Crepe Myrtles, plus others.

The catch is that Crepe Myrtles originate in warm regions of India and are heat sensitive.  They blossom reliably only in the tropics.  When I lived in the tropics, we called them Christmas bushes because they came out just before Christmas in December.  In the subtropics where I now live, however, the warm weather is slower to arrive and they normally blossom in January.  And this year my eight trees did not blossom at all. So my locality experienced COOLING at the same time that global warming was being proclaimed.

So does that show anything?  It does.  It shows that the "smashing" temperature rise proclaimed by Jim Hansen was in fact so weak that it coincided  with cooling in some places.  It was not a "global" temperature rise at all.  It was only a rise in some places.  That is all one can accurately say about it

Below is part of what I saw when I looked out my backdoor in January, 2015:  17 metres of blossom right across my backyard




Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

More evidence that the recent global temperature uptick is not the result of human activities

The Cape Grim figures show that CO2 levels have been static during the recent temperature uptick and these new figures below show the same thing. But if CO2 figures have been static, they cannot have been driving a temperature uptick. These latest CO2 emission figures are probably a bit shaky, but no more so than other climate-related figures. At least there seems to be no evidence that they are massaged, unlike temperature data from NOAA and GISS

Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions held steady for the second year in a row while the economy grew, according to the International Energy Agency.

In a simple, two-column spreadsheet released yesterday, IEA showed that the world’s energy sector produced 32.14 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide in 2015, up slightly from 32.13 metric gigatons in 2014. Meanwhile, the global economy grew more than 3 percent.

Analysts credited the rise of renewables—clean energy made up more than 90 percent of new energy production in 2015—for keeping greenhouse gas emissions flat.

“The new figures confirm last year’s surprising but welcome news: we now have seen two straight years of greenhouse gas emissions decoupling from economic growth,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol in a press release. “Coming just a few months after the landmark COP21 agreement in Paris, this is yet another boost to the global fight against climate change.”

IEA, an energy cooperative and research firm with 29 member countries, has tracked global greenhouse gas emissions for 40 years and in that time witnessed only three other periods when global emissions fell, each associated with an economic recession.

The findings challenge assumptions that billowing smokestacks are harbingers of growing economies. They also indicate that a similar report last year was not a fluke but part of a larger trend of decoupling emissions from growth.

Mixed reactions greeted the findings.

Doug Vine, a senior energy fellow at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, said IEA’s announcement echoes past trends within many developed nations in which gross domestic product grew much faster than greenhouse gas emissions.

“This is the first time it’s showed up at the global level,” he said.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

February global temperature rise proves nothing


The shrill article below is panicking over February temperatures so I suppose I should point out a few obvious things.  I have really dealt with this nonsense before but a few comments anyway.

For a start, hanging anything on the figures for one month is dumb.  You can have unusually hot months in a year where there is no overall change.  Even figures for one year are rubbery.  Figures for years can go up and down but still show no overall trend.  You need a trend over a period of years to conclude anything.  2015 was a touch warmer but 2016 could be a touch cooler overall.  If we get an early return of La Nina, the later months of 2016 could be cool in the same way that the early months were warm.  That's all elementary stuff -- even if it is conspicuously overlooked below.

It was a bit boring writing all that freshman-level stuff above but I was listening to some Stravinsky while I wrote it so that kept me alert and happy

But now to get onto the specifics about February 2016:  According to NOAA (See here) The February 2016 temperature was 5.69°F above the C20 average.  That seems a lot.  One can understand it being called "whopping".  But wait a minute.  2005 was 4.12°F above the same average.  Was that "whopping" too?  Did that presage climate catastrophe?  Ten years later we can say that it clearly didn't.  And February 2015 was -0.85°F -- BELOW average.  Did that warn of an oncoming ice age?  Clearly not.  Hanging your hat on one month is brick thick. I really shouldn't have to point out what excreta the article below is.  Temperatures fluctuate but there is no statistically significant long-term trend.

So Feb 2016 was a bit higher than 2005. Why?  Easy:  El Nino. Despite what is said below, it was in fact TOTALLY due to El Nino. How do I know that?  Because it was NOT due to a rise in CO2.  The recent temperature rises did not fit neatly into any one year.  They were concentrated in late 2015 and early 2016,  And that is PRECISELY a period over which CO2 levels plateaued.  From August 2015 to February 2016, CO2 levels have been stuck on 398 ppm, according to the Cape Grim data.  CO2 levels over that period only varied by less than one part per million.  Annual changes before that were around 2 parts per million.

The big Warmist story is that warming is due to CO2 levels.  If that were so, the recent rise in temperature would be a mirror of rising CO2 levels.  But the CO2 levels belie that. They didn't rise.  Once again temperature and CO2 are disconnected. So El Nino is the only explanation left for the recent temperature uptick.  It is an entirely natural fluctuation with nothing to do with human actions.  That's what the data tells us.  Do look up the Cape Grim data yourself to check it


February shattered climate records, scientists worried we could see 2C warming within months.

Does everybody still believe global warming is a hoax? Yet more data confirms what scientists have feared for a long time, the planet is warming, and it may have passed a tipping point. The latest data now reveals that February 2016 was the hottest February on record, and it blew that record by a wide margin.

February is a cold month, especially in the northern hemisphere, so it's surprising to see that it was so hot. And hot is the right word to use. According to climate data, the entire northern hemisphere was 2.43 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than average, and a full  third of a degree hotter than the record.

Whens peaking of climate records, it is common to deal in tenths or even hundredths of a degree. To see a third of a degree, or, in this case, nearly two-and-a-half degrees, overall, is literally unprecedented. February 2016 is the first month in history that global average temperatures exceeded the 1.5 degree (Celsius) average.

Scientists also noted that the warmth was unusually concentrated in the Arctic, contributing to record ice melt and likely weather anomalies.

While El Nino can be blamed for some of the weather anomalies for 2015-2016, global warming also has a major role to play in both El Nino and overall temperature rise. Also, EL Nino, despite its hype, is  only responsible for a tenth of a degree Celsius rise in years when it occurs, which means the additional 1.2C degrees of warming cannot be attributed to the Pacific weather phenomenon.

The heart of the problem is simple thermodynamics. The planet is absorbing more radiation from the Sun than it is putting back out into space, resulting in a slow warming trend. The additional radiation is stored as heat, both in the atmosphere and in the oceans. Part of the reason for this imbalance appears to be rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels. Carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas, which traps heat. The increased heat increases evaporation, and water vapor is an even better store of heat energy, which causes yet more warming.

Scientists are alarmed because it has taken over a century to see the planet warm a full 1 degree Celsius. Now, in the past five months, the planet has warmed another half degree. Will we see 2 degrees before the summer is though? It's an alarming thought.

According to the most pessimistic global warming hypothesis, once the planet sees 2 degrees Celsius of average global warming, the climate trend will be virtually irreversible. The polar ice caps will melt, resulting in sea level rise and destroying cities. Shifts in weather patterns, as well as more extreme weather will destroy food crops and render some regions nearly uninhabitable. Mass extinctions of many species could occur.

These changes will impact humanity by forcing mass human migration, while also disrupting food and water supplies. This means more conflict and chaos overall.

Indeed, we have already seen the beginning of polar ice melts with Arctic ice now the lowest it has ever been recorded for a winter season. Animals, especially in the Arctic, are facing famine as food supplies run low. Polar bears are dying off in large numbers. And people are being impacted too. The warmer temperatures mean less snow and ice, which is hurting people whose lives depend on the snow and ice. As coastal villages thaw, erosion as well as a lack of food available for hunting is creating challenges all around the Arctic.

In the tropics, scientists are alarmed because around the world, they're observing the single greatest coral bleaching event in history.

Despite these well-documented changes, a hardcore of deniers continues to dispute that anything unnatural is happening, insisting that either humans are blameless, or that nothing unusual is happening at all. However, to believe this requires the denial of the nearly unanimous consensus of the scientific community.

Even climate skeptic Roy Spencer characterized the warming as "whopping."

Thousands of climate scientists around the world have no reason to lie about this basic truth: humans are pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere with predictable effect. If we are to survive the future without extreme climate disruption and mass extinctions, we need to curtail emissions. Scientists are not getting rich off these discoveries. However, the fossil fuel lobby, has been implicated in pushing climate change skepticism. The scandal is such that authorities in the U.S. have even discussed bringing suit against prominent deniers, much the same way the government sued those who claimed cigarette smoking wasn't harmful.

While few Americans would support such harsh action against climate deniers, their work is producing a discernible harm, as our nation fails to decisively tackle its own problems with CO2 emissions.

How hot does it have to get for us to see that the scientists are right? How many species need to go extinct before we start to care? How high does sea level need to rise before we act? How bad does global warming have to impact your life before you change your attitude?

SOURCE


Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

A libertarian Warmist?


Isn't he pretty?

It seems that Jerry Taylor is one.  He must be the only libertarian advocating a new tax.  He advocates a carbon tax in exchange for wiping all other State and Federal Warmist regulations.  And he states clearly that he believes in urgent action to limit CO2.  He is a Warmist.

When he was at Cato he was a climate skeptic.  He once compared Warmists to Maoists. Now he calls skeptics "denialists". So how come the big change?  He set up his own thinktank in 2014 called the Niskanen center.  It's stated objectives give the game away.  An excerpt:

Established in 2014, the Niskanen Center is a libertarian 501(c)(3) think tank that works to change public policy through direct engagement in the policymaking process: developing and promoting proposals to legislative and executive branch policymakers, building coalitions to facilitate joint action, and marshaling the most convincing arguments in support of our agenda.  The Center’s main audience is the Washington insiders – policy-oriented legislators, presidential appointees, career civil servants in planning, evaluation and budget offices, congressional committee staff, engaged academics, and interest group analysts – who together decide the pace and direction of policy change

He is getting on in years and he wants to be an insider.  Warmists are in power so he wants to be in there.  The sniff of power is what he wants.  He wants to feel significant before he dies.  He wants to feel important.  Ego has got the better of him.

His proposal to wipe all other Warmist regulations in exchange for a carbon tax  sounds like something that could be attractive to the Left and there may even be some sense in it but since we know what he really thinks it would seem that he has sold his soul for 30 pieces of silver.

There's some background on Taylor here and an interview with him here

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Cherrypicking is bad  -- except when I do it

That seems to be the Warmist idea.  The amusing Phil Plait has praised to the skies a long article by Tamino, an inveterate Warmist, which sets out incontrovertible evidence that global warming is real.  So I had a look at that article.  Tamino says:

"The satellite data for temperature in the troposphere is what senator Ted Cruz likes to use when he claims global warming isn’t happening. But he doesn’t show all of it — just the part after 1997. That way, he can start his graphs with that big fluctuation in 1997-1998, so that fluctuation will look like it’s part of the trend. It isn’t. But Ted Cruz wants you to think it is, so he won’t show you what happened before that — proper context would reveal how shallow his argument is."

So it's bad to choose  your starting points for a graph.  But Tamino himself does exactly that. His first graph starts from 1880 and his next one starts in 1970.  And so it goes.   He has many graphs and many different starting points for them.  They start wherever he needs them to start to make his case.  I won't reproduce anything further from his article but you can log on and see for yourself.

Tamino is very good at lying with statistics.  It would be amusing to see him start all his graphs from 1880.  In fact, if you look at his graph that does start from 1880, you can clearly see that warming levelled out from around the year 2000.  There was a rise last year but that was  due to the El Nino weather cycle. So there was some slight warming in C20 but none in the present century.  Will it resume?  Nobody knows.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Woman Accused of Removing Husband's Penis

(Kuala Pilah, Malaysia)

A 51-year-old woman who was accused of slicing off her husband's penis today changed her plea to 'not guilty' at the Sessions Court.

Fatimah Abdullah pleaded not guilty to slicing off her husband's genitals at Batu Kikir, Jempol, near here.

Fatimah made the plea after the interpreter indicated the charge against her before Judge Sazlina Safie.

Fatimah was charged with committing the act at a house in Batu Kikir, Jempol at 1.20am on Jan 20.

The accused was charged under Section 326 of the Penal Code for intentionally causing injury by a dangerous weapon to her Pakistani husband, Umar Rahman, 44, with a knife.

OK

Leftist projection and inability to learn

The concept of "authoritarianism" as an explanation for conservatism has been like catnip to Leftist psychologists.  They cannot leave it alone.  It first arose among a group of Jewish Marxists in the late 1940s and was published in a 1950 book called "The authoritaian personality" under the lead authorship of a prominent Marxist theoretician, Theodor Wiesengrund, who usually used as his surname the stage name of his Spanish dancer mother -- Adorno.

The theory underlying it failed in all sorts of ways so it fell out of favour after the '60s, though it still got an occasional mention. For more on the Adorno work see here

In the first half of his first book in 1981, "Bob" Altemeyer gave a comprehensive summary of the problems with the Adorno theory and submitted that it had to be discarded.  He then went on to put forward a slightly different theory and measuring instrument of his own that rebooted the concept of authoritarianism as an explanation of conservative thinking.

That theory and its accompanying measuring instrument (the RWA scale) also soon ran aground, however.  Altemeyer himself admitted that scores on the RWA scale were just about as high among Leftist voters as Rightist voters -- which rather ruined it as an explanation of conservatism.  The death knell came when it was revealed that the highest scorers on the RWA scale were in fact former Russian Communists!  Right wing Communists??  For more on Altemeyer's confusions see here

So the RWA scale lost most of its interest after that, though it is still cautiously used on some occasions -- e.g here.

But, as I mentioned yesterday, Leftist psychologists did not give up.  A group of them including Karen Stenner, Stanley Feldman, Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler revived the old ideas and invented a new questionnaire to measure the concept.  And reading their "new" theory is like a trip back into the 1940's.  Conservatives are still said to be sad souls who live in a state of constant and unreasonable  fear.

The amusing thing is that there is some reality behind their theory.  The key word is "unreasonable".  How much fear is "unreasonable"?  Is all fear "unreasonable"?  Obviously not.  Fear is an important survival mechanism.  We would all be eaten by lions etc. without it.  And conservatives do fear the probable results of the hare-brained schemes put forward by Leftists.  Conservatives are nothing if not cautious but to the superficial thinkers of the Left, that caution seems like fear.  So from a conservative viewpoint Leftists are not fearful enough.  They do not fear the "unforeseen" and adverse side effects that invariably accompany any implementation of their schemes.

So, despite the laughable psychometric characteristics of their new measuring instrument, which I set out yesterday, they have in fact achieved some grasp of reality.  They have just not grasped that caution can be a good thing and have not thought deeply enough about the distinction, if any, between caution and fear.  So all their writings amount to little more than an adverse value judgment of things that are in fact probably desirable.

So why all the mental muddle from them?  Why does the old "authoritarianism" catnip keep them coming back to that dubious concept?  Why have they not learnt from its past failures?  Easy:  It's all Freudian projection.  They see their own faults in conservatives.  The people who REALLY ARE authoritarian are Leftists themselves.  Communist regimes are ALWAYS authoritarian and in democracies the constant advocates of more and more government control over everything are the Left.  The Left are the big government advocates, not conservatives.  What could be more authoritarian than Obama's aim to "fundamentally transform" America? It is the Left who trust in big brother while conservatives just want to be left alone.

But somehow Leftist psychologists are blind to all that.  They appear to know nothing about the currents of day-to-day politics.  They are the sad souls who are so out of touch with reality as to be pitiable.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).  

Medical journal editors make fools of themselves

The major British medical journals are heavily politicized -- both Lancet and BMJ.  Lancet even criticized the Iraq intervention under  George Bush II.  When they stick to their knitting -- medical research -- they do publish some good studies and are prestigious because of that.  But the people running the journals are obviously Left-leaning -- like most academics -- so they can't help misusing the platform they have to hand in order to promote their Leftist views.

That is of course bound to be an amusing exercise.  Leftist claims are so counter-factual that a political study is bound to require all sorts of distortions and evasions to make any case at all.  And the political studies they do publish are so unscholarly that the editors have obviously put their brain into  neutral before publishing them.

The latest such study in Lancet ("Firearm legislation and firearm mortality in the USA: a cross-sectional, state-level study") is a good example of that.  It purports to show that some gun control laws do reduce deaths from guns.  But the methodology behind the  article is so naive that no such study would normally get published in a good academic journal.

What the researchers did was to look at gun deaths in the various States of the USA and compare the death rates with the various gun control laws in the various states.  And they found that States with strict laws (e.g. Massachusetts) had fewer deaths per head than did States with more relaxed laws (e.g. Louisiana). And from that they concluded that certain gun control laws should be implemented nationwide.  And if that were done gun deaths would drop dramatically nationwide.

Can anybody see something wrong with that reasoning? I am inclined to think that anyone with an IQ over 100 could.  The study is an example of a fallacy that is all too common in the medical research literature:  The fallacy that correlation is causation.  If you ever do a course in logic, one of the first things you will be told is that correlation is NOT causation.  To prove causation you need a strictly controlled before-and-after study.

To show how fallacious the reasoning is in the Lancet study, let me cautiously suggest that there are other factors that could lie behind the correlation between gun control and gun deaths.  Let me suggest, for instance, entirely hypothetically, of course, that Massachusetts might have fewer gun deaths, not because of its laws but because they have fewer people there from a certain population segment that is more prone to gun deaths and crime generally.  I am not going to nominate the population segment concerned because that does not affect the argument.  But if the thought "Massachusetts has fewer blacks" pops into your mind, who am I to correct you?  Entirely as a matter of academic interest of course, Mass. is less than 2% black and Louisiana is about a third black.

The study might have been of some interest if it had controlled for other factors. So I read the study carefully looking for that.   But in fact they controlled for unemployment rate only.  Control for race would be politically incorrect, of course.  All men are equal, don't you know?  It would be a compliment to call the study sophomoric. It is a disgrace to the journal.  By normal scientific standards, it should never have been published.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

New Report Says Science Can Estimate Influence of Climate Change on Some Types of Extreme Events

"For years scientists have given almost a rote response to the question of whether an instance of weird weather was from global warming, insisting that they can't attribute any single event to climate change. But "the science has advanced to the point that this is no longer true as an unqualified blanket statement," the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has reported".  So says good ol' Seth Borenstein of AP.  The Academy press release below tells more.

But the whole thing is just climate theology: untestable guesswork.  The most basic element of science is testability. If a proposition is not testable, it is not science.  When the Warmists can make accurate predictions, their propositions will have been successfully tested, but they have never managed to do that. The estimates below can be challenged by other estimates but that is still proof of nothing


It is now possible to estimate the influence of climate change on some types of extreme events, such as heat waves, drought, and heavy precipitation, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.  The relatively new science of extreme event attribution has advanced rapidly in the past decade owing to improvements in the understanding of climate and weather mechanisms and the analytical methods used to study specific events, but more research is required to increase its reliability, ensure that results are presented clearly, and better understand smaller scale and shorter duration weather extremes such as hurricanes and thunderstorms, said the committee that conducted the study and wrote the report.

“An increasingly common question after an extreme weather event is whether climate change ‘caused’ that event to occur,” said committee chair David W. Titley, professor of practice in meteorology and founding director of the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk at the Pennsylvania State University.  "While that question remains difficult to answer given all the factors that affect an individual weather event, we can now say more about how climate change has affected the intensity or likelihood of some events.”

Extreme event attribution is a fairly new area of climate science that explores the influence of human-caused climate change on individual or classes of extreme events compared with other factors, such as natural sources of climate and weather variability.  The science typically estimates how the intensity or frequency of an event has been altered by climate change and provides information that can be used to assess and manage risk, guide climate adaptation strategies, and determine greenhouse gas emissions targets.  For example, in the wake of a devastating event, communities may need to make a decision about whether to rebuild or relocate and need input on how much more likely or more severe this type of event is expected to become in the future.

Some extreme event attribution studies use observational records to compare a recent event with similar events that occurred in the past, when the influence of human-caused climate change was much less.  Other studies use climate and weather models to compare the meteorological conditions associated with an extreme event in simulated worlds with and without human-caused climate changes.  The report finds that results are most reliable when multiple, different methods are used that incorporate both a long-term historical record of observations and models to estimate human influences on a given event.

The most dependable attribution findings are for those events related to an aspect of temperature, for which there is little doubt that human activity has caused an observed change in the long-term trend, the report notes.  For example, a warmer climate increases the likelihood of extremely hot days and decreases the likelihood of extremely cold days.  Long-term warming is also linked to more evaporation that can both exacerbate droughts and increase atmospheric moisture available to storms, leading to more severe heavy rainfall and snowfall events.  However, temperature alone does not fully determine the probabilities of extreme events.  Attributing specific extreme events to long-term climate change may be complicated by factors such as natural long-term fluctuations in the ocean surface temperatures.

Statements about event attribution are sensitive to the way the questions are framed and the context within which they are posed, the report says.  For example, choices need to be made about defining the duration of the event, the geographic area impacted, what physical variables to study, what metrics to examine, and what observations or models to use.  These assumptions and choices can lead to large differences in the interpretation of the results, and should be clearly stated.

The committee supported continued advancements in weather and climate modeling, and noted that focused research on weather and climate extremes would improve event attribution capabilities.  In addition, community standards for attributing classes of extreme events would make it easier to compare results from multiple studies.  Objective event selection and definition criteria could reduce potential selection bias and help elucidate how individual events fit into the broader picture of climate change.

Event attribution is retrospective, but the report calls for the development of predictive weather-to-climate forecasts of future extreme events that account for natural variability and human influences.  This could be based on concepts and practices within the Numerical Weather Prediction framework, including routine verification of forecasts using observations and rigorous approaches to improving the forecast system.

SOURCE  

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Should political lies be prosecuted as libel?

The Israeli writer below is unthinking.  He says "Hate Speech Is Not Free Speech".  But it is.  If we allow that hate speech can be banned, anything you disagree with can be banned.  It is the ultimate slippery slope.

A more sophisticated writer might have argued that political lies should be prosecuted, as Donald Trump argues.  Lies are are an essential feature of libel and libel has never been protected speech.  And the words deplored below are clearly libel.  The Israeli government could well launch a lawsuit claiming that Israel has been libelled by the lies concerned.

Israeli lawyer Nitsana Darshan-Leitner already does some of that in a private capacity.

It is not hate speech that should be prosecuted.  It is lies


University professors enjoy the benefits of academic freedom and free speech. These cherished concepts are essential ingredients in the unhindered exchange and flow of ideas.

Joy Karega, a non-tenured assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at Oberlin College, a liberal arts institution in the state of Ohio, made an utter mockery of these hallowed principles by spewing out a toxic torrent of antisemitic screeds on her Facebook page.

Let’s be absolutely clear.

These rants could have been written by a neo-Nazi foaming at the mouth. They certainly have no place in civilized discourse. That they were posted by a woman of color is surprising and disappointing. African Americans, having been the victims of prejudice and violence, should be aware that racism is a malignancy that undermines and demeans society at large.

Has Karega fallen under the baneful influence of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan?

With her eyes wide open, she crossed a dangerous line and entered the realm of antisemitic incitement. Not for a second can she claim that her vile and ignorant comments are protected by the sanctity of the First Amendment.

She should be severely reprimanded, if not punished.

In a series of posts in the past few years, which she has since taken down, Karega issued a litany of baseless and absurd accusations.

She claimed that Israel was behind the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States and the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris in 2015. These are the kind of accusations that come from the filthy mouths of antisemites and Islamic radicals, who have a lot in common.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

Another coverup: NOAA Radiosonde Data Shows No Warming For 58 Years

In their “hottest year ever” press briefing, NOAA included a  graph, which stated that they have a 58 year long radiosonde temperature record. But they only showed the last 37 years in the graph.

Here is why they are hiding the rest of the data. The earlier data showed as much pre-1979 cooling as the post-1979 warming.

I combined the two graphs at the same scale below, and put a horizontal red reference line in, which shows that the earth’s atmosphere has not warmed at all since the late 1950’s


(Bigger graph here)

The omission of this data from the NOAA report, is just their latest attempt to defraud the public. NOAA’s best data shows no warming for 60 years. But it gets worse. The graph in the NOAA report shows about 0.5C warming from 1979 to 2010, but their original published data shows little warming during that period.

Due to Urban Heat Island Effects, the NOAA surface data shows nearly one degree warming from 1979 to 2010, but their original radiosonde data showed little warming during that time. Global warming theory is based on troposphere warming, which is why the radiosonde data should be used by modelers – instead of the UHI contaminated surface data

More HERE. (See the original for links and more graphics)

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

The Real Matt Lynch

Commercials against Matt Lynch, candidate for Ohio's District 14 US Representative, are now prevalent on TV. They show a cartoon version of the conservative Republican running for Congress and suggest that he is anything but conservative and will spend taxpayer money irresponsibly. Whoa! What?

Never believe what you hear without doing your own research! When Googling "Matt Lynch," the very first entry is an ad for a website called "The Real Matt Lynch." The website is "Paid for by Friends of Dave Joyce" (his incumbent opponent) and is wrought with inaccurate statements about Mr. Lynch's record. For example:

The website says with respect to his Pro-Life stance:

"Voted against heartbeat informed consent requirement"

Hmmm, where did they get that? Matt Lynch actually co-sponsored HB-248 "Prohibits Abortions After Detection of Fetal Heartbeat."

Matt Lynch also co-sponsored and voted FOR the budget bill (HB-59) that he supposedly voted AGAINST. There are other strange statements (i.e., lies) attacking Matt Lynch on "The Real Matt Lynch" website.

Also, check out Matt Lynch's ratings compared to Dave Joyce's ratings on the Vote Smart website.

Comparing voting records and ratings by various evaluating organizations, Matt Lynch appears to be "The Real Conservative."

Posted by Note Taker

Hatred of Truth as Freudian denial

The following essay is by psychohistorian Richard Koeingsberg.  Psychohistorians are particularly interested in the Hitler episode and rightly see Nazism as a pursuit of the old Leftist dream of an ideal, Edenic society.  Greenies are the chief modern-day exponents of that.  What Koenigsberg says below is very relevant to the furious hatred that conservatives often encounter from Leftists these days

At the 1997 Annual Holocaust Conference, I attended a lecture by Dr. John Weiss on “The Ideology of Death” (he had just published Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany).
In the course of the discussion, he mentioned “the hated Goldhagen.” Apparently, the audience understood what he meant—because a substantial conversation ensued about “the hated Goldhagen.”

I wondered what this was about. I’d attended over 100 conferences by then and many presentations—and had never heard academics speak like this. Indeed, the reigning ideology of the time was “Everyone is entitled to his (or her) own discourse.”

Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners was published in 1996. Apparently, the book generated enormous controversy among academics in the United States as well as Germany. The book became a best-seller.

What was all the fuss about?

I read the book—all 656 pages. It’s the richest, most dynamic book I’ve ever read on the Holocaust—and I’ve read quite a few.

Apparently, people took issue with Goldhagen’s claim that there was a uniquely German anti-Semitism, and that many Germans killed willfully—responding to their hatred of Jews.

I won’t address the substance of Goldhagen’s arguments here. Rather, I’d like to discuss the issue of hatred—why someone might be “hated” for putting forth certain propositions or theories.

Of course, we’ve seen this occur many times. Freud was hated and condemned for his theory of sexuality: his discovery that sexual desire plays a profound role in shaping our lives.

Similarly, people did not take kindly to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution—showing how human beings have descended from “lower” forms of animal life. Darwin’s ideas, like those of Freud, generated disagreement that took the form of anger, even rage.

It’s not difficult to understand that the theories of Freud and Darwin generated hostility because many people found their ideas disturbing, or painful. People become angry when confronted with truths they find unpleasant. Anger or hatred serves in the name of pushing away—disavowing—certain ideas. Hatred is a form of denial.

This dynamic of hatred as denial is no less operative today than it was a century ago. Each culture (including each academic culture) embraces certain beliefs as if they are absolutes—and reacts violently to ideas that contradict their world view.

Can everyone be wrong? Can entire cultures embrace ideas that have no foundation in reality? Can many ideas that society puts forth turn out to be nonsense? I have found this to be the case.

I often ask people: “How many Jews do you think were in Germany in 1933—out of a population of 65 million?” I get answers of 5 million, 10 million, even 20 or 30 million. The correct answer is: there were approximately 500,000 Jews in Germany in 1933, half of 1%.

I no longer find it fruitful to debate the point that Jews were killed for no reason at all. People have difficulty with this idea. They insist there must have been some reason that the Nazis acted as they did.

There weren’t any reasons. Hitler and the many Germans were embroiled in a shared fantasy. Entire societies can be wrong. Many cultural ideas—that people fervently believe are true—turn out to have no foundation in reality.

On the surface, people challenged Goldhagen because they believed his theories were “wrong;” not supported by the evidence; or because they felt his scholarship was suspect. But why would someone be “hated” for a theory that was incorrect?

At the Holocaust conference, Goldhagen was invited to give the keynote address, “The Holocaust in the Context of the 20th Century.” I arrived early to set up the Library of Social Science Book Exhibit. Enjoying the sights of the Millersville campus, I spotted conference director Jack Fischel walking with someone at a distance. Perhaps he was taking Goldhagen out to lunch?

Ah, I reflected, that couldn’t. The person walking with Jack was a slight, unimposing young man. Could this be “the hated Goldhagen?” Based on the way people spoke about him, I imagined Goldhagen as having a commanding, threatening presence.


Daniel Goldhagen

The young man walking with Jack Fischel indeed was Daniel Goldhagen. I met him later when he came to check out the books in the exhibit room. He was a warm, gentle person. Nothing whatsoever to “hate.”

We began rapping. I explained to him why I thought many people were disturbed by his theories. I gave him a copy of Hitler’s Ideology (no charge). We were having a great conversation.

But then Jack Fischel was at the door. The lecture was about to begin (down the hall from the exhibit room). Goldhagen couldn’t tear himself away. Fischel called his name several times; finally, he departed. Time to go back to work, do his job, earn his fee.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

NASA study shows worst drought in 900 years may be behind Middle East upheaval

This is actually a rather old story but this time we are relying on dendrochronology.  Amusing that tree rings in other Warmist studies are said to represent temperature but below are said to represent water shortage. Versatile!  I wonder which button you push to get the two different readings? Obviously, what you make of them is very much open to interpretation -- and we can expect only one interpretation from Warmists: Doom!

But even if we take the study seriously, it's just guesswork that attributes the severity of the drought to global warming.  The Saharah was once lush but went into drought.  Was that because of all those ancient Egyptians running around in SUVs when they weren't building pyramids?  Climates certainly change but nobody so far has been able to predict it

And right in the middle of it is Israel, which has NO water shortages these days.  Clearly politics is the crucial difference in providing water to farmers.  Has Israel seized everybody else's water?  No. Only Israel desalinates

I am actually rather peeved at the moment over the cooling that has gone on in my neck of the woods. In January, I normally have a 17 metre long solid expanse of blossom from my eight Crepe Myrtle trees.  But they missed out entirely this year.  No blossom. They are temperature sensitive.  They need solid high temperatures for weeks to bloom.  And we just did not have that this year.  So does that indicate global cooling?  No.  Any more than drought in the Middle East indicates warming.  It just indicates unpredictable natural variability

And drought usually goes with cooling, not warming.  Warm oceans give off more water vapour which brings rain.  So are we saying that the Middle East has been really cool in recent years?  Could be

And are we allowed to mention that it's actually ISIS causing all the trouble over there -- and not global warming?


THE incredibly complex chaos of Islamic State and the upheavals of Syria and Iraq may have a very simple cause: The region’s worst drought in 900 years.

A NASA study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres shows the Middle East is in the grip of a mega-drought that began in 1998. It has taken hold in Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey.

The water shortage has been taking a steadily increasing toll on farmers and the region’s ecology, with crop failures, dust storms and record-breaking heat now an annual event.

But the true extent of the drought is only now becoming clear.

“The range of how extreme wet or dry periods were is quite broad, but the recent drought in the Levant region stands out as about 50 per cent drier than the driest period in the past 500 years, and 10 to 20 per cent drier than the worst drought of the past 900 years,” a NASA statement reads.

NASA climate scientists have been mapping a database of the Mediterranean and Middle East’s tree rings — the pattern in which a plant’s new growth is laid upon itself each season — spanning several thousand years.

Tree rings are a kind of ecological fingerprint.  Each band reveals how much water the tree has been taking in, and how optimal conditions were for growth.  When a tree goes through a period of drought, the bands get thinner. The more thin bands, the longer the drought.

Mapping when — and where — these trees were suffering water starvation offers an opportunity to understand the natural variation in the areas weather.

“If we look at recent events and we start to see anomalies that are outside this range of natural variability, then we can say with some confidence that it looks like this particular event or this series of events had some kind of human caused climate change contribution,” says lead author of the study Ben Cook.

In the case of the Middle East, a wide-reaching drought spanning more than 15 years has not been seen for more than 900 years.

Historical documents dating from 1100AD were used to corroborate the accuracy of the tree-ring map.

The flood of refugees out of the Middle East and into Europe is a natural consequence of the conditions, the study infers.

Historically, when there is drought in the Eastern Mediterranean, there is no escape to the west. Both ends tend to suffer at the same time. Which generates cause for conflict.

“It’s not necessarily possible to rely on finding better climate conditions in one region than another, so you have the potential for large-scale disruption of food systems as well as potential conflict over water resources,” says co-author Kevin Anchukaitis.

But the patterns established over thousands of years do suggest refuge: To the north.

When eastern North Africa is dry, Greece, Italy, France and Spain tend to be wet. And vice-versa.

From these patterns, the NASA scientists were able to identify the engines behind the Middle East’s weather: The North Atlantic Oscillation and the East Atlantic Pattern.

These regular wind patterns over the Atlantic are themselves driven by oceanic currents and temperatures. Periodically they push rainstorms away from the Mediterranean, instead causing long dry winds to circulate in their place.

The NASA research shows that this time, however, the drought is different. Its behaviour does not match the patterns clearly established over the past thousand of years.

“The Mediterranean is one of the areas that is unanimously projected as going to dry in the future [due to man-made climate change],” climate scientist Yochanan Kushnir states in the NASA release.

SOURCE  

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

 Who made Trump the frontrunner?

There seems to be an emerging agreement that America's Leftist hegemony did.  Obama and the Democrats did -- along with their sycophants in the media, the bureaucracy and the education system.  They have foisted on America so many weird forms of correctness that the ordinary American has been left completely out of it:

Homosexuals are glorious; Men who feel they are women should be allowed to use women's restrooms; Fighting global warming is the main job of the armed forces;  Only Muslims are allowed to pray in public; Christians must betray their faith in the service of homosexuals; little kids must be given lessons about sex; Women should be put into frontline combat as Marines; you must not say anything negative about Muslims or illegal immigrants or blacks etc etc.

All of these positions go against the grain for normal people but it is they who are told they are wrong, not the Leftist establishment.  And if you express your honest opinion you run the risk of losing your job.

And the GOP have been no help.  They just fall in line behind the Democrats on most issues. They agree that you must not say anything negative about Muslims or illegal immigrants or blacks etc etc.  The GOP have been bullied into submission by Leftist shrillness.

Whether Trump has good policies or bad on various things hardly matters compared to the chance he gives of escaping from the Leftist mental straitjacket. His "incorrectness" is his main appeal

And note that his degree is in economics so he is unlikely to do anything foolish with the economy, which would be a welcome change

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

"Old sooty material"!  A change off CO2

Warmists are always telling us that Greenland ice is melting and it's all due to CO2 in the air.  But below we read that "Old sooty material" in the ice is the culprit


Greenland's snowy surface has been getting darker over the past 20 years, absorbing more heat from the sun and increasing snow melt.

That's the conclusion of a 30-year study of satellite data, which found that the darkening and melting have accelerated due to 'feedback loops'.

The trend is set to continue, with the surface's reflectivity - or albedo - decreasing by as much as 10 per cent by the end of the century, researchers said.

The findings have global implications, because fresh meltwater pouring into the ocean from Greenland raises sea levels and could affect ocean ecology.

While soot blowing in from wildfires contributes to the problem, experts were surprised to find they are not driving the change.

Professor Marco Tedesco, a researcher at Columbia University and adjunct scientist at Nasa Goddard Institute of Space Studies, said the darkening is caused by old sooty material locked below the surface of the ice sheet.

As the ice starts to melt in summer, dust and soot are exposed and darken the pristine snowy surface. Then, as the snow refreezes, the grains get larger because they become stuck together.

Both the old dark material and the new grainier snow decrease the reflectivity of the ice sheet – a property called the albedo – particularly in the infrared range.

This means that more solar radiation is absorbed, leading to faster melting in a potentially-disastrous feedback loop.

The study used satellite data from 1981 to 2012 and found that, at first, there was very little change.

But from about 1996, the darkening increased and the ice began absorbing about two per cent more solar radiation per decade.

At the same time, summer temperatures in Greenland increased by about 0.74°C per decade, due to the effects of the North Atlantic Oscillation.

This is a natural large-scale weather cycle bringing warm, moist air from the south.

The pattern shifted back again in 2013 to 2014, but by then the ice sheet had become more sensitive and surface melting spiked again in 2015.

'It's a complex system of interaction between the atmosphere and the ice sheet surface,' Professor Tedesco said.

'You don't necessarily have to have a "dirtier" snowpack to make it dark.

'It might look clean to our eyes but be more effective in absorbing solar radiation.'

'Overall, what matters, it is the total amount of solar energy that the surface absorbs. This is the real driver of melting.'

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).

The Left are amusing: The "authoritarianism" explanation for Trump support

On Feb 25 I put up some comments on the accusation that Trump supporters are "authoritarian".  The article I critiqued was based on some research by a PR man named Matthew MacWilliams.

The claim is that "authoritarians" are fear-motivated and that Trump panders to those fears.  That authoritarians are fear motivated is a claim that goes back a long way.  Erich Fromm asserted it in the '50s and various subsequent authors have made feeble attempts to prove it, e.g. Sales, S. (1973). Careful researchers would use a measure of fear motivation and a measure of authoritarianism and try to show that the two were correlated.  But MacWilliams and his gurus skipped that awkward step as far as I can see.  They just defined authoritarianism in their own way and noted that it showed correlations with some fears.  That their measure of authoritarianism was in fact a measure of anything authority-related was not shown.  As far as I can see it at most measures old-fashioned thinking. But even the academic work that MacWilliams relies on -- work by Feldman & Stenner (1997) -- concedes that there is no direct relationship between authoritarianism and threat/fear.

And the research made elementary mistakes -- indicating a profound ignorance of the precautions that psychometricians normally take when doing survey research.  Recently, however, a new and much expanded article based on the MacWilliams research has emerged -- under the title "The rise of American authoritarianism", written by Amanda Taub.

I think my previous comments were sufficient to show that the work is a lot of hokum but maybe I can add a few more comments.

I might initially expand my comments about the naive nature of the questions they used to assess authoritarianism. They were "forced-choice" questions.  A typical question was

"Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: to be considerate or to be well-behaved?".

The option you chose was supposed to indicate whether you are authoritarian or not.  But what if you thought that BOTH attributes are important?  What if you wanted a kid who was BOTH considerate AND well-behaved?  The form of the question prevents you from saying that.  So the answers given might not well represent what the person actually thinks.

So is that naive form of question construction actually misleading?  It is. If the people don't like the choices they are offered, what is likely to happen is that a "Donkey vote" effect will result: If the choices in a forced-choice scale are labelled "a" and "b", the Donkey voter will, at the extreme, simply tick all the "a"s.  And I showed in my own survey research years ago that forced choice questions can push the results in a direction more or less opposite to what occurs with more straightforward questions

I think that alone invalidates their conclusions but "Wait! There's more"! -- as the steak-knife salesman said.

The "authoritarianism" researchers say that Trump appeals to "authoritarians" as defined by them and that Trump is the ideal candidate for authoritarians. So virtually all authoritarians should support him, it would seem.   So I was amused to read this about their research findings:

"Trump has ...  a full 52 percent support among very high authoritarians."

What a laugh!  Even high authoritarians split roughly 50/50 in support for Trump.  Nearly half of these sad people DON'T support Trump.  Where does that leave Trump as the ideal candidate for authoritarians?  As is common in Leftist researchers, they can't even read their own data.  They conclude what they want to conclude, regardless of their actual findings.  Keeping reality out is an essential skill for Leftists.

So they have a lovely theory but it happens to be wrong.  So they might have to accept that there really is something rotten in the state of American politics, and Donald Trump is bringing that to the fore.  The fault may lie with the political establishment, not with the personal inadequacies of Trump supporters.

Reference:

Sales, S. (1973) "Threat as a factor in authoritarianism".  J.  Personality & Social Psychology, 28, 44-57.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).  

It's Trump

A lot of Trump's positions clash with orthodox GOP policies but most GOP politicans are overlooking that Trump is obviously offering the public what they want.  It may therefore  be the orthodox positions that have to change.  Since most of those positions are designed to fit in within the straitjacket of Leftist political correctness, that could be a really good thing.

Trump seems likely to break the grip that Leftist  thinking has on American politics.  The GOP establishment have certainly shown no willingness or ability to break out from the Leftist mental straitjacket  -- which is why Trump has appeal.

Some of Trump's policies seem economically destructive to informed people but they are overlooking that his degree is in  economics.  Whatever he does is therefore likely to be tokenism rather than anything seriously destructive economically

The Gipper was derided as a fool too and his degree was in economics also.  And he broke out of the straitjacket of conventional thinking in his time.  Rather than appease the Soviets he said:  "I've got another idea:  We win, they lose".  And that was greeted with gasps of incredulity too.  But it came about


Donald Trump, leading a seismic transformation of the modern Republican Party, leapt closer to securing its presidential nomination with a near sweep of Super Tuesday states, scoring strong wins across the conservative Deep South, in liberal parts of New England, and almost everywhere in between.

With states that hold a quarter of the US population voting, Trump won among almost every demographic, robbing his rivals of room to claim victory and putting him into a commanding position that has flabbergasted the party establishment.

Just after the polls closed, Trump was declared the winner in Massachusetts, winning support from working-class voters around the state. He also won Vermont.

“We have expanded the Republican Party,” Trump said from Palm Beach, Fla. “I’m a unifier. I know people are going to find that hard to believe. But I am a unifier.”

Senator Ted Cruz claimed his home state of Texas as well as Oklahoma, allowing Cruz to argue that he is the GOP’s best alternative to Trump. Senator Marco Rubio, despite a flood of establishment endorsements and cash, notched his lone victory in the Minnesota caucus, helping Cruz prevent Trump from making a clean sweep of all 11 states that voted Tuesday.

Anger at Washington and a yearning for a leader to shake things up continued to fuel Trump’s extraordinary popularity. Exit polls showed that Southern Republicans were more likely to say they were “angry” with the government. Voters in nearly all states said they wanted an outsider in the Oval Office.

The Republican Party establishment has been flummoxed by Trump for months — with increasing alarm about his anti-immigrant and divisive rhetoric — but only recently has mobilized against him.

Top Republican congressional leaders Tuesday took a dramatic step to distance themselves from Trump, denouncing some of his comments when he declined over the weekend to immediately denounce the endorsement of David Duke, the former leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

“If a person wants to be the nominee of the Republican Party, there can be no evasion and no games,” House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters on Capitol Hill. “They must reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry. This party does not prey on people’s prejudices. We appeal to their highest ideals. This is the party of Lincoln.”

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell was equally forceful, saying, “Senate Republicans condemn David Duke, the KKK, and his racism.”

“There has been a lot of talk in the last 24 hours about one of our presidential candidates and his seeming ambivalence about David Duke and the KKK, so let me make it perfectly clear,” he said. “That is not the view of Republicans who have been elected to the United States Senate, and I condemn his views in the most forceful way.”

The Republican leader found himself straddling a difficult line between trying to avoid lasting damage from his party but also not dismiss the candidate who is winning overwhelmingly in state after state.

“If I’m going to win all these states tonight,” Trump said, “it’s awfully hard to say this is not the person we want to lead the party.”

Trump said he didn’t know Ryan very well. “I’m sure I’ll get along with him,” he said. “And if I don’t? He’ll have to pay a big price.”

With 595 delegates at stake across 11 states — and record turnouts in many of them — Trump was in a position to take a dominant role in the nomination contest. Although the delegates Tuesday will be awarded proportionally, Trump is likely to win a large share of them.

“Maybe the establishment needs to get out, too,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News Tuesday morning. “When you see what’s going on. They’ve lost two elections in a row. Big ones. The last one with Mitt Romney should have been easy.”

Trump also said Rubio should drop out of the race.

“I think he has to get out,” Trump said. “He hasn’t won anything, and Ted Cruz very rightly points out Marco has not won.”

According to CNN exit polls, voters who described themselves as “angry” turned out in Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Texas, whereas Republicans in Northern states reported being “dissatisfied” with the government but not angry. Voters in nearly all states — with the exception of Texas and Vermont — said they were looking for an outsider candidate.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).  

What Are The Chances Of Getting All These Record Hot Years Without The Extra Greenhouse Gases?

This little post is a potboiler aimed at debunking a Warmist potboiler.

Graham Readfearn labours long in the Garden of Warmism.  He is a freelance writer so has to keep churning the stuff out. Hence the potboiler he has written below.  I note parenthetically that he is of Northern English origin but has now settled in Brisbane, where I live. Maybe I should invite him over for a cup of tea and some cake one day and see if I can find out what makes him tick.  Northern grievance?  Could be.

I am mentioning his piece because similar claims are made "ad nauseam" by Warmists and yet are grossly deceptive.  No one who has seen an actual graphical and numerical plot of 21st century temperatures would be in any doubt that it is utter BS.  So, to start, here is one plot:



What you see is a plateaued number series.  In some years the temperature goes up a bit while in others it goes down a bit -- with no overall trend, no sign of warming going on.  But before that plateau, temperatures were lower.  So they are all hotter than that previous period, however specified.  There was some warming prior to the plateau but it has now stopped.

But Warmists never mention a plateau.  They pretend that all those hotter years were hotter than one-another, when they are not.  A series of "hot" years COULD indicate steady warming or it could indicate a plateau.  Warmists pretend that the obviously wrong explanation is the right one.

Is there such a thing as an honest Warmist?

But it is reasonable to ask why the graph supplied by Readfearn shows a great leaping line whereas my graph above shows a flat line?  What gives?



Easy:  With all graphs you have to look at the calibrations on both axes.  And if you do that, you see that Readfearn depicts an entirely different period from my graph above.  His graph goes back to 1880 whereas my graph shows the current situation only. And during the C20, there WAS some slight warming.  But that has now ceased in C21.

The rise in temperature on Readfearn's graph doesn't look slight but again the trick is to look at the calibrations.  It is calibrated in tenths of one degree Celsius only.  So it DOES show very slight warming.  It just uses a visual trick (widely-spaced  calibrations) to make the rise seem dramatic.

Since this is a potboiler, I should perhaps mention one remaining issue:  Warmists don't accept that there has been a complete temperature plateau.  They are always declaring some year to be the warmest, third warmist etc.  But again they are being deceptive.  The differences between years that they are talking about are tiny  -- in hundredths of one degree -- so are not significant statistically or in any other sense


From hot to fractionally less hot, here are the planet’s ten warmest years on record – 2015, 2014, 2010, 2005, 2007, 2013, 2009, 1998, 2002 and 2006.

These are the numbers according to NASA and include measurements taken on land and at sea in a record that goes back to the year 1880.

Now that’s a pretty remarkable run of hot years for an era when, according to the rusted-on professional climate science denialists, global warming was supposed to have stopped.

But what are the chances of getting a run of “hottest on record” years like that - 14 of the 16 hottest years all happening since 2000 - without all the extra greenhouse gases that humans have been judiciously stockpiling in the atmosphere and oceans?

Well, the chances of this happening, climate scientist Professor Michael Mann tells me, are… wait for it…  one-in-13000.  Mann, of Penn State University, is the lead author of a new paper published in Nature’s Scientific Reports.

The study takes in data up to 2014, when the chance of that hot streak was one-in-10000.  Since the study was submitted, Mann has re-run the numbers to include the new “hottest year” of 2015, giving us the one-in-13000 number.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).