Al Bore Blather

[Minstrel]

They can't even predict the weather tomorrow accurately, let alone 100 years from now..

Predicting the weather is meteorology. Predicting (and studying the past) climate is climatology. These are two different fields.

 

[Minstrel]

Carbon emissions have been increasing yearly since 1998, yet temperatures have not been increasing at a similar rate. In fact, 2008 was cooler than 1998, which means an overall temperature cooling in the same period.

Incorrect. What it means is that there was a high spike in 1998, not that the trend reversed from that point on.

1998 was indeed hotter than 2008, but it was a high spike in a general warming trend.

 

[PapaG]

Incorrect. What it means is that there was a high spike in 1998, not that the trend reversed from that point on.

1998 was indeed hotter than 2008, but it was a high spike in a general warming trend.

The bill of goods being sold is that carbon emissions have a direct causal effect on the warming of the planet. My post about the lack of correlation between still-rising carbon output versus a decreasing temperature still stands. Unless, of course, you have some 10-year data that shows a direct relationship between post-1998 carbon output and rising temperature.

Your graph shows a comparative value from a mean and not actual temperature, BTW, and it leaves out the 1930s, which had years hotter than 1998.

 

[Minstrel]

The bill of goods being sold is that carbon emissions have a direct causal effect on the warming of the planet.

No, the theory is that carbon emissions are part of what is driving increased temperatures, not that it is a pure casual relationship. Climatologists say that climate cycles naturally, but other factors (like carbon emissions) are increasingly shifting the temperature. So there wouldn't be a perfect correspondence between carbon emissions and temperatures, just that carbon emissions are pushing temperatures beyond where they'd be without carbon emissions. And that over time, unchecked, it can create temperatures that will have seriously adverse effects on life on Eath.

My graph doesn't prove that, but I didn't post it for that purpose. I posted it to show that there certainly hasn't been cooling over the past decade, even though 1998 was hotter than 2008.

To be clear in my position on global warming, I think Gore's presentation, while there's some real science in it, takes a more definitive position than the science community does and is overly alarmist. The main thing that it doesn't account for is the fact that technology is going to increase drastically over the next 10, 20 and 50 years, which will lead to greater and greater energy efficiency and the ability to clean the environment in ways we currently can't.

So, if technology just stopped progressing today but more and more industrialization took place, I think it's correct that temperatures could be pushed to dangerous levels. But since technology isn't going to stop progressing, I doubt that dangerous temperatures will result from manmade means.

 

[PapaG]

No, the theory is that carbon emissions are part of what is driving increased temperatures, not that it is a pure casual relationship. Climatologists say that climate cycles naturally, but other factors (like carbon emissions) are increasingly shifting the temperature. So there wouldn't be a perfect correspondence between carbon emissions and temperatures, just that carbon emissions are pushing temperatures beyond where they'd be without carbon emissions. And that over time, unchecked, it can create temperatures that will have seriously adverse effects on life on Eath.

My graph doesn't prove that, but I didn't post it for that purpose. I posted it to show that there certainly hasn't been cooling over the past decade, even though 1998 was hotter than 2008.

To be clear in my position on global warming, I think Gore's presentation, while there's some real science in it, takes a more definitive positios than the science community does and is overly alarmist. The main thing that it doesn't account for is the fact that technology is going to increase drastically over the next 10, 20 and 50 years, which will lead to greater and greater energy efficiency and the ability to clean the environment in ways we currently can't.

So, if technology just stopped progressing today but more and more industrialization took place, I think it's correct that temperatures could be pushed to dangerous levels. But since technology isn't going to stop progressing, I doubt that dangerous temperatures will result from manmade means.

Thanks for clarifying. The man-made global warming "debate" has been turned into a cartoon, so it is difficult to find people with a nuanced take on the subject. I blame that squarely on Al Gore's alarmism.

 

[Denny Crane]

No, the theory is that carbon emissions are part of what is driving increased temperatures, not that it is a pure casual relationship. Climatologists say that climate cycles naturally, but other factors (like carbon emissions) are increasingly shifting the temperature. So there wouldn't be a perfect correspondence between carbon emissions and temperatures, just that carbon emissions are pushing temperatures beyond where they'd be without carbon emissions. And that over time, unchecked, it can create temperatures that will have seriously adverse effects on life on Eath.

My graph doesn't prove that, but I didn't post it for that purpose. I posted it to show that there certainly hasn't been cooling over the past decade, even though 1998 was hotter than 2008.

To be clear in my position on global warming, I think Gore's presentation, while there's some real science in it, takes a more definitive position than the science community does and is overly alarmist. The main thing that it doesn't account for is the fact that technology is going to increase drastically over the next 10, 20 and 50 years, which will lead to greater and greater energy efficiency and the ability to clean the environment in ways we currently can't.

So, if technology just stopped progressing today but more and more industrialization took place, I think it's correct that temperatures could be pushed to dangerous levels. But since technology isn't going to stop progressing, I doubt that dangerous temperatures will result from manmade means.

There has been cooling for the past decade. Each succeeding year since 1998 has been cooler than the previous year. This actually fits the projections of scientists who are skeptical of the man made global warming hoax.

I have to laugh at the big long post. I stopped after the claim that the IPCC is a scientific group. It's a political group, no point in reading any further misinformation. You know it's political because 1) it's the UN (a political organization), and 2) the actual scientists who participated complained the politicians misrepresented their findings.

I did look at the graph, and 400,000 years is not much in the geologic time scale. The dinosaurs died off 64,600,000 years earlier and the climate was considerably warmer back then.

 

[Minstrel]

There has been cooling for the past decade. Each succeeding year since 1998 has been cooler than the previous year.

That isn't true. I posted a graph a couple of posts back. For some reason, it's not showing up now. 1998 was a high spike, but the trend continued toward warming.

Here's the graph again:

And the direct link, in case the image continues to be in and out:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_5ieXw28ZUpg/SZj5GvNaHII/AAAAAAAAA7g/IKf7cd_An1c/s400/warming3.PNG

The data presented comes from NASA temperature collections. Here's the raw data:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts.txt

 

[Denny Crane]

http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/32821

Globe may be cooling on Global Warming

Submitted by SHNS on Thu, 05/01/2008 - 13:33

Australia, the land where sinks drain the other way, has alerted Americans that we see Earth's climate upside down: We're not warming. We're cooling.

"Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously." Dr. Phil Chapman wrote in The Australian on April 23. "All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead."

Chapman neither can be caricatured as a greedy oil-company lobbyist nor dismissed as a flat-Earther. He was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology staff physicist, NASA's first Australian-born astronaut, and Apollo 14's Mission Scientist.

Chapman believes reduced sunspot activity is curbing temperatures. As he elaborates, "there is a close correlation between variations on the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate." Anecdotally, last winter brought record cold to Florida, Mexico, and Greece, and rare snow to Jerusalem, Damascus, and Baghdad. China endured brutal ice and snow.

NASA satellites found that last winter's Arctic Sea ice covered 2 million square kilometers (772,000 square miles) more than the last three years' average. It also was 10 to 20 centimeters (about 4-8 inches) thicker than in 2007. The ice between Canada and southwest Greenland also spread dramatically. "We have to go back 15 years to find ice expansion so far south," Denmark's Meteorological Institute stated.

"Snows Return to Mount Kilimanjaro," cheered a January 21 International Herald Tribune headline, as Africa also defies the "warming" narrative.

While neither anecdotes nor one year's statistics confirm global cooling, a decade of data contradicts the "melting planet" rhetoric that heats Capitol Hill and America's newsrooms.

"The University of Alabama-Huntsville's analysis of data from satellites launched in 1979 showed a warming trend of 0.14 degrees Centigrade (0.25 Fahrenheit) per decade," Joseph D'Aleo, the Weather Channel's first Director of Meteorology, told me. "This warmth peaked in 1998, and the temperature trend the last decade has been flat, even as CO2 has increased 5.5 percent. Cooling began in 2002. Over the last six years, global temperatures from satellite and land-temperature gauges have cooled (-0.14 F and -0.22 F, respectively). Ocean buoys have echoed that slight cooling since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration deployed them in 2003."

These researchers are not alone. They are among a rising tide of scientists who question the so-called "global warming" theory. Some further argue that global cooling merits urgent concern.

"In stark contrast to the often repeated assertion that the science of climate change is 'settled,' significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming," 100 prestigious geologists, physicists, meteorologists, and other scientists wrote United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon last December. They also noted "today's computer models cannot predict climate. Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998."

In a December 2007 Senate Environment and Public Works Committee minority-staff report, some 400 scientists -- from such respected institutions as Princeton, the National Academy of Sciences, the University of London, and Paris' Pasteur Institute -- declared their independence from the pro-warming "conventional wisdom."

"Not CO2, but water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas," asserted climatologist Luc Debontridder of Belgium's Royal Meteorological Institute. "It is responsible for at least 75 percent of the greenhouse effect. This is a simple scientific fact, but Al Gore's movie has hyped CO2 so much that nobody seems to take note of it."

AccuWeather's Expert Senior Forecaster Joe Bastardi has stated: "People are concerned that 50 years from now, it will be warm beyond a point of no return. My concern is almost opposite, that it's cold and getting colder."
And on Wednesday, the respected journal, Nature, indicated that Earth's climactic cycles have stopped global warming through 2015.

If nothing else, all this obliterates the rampant lie that "the scientific debate on global warming is over." That debate rages on.

Assuming that the very serious scientists cited here are correct, the "inconvenient truth" about global-warming is inconveniently false. If so, mankind should chill out and turn our thinking right side up.

(Deroy Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. E-mail him at deroy.Murdock(at)gmail.com)

 

[WWBRoyD]

http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/32821

Globe may be cooling on Global Warming

Submitted by SHNS on Thu, 05/01/2008 - 13:33

Australia, the land where sinks drain the other way, has alerted Americans that we see Earth's climate upside down: We're not warming. We're cooling.

"Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously." Dr. Phil Chapman wrote in The Australian on April 23. "All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead."

Chapman neither can be caricatured as a greedy oil-company lobbyist nor dismissed as a flat-Earther. He was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology staff physicist, NASA's first Australian-born astronaut, and Apollo 14's Mission Scientist.

Chapman believes reduced sunspot activity is curbing temperatures. As he elaborates, "there is a close correlation between variations on the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate." Anecdotally, last winter brought record cold to Florida, Mexico, and Greece, and rare snow to Jerusalem, Damascus, and Baghdad. China endured brutal ice and snow.

NASA satellites found that last winter's Arctic Sea ice covered 2 million square kilometers (772,000 square miles) more than the last three years' average. It also was 10 to 20 centimeters (about 4-8 inches) thicker than in 2007. The ice between Canada and southwest Greenland also spread dramatically. "We have to go back 15 years to find ice expansion so far south," Denmark's Meteorological Institute stated.

"Snows Return to Mount Kilimanjaro," cheered a January 21 International Herald Tribune headline, as Africa also defies the "warming" narrative.

While neither anecdotes nor one year's statistics confirm global cooling, a decade of data contradicts the "melting planet" rhetoric that heats Capitol Hill and America's newsrooms.

"The University of Alabama-Huntsville's analysis of data from satellites launched in 1979 showed a warming trend of 0.14 degrees Centigrade (0.25 Fahrenheit) per decade," Joseph D'Aleo, the Weather Channel's first Director of Meteorology, told me. "This warmth peaked in 1998, and the temperature trend the last decade has been flat, even as CO2 has increased 5.5 percent. Cooling began in 2002. Over the last six years, global temperatures from satellite and land-temperature gauges have cooled (-0.14 F and -0.22 F, respectively). Ocean buoys have echoed that slight cooling since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration deployed them in 2003."

These researchers are not alone. They are among a rising tide of scientists who question the so-called "global warming" theory. Some further argue that global cooling merits urgent concern.

"In stark contrast to the often repeated assertion that the science of climate change is 'settled,' significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming," 100 prestigious geologists, physicists, meteorologists, and other scientists wrote United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon last December. They also noted "today's computer models cannot predict climate. Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998."

In a December 2007 Senate Environment and Public Works Committee minority-staff report, some 400 scientists -- from such respected institutions as Princeton, the National Academy of Sciences, the University of London, and Paris' Pasteur Institute -- declared their independence from the pro-warming "conventional wisdom."

"Not CO2, but water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas," asserted climatologist Luc Debontridder of Belgium's Royal Meteorological Institute. "It is responsible for at least 75 percent of the greenhouse effect. This is a simple scientific fact, but Al Gore's movie has hyped CO2 so much that nobody seems to take note of it."

AccuWeather's Expert Senior Forecaster Joe Bastardi has stated: "People are concerned that 50 years from now, it will be warm beyond a point of no return. My concern is almost opposite, that it's cold and getting colder."
And on Wednesday, the respected journal, Nature, indicated that Earth's climactic cycles have stopped global warming through 2015.

If nothing else, all this obliterates the rampant lie that "the scientific debate on global warming is over." That debate rages on.

Assuming that the very serious scientists cited here are correct, the "inconvenient truth" about global-warming is inconveniently false. If so, mankind should chill out and turn our thinking right side up.

(Deroy Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. E-mail him at deroy.Murdock(at)gmail.com)

Dr. Phillip Chapmam is as qualified to comment on enironmental issues as he is to practice medicine.

"Philip Kenyon Chapman (born March 5, 1935) was the first Australian-born American astronaut, serving for about five years in NASA Astronaut Group 6 (1967).

Born in Melbourne, Australia, his family moved to Sydney and he was educated at Parramatta High School. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and Mathematics from Sydney University in 1956, and a Master of Science degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1964 and a Doctorate of Science in Instrumentation in 1967 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Chapman

Chapman is an Aircraft Cockpit Instrumentation designer. He knows as much about meteorology and climatology as my Uncle Bob, who went straight from High School to Army Air Corps flight training in WW2. He went on to be an airline pilot.

As far as astronaut training making someone's statements extra worthy...

Apollo Astronaut Edgar Mitchell Claims UFO Cover Up
July 24, 2008 by

"Former Apollo 14 moonwalker Edgar Mitchell claimed, in a recent radio interview, that not only have aliens been visiting the Earth for the past sixty years since the Roswell incident, but that Earth governments are aware of this fact and are covering it up.

Edgar Mitchell claims that sources at NASA, the military, and the intelligence community have described these aliens as, "little people who look strange to us." The aliens have a small body frame, a large head, and large eyes as has been traditionally depicted in popular films and television.

Edgar Mitchell made the claim on the popular British radio show Kerrang!, which generally covers music and popular culture. The host of the show, Nick Margerrison, thought at first that Edgar Mitchell was indulging in a little astronaut humor until he realized that Mitchell was deadly serious...."

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/902799/apollo_astronaut_edgar_mitchell_claims.html

As far as whatever University of Alabama-Huntsville is claiming, this...

...clearly shows UA-H was in making such claims from anecdotal evidence.

 

[Denny Crane]

Twice you bring up a strawman argument about some other NASA scientist.

From your own Wikipedia link about THIS scientist:

From 1956 to 1957, he worked for Philips Electronics Industries Proprietary Limited in Sydney, Australia. He then spent 15 months in Antarctica with the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions (ANARE), for the International Geophysical Year (IGY) as an auroral/radio physicist. The work required that he spend most of the winter with one other man at a remote camp.

After spending the next five years working on laser propulsion at Avco Everett Research Laboratory, he moved to Arthur D. Little, Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts to work with Dr. Peter Glaser, the inventor of the solar power satellite (SPS). Dr. Chapman was actively involved in the NASA/DOE SPS Concept Development and Evaluation Program (CDEP) in the late 1970s and early 1980s and has since continued contributions to the literature on power from space.

In 1989, Dr. Chapman led a privately funded scientific expedition by sea from Cape Town to Enderby Land, Antarctica, to gather information about mineral resources before the Madrid Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty made prospecting illegal on the continent.

From 1989-1994, Dr. Chapman was the president of Echo Canyon Software in Boston, which produced the first visual programming environment for Windows, before Microsoft introduced Visual Basic.

(2004) The second paper, "Power from Space and the Hydrogen Economy," discussed the implications of the recent discovery of vast deposits of methane hydrates under Arctic permafrost and on continental shelves, which may be sufficient to meet all world energy needs for many thousands of years. See the IP address below to full text of this paper.


-- Seems to be an authority/expert on Antarctica, Geology, Physics, energy, and those NASA satellites that Alabama-Huntsville used for their studies. And the computer models the chicken little crowd have been using instead of scientific experiment.

Qualified, yep.

 

[WWBRoyD]

Twice you bring up a strawman argument about some other NASA scientist.

From your own Wikipedia link about THIS scientist:

From 1956 to 1957, he worked for Philips Electronics Industries Proprietary Limited in Sydney, Australia. He then spent 15 months in Antarctica with the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions (ANARE), for the International Geophysical Year (IGY) as an auroral/radio physicist. The work required that he spend most of the winter with one other man at a remote camp.

After spending the next five years working on laser propulsion at Avco Everett Research Laboratory, he moved to Arthur D. Little, Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts to work with Dr. Peter Glaser, the inventor of the solar power satellite (SPS). Dr. Chapman was actively involved in the NASA/DOE SPS Concept Development and Evaluation Program (CDEP) in the late 1970s and early 1980s and has since continued contributions to the literature on power from space.

In 1989, Dr. Chapman led a privately funded scientific expedition by sea from Cape Town to Enderby Land, Antarctica, to gather information about mineral resources before the Madrid Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty made prospecting illegal on the continent.

From 1989-1994, Dr. Chapman was the president of Echo Canyon Software in Boston, which produced the first visual programming environment for Windows, before Microsoft introduced Visual Basic.

(2004) The second paper, "Power from Space and the Hydrogen Economy," discussed the implications of the recent discovery of vast deposits of methane hydrates under Arctic permafrost and on continental shelves, which may be sufficient to meet all world energy needs for many thousands of years. See the IP address below to full text of this paper.


-- Seems to be an authority/expert on Antarctica, Geology, Physics, energy, and those NASA satellites that Alabama-Huntsville used for their studies. And the computer models the chicken little crowd have been using instead of scientific experiment.

Qualified, yep.

I never said the Chapman wasn't qualified in his field of study. His field of study was aeronautics and aeronautics instrument design.

I said Chapman IS NOT qualified to be considered anything but an untrained amateur on subject matter in the field of meteorology / climatology. Any statements by Chapman regarding Global Warming carry the same weight as any other layman.

Chapman, Leonardo DiCaprio, Sheryl Crow, Deepak Chopra, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Dr. Phil... all have the same level of expertise in the field of Meteorology / Climatology to comment on Global Warming. None.

 

[Denny Crane]

I never said the Chapman wasn't qualified in his field of study. His field of study was aeronautics and aeronautics instrument design.

I said Chapman IS NOT qualified to be considered anything but an untrained amateur on subject matter in the field of meteorology / climatology .

His two trips to the antarctic don't qualify him as some sort of expert on that?

Wow.

 

[WWBRoyD]

His two trips to the antarctic don't qualify him as some sort of expert on that?

Wow.

This guy...

http://www.iditarod.com/

...isn't an expert on global warming either, and he spent a lot more time out in Arctic conditions than Chapman.

 

[Denny Crane]

This guy...

http://www.iditarod.com/

...isn't an expert on global warming either, and he spent a lot more time out in Arctic conditions than Chapman.

If he has advanced degrees in math and physics and is there to study the environment, then he would be.

 

[WWBRoyD]

If he has advanced degrees in math and physics and is there to study the environment, then he would be.

Nonsense!

Chapman doesn't have advanced degrees in math and physics. He has a B.S in Math and Physics, and MS in AERONAUTICS and a PhD in INSTUMENTATION. He has advanced degrees in aircraft cockpit instruments.

As far as what he did in Antarctica, read your own post, Denny.

In 1989, Dr. Chapman led a privately funded scientific expedition by sea from Cape Town to Enderby Land, Antarctica, to gather information about mineral resources before the Madrid Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty made prospecting illegal on the continent.

Chapman went to Antarctica to try open up a mining operation there. That makes someone as qualified to comment on global climate change as this guy....

 

[BrianFromWA]

I'm now confused. What are the minimum qualifications to speak with gravity on the subject?

Advanced degree? What subject? From which school? Do you have to have written a thesis? How much field time do you need? What is "field time"? Do you have to have done computer modeling? Experimentation? Being paid as a professional climatologist?

Or do you just have to believe Al Gore?

 

[PapaG]

What I don't understand is how people can trust "long-term models". Are there any "long-term models" that have actually had time to come to fruition? In the '70s, the alarmism was on long-term cooling. Then, when temperatures increased, the models switched to warming. Lost in all of this is that not a single long-term model has had time to come to an end result. It seems silly to me for a person to claim that long-term models are more accurate than prediciting the weather for the sole fact that there is no historical scientific evidence that supports any long-term model. In the end, "long-term models" are basically believed in solely due to trusting the person predicting the future, and trust of any individual's untested model has no place in science, let alone in setting political policy. Plus, long-term models vary and have been adjusted, so saying they are accurate seems a bit pie-in-th-sky idealistic.

 

[Denny Crane]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=aIe9swvOqwIY

Arctic Sea Ice Underestimated for Weeks Due to Faulty Sensor

By Alex Morales

Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) -- A glitch in satellite sensors caused scientists to underestimate the extent of Arctic sea ice by 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles), a California- size area, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center said.

The error, due to a problem called “sensor drift,” began in early January and caused a slowly growing underestimation of sea ice extent until mid-February. That’s when “puzzled readers” alerted the NSIDC about data showing ice-covered areas as stretches of open ocean, the Boulder, Colorado-based group said on its Web site.

“Sensor drift, although infrequent, does occasionally occur and it is one of the things that we account for during quality- control measures prior to archiving the data,” the center said. “Although we believe that data prior to early January are reliable, we will conduct a full quality check.’’

The extent of Arctic sea ice is seen as a key measure of how rising temperatures are affecting the Earth. The cap retreated in 2007 to its lowest extent ever and last year posted its second- lowest annual minimum at the end of the yearly melt season. The recent error doesn’t change findings that Arctic ice is retreating, the NSIDC said.

The center said real-time data on sea ice is always less reliable than archived numbers because full checks haven’t yet been carried out. Historical data is checked across other sources, it said.

The NSIDC uses Department of Defense satellites to obtain its Arctic sea ice data rather than more accurate National Aeronautics and Space Administration equipment. That’s because the defense satellites have a longer period of historical data, enabling scientists to draw conclusions about long-term ice melt, the center said.

“There is a balance between being as accurate as possible at any given moment and being as consistent as possible through long time-periods,” NSIDC said. “Our main scientific focus is on the long-term changes in Arctic sea ice.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in London at amorales2@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: February 20, 2009 08:15 EST

 

[PapaG]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=aIe9swvOqwIY

Arctic Sea Ice Underestimated for Weeks Due to Faulty Sensor

By Alex Morales

Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) -- A glitch in satellite sensors caused scientists to underestimate the extent of Arctic sea ice by 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles), a California- size area, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center said.

The error, due to a problem called “sensor drift,” began in early January and caused a slowly growing underestimation of sea ice extent until mid-February. That’s when “puzzled readers” alerted the NSIDC about data showing ice-covered areas as stretches of open ocean, the Boulder, Colorado-based group said on its Web site.

“Sensor drift, although infrequent, does occasionally occur and it is one of the things that we account for during quality- control measures prior to archiving the data,” the center said. “Although we believe that data prior to early January are reliable, we will conduct a full quality check.’’

The extent of Arctic sea ice is seen as a key measure of how rising temperatures are affecting the Earth. The cap retreated in 2007 to its lowest extent ever and last year posted its second- lowest annual minimum at the end of the yearly melt season. The recent error doesn’t change findings that Arctic ice is retreating, the NSIDC said.

The center said real-time data on sea ice is always less reliable than archived numbers because full checks haven’t yet been carried out. Historical data is checked across other sources, it said.

The NSIDC uses Department of Defense satellites to obtain its Arctic sea ice data rather than more accurate National Aeronautics and Space Administration equipment. That’s because the defense satellites have a longer period of historical data, enabling scientists to draw conclusions about long-term ice melt, the center said.

“There is a balance between being as accurate as possible at any given moment and being as consistent as possible through long time-periods,” NSIDC said. “Our main scientific focus is on the long-term changes in Arctic sea ice.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in London at amorales2@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: February 20, 2009 08:15 EST

The best part of this story is if you follow some of the links on other sites, it shows how the icepack is actually much more pronounced now than it was in 2005 images.

The liars got caught this time, but I'm guessing it won't matter in terms of making economic policies that cripple our coal/oil/steel/auto industries.

 

[WWBRoyD]

NEW YORK, New York, February 24, 2009 (ENS) - Climatologists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City said today that 2008 was the planet's coolest year since 2000.

Yet this does not mean that global warming is no longer a threat, they said. The analysis also showed that 2008 was the ninth warmest year since continuous instrumental records were started in 1880. The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred between 1997 and 2008.

"GISS provides the ranking of global temperature for individual years because there is a high demand for it from journalists and the public," said climatologist Dr. James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute.

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2009/2009-02-24-01.asp

Repeat That... NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies says The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred between 1997 and 2008.

 

[Denny Crane]

Repeat That... NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies says The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred between 1997 and 2008.

Since 1880.

And repeat: 2008 is the coolest year since 2000. Last year, 2007 is the coolest year since 2000. And so on.

 

[WWBRoyD]

Since 1880.

The graphic for the 400,000 years prior was already posted on the thread more than once. You keep trying to ignore that. Have it again.

See the far right side of the graphic. Highest Co2 levels by a wide margin in 400,000 years. Highest temperatures in 400,000 years staying in the highest part of the temperature. Simultaneously.

 

[Denny Crane]

The graphic for the 400,000 years prior was already posted on the thread more than once. You keep trying to ignore that. Have it again.

See the far right side of the graphic. Highest Co2 levels by a wide margin in 400,000 years. Highest temperatures in 400,000 years staying in the highest part of the temperature. Simultaneously.

400,000 years is better than the 10 or 200 you're fixated on, but the dinosaurs died 65,000,000 years ago. I think your graph is selective and cherry picking to facilitate the Big Lie (google that).

 

[WWBRoyD]

400,000 years is better than the 10 or 200 you're fixated on, but the dinosaurs died 65,000,000 years ago. I think your graph is selective and cherry picking to facilitate the Big Lie (google that).

Google this. "Evidence" I have evidence supporting my position. You do not.

 

[Denny Crane]

Google this. "Evidence" I have evidence supporting my position. You do not.

Your evidence is simply weak.

It was warmer 128,000 years ago, 238,000 years ago, 323,000 years ago, and 410,000 years ago.

Do you wish to make the case we were burning fossil fuels back then?

And another that shows this is true.

 

[huevonkiller]

Lol Denny, you're unstoppable on this subject.

 

[Denny Crane]

Like tornadoes to a trailer park.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/03/02/shiver-global-warming-protest-frozen-massive-snowfall/
Out With A Shiver: Global Warming Protest Frozen Out by Massive Snowfall

It was snowing irony in Washington on Monday when global warming activists descended on the District like a storm -- but got beaten to the punch by a blast of wintry weather that incapacitated the city.


Global warming activists stormed Washington Monday for what was billed as the nation's largest act of civil disobedience to fight climate change -- only to see the nation's capital virtually shut down by a major winter storm.

Schools and businesses were shuttered, lawmakers cancelled numerous appearances and the city came to a virtual standstill as Washington was blasted with its heaviest snowfall of the winter.

It spelled about six inches of trouble for global warming activists who had hoped to swarm the Capitol by the thousands in an effort to force the government to close the Capitol Power Plant, which heats and cools a number of government buildings, including the Supreme Court and the Capitol.

The snowy scene, with temperatures in the mid-20s, was reminiscent of a day in January 2004, when Al Gore made a major address on global warming in New York -- on one of the coldest days in the city's history.

Protest organizers said about 2,500 people braved the blizzard to oppose greenhouse gas emissions, but the shroud of snow wasn't the only wet blanket in the nation's capital Monday.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who called on the architect of the Capitol to stop burning coal at the power plant last week, cancelled her appearance at the rally because her flight to Washington was cancelled.

Michelle Obama canned a public "Read Across America" event and HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan canceled a meeting with the Democratic Caucus because the members of Congress couldn't get to D.C. An honor cordon at the Pentagon for Afghanistan's defense minister also had to be called off.

Some protesters couldn't make it as dozens of flights in the area were delayed or called off, and some couldn't face the dangerous roads or blustery weather, leaving hundreds safe, if sorry, back at home.

One protester named Kat had planned to get arrested and be bailed out Monday but decided to stay put and donate her money to a good cause instead.

"I don't want to travel in the snow today. However, I am donating my bail money to fight mountaintop removal," she wrote to the Climate Action Web site.

Even marchers in gloves and parkas were wringing their hands to stay warm, and some protest leaders were having trouble providing updates on blog sites like Twitter.

"I admit, it's hard to tweet with cold hands!" wrote the author of the Capitol Climate Action Web site, who said the activists were "staying warm with a chant: 'Clean coal is a dirty lie.'"

The plant has been seized as a symbol of the government's energy excess, and the 99-year-old facility accounts for a third of the legislative branch's greenhouse gas emissions.

Protesters gathered earlier Monday in the Spirit of Justice Park near the Capitol and marched a few blocks to the power plant, where D.C. police set up a careful cordon.

In a press release supporting the protest, Greenpeace wrote that "coal is the country's biggest source of global warming pollution" and that "burning coal cuts short at least 24,000 lives in the U.S. annually."

On a blustery, frigid day, it might be worth noting the government's own stark numbers: pneumonia kills twice as many each year.

 

[maxiep]

I wonder what the greenhouse gas emissions on Speaker Pelosi's private plane are? Are they factored into the Capitol's emissions figure?