Thread: Any doubts about Climate Change?

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Minimum of pretty graphs that don't count for shit.

Fail...

Originally Posted by Neo

Originally Posted by BobR

Climate change is a convenient excuse for Western governments to explain the lower standard of living caused by Globalization.

Really... please do explain

Still waiting for that explanation Bob

Home with Rick Scott (R) and climate deniers

Terms such as 'climate change,' 'global warming' were outlawed, former Florida DEP employees say

DEP officials have been ordered not to use the terms "climate change" or "global warming" in any official communications, emails, or reports, according to former DEP employees, consultants, volunteers and records obtained by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.

"We were told not to use the terms 'climate change,' 'global warming' or 'sustainability,' " said Christopher Byrd, an attorney with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection's Office of General Counsel in Tallahassee from 2008 to 2013. "That message was communicated to me and my colleagues by our superiors."

Kristina Trotta, a former DEP employee in Miami, said her supervisor told her not to use the terms "climate change" and "global warming" in a 2014 staff meeting.

"We were told that we were not allowed to discuss anything that was not a true fact," she said.

This unwritten policy went into effect after Gov. Rick Scott took office in 2011 and appointed Herschel Vinyard Jr. to lead the approximately 3,200-employee agency, with a budget of $1.4 billion, according to former DEP employees. Vinyard resigned in November. Neither he nor his successor, Scott Steverson, would comment for this report.

"DEP does not have a policy on this," Tiffany Cowie, department press secretary, wrote in an email.

Scott spokeswoman Jeri Bustamante wrote in an email: "There's no policy on this."

But former DEP employees from offices around the state say the order was well known.

"It's an indication that the political leadership is not willing to address these issues and face the music when it comes to the challenges that climate change presents," Byrd said.

Since 2010, Scott, who is in his second term, has repeatedly expressed doubt that climate change is occurring. In 2014 he said he was "not a scientist," when asked about the issue. This prompted a group of scientists to request a meeting.

"We had our 20 to 21 minutes, and he said thank you," recalled geologist and University of Miami professor Harold Wanless, who was at the meeting. "There were no questions of substance."

Scott's predecessor, Charlie Crist, had formed a statewide task force and convened a national summit in Miami in 2007. But evidence that the issue is out of favor in the Scott administration is apparent.

One example is an annual report on coastal conditions put together by DEP and other agencies. The report, published the year before Scott was elected, contains 15 references to climate change, including a section titled "Research Priorities — Climate Change."

In the 2014-15 report, climate change is only mentioned if it is in the title of a past report or conference. There is one standalone reference that sources say must have slipped by.

Instead, terms like "climate drivers" are used.

Byrd said the policy in his office started during a 2011 staff meeting.

During a briefing on what to expect with the new secretary, deputy general counsel Larry Morgan gave "a warning to beware of the words global warming, climate change and sea level rise, and advised us not to use those words," Byrd said.

Morgan did not respond to a request for comment.

The DEP dismissed Byrd in 2013. He said it was because of disagreements over other policy issues.

Jim Harper was a consultant with the DEP's Coral Reef Conservation Program in Miami in 2013, writing educational material about protecting the reefs north of Miami.

"We were told not to use the term climate change," Harper said. "The employees were so skittish they wouldn't even talk about it."

His business partner, Annie Reisewitz, confirmed this account. "When we put climate change into the document, they told us they weren't using the term," she said.

A year later, Harper wanted to volunteer with the DEP to bring an informational PowerPoint about protecting reefs to community groups. When he saw that climate change was not in the PowerPoint, he and others at a training meeting asked why.

The two DEP employees running the meeting, Ana Zangroniz and Trotta, "said they were not allowed to show the words . . . climate change," according to Doug Young, another volunteer at the meeting.

Trotta left her position as a field and administrative assistant in January. She confirmed to FCIR that she was told about the policy during a staff meeting held by regional administrator Joanna Walczak in 2014.

"We were instructed by our regional administrator that we were no longer allowed to use the terms 'global warming' or 'climate change' or even ' ,' " Trotta said. "Sea level rise was to be referred to as 'nuisance flooding.' . . . The regional administrator told us that we are the governor's agency and this is the message from the governor's office."

Walczak declined to comment, citing DEP policy.

The ban on using "sea level rise" seems to have ended. In February, Scott unveiled $106 million in his proposed budget to deal with the effects of rising seas for things like sewage treatment in the Florida Keys and beach restoration. Critics say this is not enough to protect homes, roads and infrastructure.

nuisance flooding

Originally Posted by blue

The warmists are losing their argument. Their desperation is beginning to show.

BBC bias

The BBC’s Climate Change Coverage Is Not Just Dishonest but Illegal



The programme – – purported to explore global warming from a fresh, unbiased angle by getting three mathematicians not hitherto known as arch-warmists to crunch the numbers and conclude that, yes, climate change is indeed a greater threat than we could ever possibly have imagined…
In my takedown last week, I did the snark. Now Booker has dealt with the main scientific flaws with the programme. They are as follows:
First section: this attempted to make a big deal of the fact that the world has warmed by around 0.85 degrees since 1880. But as Booker notes, this isn’t really the issue of contention.

What she left out was that there has been nothing unprecedented about our recent warming. As the world has generally warmed since emerging from the Little Ice Age 200 years ago, two earlier warming phases from natural causes, between 1860 and 1880 and from 1910 to 1940, were just as great as that of the last 30 years – before CO2 levels rose as they have done recently.

Second section: this sought to tell us that just as we can use models accurately to predict the future performance of premier league football clubs, so too we can rely on them to predict climate.

What he omitted to explain was that, in the past 17 years, the IPCC’s computer model predictions have turned out to be comprehensively wrong.

Third section: this used a long sequence about Formula One motor racing to back up its assertion that pouring increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere has already led to an increase in “extreme weather events” and that, unless we radically change our lifestyles, things are going to get much, much worse.

What he failed to tell us was that, as even the IPCC concedes, such events have not become more frequent or intense at all. There have been no more floods, droughts and hurricanes than there were before the global warming scare was invented.


Here was a programme so lamentably biased, so completely uninterested in counterarguments, so blatantly determined to pull the wool over its viewers’ eyes with straw men, false analogies and calculated misrepresentations of the real points at issue, that it constituted a flagrant breach of the BBC’s statutory obligations to accuracy and impartiality.
In short, this programme broke the law.
Under the BBC Charter 2006, the BBC is legally obliged to “do all it can to ensure that controversial subjects are treated with due accuracy and impartiality in all relevant output.”
Not only did the BBC fail to do this with Climate Change By Numbers but it has also failed to do this with every single documentary it has made on the subject for well over a decade.

Rep. Raul Grijalva, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, wants to know whether money from the energy sector might be influencing scientists who come before Congress to deny climate change. Since asking that question, Grijalva has been accused by fellow lawmakers, and some scientists, of perpetrating a "witch hunt" that could have a "chilling effect" on scientific exploration.

Rep. Grijalva's questioning comes after a lengthy article in the New York Times last month detailed the source of research funds used by Wei-Hock Soon, an aerospace engineer who has testified in several congressional hearings to express doubt that climate change can be attributed to human activity. Soon, who is affiliated with a joint venture of Harvard and the Smithsonian, is responsible for bringing in research dollars to pay his salary and fund his projects. The Times revealed he has received more than $1.2 million from the fossil-fuel industry over the past decade, including at least $230,000 from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. (As the Times notes, part of Koch’s fortune comes from oil refining.)

Grijalva sent letters last week to universities that employ some of the scientists who remain skeptical about the causes of climate change, asking about the sources of their research funds. This sparked accusations of intimidation from the other side of the aisle. Eleven Republican senators, led by James Inhofe of Oklahoma, sent a letter of their own to academic institutions, expressing concern that Grijalva was out to “silence legitimate academic and scientific inquiry.”

The controversy recalls another political dustup over climate change research, when Virginia's then–attorney general, Republican Ken Cuccinelli, demanded in 2010 that the University of Virginia turn over emails and other documents related to researcher Michael Mann, in an effort to show that Mann had fabricated evidence that human activity had contributed to climate change. A court later ruled that Cuccinelli lacked the authority to compel the university to turn over Mann’s papers.

Politico notes that several conservative commentators now criticizing Grijalva trumpeted Cuccinelli's probe into Mann’s academic work as a “thorough investigation by someone not in cahoots with the climate mob.”


Democrats seek funding info on scientists who deny human impact on climate.

One for the old men who think nothing will change.

Have we found another habitable planet yet..?

^ No the corporapists have not stole all the resources from the earth yet....

Two days after bombing in a speech before a firefighters’ union, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was rebuffed in a Senate subcommittee hearing while trying to criticize NASA’s increased emphasis on studying climate change, Mashable reported. “We can’t go anywhere if the Kennedy Space Center goes underwater and we don’t know it — and that’s understanding our environment,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told Cruz on Thursday. “It is absolutely critical that we understand Earth’s environment because this is the only place we have to live.”
The exchange came during a meeting of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Space, which Cruz now chairs. Cruz expressed skepticism toward President Barack Obama’s $18.6 billion budget request for the agency — specifically recent increases in funding for studying Earth phenomena compared to a slight decrease in money for space exploration efforts.
“I would suggest that almost any American would agree that the core function of NASA is to explore space,” Cruz said. “That’s what inspires little boys and little girls across this country. It’s what sets NASA apart from any agency in the country.”
Bolden explained that the decrease in funding for outer space-related projects was due in part to a desire to reduce the cost of those types of missions.
“The fact that earth science [funding] has increased, I’m proud to say, has enabled us to understand our planet far better than we ever did before,” Bolden added. “It’s absolutely critical.”
For example, Bolden said, NASA supports studies in Cruz’s home state of Texas that measured the effects of emptying out the state’s aquifers on local land elevations.
“That’s just looking at our environment, trying to make sure that we have a better place for all of us in which to live,” he told the senator. “I think that’s critical.”
The committee’s ranking member, Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) also knocked Cruz’s rationale, pointing out that the funding increase he criticized was actually a rebound from cuts levied under former President George W. Bush’s administration.
“The chairman has mentioned that he wants science to drive the process here,” Peters said. “Here we have leading experts in our country on science saying that the cuts that we saw in earth sciences were disastrous in the Bush era.”
Cruz’s appointment to lead the subcommittee led to concern in the scientific community over having an avowed climate change denier in charge of the group controlling NASA’s funding, with at least one scientist saying it was like “having the fox guard the chicken coop.”
Watch footage from the meeting below.


youtube.com/watch?v=8A6q6eGM_Aw

Top all the morons who like to claim that global warming started with Al Gore you should watch this video from Cosmos. Carl Sagan and other scientist were well aware of it long before. This clip is from 1990;

youtube.com/watch?v=HQ5u-l9Je0s

Originally Posted by S Landreth

Well it isn’t good news,……….

Hottest 12 Months On Record Globally Thanks To Warm January, Reports NASA

In January, the planet continued the warming trend that made 2014 the hottest calendar year on record. NASA reports that last month was the second-hottest January on record (after 2007), while the Japan Meteorological Agency ranked it the hottest.

Significantly, there has never been as hot a 12-month period in NASA’s database as the previous 12 months (February 2014–January 2015). This is using a 12-month moving average, so we can “see the march of temperature change over time,” rather than just once every calendar year.

While it has been cold for those of us living in a slice of the eastern and northeastern U.S., the rest of the country and the globe is quite warm, with large parts of North America and Asia experiencing nearly off-the-charts heat. That’s clear in the NASA chart below for January temperatures, whose upper range extends to a whopping 8.1°C (14.6°F) above the 1951-1980 average!

What’s remarkable is that we keep breaking the 12-month global temperature record even though we still haven’t started an El Niño. It is usually the combination of the underlying long-term warming trend and the regional El Niño warming pattern that leads to new global temperature records, as NASA has explained.

But the human-caused warming is simply too strong to be denied, as it were. If we want to slow it down and ultimately stop it before it destroys a livable climate, it will take some serious cuts in carbon pollution ASAP.

____________

And before some idiot posts some cherry picked graph showing that it hasn’t warmed in 18 years 007.842433 months (not land or sea), I’ll post the full graph from the remss.com site (satellite information) showing that it is warming in the troposphere.

_____________

And it continues

February Was Very Warm, Continues Upward Global Warming Trend

The NASA GISS data for surface temperatures of the planet Earth are in for February, and February was warm. The anomaly value was 79, which means 0.79 degrees C above a the baseline NASA uses (1951-1980). So, while it looks like the planet has warmed by a about 8 tenths of a degree, since warming started well before 1880, it is really more like a whole degree or more. Depending on what you know and don’t know about how climate works, that may seem like a lot or a little. Trust me, it is a lot.

Most interestingly, the last 12 months were the warmest 12 months in the NSAS GISS database (you’ll remember that 2014 was the warmest year in that database as well as other). This continues an upward trend of temperatures that we expect with global warming.

February 2015 was the seventh warmest month in the entire GISS record, which goes back to 1880. All of the warmest months have been recent. February 2015 was the second warmest February in that record.

We are not going to know about March officially for another month (obviously!), but indications are that March has been warm and will continue to be warm, so I don’t see this trend turning around.

______________

I remember a short time ago bsnub was discussing weather in the Seattle area with one of our weather reporters.

Originally Posted by koman

Originally Posted by bsnub

I know clearly what should and should not be blooming in my city and neighborhood

I was talking about Victoria.....not Seattle. Anyhow the Pacific Northwest is having one of it's milder than normal winters this year....so what. I live there for many years and there's nothing unusual about it...so stop talking nonsense.

Clearly the weather reporter was wrong. The weather in the Seattle area was unusual. Looks to me like it was the 4th warmest winter on recorded.

Originally Posted by S Landreth

Well it isn’t good news,……….

if its getting warmer it is good news, I like most people hate the cold ,but unfortunately it isn't....
A good article here about the data rejigging, basically:

Each iteration of adjustments to old data produces more 'cooling' of the past and therefore greater apparent warming today .

Even Though Warming Has Stopped, it Keeps Getting Worse?

March 9th, 2015 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.I was updating a U.S. Corn Belt summer temperature and precipitation dataset from the NCDC website, and all of a sudden the no-warming-trend-since-1900 turned into a significant warming trend. (Clarification: the new warming trend for 1900-2013 is still not significantly different from zero at the 90% confidence level. H/T, Pat Michaels)
As can be seen in the following chart, the largest adjustments were to earlier years in the dataset, which were made colder. The change in the linear trend goes from 0.2 deg F/century to 0.6 deg. F/century.

I know others have commented on the tendency of thermometer data adjustments by NOAA always leading to greater warming.
As Dick Lindzen has noted, it seems highly improbable that successive revisions to the very same data would lead to ever greater warming trends. Being the co-developer of a climate dataset (UAH satellite temperatures) I understand the need to make adjustments for known errors in the data…when you can quantitatively demonstrate an error exists.
But a variety of errors in data measurement and collection would typically have both positive and negative signs. For example, orbit decay causes a spurious cooling trend in the satellite lower tropospheric temperatures (discovered by RSS), while the instrument body temperature effect causes a spurious warming trend (discovered by us). The two effects approximately cancel out over the long term, but we (and RSS) make corrections for them anyway since they affect different years differently.
Also, the drift in satellite local observation time associated with orbit decay causes spurious cooling in the 1:30 satellites, but spurious warming in the 7:30 satellites. Again this shows that a variety of errors typically have positive and negative signs.
In contrast, the thermometer data apparently need to be adjusted in such a way that almost always leads to greater and greater warming trends.
How odd.

Even Though Warming Has Stopped, it Keeps Getting Worse? « Roy Spencer, PhD

Originally Posted by blue

I'm an Opinionated, Racist, Homophobic, Xenophobic, Global Warming Denying, Immigrant Hating BIGOT, Whats not to like

Atta boy Blue.....

A hundred years from now, humans may remember 2014 as the year that we first learned that we may have irreversibly destabilized the great ice sheet of West Antarctica, and thus set in motion more than 10 feet of sea level rise.
Meanwhile, 2015 could be the year of the double whammy — when we learned the same about one gigantic glacier of East Antarctica, which could set in motion roughly the same amount all over again. Northern Hemisphere residents and Americans in particular should take note — when the bottom of the world loses vast amounts of ice, those of us living closer to its top get more sea level rise than the rest of the planet, thanks to the law of gravity.
The findings about East Antarctica emerge from a new paper just out in Nature Geoscience by an international team of scientists representing the United States, Britain, France and Australia. They flew a number of research flights over the Totten Glacier of East Antarctica — the fastest-thinning sector of the world’s largest ice sheet — and took a variety of measurements to try to figure out the reasons behind its retreat. And the news wasn’t good: It appears that Totten, too, is losing ice because warm ocean water is getting underneath it.
“The idea of warm ocean water eroding the ice in West Antarctica, what we’re finding is that may well be applicable in East Antarctica as well,” says Martin Siegert, a co-author of the study and who is based at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London.
[Research casts alarming light on the decline of West Antarctic glaciers]
The floating ice shelf of the Totten Glacier covers an area of 90 miles by 22 miles. It it is losing an amount of ice “equivalent to 100 times the volume of Sydney Harbour every year,” notes the Australian Antarctic Division.
That’s alarming, because the glacier holds back a much more vast catchment of ice that, were its vulnerable parts to flow into the ocean, could produce a sea level rise of more than 11 feet — which is comparable to the impact from a loss of the West Antarctica ice sheet. And that’s “a conservative lower limit,” says lead study author Jamin Greenbaum, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin






In its alignment with the land and the sea, the Totten Glacier is similar to the West Antarctic glaciers, which also feature ice shelves that slope out from the vast sheet of ice on land and extend into the water. These ice shelves are a key source of instability, because if ocean waters beneath them warm, they can lose ice rapidly, allowing the ice sheet behind them to flow more quickly into the sea.
The researchers used three separate types of measurements taken during their flights — gravitational measurements, radar and laser altimetry — to get a glimpse of what might be happening beneath the massive glacier, whose ice shelves are more than 1,600 feet thick in places. Using radar, they could measure the ice’s thickness. Meanwhile, by measuring the pull of the Earth’s gravity on the airplane in different places, the scientists were able to determine just how far below that ice the seafloor was.
The result was the discovery of two undersea troughs or valleys beneath the ice shelf — regions where the seafloor slopes downward, allowing a greater depth of water beneath the floating ice. These cavities or subsea valleys, the researchers suggest, may explain the glacier’s retreat — they could allow warmer deep waters to get underneath the ice shelf, accelerating its melting.


In this particular area of Antarctica, Greenbaum says, a warmer layer of ocean water offshore is actually deeper than the colder layers above it, because of the saltwater content of the warm water (which increases its density). And the canyons may allow that warm water access to the glacier base. “What we found here is that there are seafloor valleys deeper than the depth of the maximum temperature measured near the glacier,” Greenbaum says.
One of these canyons is three miles wide, in a region that was previously believed to simply hold ice lying atop solid earth. On the contrary, the new study suggests the ice is instead afloat.
The availability of warm water, and the observed melting, notes the study, “support the idea that the behaviour of Totten Glacier is an East Antarctic analogue to ocean-driven retreat underway in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). The global sea level potential of 3.5 m flowing through Totten Glacier alone is of similar magnitude to the entire probable contribution of the WAIS.”
For Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State University, the new research hints at a possible solution to a question that scientists have long had about the planet’s past — and in particular the Pliocene epoch, beginning 5.3 million years ago, when sea levels were dramatically higher, by as much as 40 meters.
“The sea-level indicators from the Pliocene have suggested that an important amount of ice came out of East Antarctica into the ocean,” says Alley. “Sedimentary records offshore pointed in the same way, and recent modeling…shows the strong potential for this to have happened. This new paper adds to the evidence — the pieces are fitting together.”
One limitation of the study is that the scientists were not able to directly measure the temperature of ocean water that is reaching the glacier itself. While this could be done with robotic underwater vehicles or other methods, that wasn’t part of the study at this time. Thus, the conclusions are more focused on inferring the vulnerability of the glacier based on a number of different pieces of evidence — topped off by the fact that the glacier is, indeed, retreating.
“What we need now is a confirmation of the findings of the paper from oceanographic data, because it is one thing to find potential pathways for warm water to intrude the cavity, it is another to show that this is actually happening,” observes Eric Rignot, an Antarctica expert at the University of California, Irvine. “This paper comes short of the latter, but other research efforts are underway to get critical oceanographic information near Totten.”


The melting of Antarctica was already really bad. It just got worse. - The Washington Post

How Future Cities Will Look After Extreme Flooding

By Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan on 25 Feb 2015 at 10:30PM



We know sea levels are rising. We know this empirically. We can even project how the rising ocean will change human cities. But seeing how drastically our world will be changed in hundreds or even thousands of years in the future? That's something else.

The designer and cartographer behind the blog Spatialities, Jeffrey Linn, is finding out what that distant future looks like. And he's naming it—the map of LA includes the "Sea of O.C."; New York has the "Isle of Jersey."

Linn uses public data to create maps that show what major cities look like in a world of extreme sea level rise, which the US Geological Survey says is about 80 metres, or 262 feet.

"The maps that show what will happen within our children's or grandchildren's lifetimes is fairly well-worn territory," he says over email. "What I haven't seen much of are maps that take it to the end point of what is possible in a thousand or more years." Except for Burrito Justice's 2012 map of the so-called San Francisco archipelago, those distant projections didn't really exist.

"I wanted to make something that hasn't been seen before, and is beautiful, detailed, and extreme," says Linn.



Using publicly available sources on both sea level rise and urban elevation data, he is extrapolating what we know about the changing oceans into a vision of the future that's both unbelievable and very realistic. For example, he takes care to label each map with new place-names that are sensitive to the city's culture and current geography.

In New York, there's the Isle of Jersey, and most of what remains of Manhattan is split up into islands named for the cultural institutions they rest on: CUNY Island, Carnegie Island, and Columbia Island.



LA, meanwhile, has the Sea of O.C. and LAX has become Ex-LAX, of course. Linn even invites suggestions for naming these speculative landmasses—his map of of the Montreal Archipelago, for example, has mostly French names, for which he invites new suggestions ("I gave names to some of the larger islands, but I don't know it well enough to do it justice," he writes).



Linn doesn't have a single motive for creating these half-fictional cities of the distant future—they are both fun experiments and depressing demonstrations of what could very well be coming to pass in slow-motion around us.

"The real damage from climate change will happen well before any of these scenarios come to pass," he says, "but if these maps help create awareness of how humans are accelerating it, then I consider that an added bonus to a fun, fascinating project."
You can buy versions of the maps for hanging here, or browse them all on Linn's site right here.

This Globul Warming is getting too much!

Massive Ice Boulder Crashes Through Boston-Area Apartment Complex Ceiling...

Ice jam topples Civil-War era headstones in Ohio cemetery...

Ice Boulder Crashes Through Wilmington Apartment Ceiling « CBS Boston

Ice Jam Pushes up Into Ohio Cemetery, Toppling Headstones - ABC News

The only unusually cold place on Earth last month was the eastern U.S.