Sunday, July 28, 2013

SHARKNADO : THE SEQUEL !


Although absent from the list of things seen in the sky prefacing Aristotle's Meteorologia, this splendid meteor, last seen at the Bali Kite Festival in Denpasar, has been invited to drop in on the Mustique Blues Festival- if Garuda Airways provides a seat, and the TSA can summon the courage to inspect its interior. 

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Quis Custodiet ?

Having run out of climate scientists to ban,

Watts Up With That? censors are turning on each other.

Watt's sidekick Willis Eschenbach has been banned from the blog of fellow censor and sometime person of interest to the Norfolk constabulary Tallbloke, seen here dining with Judith Curry.

Eschenbach in turn has taken to beating the drums for Duke cyclotron jock turned numerologist Nick Scaffeta, whose last DIY climate science paper referenced six of own his previous efforts, which is about a half dozen more citations than they have received elsewhere.

Juvenal might ask who Willard's famously incestuous crew will cite once they have banned each other entirely ?

Congenital Cyclomania Redux

Posted on  by 
Guest Post by Willis EschenbachWell, I wasn’t going to mention this paper, but it seems to be getting some play in the blogosphere. Our friend Nicola Scafetta is back again, this time with a paper called “Solar and planetary oscillation control on climate change: hind-cast, forecast and a comparison with the CMIP5 GCMs”. He’s posted it up over at Tallbloke’s Talkshop. Since I’m banned over at Tallbloke’s, I thought I’d discuss it here.

Monday, July 22, 2013

CRUISING FOR A BRUISING


SAME BLOG. SAME PAGE, SAME DAY :
Certainly not!
By Judith Curry, Climate Etc., Jul 17, 2013
http://judithcurry.com/2013/07/17/certainly-not/#more-12206[SEPP Comment: Selections from a provocative essay stating uncertainty and questioning the consensus benefits scientific advancement. Unfortunately, the essay was greatly diminished by the essayist’s certainty in human caused catastrophic global warming, a certainty that does not exist.]

Same blog, more of same for five years running : 

The Ocean Is Not Getting Acidified

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach There’s an interesting study out on the natural pH changes in the ocean. I discussed some of these pH changes a year ago in my post “The Electric Oceanic Acid Test“. Before getting to the … Continue reading Posted in Uncategorized | 168 Comments

Nutty Story of the Day #2: whitewashing the ocean

How much lime does it take to treat the whole ocean? Where have we heard this before? Oh yes, dump powdered iron into the ocean. That one didn’t happen yet. Sure, let’s just toss a bunch of lime into the ocean and … Continue reading Posted in Climate_changeRidiculaeScience | 82 Comments

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

The Mandate Of Heaven

Having rejected the Heartland Institute's Manchurian candidate, Fred Singer, as a source of science advice, the nefarious ChiComs  have laid down the law on environmental policy by enshrining respect for the environment as  a constitutional feature of the Party Line -   in  Science , no less


It ain't exactly the Taoist Path of Water : 

SCIENCE AND LAW

Revising China's Environmental Law

China's Environmental Protection Law (EPL) is the main national environmental legislative framework. Yet the environmental legal system is incomplete, and implementation and enforcement of environmental laws have shown major shortcomings (13). A controversial attempt to revise the EPL could have far-reaching impacts on China's economic development and environmental protection, which may have global implications (45). Increasing pressures to strengthen the rule of law in China raise the stakes (6). We discuss the need for a sound legal and scientific basis for revising the EPL.
The National People's Congress (NPC) (the highest legislative body in China) Standing Committee included major revision of the EPL in its 2011 legislative agenda [see supplementary materials (SM)]. Proponents for radical revisions [e.g., the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP)] opposed other agencies and ministries that favor incremental adjustments. The 2012 draft revision shows the power of the incrementalists: Only the most urgent, feasible, and commonly agreed-upon improvements that require little change of other existing environmental laws have been included (78). Release of the draft revised EPL has triggered a flood of questions, comments, and complaints (458) (SM).
Debates resounded during the 2012 National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), when top leadership changed and “Ecological Civilization” (restructuring the economy to achieve man-nature, production-consumption harmony) was included in the Constitution of the CPC, with emphasis on scientific and democratic governance under the rule of law (910). Inclusion in the Constitution strengthened the legal and authoritative position of ecological civilization in development planning.
Because EPL revision was not approved by the NPC in March 2013, a new round of drafting is in process. The Legislative Affairs Commission of NPC has listed an EPL revision in the 2013 legislation plan. We suggest addressing the following four major issues.
In compliance with the Constitution, environmental protection and ecological civilization as national basic policy must be reaffirmed. The EPL should provide a legal basis for key environmental principles: the precautionary and prevention principles, public environmental rights and participation, and environmental justice (1112). These are absent or insufficiently stressed in the current draft.
A strong legal basis must be provided for independent strategic environmental assessment and performance-based auditing. The current Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) law only requires EIA of plans or projects not of policies (13). Although after-the-fact environmental audits should be conducted on all major public projects and programs by independent auditing institutions, few have been conducted because of limited capacity and knowledge within the National Audit Office and lack of legal backup (14). Environmental audits should be indispensable parts of decision-making of major governmental investments. EPL revision provides an opportunity to remove obstacles for powerful policy and to plan EIAs and governmental environmental audits crucial for science-based environmental policies.

Monday, July 1, 2013

QUOTATIONS FROM CHAIRMAN FRED.

For some inscrutible reason, the Chinese Academy of Sciences will not host a celebration of the op-ed the visiting tourist on the left submitted to the un-peer reviewed Shanghai Daily.

Though he claims that journal published it, his stateside blog, The Week That Was, strangely fails to provide a link, and queried by title, Shanghai Daily's search engine has no record of :

Climate change by the numbers.
In his Shanghai Daily essay of June 19, Mr. Bob Ward, a publicist with the Grantham Research Institute (London), promotes an alarmist view of climate change. He presents the conclusions of the IPCC, which claims that human-caused emission of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas), is producing dangerous global warming.

The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] was set up by the United Nations to provide the necessary evidence to support the (Rio de Janeiro) Global Climate Treaty, signed by most nations. This 1992 Treaty resulted in the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which was supposed to reduce the CO2 content of the atmosphere. It has failed completely in its task; by now, CO2 has risen to 400 ppm, about 40% above the pre-industrial level. The Protocol expired in 2012; but activists want to set up another one. However, there is little enthusiasm for any such agreement to limit energy production and economic growth.

The IPCC is supposed to survey published scientific results impartially but instead it has ignored research papers that contradict its conclusion. For evidence of human influence on climate, the IPCC relies on a supposed agreement between climate models and observations. In fact, the models cannot reproduce most of the observations and therefore fail to support the IPCC conclusion.

This disagreement has now become apparent to many scientists around the world, who have set up a competing study group called NIPCC [Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change]. The Chinese Academy of Sciences has just translated and published the reports of the NIPCC. The CAS also organized a June 15 Workshop in Beijing, where an international group of NIPCC authors presented their results. 

Contrary to the IPCC, NIPCC finds that natural influences rule the climate and human influences are relatively insignificant. I will give several examples where models and observations disagree.

Bob Ward mentions in passing that there has been no warming observed in the last fifteen years. But he fails to point out that this result disagrees with the predictions of every climate model. 

Ward is also dismissive of scientific research that cosmic rays from outer space can and do change the climate. The full story is that the cosmic ray intensity is affected by solar activity. Ultimately therefore, solar activity affects cosmic rays, which in turn change the earth s cloud cover and thereby affect climate.

One could cite many other examples of credible scientific work ignored by the IPCC. It has been the aim of the NIPCC to restore the balance of evidence necessary to permit informed decisions on policy.

Bob Ward relates, with pride, that the IPCC s Summary for Policy Makers is approved line-by-line by the nearly 200 participating national delegations. But these delegates are not scientists; they are working with a draft carefully compiled by a handful of politically oriented scientists who cherry-pick evidence from the IPCC Report itself and ignore contrary evidence. Unlike the Report, this draft Summary does not acknowledge the existence of scientific uncertainties. 

It is on the basis of such a Summary that politicians then try to develop policies that affect energy use -- and therefore have tremendous economic consequences. Right now, China is beginning to experiment with cap-and-trade policies. The US Congress has refused to approve such a policy; yet President Obama will attempt to achieve a similar result through regulation without the Congress. Europeans have tried it, but it has been an economic disaster. Australia has instituted a carbon tax as an alternative, but will soon abandon it. Only the State of California is proceeding with such a scheme, but is using it primarily to raise revenues, like a tax. It will have no detectible effect on climate.

A cap and trade scheme in China may have some value in improving energy efficiency in reducing the amount of energy required to produce a unit of output. That would be a useful objective. But it will do little if anything for the global climate and should not be considered as climate policy.

A quick word about carbon dioxide: It is an odorless, non-toxic natural constituent of the Earth s atmosphere. As the basic food for all plants, it is absolutely essential for maintaining life on our planet. CO2 should not be called a pollutant. In the geological past, its level has been ten times or more higher than its present value; in fact, our major food crops developed when CO2 levels were about five times higher. China is now the world s largest emitter of CO2 and thereby making an important contribution to increasing agricultural yields at a time when much of the global population is still hungry. The world should be grateful to China.

S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project. His specialty is atmospheric and space physics. An expert in remote sensing and satellites, he served as the founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service and, more recently, as vice chair of the US National Advisory Committee on Oceans & Atmosphere. He is a Senior Fellow of the Heartland Institute and the Independent Institute, and an elected Fellow of several scientific societies. He co-authored the NY Times best-seller "Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 years." In 2007, he founded and has since chaired the NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change), which has released several scientific reports [Seewww.NIPCCreport.org]. For recent writings seehttp://www.americanthinker.com/s_fred_singer/ and also Google Scholar. 

and only returns this under the author's name: