Wednesday, August 30, 2017

               NINE  OUT OF  TEN  VEGAN GRIZZLIES CHOOSE TO
                                          WRAP  THEIR  SALMON  IN 

Grizzly bears have stopped eating salmon in favour of elderberries after being forced to make a choice due to climate change. Warming temperatures meant that the berries are ripening earlier than usual, at exactly the same time as the freshwater streams on Alaska’s Kodiak Island are overflowing with sockeye salmon.
The island's brown bears typically feed first on salmon in early summer, followed by elderberries later in the season, in late August and September.
“What you have is a scrambling of the schedule," said William Deacy, a biologist at Oregon State University that studied the phenomenon.

"It's essentially like if breakfast and lunch were served at same time and then there is nothing to eat until dinner.
"You have to choose between breakfast and lunch because you can only eat so much at a time."
The study found that during the unusually warm summer of 2014, the bears, which would traditionally kill up to 75 percent of the salmon, were nowhere to be seen near the streams.
Instead, they were in the hills busy munching on berries, which contain less protein and therefore take less energy to break down, causing them to gain weight more quickly.
Biologists warned that changes caused by a warming planet were behind the bears' unusual behavior and could affect the entire ecosystem.
The researchers found that the forests around the streams suffered because the bears’ fish carcasses were no longer there to enrich the soil.
"Bears switched from eating salmon to elderberries, disrupting an ecological link that typically fertilizes terrestrial ecosystems and generates high mortality rates for salmon," the study said.
On average, red elderberries are said to be ripening two and a half days earlier every decade.
If the pattern continues, they will regularly overlap with the salmon by 2070.
The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

                                   PLAYING WITH  FIRE

Asks:  

Might CO2 targets be behind the fad for flammable cladding?
After the Grenfell disaster, local authorities are busy checking their housing stock for fire risks. Rightly, they are looking at the estates and blocks that have been retro-fitted with external cladding, which has been identified as a probable key factor in spreading the fire at Grenfell...
But few people have asked why so many tower blocks and housing estates in the UK have been clad in recent years. Some have argued that the refurbishments were cosmetic, added to appease private investors by prettifying housing estates. But this is not the main reason for the cladding. In fact, it was added to meet the government’s targets for reducing CO2 emissions.

Just last year, Kensington and Chelsea Council proudly announced the completion of the £10million refurbishment project at Grenfell, which included ‘the installation of insulated exterior cladding’, new boilers and double glazing. The council said that the reason for the project was to ‘enhance energy efficiency and help reduce residents’ living costs’.In May 2012, the government’s committee on climate change (CCC) published its ‘advice on how local authorities can reduce emissions and control climate risk’ under the 2010 Climate Change Act. The CCC identified social housing as one of the key areas where CO2 emissions could be reduced by improved energy efficiency from greater insulation...

There is nothing wrong in principle with cladding. But it is a piecemeal solution to the question of energy efficiency put forward by a state that has put severe limits on new building...The rush to act on energy efficiency is undermined by the reluctance to build new houses and estates...

The problem with cladding and other kinds of insulation is that they are add-ons that are imperfectly integrated into the original design of a building, often with unintended consequences. One unintended consequence is that many of the estates that were given extra insulation were unnaturally warm, even stifling. The whole block would become a tower of hot air. On a summer evening, many tenants of these blocks would open windows to let some cooler air in. This was another reason why the fire at Grenfell spread between floors...

Though the conclusive report on the fire at Grenfell is not expected for some time, it does seem that Rydon’s cladding aggravated the spread of fire between floors. A likely cause is the gap between the cladding and the building, which can act as a flue; the use of combustible materials in the cladding; and the insulating foam between the aluminium cladding and the building. Any engineer will tell you that more moving parts means more things to go wrong – and that is true of buildings as well.

The fad for recladding tower blocks in London and the rest of the country looks increasingly like a hysterical response to international obligations for action over climate change. Social-housing tenants were the people who could most easily be made to carry the responsibility for energy efficiency because they had little control over their estates.

James Heartfield is the author of Let’s Build! Why We Need Five Million New Homes in the Next 10 Years ( 2007)

Monday, August 28, 2017

ANOTHER EXCOMMUNIFLATULATOR BITES THE DUST , AGAIN

EX-SOLOMON ISLANDS CONTRACTOR TURNED SALMON FISHING GUIDE TELLS  LATEST  TALE OF  ONE THAT GOT AWAY

Stefan Rahmsdorf, Climate Ex-Communicator


Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach [see update at the end of the post]
Stefan Rahmstorf recently got the AGU Climate Communications Prize, despite acting like a vicious jerkwagon when his claims get questioned by mere mortals, Here he is, crocodile smile and all …
Now, however, he’s had to retract one of his usual BS claims due to errors that he is unwilling to specify … details here.

Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels



Study claimed in 2009 that sea levels would rise by up to 82cm by the end of century – but the report’s author now says true estimate is still unknown
Wonderful fellow, right up there with Michael Mann, Peter Gleick, and the Climategate Unindicted Co-Conspirators … and just as foolishly wrong as the rest of them.
Regards to all,
w.
[Update] 
Well, that will teach me to read too fast. As Nick Stokes  points out, Rahmstorf did NOT write the paper,  in fact  Rahmsdorf was the one to point out the error.  Score … Nick Stokes  100%, and me, 0%.  However,  Rahmstorf  is  still  not a candidate for a communications prize… but then clearly, neither am I.  w.

Saturday, August 26, 2017

          SCIENCE GUY DEMANDS  MEGABUCK  PER  DEGREE
                              CLIMATE  SENSITIVITY BONUS

Bill Nye sues Disney claiming the company underpaid him by $9M

STORY CYCLE  CONTINUES TO BE THE WEAKEST IN 3 MILLENNIA


Wednesday, August 23, 2017

                   DELINGPOLE  DOUBLES DOWN ON DENIAL

HAVING BEEN CAUGHT  YESTERDAY TRYING TO PASS OFF TWO PR HACKS AS CLIMATE SCIENTISTS, BREITBART'S ANSWER TO  CARL SAGAN HAS BOUNCED BACK WITH  A GRAPH TRACABLE  ONLY TO A NOM DE BLOG - UNDER THE PSEUDONYM 'STEVEN GODDARD', TONY  HELLLER DENIES GLOBAL WARMING  AS THE " “biggest scientific fraud in history.” 
"You don’t need to be a scientist to see the hoax here: it’s there in blue and red. The blue is based on the raw data from weather stations in each of the U.S. states since 1990, which clearly shows a downward (ie cooling) trend. The red is what the data from these same stations shows after the climate fraudsters at NOAA have “adjusted” it. Now, instead of cooling it shows warming.
How do they get away with this stuff?

For the same reason a dog licks his balls.

Because they can.

At least they have been able to do so up till now.

Over to you, President Swamp Drainer…"



Tuesday, August 22, 2017

THE CURSE OF BREITBART ?  GeoResJ    TO  CEASE  PUBLICATION

Those seeking "No" as an answer to dumb questions about climate change have long loved  Watts Up With That  for the gibberings of amateur statisticians, high amperage hypocrisy from K-Street shills, and the sustained hilarity of Watts' dividing science editing between an  Oklahoman  CO2  well driller, and a  building  contractor  in the Solomon Islands. For the past few years, it's faced competition in the Spin  Zone  from   Pay- For- Play blogs  open  access  journals  like GeoResJ,  featuring  ordinarily  unpublishable  items such as:

The application of machine learning for evaluating anthropogenic versus natural climate change

Time-series profiles derived from temperature proxies such as tree rings can provide information about past climate. Signal analysis was undertaken of six such datasets, and the resulting component sine waves used as input to an artificial neural network (ANN), a form of machine learning. By optimizing spectral features of the component sine waves, such as periodicity, amplitude and phase, the original temperature profiles were approximately simulated for the late Holocene period to 1830 CE. The ANN models were then used to generate projections of temperatures through the 20th century. The largest deviation between the ANN projections and measured temperatures for six geographically distinct regions was approximately 0.2 °C, and from this an Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) of approximately 0.6 °C was estimated. This is considerably less than estimates from General Circulation Models (GCMs) used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and similar to estimates from spectroscopic methods.
While Breitbart's clueless climate science  guru  thinks  Abbot  & Mahrosy's  fueilleton  packs the biggest bang since the  runaway H-bomb that vaporised Elugulab, the  scientific  response  to  their theory  has  been underwhelming:
"This is basically nonsense." 

How  basic?

So basic  that   GeoResJ 's  staid scientific publisher, Elsevier, has decided to ditch the journal for good:

"GeoResJ  will  be  discontinued  from January 2018 and is closed to new submissions... 

Authors wishing to find alternative journals to publish in may wish to use the Elsevier Journal Finder tool."

Neither Terminauthor is a climate modeler. Boh have long worked at the soft coal fired Institute of Public Affairs , which besides novel climate scince ideas, offers  informative books on cat palmistry. Abbot got his PhD "in association with the Pulp and Paper Research Institute of Canada." and has engaged  in basic research associated with the refining of crude oil, working at the Caltex oil refinery in Brisbane" while full time publicist & part time  water chemist Maharosy has worked with him defending their patrons against a string of agricultural runoff lawsuits


Monday, August 21, 2017

                       NONE  DARE  CALL  IT  GEOENGINEERING

But Monday saw the daily rise in anthropogenic radiative climate forcing stopped in its tracks. and run backwards. For half a day, the moon's shadow took a bite out of total solar irradiance, and the Mother of All SRM Experiments carved an ungoverned track from the Aleutians across America, and out to the Cape Verde Islands.  

The eclipse abstacted some few megajoules per square meter from the day's total solar forcing but calculating the integral is not for the faint of heart, as it  must incorporate cloud albedo changes along the whole shadow track, but readers are welcome to try. Above are some model shapshots of what happened over land, and NASA has posted the whole animation


Sunday, August 20, 2017

                              THE  ECLIPSE  OF  REASON


Having seen two total eclipses, in Quebec in 1963, and in the Caribbean in 1998,  I  cannot overemphasize the importance of :
  • Getting to a viewing site dead in the middle of the centerline. 
  • Not forgetting to look at the rest of the sky.
We  were on the  nearest island,  about  ten miles distant, in 1998, and while the corona was spectacular, we experienced shorter totality, a bizarre dark green sky eerily recalling a Giotto fresco, and few stars visible on our side of the centerline between Antigua and Guadeloupe.
In contrast, from the dead center vantage of 1963,  the whole Solar System, from Mercury to Saturn was visible to the naked eye laid out in a spectacular straight line on both sides of the sun, in a  black sky backlit by the Milky Way- things of  unexpected and uneclipsed wonder. 

                                AT  GENERAL  MONCKTONICS,
                 PROGRESS IS OUR LEAST IMPORTANT PRODUCT


Watts' latest news is George White repeating Viscount Monckton's repetition of what George White said last year.

A Consensus Of Convenience


We publish this here, not to confirm that it is correct, but to stimulate the debate needed to determine whether or not it is correct or if it’s simply an exercise in curve fitting. ~ctm
George White, August 2017
Climate science is the most controversial science of the modern era. A reason why the controversy has been so persistent is that those who accept the IPCC as the arbiter of climate science fail to recognize that a controversy even exists. Their rationalization is that the IPCC’s conclusions are presented as the result of a scientific consensus, therefore, the threshold for overturning them is so high, it can’t be met, especially by anyone who’s peer reviewed work isn’t published in a main stream climate science journal. Their universal reaction when presented with contraindicative evidence is that there’s no way it can be true, therefore, it deserves no consideration and whoever brought it up can be ignored ..
Here's the orginal, based not on peer reviewed climate science-  The board of Monckton's ersatz "learned journal "  resigned in protest over its publication of White's  the bogus analogy to  circuit theory, but the same nonsense  the electircal engineer has been parroting  at WUWT and GWPF conferences since 2011:

SCIENTISTS ADMIT FAKE CLIMATE CHANGE PREDICTIONS

Breaking news: Major climate science error exposed!

At the recent high-level climate change conference in London, a fundamental error in climate science was revealed for the first time. 
The much-vaunted “climate consensus” turns out to have been wrong all along.
At the London conference, 80 Professors, 60 Doctors of Science and 40 other experts, including Piers Corbyn, brother of Britain’s opposition leader, who has a first-class degree in Astrophysics, were shocked to learn that the error, first introduced a generation ago when climate scientists borrowed feedback math from electronic network analysis without really understanding it, is the reason for their exaggerated predictions of how much global warming Man may cause.
Without that error, no one would ever have tried to pretend that global warming is a global crisis.
Once the error is corrected – which will happen when the paper describing it in mathematical detail is published in a leading scientific journal – the climate scare will be officially over.
Last year I published a paper in the learned journal Energy & Environment drawing attention to a problem deep in the math used by climate modelers to fabricate their profitable predictions of doom.
At that time I was hunting for the error that had caused the problem... A few weeks ago George White, an electronics engineer, contacted me to say that there were indeed several ... so grievous that the arrogant profiteers who have made fortunes out of pretending the science is settled could be thrown out of business overnight – and good riddance.

Saturday, August 19, 2017

        IF  YOU DON'T LIKE  THE WEATHER IN NEW ENGLAND,
                                 JUST  WAIT  62,000  YEARS.

       WATTS' LATEST  SURE-FIRE  FIX  FOR  CO2  FORCING

              A Deterministic Forecast of Future Climate Changes

By Renee Hannon
In my previous WUWT  post, I proposed a conceptual process model describing the influences of astronomical controls on interglacial warm periods and glacial cycles (Figure 1). The warm onsets with rapidly increasing temperatures are triggered by an increase in the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit, an increase in obliquity and an increase in summer insolation. The nearly concurrent increase in these astronomical forces is a necessary component for a significant interglacial warm onset... Summer insolation which retains the higher frequency signal of precession may modify warm duration patterns or influence stadial and interstadial occurrences.

As seen in past warming onsets, an increase in eccentricity, obliquity, and summer insolation are required. The next concurrent increase of these astronomical cycles is interpreted to initiate a future interglacial in approximately 62 kyrs from present day. This will terminate the current glacial cycle making it one of the shortest glacial cycles in the past 450 kyrs 

Friday, August 18, 2017

                               HIS FIRST  SCIENCE TUTOR

                             BETTER LATE THAN NEVER:


SINCE BREITBART PUNDIFICATOR AND ALL-ROUND SCIENCE CRANK JAMES DELINGPOLE'S DISASTROUS BBC RUN-IN WITH SIR PAUL NURSE,  HE'S BEEN AT A LOSS FOR AN  ON-THE-AIR  REMATCH WITH REASON.


HE'LL TURN 100 TWO SUMMERS HENCE
HIS PRODUCERS HIT ON INVITING A CONTRARIAN TOO FAMOUS TO IGNORE .AND TOO ANCIENT TO ARGUE  WITH, BUT BIT OFF MORE THAN DELINGPOLE  COULD CHEW IN ASKING  GRAND OLD  GAIAN  JAMES LOVELOCK  C.H. IN FOR A REMEDIAL SCIENCE CHAT -


     BUT  CANADA  DOESN'T  NEED  RHODE ISLAND  ANYWAY







Aug 15, 2017
Heat has been declining for decades despite government reports
Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, AMS Fellow
In the embarrassing NCA model-biased government report leaked by the NYTthe threat of model based future heat issues is greatly exaggerated. We live in the atmosphere not in a model world. The trend towards heat in the real world is clearly DOWN not up...The headlines from the mainstream media and Soros funded alarmist science organizations want you to believe heat is increasing and has become or will soon become deadly. 

Enlarged Courtesy of Tony Heller
Except in the west and despite a few brief intense heat spells most notably in July in the central, this summer has been relatively cool across the nation. Numerous friends and acquaintances from Colorado, Wisconsin, Georgia and the northeast have remarked at different times ‘it feels like fall’.
Unless you happen to be farther north, where it feels like Hell, because temperatures in the high  nineties have turned the Canadia Rockies into a blazing inferno :

More fire, more fury: Canada is ablaze amid record heatwave

Massive wildfires are raging in British Columbia and the Northwest Territories.





WILDFIRES PRODUCE HIGH CONCENTRATION OF AEROSOLS, SMOKE, AND HAZE (DARK ORANGE). CREDIT: NOAA
With temperatures toppling 100-year-old records, British Columbia’s raging wildfires have already set the record for the most acres burned. And it’s only mid-August. Meanwhile, the Northwest Territories have been experiencing their own Arctic heatwave, and equally devastating wildfires. One blogger pointed out that on Monday, the intense fires “rapidly expanded to consume a section of territory larger than Rhode Island in just one day.”

The thick smoke and aerosols led Environment Canada to issue health advisories last weekend for the Territories, and they re-issued warnings Monday for the worst-hit areas. And humans aren’t the only ones suffering: while adult animals know to flee the fires, younger ones don’t or can’t flee, especially young birds. “The heat is overwhelming them, particularly the past couple weeks have been really bad,” Sam Smith at Wildlife Rescue told CBC News

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

 PUTTING  THE SCOTCH VERDICT BEFORE  THE SCOTCH EGG

Pizzagate true or false? Verdict: likely both a real scandal AND fake news.

I’ve been hearing about “Pizzagate” for a while. Reading another tweet without hearing any media commentary I decided to try to have a look to find out how convincing, if at all, the “evidence” was.
The first thing I notice is that it’s pretty difficult to find any websites that are putting the case for Pizzagate being real. This is the typical censorship that we get from Google and their ilk. However I did find two sites:
  1. Wikileaks
  2. Massive Repository of Indisputable PizzaGate Evidence
The second I took as my “advocate for the prosecution”. This is full of snippets of biased evidence – for example repeating the reference to “Ping Pong” as if it were a reference to child sex, but ignoring that the restaurant owner’s name (appears to be) Mr Pong.
And because the article on “Pizzgate Evidence” was clearly trying to construe every possible piece of evidence in the worst possible light I chose as my test the least worst circumstances which would still be consistent with the evidence.

Main Non-Coincidental Evidence

  • 2007: Stratfor employee Chris Douglas asks, “Who all is in the Austin office today who is going to want pizza? We only have one slice and we need to know how thinly to slice it…” 
  • 2009: Stratfor discusses using same “waitresses” from President Barack Obama’s party in which $65,000 in “pizza” and “hot dogs” were flown to the White House.(archived version) This is against official White House policy.
  • February: Stratfor CEO George Friedman frustrated by not being told what “Pizza Party” codeword means
  • November: Stratfor employee Ben West asks if fellow employee Bayless Parsley is on list of pedophiles caught in recent sting
  • January: Tony Podesta asks John Podesta, “Would love to get a pizza for an hour? Or come over,” and tells him, “I’m seated with the kids so little wired"
  • September: John Podesta receives infamous email about “map that seems pizza-related” on a handkerchief of his

 Verdict

Clearly there is coded language being used. Whatever “Pizza” refers to can be used for an hour. And this “pizza” and “hot dogs” seems to be officially sanctioned with a massive price tag of $65,000. It is clear there is a scandal of some sort here. But I see nothing except coincidental symbols (in the “evidence” article) to suggest paedophilia. Yes the symbols are similar – but from other research I know how easy it is to find likenesses like this and for example I’ve certainly doodled a triangle with a spiral myself.
So there is a real scandal, so, why aren’t the press investigating the real scandal?
The answer is almost certainly because someone has deliberately set out to muddy the waters of a real scandal by linking it to something so bizarre that the Fearty press won’t touch it. This is just what I was suggesting in my article: The use of conspiracy theories to hide the truth.
The author studied physics, electronics and some philosophy at St.Andrews, has  an MBA from Strathclyde, was studying archaeology in Glasgow, worked in a variety of industrial manufacturing companies on a large range of projects, then decided to enter the new area of renewables, andv learnt Danish in order to “understand the competition” and was selected as a Green candidate for the Scottish Green party in 2003, but decided not to stand when the first candidate on the list refused to support his local hospital