Presto Agitato

Missing You

X-Ray?

I just caught a show on the Science Channel in which the host rode in an old British military jet to 60,000' in order to see the ‘thin blue line’ of Earth's atmosphere.  The host intoned his concern: From up there, he said, you can see the thinness and fragility of the atmosphere, Earth's only protection from being another damned space rock.

Wait a minute: He could see the fragility of the atmosphere?  How's that again? 

Man, his eyesight is much better than mine!

Chuck Woolery for President

These aren't just ‘baseline cuts’ but for-real, bona fide, honest-to-goodness cuts!  But Chuck, honey, $1.5 trillion isn't even a drop in the ten-year bucket (a few trillion here, a few trillion there…), so let's get back to the chopping-block, eh?

Oh, yes, one more thing: Those ‘squirrels’ are rabbits.

Denial Canada

It looks like the folks at CRU will need to smear another set of scientists:

The climate system may be less sensitive to greenhouse-gas warming than many models have predicted.

Nathan Gillett and his co-workers at Environment Canada in Victoria, British Columbia, analysed how well the latest Canadian Earth System Model tracked temperature changes attributable to volcanoes, man-made aerosols and rising greenhouse-gas emissions.  They adjusted the model using temperature records from 1851 to 2010 — 60 years of data more than most previous analyses.  The model predicted a short-term increase of 1.3–1.8 °C for a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, which is low in the range of estimates from previous forecasts.

That's the problem with the climate models: They only work for the time period they were tweaked to match.  Run them against a different time period — longer, shorter, or just a different frame — and the numbers come out upside-down.  In other words, the results are fudged.  This is why your they made you show your work in  school.

Don't Like Huntsman? You're Nuts!

I'm not sure Jon Huntsman really wants to run with this theme:

In an interview Friday, the Utah governor turned [ambassador to China] said bluntly that the GOP had lost its equilibrium in the Obama era but predicted it would eventually return to its bearings — and vindicate his own brand of pragmatism.

‘I believe in the ideas put forward by Theodore White, the cycles of history’, Huntsman told POLITICO.  ‘I believe we are in one such cycle.  I think that cycle ultimately takes us to a sane Republican Party based on real ideas.’

So smaller government, lower taxes, and balanced budgets don't count?  And he wonders why he polls so poorly?

Mr. Huntsman began his campaign by excoriating Republicans as antiscientific know-nothings for questioning the global-warming panic.  Yet only a week ago, Huntsman was declaring himself the true conservative in the race.  Makes you wonder what he means by ‘conservative’, doesn't it?  (Assuming that you give a damn, of course.)

Kyoto, RIP

Canada is out:

For Canada, the cost of either meeting its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol, or failing to do so, was too much to bear.

On Monday, the country became the first signatory of the landmark climate treaty to back out of the deal, citing the huge potential cost of legally binding commitments.

Confirming the move, environment minister Peter Kent said to meet its obligations under the accord Canada would have to take every single vehicle off its roads.

‘Every car, truck, ATV, tractor, ambulance, police car’, he elaborated in a media briefing, before giving another equally unpalatable option of closing down the country's entire farming and agricultural sector and cutting heat to every home, building and factory.

For some, such a retreat to pre-industrial oblivion is the point; we're hurting Gaia, and what right do we have?

Global Warming Fail

Scientists have discovered that plants absorb carbon dioxide twenty-five percent faster than previously assumed:

Lisa Welp-Smith of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, California, and her team came up with a new method for measuring how much CO2 is absorbed and released by plants.

The team used oxygen isotope markers in CO2 and more than 30 years of data from a global network that analyses air samples to measure changes in greenhouse gases, pollution and other factors.

‘What this (finding) means is that plants are working faster than we thought they did’, said Colin Allison, an atmospheric chemist and one of the study's authors, told Reuters from Australia.

The Reuters story tapdances around the implications, but this adjustment is three to four times larger than the entirety of man-made CO2 emissions.  Of course a significant amount of this carbon will be released when the plants die (or are burned, or farted out), but between this and the discovery that heat is escaping the ‘greenhouse’ faster than assumed should — one would think — induce a large measure of humility in the warmists.

Yeah, I know: What was I thinking?

 

Shortcutting Science

From the Washington Times:

The Environmental Protection Agency’s internal watchdog said Wednesday the Obama administration cut corners in evaluating the science it used to back up its finding that carbon is a dangerous pollutant that can be regulated under existing federal law.

The report by the EPA’s inspector general is certain to be used in court by those seeking to overturn EPA’s claim that it can write global-warming rules under existing law and doesn’t need new authority from Congress.

It is unfortunately common — especially common among the deeply invested — to forget that science is a process, a method of arriving at ever-closer approximations of the truth.  If you skip any part of the process, what you are doing isn't science.  You may be wrong even if you do everything right, but the chances that an error, e.g. a bad assumption or an error in technique, will go undiscovered will be very much smaller.  Proper broad-based, expert, independent, unbiased, honest review can be brutal (and very inconvenient) but it is absolutely integral to the process — that is, it is fundamental to the vital matter of scientific integrity.  Without it you're Al Gore.

Showing Their Ignorance

The Associated Press tests this whopper in an article comparing the brilliant and responsible (according them) Jon Huntsman to that notorious neanderthal Rick Perry:

Perry’s home state of Texas releases more heat-trapping pollution carbon dioxide — the chief greenhouse gas — than any other state in the country, according to government data.

Um, did the author bother to ask an actual scientist about this?  Carbon dioxide isn't even close to being 'the chief greenhouse gas'; methane is more powerful by quite a bit, and water vapor is by orders of magnitude.  In fact, all the computer models that predict anthropogenic global warming assume a large 'amplification effect' (positive feedback) from increased atmospheric water vapor without which the warming due only to carbon and hydrocarbon gases is trivial.  But the best scientific evidence is that this assumption is wrong both in magnitude and sign — that is, that an increase in atmospheric water vapor leads to an increase in sun-blocking low-level cloud cover while adding nothing to heat-trapping upper-tropospheric cloud cover, thus producing a net negative feedback.

But don't bother the Associated Press with the news; they're too busy 'editing' and 'fact-checking'.

(h/t: Powerline)

A Guess is as Good as Data

I have noted before that computerized climate models are substantially reliant on very dubious assumptions about the 'energy budget' of the planet, especially regarding the effect of changes in atmospheric water vapor.  Data generally contradict these assumptions, yet the bad assumptions remain in the models, the (spurious) results of which are then used to argue for substantial and very expensive energy austerity. 

Enter the latest study of satellite data, just published, regarding the planet's energy budget:

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing.  The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than [some scientists] have claimed. ...

'The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show', [study co-author Roy] Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release.  'There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans'. ...

The new NASA Terra satellite data are consistent with long-term NOAA and NASA data indicating atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds are not increasing in the manner predicted by [...] computer models.  The Terra satellite data also support data collected by NASA's ERBS satellite showing far more longwave radiation (and thus, heat) escaped into space between 1985 and 1999 than [...] computer models had predicted.  Together, the NASA ERBS and Terra satellite data show that for 25 years and counting, carbon dioxide emissions have directly and indirectly trapped far less heat than [...] computer models have predicted.

Wherever you see '[...]' or '[some scientists]', I have removed the word 'alarmist' or 'alarmists'.  The article is from Forbes and thus contains some, um, editorial comment, but the issue here is objective; only the data and proper scientific argument matter, not a characterization of the scientists behind the models.  (No, not even if it hurts....)