Real Climate Science

Ancient Climate Change: When Palm Trees Gave Way To Spruce Trees

ScienceDaily (June 17, 2009) — For climatologists, part of the challenge in predicting the future is figuring out exactly what happened during previous periods of global climate change.

One long-standing climate puzzle relates to a sequence of events 33.5 million years ago in the Late Eocene and Early Oligocene. Profound changes were underway. Globally, carbon dioxide levels were falling and the hothouse warmth of the dinosaur age and Eocene Period was waning. In Antarctica, ice sheets had formed and covered much of the southern polar continent.

Apparently Dinosaur farts were actually keeping them alive.

But what exactly was happening on land, in northern latitudes? When and how did Northern glaciation begin, and what does this knowledge add to the understanding of the relationship between carbon dioxide levels and today’s climate?

An international team that included Dr. David Greenwood, an NSERC-funded researcher at Brandon University, now provides some of the very first detailed answers, and they come from an unusual source.

“Fossils of land plants are excellent indicators of past climates,” said Dr. Greenwood. “But the fossil plant localities from the Canadian Arctic and Greenland don’t appear to record this major climate change, and pose problems for precisely dating their age, so we needed to look elsewhere.“

Sucks when the data doesn’t fit the theory.

Ancient Climate Change: When Palm Trees Gave Way To Spruce Trees

Justin Gillis may have some competition at the Times for the most clueless global warming author.

Hawaii’s Beaches Are in Retreat, and Its Way of Life May Follow   Beaches like Waikiki face accelerating erosion, a new report says.

Little by little, Hawaii’s iconic beaches are disappearing.

Most beaches on the state’s three largest islands are eroding, and the erosion is likely to accelerate as sea levels rise, the United States Geological Survey is reporting.

Though average erosion rates are relatively low — perhaps a few inches per year — they range up to several feet per year and are highly variable from island to island and within each island, agency scientists say. The report says that over the last century, about 9 percent of the sandy coast on the islands of Hawaii, Oahu and Maui has vanished. That’s almost 14 miles of beach.

The findings have important implications for public safety, the state’s multibillion-dollar tourism economy and the way of life Hawaiians treasure, said Charles H. Fletcher, who led the work for the agency.

Hawaii’s Beaches Are in Retreat, and Way of Life May Follow – NYTimes.com

The sand at Waikiki Beach was brought in from California from the 1920s through the 1970s. It has been disappearing for the last 40 years, because they aren’t replenishing it any more. Sea level has risen 120 metres in the last 15,000 years. Beaches don’t drown – they relocate.

The arrival of tropical species in Greenland is more than enough evidence to justify blocking Keystone.

19 Jan 1928 – GREENLAND PALMS Jazz for Eskimos

Kofi Annan did nothing to stop the Rwandan massacre in 1994, and now is in charge of peace in Syria.

March, 2004

UN chief’s Rwanda genocide regret

Annan headed UN peacekeepers at the time of 1994 genocide
The United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has said he could and should have done more to stop the genocide in Rwanda 10 years ago.

At a memorial conference at the UN, Mr Annan said he realised he personally could have done more to rally support for international efforts to stop it.

“The international community is guilty of sins of omission,” Mr Annan said.

The genocide – in which some 800,000 people died – occurred when Mr Annan was head of UN peacekeeping forces

Rwandans have accused the peacekeepers who were there at the time of failing to protect them.

One survivor, Specios Kenya Bugoi, described how 4,000 Tutsis took shelter close to Belgian troops hoping to be safe.

Speaking through an interpreter she described how the troops left and the killings began.

“During that massacre I lost my husband, members of my family, all of my friends, neighbours,” she said.

“I slept among the cadavers for the whole night.”

In April 2000 the UN Security Council admitted responsibility for failing to stop the genocide.

BBC NEWS | Africa | UN chief’s Rwanda genocide regret

Having failed to do anything useful in Rwanda, the UN decided to let him do the same thing to Syria.

Former U.N. chief Kofi Annan was this year picked to lead a joint ceasefire mission with the Arab League to Syria and has been negotiating with the Syrian regime for several months.

Earlier, the EU’s Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton said “the continuing violence is appalling,” and that the EU will continue to support Annan “for as long as he wishes to continue” it. However, others were more concerned about the progress of the Annan mission.

Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders expressed frustration with the amount of time the Annan mission to Syria was taking and said it was time to reopen the debate about a humanitarian corridor into Syria with some military presence.

“We support the mission of Kofi Annan but it has begun to be very long now without any ceasefire. And so I’m sure that we need to do more and maybe we’ll go back to the humanitarian corridor,” he told reporters before a meeting of EU foreign ministers.

3rd UPDATE: EU Agrees New Syria Sanctions,Some Worry On Annan Mission – WSJ.com

March 2012

The last two calendar years saw a total of 146 global tropical cyclones, the lowest 2-year total in records since at least 1970. In the past 24-months, including ongoing Southern Hemisphere tropical cyclone activity, there have been a total of 141 global tropical storms. This is also a record low.

http://policlimate.com/tropical/

Time Magazine babbles mindlessly about global warming and hurricanes, without bothering to do any actual research.

James Hansen’s Scary New Math

A new analysis by the NASA climatologist for the first time ties specific weather events to human-induced climate change

How can NASA physicist and climatologist James E. Hansen, writing in the New York Times today, “say with high confidence” that recent heat waves in Texas and  Russia “were not natural events” but actually “caused by human-induced climate change”?

It wasn’t all that long ago that respected MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel flatly refuted the notion that you can pinpoint global warming as the cause of an extreme weather event. “It’s statistical nonsense,” he told PBS.

In 2005, Emanuel reported that hurricane intensity, which is fed by warmth, had increased some 80 percent during the previous 50 years, a period during which temperatures had increased more dramatically than any time in at least 500 years. Nonetheless, he asserted, that didn’t mean Hurricane Katrina, the sixth strongest Atlantic storm on record, had been brought on by climate change.

http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/

Complete BS. Hansen has blamed practically every weather event since 1988 on coal death trains, evil oil executives, or missing Arctic ice.

The most intense hurricane in US history occurred in 1935, and seven of the ten most intense hurricanes occurred below 350 ppm. It has been seven years since a major hurricane hit the US – the longest period on record.

Is there any way to make these babbling morons shut up?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1935_Labor_Day_hurricane

If you average two odd integers, the average is also an integer.  average(7,5) = 6.0

If you average two even integers, the average is also an integer.    average(8,6) = 7.0

If you average an odd and an even integer, the average always has a decimal of .5  average(6,3) = 4.5      50% of all integer pairs come in this category.

@afreedma: Chart that speaks volumes re: extreme weather in US this yr: 82% of country affected by extreme max temperatures. http://1.usa.gov/Kapor3
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First problem is that mild springtime weather is not extreme, and second is that there is no trend. In statistics people often throw out outliers. If Andrew was in the UK right now he probably wouldn’t be complaining about mild daytime temperatures.

h/t to Marc Morano

Joe D’Aleo sent this over. The average of -1 and -1 is zero.

http://www.crh.noaa.gov/product.php?site=LOT&issuedby=ORD&product=CLI&format=CI&version=7&glossary=0

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwzeTnI7vLA&feature=player_embedded]