Real Climate Science

Rocks are too dumb to even spell their own name properly

In April, 1888 a massive flood on Mars inundated an area the size of France, cut the polar ice cap in half, and joined the two Martian seas. Global warming was rapidly destroying the Martian ice caps. The consensus of leading astronomers around the world agreed.

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Dr. James Hansen at NASA proposes 350 ppm as a safe level to stabilize the climate, halt sea level rise, stop glacial melt, and make the weather like it used to be in the good old days. Others have suggested that we have to cut CO2 back to 300 ppm.

There is no need to speculate about what would happen at 300 ppm, as we have plenty of historical records from the 19th century – when CO2 was below 300 ppm.

The glacier at Glacier Bay, Alaska retreated an incredible eight feet per day during the 19th century. It is quite clear that dropping CO2 below 300 ppm will not stop glaciers from retreating.

http://soundwaves.usgs.gov/2001/07/glacierbaymap.gif

Now let’s focus on a small sampling of some of the more notable weather events during the years 1886 – 1894.

1886 was the most active hurricane season in US history. Seven hurricanes made landfall, including two major hurricanes.

Highest Saffir-		Central		Max.   	Name
		and Category by 	Simpson U.S.		Pressure	Winds
		States			 Category 		

1886	Jun	TX, N2; LA, 2			2		973		85	-----
1886	Jun	FL, NW2; I-GA, 1		2		973		85	-----
1886	Jun	FL, NW2; I-GA, 1		2		973		85	-----
1886	Jul	FL, NW1				1		985		70	-----
1886	Aug	TX, C4				4		925		135	"Indianola"
1886	Sep   #	TX, S1, C1			1		973		80	-----
1886	Oct	LA, 3; TX, N2			3		955		105	-----

http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/ushurrlist18512009.txt

Terribly destructive storms also struck Europe that year.

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Tony Duncan suggests that Texas can run off solar electricity. Let’s do the math.

Texas is averaging about 55 Gigawatts of electrical consumption today.  Averaged out over 24 hours, a cloudless summer day might achieve 200 watts / m² solar insolation. The most efficient solar collectors are about 15%.

55,000,000,000 / (200 * 0.15) = 1,830,000,000

It would require almost two billion 1 m² solar panels to meet the average consumption today – assuming that you had a currently non-existent technology to store the electricity at night.

Now assume you got an outrageously good deal on the solar panels and only had to pay $100/m² – that would cost $200,000,000,000 for the panels and maybe that much again for the installation and power lines.

And of course it won’t work very well when it is winter, cloudy, dusty or at night.

Texas has been cutting back on building gas and coal power capacity, because of their heavy reliance on wind. During this summer’s heatwave, there has been almost no wind – and they are almost out of electricity to run their air conditioners.

October 8, 2009

Texas Wind Boom Cutting into Fossil Generator Profits
By Chris Holly

Can wind turbines actually reduce the amount of fossil fuels consumed? A Wall Street Journal analysis concludes that ERCOT utilities will begin to feel the squeeze in their profits this year and to expect the amount of fossil fuels used to generate electricity to be reduced.

http://www.coalpowermag.com/

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Witnesses’ accounts claim everything from dozens to hundreds of young black people beating white people as they left State Fair Thursday night.

“It looked like they were just going after white guys, white people,” said Norb Roffers of Wind Lake in an interview with Newsradio 620 WTMJ.  He left the State Fair Entrance near the corner of South 84th Street and West Schlinger Avenue in West Allis.

“It was 100% racial,” claimed Eric, an Iraq war veteran from St. Francis who says young people beat on his car.

Eric, a war veteran, said that the scene he saw Thursday outside State Fair compares to what he saw in combat.

“That rated right up there with it.  When I saw the amount of kids coming down the road, all I kept thinking was, ‘There’s not enough cops to handle this.’  There’s no way.  It would have taken the National Guard to control the number of kids that were coming off the road.  They were knocking people off their motorcycles.”

“I have not seen anything like this in my life.  It was a huge mob, and it was a fight that maybe lasted one to two minutes.”

http://www.todaystmj4.com/news/local/126825018.html

http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent.png

2011 in red. 2006 in green.

The US Navy is forecasting that the ice edge in the Chukchi and Laptev Seas will push to the north, with little change in the Beaufort or East Siberian Seas.

The upper 700 metres of the global ocean has seen a rise in temperature since reliable records began in the late 1960s. However, there has been a pause in this warming during the period from 2003 to 2010. The papers published this week offer explanations for this.

Climate model simulations from KNMI show that such pauses in upper ocean warming occur regularly as part of the climate system’s natural variability.

This is because of two factors. Firstly variations in the El Niño – Southern Oscillation, known as ENSO (a climate cycle which affects sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean), cause more of the heat stored in the upper ocean to be released into space.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2011/ocean-warming

Then they explain their theory that warm water sinks.

Secondly, heat can be temporarily moved to the deeper ocean below 700m due to changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation – the oceanic conveyor belt that transports vast amounts of heat in the North Atlantic Ocean.

h/t to Marc Morano

USHCN shows that Meeker, Oklahoma has cooled considerably since 1950

GISS shows Meeker in a crazy warming trend since 1990

If the present refuses to get warmer, then the past must become cooler. GISS quit subtracting a degree in the mid-1990s, and gave 1998 a super-duper turbo charge!

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