Real Climate Science

As you enter Glacier Bay in Southeast Alaska you will cruise along shorelines completely covered by ice just 200 years ago.

Explorer Captain George Vancouver found Icy Strait choked with ice in 1794, and Glacier Bay was barely an indented glacier. That glacier was more than 4000 ft. thick, up to 20 miles or more wide, and extended more than 100 miles to the St.Elias Range of mountains.

By 1879 naturist John Muir found that the ice had retreated 48 miles up the bay. By 1916 the Grand Pacific Glacier headed Tarr inlet 65 miles from Glacier Bay’s mouth.

http://www.glacierbay.org/glaciers.html

Historically, Earth’s climate has regularly shifted back and forth between temperatures like those we see today and temperatures cold enough that large sheets of ice covered much of North America and Europe. The difference between average global temperatures today and during those ice ages is only about 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit), and these swings happen slowly, over hundreds of thousands of years.

Now, with concentrations of greenhouse gases rising, Earth’s remaining ice sheets (such as Greenland and Antarctica) are starting to melt too. The extra water could potentially raise sea levels significantly.

http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/

Sea level has been rising for at least 15,000 years. The first Americans walked to North America from Asia. USGS maps show that Alaskan glaciers retreated rapidly during the 1700s. Blaming sea level rise and glacial melt on human generated CO2 does not have one iota of legitimate scientific support.

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

Sea level rise was much faster during the 1940s.

I can’t see the layers in any software on my computer (typical Adobe nonsense) but here is a video.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt7oi2qfxlY]

We have received several e-mails today calling into question the validity of the PDF that the White House released, namely that there are embedded layers in the document. There are now several other people on the case. We looked into it and dismissed it.

The PDF is composed of multiple images. That’s correct. Using a photo editor or PDF viewer of your choice, you can extract this image data, view it, hide it, etc. But these layers, as they’re being called, aren’t layers in the traditional photo-editing sense of the word. They are, quite literally, pieces of image data that have been positioned in a PDF container. They appear as text but also contain glyphs, dots, lines, boxes, squiggles, and random garbage. They’re not combined or merged in any way. Quite simply, they look like they were created programmatically, not by a human.

What’s plausible is that somewhere along the way — from the scanning device to the PDF-creation software, both of which can perform OCR (optical character recognition) — these partial/pseudo-text images were created and saved. What’s not plausible is that the government spent all this time manufacturing Obama’s birth certificate only to commit the laughably rookie mistake of exporting the layers from Photoshop, or whatever photo editing software they are meant to have used. It’s likely that whoever scanned the birth certificate in Hawaii forgot to turn off the OCR setting on the scanner. Let’s leave it at that.

UPDATE: I’ve confirmed that scanning an image, converting it to a PDF, optimizing that PDF, and then opening it up in Illustrator, does in fact create layers similar to what is seen in the birth certificate PDF. You can try it yourself at home.

http://www.nationalreview.com/

I wrote an unnecessarily rude article a few days ago about a study of Texas precipitation variability. Here is the response from the author. I’m going to take her suggestion and check out the daily data she based the study on.

Hi,

Just thought I’d drop in to clarify a few issues.

I do have a BSc in physics and a PhD in atmospheric science, if anyone is wondering where my credentials come from.

Regarding the information quoted above, I analyzed changes in the variance of observed *daily* data from NOAA/NCDC stations, no modelling of any kind involved. You are welcome to do the same and I would be happy to compare our results. Please note that the figure copied above is based on annual averages, not daily data, while my statement refers to changes in daily data for long-term stations with no more than 5% missing data over the period of record.

I appreciate any honest and civil critiques. Anonymous slurs are more insulting to the person making them than to the person on the receiving end.

Yours sincerely,

Katharine Hayhoe

———————————

The data I used is from the Global Historical Climatology Network. It is available here: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/ghcn-daily/

There isn’t any contradiction between having more variability at the day-to-day level but not seeing it at the annual level. For example: the average of (2,2,2) is 2, but the average of (0,0,6) is also 2. So if you have more dry days and more wet days, they can still average out to the same number over the year, but with very different consequences for farmers, homeowners, and even surface water supply, in the meantime.

Tell him it is a “sideshow” and that you “have better things to do.” Tell him that the legal requirements for your job aren’t important, and then refuse to show it to him for three years.

Also, cite the President of the US as your precedent.

http://graphs.water-data.com/ucsnowpack/

“climate change … is likely to challenge governments and social systems in a way that has never happened before. ”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmADZpqhKhQ]

Armadillos have never been among the cuddly creatures routinely included in petting zoos, but on Wednesday federal researchers offered a compelling reason to avoid contact with the armored animals altogether: They are a source of leprosy infections in humans.

http://www.nytimes.com/