Real Climate Science

Are they locked in the boiler room with no windows?

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

That seals the deal. Useless, ugly, environmentally destructive windmills only cost everyone an extra £450 – not £500 as originally claimed!

She also admitted uSwitch’s latest projections suggest more modest energy bill increases of £450 by 2020,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/dec/17/energy-bills-telegraph

http://www.nobasscoal.org/

Until today, we had been having a beautiful December out here in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. Almost no snow and ice, and I have been able to go  the most of the month without getting in a car.

Ahead of last night’s storm I got in one last ride on my road bike. Now that the cold and snow is here, I won’t be using my road bike for a few days.

In other words, I’ll have to switch to my mountain bike! It is supposed to drop to -4F tomorrow night, so I’ll probably have to put on long pants and wear a scarf over my face when I ride.

BTW – I assume that most of the eco-loons who think the environment is falling apart live in big cities, because everything is just fine around here – in the environment.

And Hansen is an honourable man.

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90776/90882/7247130.html

“Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the century.”

–  John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, “What We Must Do, and the Cost of Failure,” in Holdren and Ehrlich, Global Ecology (1971), p. 279.

“As University of California physicist John Holdren has said, it is possible that carbon-dioxide climate-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020.”

–  Paul Ehrlich, The Machinery of Nature (1986), p. 274

“We have been warned by our more cautious colleagues that those who discuss threats of sociological and ecological disaster run the risk of being ‘discredited’ if those threats fail to materialize on schedule.”

– John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, eds., Global Ecology (1971), p. 6.

http://www.masterresource.org/2010/12/john-holdren-big-one-science/

h/t to Marc Morano

http://books.google.com

Some of the Earth’s tiniest naturally occurring particles may have just bred a big mess for climatologists.  New findings reveal that models scientists have long used to estimate the causes and effects of global warming may be dramatically flawed due to errors in one of their most important inputs.

These conclusions are found in a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Jasper Kok, a climatology researcher with The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

I. Recent Warming – Blame it on the Sun?

The study’s key conclusion was to show that the ratio of small soil dust particles (clay), which cool the atmosphere, to large soil dust particles (silt), which yield an indirect heating effect, may be much higher than previous estimated.  This is a critical finding because it shows that the Earth’s climate may be much more sensitive to solar radiation than previous models have indicated, which in turn casts doubt on anthropogenic warming theory — the idea that human carbon dioxide emissions bear the primary warming influence on the climate over the last several decades.

Carbon dioxide, like water vapor, has been shown unquestionably to be a greenhouse gas with some effect on the atmosphere.  And human behavior (direct — via burning fossil fuels, and indirect — via livestock and clearing vegetation) has caused atmospheric CO2 levels to creep upwards over the last half century.

That said, levels still remain drastically lower than in certain periods of the Earth’s early history.  Furthermore, it is exactly what impact these slightly elevated CO2 levels are having in terms of warming.  While it would be quick to claim causation, due to the correlation in recently rising temperatures, the exact degree of causation — if at all — remains unknown.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=20516

h/t to Marc Morano

Warmer and Wetter Winters in Europe and Western North America Linked to Increasing Greenhouse Gases

June 2, 1999

Why are winters warming up so much faster over Northern Hemisphere continents than over the rest of the globe? A new study by NASA researchers in the June 3 issue of the journal Nature is the first to link the well-documented large degree of North America and Eurasia winter warming and the associated wind changes to rising greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.

Drew Shindell, an atmospheric scientist from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University, NY, found that the large warming that has occurred during Northern Hemisphere winters over the last 30 years — up to nine degrees Fahrenheit, a full 10 times warmer than the global average 0.9 degree Fahrenheit warming — is likely a result of human activities that increase greenhouse gases. Warmer winters will bring more wet weather to Europe and Western North America, Shindell said, with Western Europe the worst hit by storms coming off the Atlantic.

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/19990602/

http://www.dailystar.co.uk/

h/t to Marc Morano