Real Climate Science

By 2050 as a result of climate change, global “potential to produce food” could decline by 5 to 10 percent, after an average increase through 2020, said Andy Jarvis, an agriculture policy expert at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, based in Cali, Colombia.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6AG55020101117

How many times have we heard that same story? Ehrlich said that we were going to starve 20 years ago. The 1970s ice age scare went like this :

There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

A more complete video has been released of the lecture and it shows a different story. The professor was challenging both sides with extreme rhetoric.

He seems badly misinformed on the issue, but this lecture was not the attack on conservatives it was portrayed to be in the heavily edited video released yesterday.

That was a hack job and my comments were inaccurate.

http://vimeo.com/16649140

Here is how Hansen’s argument goes :

Chief instigator of climate change was earth orbital change, a very weak forcing.

Chief mechanisms of Pleistocene climate change are GHGs & ice sheet area, as feedbacks

Hansen says that ice ages are driven by very small changes in Earth’s orbit, which get massively multiplied by changes in greenhouse gases (i.e H2O and CO2.)

However, when talking about solar “forcings” the story is different. Hansen says that changes in the sun’s output are “too small” to have much effect on the climate.

So why doesn’t he believe in the same massive solar feedback as he claims for orbital cycles and small increases in CO2? Is feedback somehow prejudiced against the Sun?

Now that we know that sea level altimetry data is being used as the basis of misinformation being presented to the US Congress, lets have a closer look at how it compares to tide gauge data.

It is difficult to interpret this color scheme, so I took all of the areas greater than 3mm/year and painted them red below.

Continue reading →

University of Colorado satellite altimetry shows sea level increases much higher than tide guages. East of the Philippines they show greater than 10 mm/year in a region where tide gauges show little or no sea level rise.

http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_ib.jpg

Below, I overlaid the NOAA tide gauge data on that region.The gauge at Guam is going down, while CU reports 10 mm/year. The arrow at Chuuk is rising only 0.6 mm/year and is shown in the 9.0+ region of the CU map.

Continue reading →

That can mean only one thing – Christmas gift advertising!

Thanks everyone!

SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
HEARING CHARTER
A Rational Discussion of Climate Change: the Science, the Evidence, the Response
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010
10:30 am
2325 Rayburn House Office Building

Sea Level Rise. The global sea level rose about 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) in the last century. The rate in the last decade, however, is nearly double that of the last century.

Actually, sea level rise rates have not changed a bit – when you measure them the same way as you did in the past.

http://www.globalwarmingart.com

Wed Nov. 17, 2010 3:00 AM PST
A year ago this week, the already-heated global warming debate exploded into allegations of a massive scientific fraud when a trove of emails between climate scientists was stolen and posted online. Portions of the emails were cherry-picked and taken out of context to create the impression that researchers were engaged in a sinister plot to mislead the public and silence detractors. Dubbed “ClimateGate” by global warming deniers, the ensuing hype succeeded in further clouding the public’s understanding of climate science.

Never mind that it was a noncontroversy—that myriad models and reams of data have concluded that the planet is warming due to human activity, or that five separate investigations have confirmed that the ClimateGate scientists did nothing improper. In the combustible world of climate denial, the email release added fuel to the fire, reigniting old attacks on science in the blogosphere and among right-wing members of Congress—including a few who are in line to lead powerful House committees next year.

http://motherjones.com/

Canada votes not to join California as a soon to be third-world nation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11781175