Around this time of year, the climate Cassandras normally start making their “skiing is doomed” forecasts. This year being no exception. One of my favorite ski areas is Alta, Utah which now averages over 40 feet of snow per winter. It hasn’t always been like that though, as snowfall has been increasing by about two feet per decade since the 1940s.
If long term trends continue, Alta will average 735 inches of snow by the end of the century.
NOAA monitors seven sites in Australia and New Zealand. The average rise rate is 1.63 mm/year, with none of the sites exceeding 3mm/year. At this rate, it will take 613 years to rise one metre and 3067 years to rise Hansen’s five metres.
Average 1.63 --------- ---- Fremantle 1.48 Sydney 0.59 Newcastle 2.19 Townville 1.11 Lyttelton 2.36 Wellington 2.41 Auckland 1.29
Renewable energy advocates eye break from climate change debate
Washington (Platts)–16Nov2010/712 pm EST/012 GMT
Renewable energy advocates, now facing Republican control of the House of Representatives next year, are decoupling from efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions and retooling some of their long-standing proposals as they look for ways to win. Supporters of solar, wind and other renewable energy sources will have to break away from the climate change debate and frame their issue in broad terms of economic stability, job creation and national security, Dan Esty, head of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, said Tuesday. Esty spoke at the rollout of a new policy plan by the Coalition for Green Capital, a group comprised of renewable energy advocates. “The key here is to reframe the debate. It can’t be about cap and trade and climate change, and frankly… it can’t be about renewable energy,”
Great quote from a reader at Climate Audit a few years ago. (I don’t remember who it was.)
The graph above shows how USHCN has progressively cooled the past in Liberty, Texas. They have subtracted 3.4 degrees from measured temperatures in the 1920s and 1930s.
What a brilliant way to create a warming trend! Texas hasn’t warmed, so the past had to get cooler.
The raw data shows a strong cooling trend for maximum temperatures in Liberty, Texas.
Through the magic of USHCN adjustments, this cooling trend gets turned into a warming trend.
Dire messages about global warming could backfire and actually increase skepticism about climate change among the general public, according to a new study by a University of California at Berkeley social psychologist.
The study, which will be published in the January issue of the journal Psychological Science, says warnings about the potentially devastating consequences of global warming “threaten people’s fundamental tendency to see the world as safe, stable and fair.”
Author Robb Willer said people might respond to such warnings by disputing evidence for global warming and by cutting back on their plans to reduce their carbon footprint.
Those who read the positive messages were more open to believing in the existence of global warming and had more faith in science’s ability to solve the problem, but those exposed to “doomsday” messages became more skeptical about climate change, he said.
Earlier in the year, the warm El Niño weather at the Vancouver Olympics was being widely touted as evidence of global warming.
This winter, La Niña is about to hit Vancouver hard, with temperatures 10°C below normal.
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp2.html
The forecast for this weekend is bitter cold.
Even assuming the most optimistic scenario, snowpack in the Tahoe Basin will decline by half by 2100.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/green/detail?entry_id=77186
Instead of issuing the ski report for 2100, why don’t they issue one for 2010?
They won’t do that, because it will be shown that they have no idea what they are talking about. The climate game depends on issuing forecasts for long after the forecaster is dead.
In the meantime, California and the UK have well over 100 million people who completely depend on fossil fuels to survive from day to day.
Few people would miss either of these guys if they went off to a tropical island permanently, but if the energy companies shut down – all hell would break lose in a matter of days.
NOAA has seven tide gauges around the Indian Ocean, including Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Yemen, Malaysia and Thailand. The average sea level rise rate is 0.59 mm/year, with all gauges reporting below the IPCC minimum forecast of 1.9 mm/year.
http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.shtml
All of these gauges saw most of their sea level rise prior to 1950, and graphs have been flat to down since then. At current rates, it will take infinity years to see one metre of sea level rise.
