Real Climate Science

Dr. Hansen has told us that the very survival of “life as we know it” depends on reducing CO2 levels to 350 ppm (parts per million.)

http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/greenhouse-effect

I calculated the greenhouse effect using the same radiative transfer model incorporated in NCAR’s weather and climate models. RRTM (rapid radiative transfer model) is the part of their climate model which calculates the downwards and upwards flow of shortwave and longwave radiation. In other words, it is the portion of the climate model which calculates the greenhouse effect.  Continue reading →

The Arctic is getting rather chilly, with temperatures over the entire ice pack ranging from 0 to minus 15ºC.

Over the last few days, a lot of the remaining low concentration ice in the East Siberian Sea has melted out. You can see that represented in the downwards blip below.

The modified NSIDC image below shows changes in the ice over the last week. Losses are shown in red, and gains in green. Continue reading →

Anthony reports on WUWT that geologists are being prosecuted in Italy for failing to forecast an earthquake. It is difficult to overstate how ludicrous this is.

I can imagine that there would be many benefits to having superpowers, but geologists can not see down inside the earth any better than anyone else. State of the art for earthquake prediction is giving probabilities like “LA has a 90% chance of a devastating quake sometime during the next 100 years.”

Like climate forecasting, earthquake forecasting is severely limited by very complex, poorly understood systems. Unfortunately, some scientists on the climate side have been passing themselves off as gods who can see details far into the future, and have suckered the public into believing that scientists really do have superpowers.

They may be missing half the earth, but they can still measure the earth’s temperature accurately to within one hundredth of a degree.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/05/google-galaxy-zoo-climate-project

Climate scientists meeting in Britain this week hope to build a database to predict natural disasters precisely. And records of the voyages of the Bounty and Beagle will assist them in their task.

The Met Office eliminated a natural disaster last year, by dropping their seasonal forecasts. Continue reading →

Telegraph Image

John Vidal writes in The Guardian :

If Rajendra Pachauri goes, who on Earth would want to be IPCC chair?
No future chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change can ever feel safe if Dr Pachauri is driven out

He has a point. Ken Lay was thrown out of Enron for getting a few numbers mixed up in their reports. We expect that CEOs be competent and produce accurate reports, or we fire them. It isn’t too much to expect the same from Government. Or perhaps it is ………

If a chair must go every time the sceptics and the press attack, then every IPCC chairman will be mercilessly hounded on a personal and political level. Hunting the chair will become a destructive sport not unlike vilifying football managers, guaranteed to destroy continuity, undermine trust, and encourage uncontroversial science. Ousting the IPCC chairman mid-term again would be the ultimate victory for scepticism of the wildest kind.

It must be those darn hound dog sceptics who made Pachauri screw up.

2035, 2350, what difference does a few centuries make when you are trying to continue  milking the public coffers for your world class boondoggle. If you do get caught, the key thing is to dig in and blame the messenger.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/07/03/a-sudden-change-of-state/

The IPCC predicts that sea levels could rise by as much as 59cm this century(2). Hansen’s  paper argues that the slow melting of ice sheets the panel expects doesn’t fit the data. The geological record suggests that ice at the poles does not melt in a gradual and linear fashion, but flips suddenly from one state to another. When temperatures increased to 2-3 degrees above today’s level 3.5 million years ago, sea levels rose not by 59 centimetres but by 25 metres. The ice responded immediately to changes in temperature(3).

It sucks that they just rebuilt Wembley and now it is going to drown. But how fast is sea level actually rising, outside of the ivory tower?

According to the University of Colorado, sea level has been rising at 2.1 mm / year since 2005. At that rate, it will take 11,900 years for sea level to rise 25 metres. Dr. Hansen will be almost 12,000 years old at that time.

Only problem is, by then we will almost undoubtedly be back in an ice age.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/files/2008/06/snowball-earth.jpg

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – A well-known Australian Muslim cleric has called for the beheading of Dutch anti-Islamic politician Geert Wilders, a newspaper said on Friday.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100903/wl_nm/us_dutch_wilders

Any one of the rest of us would be arrested for soliciting murder. Why is this tolerated? Does the law not apply equally for all religions?

http://forcechange.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/smog-air-pollution-city.jpg

The air and water quality in the US used to be awful. Cities were choked with smog. The plume from the Four Corners Power Plant in New Mexico was the most visible man made feature for Apollo astronauts. The Cuyahoga River near Cleveland caught on fire in 1969.

http://www.clevescene.com/images/blogimages/2009/06/17/1245269141-riverfire.jpg

Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In had a joke that Lake Erie was so filthy because of all the dead fish. It used to be difficult to see all the way across the Grand Canyon, because of particulates coming out of the Navajo Generating Station. It used to be difficult to see across the Rio Grande Valley north of Santa Fe, New Mexico – because of particulates coming out of the Four Corners Power Plant.

Things are much better now because of government regulations. There was a time when government environmental policy was sane, and they focused on actual pollutants.

The clock is ticking. Here are the current standings. Each ring represents 100,000 km² error. Place your bets.

Guardian Photo England 4 Bulgaria 0

Unfortunately, the match isn’t shown in the US until later today.