Hot zone under Antarctica

This is another update on geothermal activity under the ice in Antarctica.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1919803-surprising-hot-zone-detected-under-antarctica/

One of the more interesting parts of the article is this:

The most interesting finding, Lloyd says, is the discovery of a hot zone beneath the Bentley Subglacial Trench.

The basin is part of the West Antarctic Rift System, a series of rifts, adjacent to the Transantarctic Mountains, along which the continent was stretched and thinned.

The topography of West Antarctica below the ice sheet as viewed from above, looking toward the Antarctic Peninsula. Much of West Antarctica is a basin that lies below sea level (blue), although it is currently filled with ice, not water. West Antarctica was stretched and thinned as it moved away from East Antarctica, forming one of the world’s largest continental rift systems. (Credit: Bedmap Consortium)

The old rock of East Antarctica rises well above sea level, but west of the Transantarctic Mountains, extension has pulled the crust into a broad saddle, or rift valley, much of which lies a kilometer below sea level.

“If you removed the ice, West Antarctica would rebound, and most of it would be near sea level. But the narrower and deeper basins might remain below it,” Lloyd says. “The Bentley Subglacial Trench, which is the lowest point on Earth not covered by an ocean, would still be a kilometer and a half below sea level if the ice were removed.”

Magic Climate Balance

I mentioned before that Gavin Schmidt released a paper claiming that emissions from fossil fuels have led to global cooling. He thinks this has offset, or masked, the devastating impact of CO2. I thought that sounded like magical thinking, and a piece in Watts Up With That reached the same conclusion.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/12/21/gavin-schmidts-magic-climate-balance/

I agree with the author's conclusion:

A much simpler theory as to why our climate is so balanced, despite the release of allegedly dangerous amounts of anthropogenic CO2, is that either the various forcings are actually quite small, in which case any imbalances will be barely noticeable, or that an as yet unacknowledged dynamic mechanism, such as Willis’ emergent tropical heat pump, is compensating for any imbalance we are causing, and keeping the climate stable.

The choice then is either to believe that our current climate stability is an improbable streak of good luck, or to search for evidence of an emergent dynamic mechanism which is suppressing radical change. NASA seems to want us to blindly embrace the theory that we’ve simply been very lucky, which is a shame, because there is a lot of evidence that the Earth’s climate contains powerful dynamic compensation mechanisms, which can easily adjust to counter any imbalance we are likely to cause.

Motivations for alarmism

Conrad Black has a succinct insight:

The opening of the Paris conference on climate change will be the occasion for the customary lamentations about the imminent demise of life on Earth if we do not pull up our socks as a species and reduce carbon emission levels, and thus avoid the toasting of the world. The adduced scientific evidence does not justify any such state of alarm.

Every sane and informed person in the world is concerned about pollution and demands vigilance about any clear trends of climate change and any convincing evidence that human behavior influences the climate....

[However,] What seems to have happened is that the international far left, having been decisively routed with the collapse of the Soviet Union and of international communism, has attached itself to the environmental movement, usurped the leading positions in it from the bird-watching, butterfly-collecting, and conservation organizations, and is carrying on its anti-capitalist and anarchist crusade behind the cover of eco-Armageddonism.

While this has been rather skillfully executed, many office-holders and aspirants, including Mr. Obama, have used dire environmental scenarios to distract their electorates from their own policy failures, much as Arab powers have long diluted anger at despotic misgovernment by harping on the red herring of Israel.

http://www.nysun.com/foreign/how-the-post-soviet-left-latched-onto-the-climate/89372/

Then there's this:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/12/whats-really-going-on-with-the-earths-climate.php

WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON WITH THE EARTH’S CLIMATE

The Earth’s climate is changing, as it has for millions of years. Recent changes, however, are mild and benign, as opposed–for example–to being plunged into another ice age. The most accurate record we have of modern temperatures comes from satellites. Their readings are, in fact, the only transparent, uncorrupted temperature records in existence. Surface temperature records are unreliable because of siting issues, poor coverage of the oceans, failure to recognize the urban heat island effect, and deliberate falsification by alarmist climate scientists, who constantly revise temperatures recorded decades ago to make the past look cooler. The problem with satellite temperature data, of course, is that it only goes back to 1978.

That said, we now have 37 years of satellite data. What trends to those records reveal?Anthony Watts provides an excellent summary:

The average temperature of Earth’s atmosphere has warmed just over four tenths of a degree Celsius (almost three fourths of a degree Fahrenheit) during the past 37 years, with the greatest warming over the Arctic Ocean and Australia, said Dr. John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. Microwave sounding units on board NOAA and NASA satellites completed 37 complete years of collecting temperature data in November, giving us nearly global coverage of climate change during that time.

If that trend was to continue for another 63 years, the composite warming for the globe would be 1.1 C (about 2 degrees Fahrenheit) for the century, Christy said. That would put the average global temperature change over 100 years well under the 2.0 C (3.6 degrees F) goal set recently at the climate change summit in Paris.

Are the alarmists trying to set a low bar that will be achieved regardless of any changes in CO2 emissions, and then claim credit for saving the planet?

Watts notes that a “1.2 C or 2.2 degrees F rise over 100 years would be roughly equal to the warming seen most spring days between 10 a.m. and noon.” Interestingly, however, the warming over the last 37 years has not been uniform. The North Pole and Australia have warmed the most, while other regions, like Antarctica, have cooled. Here are the basic data, expressed in average temperature change per decade:

Global average trend.: +0.11 C (about 0.20 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade since December 1978.

Northern Hemisphere: +0.14 C (about 0.25 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade since December 1978.

Southern Hemisphere: +0.09 C (about 0.16 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade since December 1978.

Tropics: +0.10 C (about 0.18 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade since December 1978.

Of course, the trends of the last 37 years may not continue. The Earth might warm more rapidly over the next century, or it might begin to cool. But the best data that we have, the satellite records, reveal only mild and benign warming.

They also conclusively refute the computer models on which the alarmist project is based; only a fraction of the warming predicted by the models has taken place. To quote, once again, the great physicist Richard Feynman:

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.

Paris climate conference 2015

Aside from the obvious absurdity of hundreds of elitists flying to Paris for 2 weeks to tell the rest of humanity to cut back on their energy use and to reduce their standard of living, the Paris climate conference of 2015 re-emphasized the fallacious premise of the climate change agenda. My climate history blog shows how foolish it is to ignore history. It's even more foolish to revise history, as NOAA has been doing when it "adjusts" historical temperatures in its effort to show the planet is warming faster than it actually is.

I don't think any actual science supports the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) that the Paris conference was based on. It's purely an ideological effort, supported by big business and big government, who cooperate to fuel the dupes in the environmental movement.

On the science, here's another summary by Matt Ridley:

"The climate change debate has been polarized into a simple dichotomy. Either global warming is“real, man-made and dangerous,” as Pres. Barack Obama thinks, or it’s a “hoax,” as Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe thinks. But there is a third possibility: that it is real, man-made and not dangerous, at least not for a long time.

"This “lukewarm” option has been boosted by recent climate research, and if it is right, current policies may do more harm than good. For example, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and other bodies agree that the rush to grow biofuels, justified as a decarbonization measure, has raised food prices and contributed to rainforest destruction. Since 2013 aid agencies such as the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the World Bank and the European Investment Bank have restricted funding for building fossil-fuel plants in Asia and Africa; that has slowed progress in bringing electricity to the one billion people who live without it and the four million who die each year from the effects of cooking over wood fires."

http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/paris-climate-conference/

Human Development Index

One of the most frustrating things about the environmental movement is the number of anti-capitalism extremists who purport to speak for the environment. In my view, their views are counterproductive and harmful to the environment.

Here is the statistical index for the UN's Human Development Report for 2015:

http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/hdr_2015_statistical_annex.pdf

Matt Ridley explains how prosperity is created. Because only prosperous countries can afford environmental protection, and only prosperous countries develop the technology that maximizes efficiency (which minimizes the use of resources), foolish socialist and centralized government ideology impairs both prosperity and environmental quality.

http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-chan-zuckerberg-initiative/

"...technology can be the greatest leveller the world has seen: it can achieve what socialism promised but signally failed to deliver. (“Dot-communism”, it’s sometimes called.)

"The greatest beneficiaries, by far, of vast business ventures such as Facebook are not the founders, but the customers. When Lancashire entrepreneurs made cotton textiles affordable for all, it was all who benefited; when Rockefellers did the same for oil, or Carnegies for steel, again the overwhelming majority of the benefits flowed to the customers. One study, by William Nordhaus, found that entrepreneurs end up with less than 3% of the societal value that they have created. Some goes to financiers, but the vast bulk of the benefit turns up as consumer surplus.

"Likewise with today’s magnates: the fortunes amassed by the Messrs Gates, Jobs, Bezos and Zuckerberg are as nothing to the value that has been captured by their willing customers in the form of better services delivered far more cheaply and easily.

"So let’s ditch the zero-sum mentality and remember that an entrepreneur who makes something that was once a preserve of the rich cheaply available to ordinary people has done an act of philanthropy through his business, even if he also makes a fortune in the process....

"Zuckerberg thinks that “the only way to achieve our full potential is to channel the talents, ideas and contributions of every person in the world”. To that end he wants to get the four billion people who do not have access to the internet online."

Vegetarian diets worse for planet, etc.

Vegetarian and ‘healthy’ diets are more harmful to the environment

Carnegie Mellon study finds eating lettuce is more than three times worse in greenhouse gas emissions than eating bacon

Contrary to recent headlines — and a talk by actor Arnold Schwarzenegger at the United Nations Paris Climate Change Conference — eating a vegetarian diet could contribute to climate change.

In fact, according to new research from Carnegie Mellon University, following the USDA recommendations to consume more fruits, vegetables, dairy and seafood is more harmful to the environment because those foods have relatively high resource uses and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per calorie. Published in Environment Systems and Decisions, the study measured the changes in energy use, blue water footprint and GHG emissions associated with U.S. food consumption patterns.

“Eating lettuce is over three times worse in greenhouse gas emissions than eating bacon,” said Paul Fischbeck, professor of social and decisions sciences and engineering and public policy. “Lots of common vegetables require more resources per calorie than you would think. Eggplant, celery and cucumbers look particularly bad when compared to pork or chicken.”

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/12/15/shocker-vegetarian-diets-worse-for-climate-than-eating-bacon/

Original article is here: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10669-015-9577-y

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Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi explains his peer-reviewed papers that show water vapor and clouds adjust to changes in CO2 to keep Earth’s greenhouse effect constant. His predictions match observations. Therefore, CO2 can’t change the greenhouse effect and can’t cause global warming.

Question: Would Earth be an ice-covered planet if it had no CO2?

Miskolczi: The water phase diagram shows ice sublimation would add enough water vapor to produce today’s greenhouse effect, with or without CO2.

http://edberry.com/blog/ed-berry/a-physics-view-of-climate-change/

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What frustrates Ball the most is what he calls the "corruption of climate science, including the statistics on carbon dioxide.

"They talk about the CO2 that humans emit," he said. "They don't put into the formula the amount of CO2 we are currently absorbing. For example, of the total we emit (using IGCC data), we remove 50 percent of it through agriculture."

Ball further noted even the most ardent proponents of the climate agenda have admitted the wealth transfers and carbon standards don't make any difference in the health of the planet.

"One of the key scientists involved in the corruption was a guy by the name of Tom Wigley," Ball said. "He said at the time that if we introduce the Kyoto Protocol in its original form, that is every country reduced to the amounts that we want, nobody would be able to measure the difference.

"In other words, you could take everybody off the planet, leave one scientist behind and say, 'OK, measure and tell us how much the CO2 in the atmosphere's reduced.' He wouldn't be able to do it."

Ball said Secretary Kerry has admitted the same thing.

"He said this is not going to make any significant difference in terms of CO2, but it's important in terms of political policy and sharing the wealth," Ball said. "So it's a scam from top to bottom."

In addition to that admission, Kerry stated over the weekend to Fox News Sunday that there is no way to force any nation to abide by the new deal.

"If there had been a penalty, we wouldn't have been able to get an agreement," Kerry said, confident that mandatory emissions reporting requirements would  keep everyone on target.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/12/climate-expert-obamas-deal-a-scam-from-top-to-bottom/#fBukVTQqZdyFrFCo.99

http://www.wnd.com/2015/12/climate-expert-obamas-deal-a-scam-from-top-to-bottom/

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New members of the climate ‘deniers’ club:  James Hansen, Ken Caldeira, Kerry Emanuel, Tom Wigley . . . and Bill Gates.

The latest bit of idiocy from Naomi Oreskes is this article in the Guardian: There is a new form of climate denialists to look out for – so don’t celebrate yet. Subtitle: At the exact moment in which we need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuel, we are being told that renewable sources can’t meet our energy needs.Excerpts: 

After the signing of a historic climate pact in Paris, we might now hope that the merchants of doubt – who for two decades have denied the science and dismissed the threat – are officially irrelevant.

But not so fast. There is also a new, strange form of denial that has appeared on the landscape of late, one that says that renewable sources can’t meet our energy needs.

Oddly, some of these voices include climate scientists, who insist that we must now turn to wholesale expansion of nuclear power. Just this past week, as negotiators were closing in on the Paris agreement, four climate scientists held an off-site session insisting that the only way we can solve the coupled climate/energy problem is with a massive and immediate expansion of nuclear power. More than that, they are blaming environmentalists, suggesting that the opposition to nuclear power stands between all of us and a two-degree world.

http://judithcurry.com/2015/12/16/the-new-climate-deniers/

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On the self-defeating claims of some clean-energy enthusiasts:

They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon’s. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need-an-energy-miracle/407881/
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Historians, write Walter Russell Mead and Jamie Horgan of the American Interest, are likely to say that the Paris agreement ended climate change the way the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact ended war. But as the ink dries on the Paris gesture of right-mindedness, let us praise the solar energy source most responsible for the surge of human betterment that began with the harnessing of fossil fuels around 1800.

The source is, of course, coal, a still abundant and indispensable form in which the sun’s energy has been captured from carbon-based life. Matt Ridley, a member of a British coal-producing family and author of “The Rational Optimist,” notes that the path of mankind’s progress, material as well as moral, has been from reliance on renewable but insufficient energy sources to today’s 85 percent reliance on energy from fossil fuels.

The progression has been from reliance on human (often slaves’) muscles, to animal energy (first oxen, then horses), to burning wood and peat as stores of sunlight, to energy from water and wind, to, at last, fossil fuels. Sustained economic growth, a necessary prerequisite for scientific and technological dynamism, became possible, Ridley writes, when humanity was able to rely on “non-renewable, non-green, non-clean power.” Because “there appeared from underground a near-magical substance,” Britain’s landscape was spared: “Coal gave Britain fuel equivalent to the output of 15 million extra acres of forest to burn, an area nearly the size of Scotland. By 1870, the burning of coal in Britain was generating as many calories as would have been expended by 850 million laborers. . . . The capacity of the country’s steam engines alone was equivalent to 6 million horses or 40 million men.”

And cheap coal produced the iron for new labor-saving machines. The environmental toll from burning coal (it emits carbon dioxide, radioactivity and mercury) has been slight relative to the environmental and other blessings from burning it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/another-false-turning-point-on-the-climate/2015/12/16/e16dbc36-a35b-11e5-9c4e-be37f66848bb_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-b%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

Adam Smith and Bacteria

This might be my favorite article of the entire year. Researchers have shown that microbial communities specialize and exchange, just the way Adam Smith described markets in The Wealth of Nations in 1776.

An illustration accompanying the article by Jo Craven McGinty in the WSJ gives a good explanation:

It's pretty cool that nature operates on market principles this way as the most efficient utilization of resources, which is what market economists have been saying for a long time. The evidence of this in the human environment is obvious to all but the most dogmatic socialists and anti-capitalists.

McGinty summarizes the study here: 

In their experiment, the researchers documented a tradeoff between the species’ growth and relative abundance in the overall microbial population based on their level of cooperation. The more a community shared, they found, the faster it grew—but the species that shared the most accounted for a smaller fraction of the total population, and eventually the benefit evaporated if the species “overshared.”

At that point, Mr. Tasoff said, it was if the species were giving to charity but gave so much it couldn’t help itself.

“The really interesting key is just because you’re benefiting your trading partner more, in certain instances, it might still be better for you to trade with them,” Mr. Wang said. “You get more of the benefit than if you didn’t trade at all.”

I interpret this to mean that markets work out as sort of a charitable endeavor; i.e., we voluntarily contribute to the well-being of others, and can overdo it.  

One commentator put it this way:

Obviously, what's needed is price controls and centralized oversight on amino acid production!  

In a more serious vein, one should be able to extrapolate that if 'the species that shared the most accounted for a smaller fraction of the total population, and eventually the benefit evaporated if the species “overshared.”' than offering benefits to unlimited numbers of non-working folks, is definitely harmful to the taxpayers.  Intuitively obvious, but perhaps science is needed to convince socialists of that concept.  Or not -- they probably know full well what they are doing.  They are not the ones earning the money distributed in handouts, after all.

Charity and trade are good.  Bleeding dry the Little Red Hen, not.

The original study is here: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0132907

The abstract is pretty comprehensive:

Abstract

A large fraction of microbial life on earth exists in complex communities where metabolic exchange is vital. Microbes trade essential resources to promote their own growth in an analogous way to countries that exchange goods in modern economic markets. Inspired by these similarities, we developed a framework based on general equilibrium theory (GET) from economics to predict the population dynamics of trading microbial communities. Our biotic GET (BGET) model provides an a priori theory of the growth benefits of microbial trade, yielding several novel insights relevant to understanding microbial ecology and engineering synthetic communities. We find that the economic concept of comparative advantage is a necessary condition for mutualistic trade. Our model suggests that microbial communities can grow faster when species are unable to produce essential resources that are obtained through trade, thereby promoting metabolic specialization and increased intercellular exchange. Furthermore, we find that species engaged in trade exhibit a fundamental tradeoff between growth rate and relative population abundance, and that different environments that put greater pressure on group selection versus individual selection will promote varying strategies along this growth-abundance spectrum. We experimentally tested this tradeoff using a synthetic consortium of Escherichia coli cells and found the results match the predictions of the model. This framework provides a foundation to study natural and engineered microbial communities through a new lens based on economic theories developed over the past century.

Climate Change's weak arguments

Chris Mooney has one of the most unintentionally humorous columns being published anywhere. In this one, he characterizes arguments based on fact and reason as "sowing doubt" on arguments that are transparently false and irrational.

I almost put this in my 1984 Newspeak blog, but I'm putting it here because of the environmental angle. This piece from the Washington Post is so full of NEWSPEAK I'll let you enjoy the whole thing.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/12/02/new-research-confirms-that-sowing-doubt-about-climate-change-is-devastatingly-effective/

This is why sowing doubt about climate change is such an effective strategy

Chris Mooney

For some time, social science researchers have been studying an oddity about the U.S. — compared with many other nations, we’re a hotbed of global warming doubt and denial. Accordingly, and to counteract this, a variety of messages or ways of “re-framing” the issue have been proposed, often with the goal of appealing to the ideology of political conservatives, which is where most of the doubt lies.

Some of the most popular framing ideas include talking about climate change in the context of economic opportunity (solving climate change will lead to a clean energy boom), national security (not solving it will make the world a dangerous place), faith-based ethics (we need to be good stewards of the Creation) and public health (climate change will make us sicker, or lead to the spread of diseases).

Now, however, a new study suggests not only that these messages may not be  particularly effective, but that messages espousing climate change doubt or denial — which are ever-present in the din of public debate and discourse — appear to have considerably more impact.

“The positive frames really don’t move the needle at all, and the presence of the denial counter-frame seems to have a suppressive or a negative effect on people’s climate change belief,” says Aaron McCright, a researcher at Michigan State University who conducted the research with three university colleagues. The study is just out in the journal Topics in Cognitive Science.

The researchers used a large sample from Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk — 1,591 individuals — who read climate change messages embedded in fake newspaper articles. However, the articles that the participants received varied considerably. In effect, there were ten separate articles containing different messages, and each person read just one of them. Then afterward, their views about the science of climate change, and about what we should do about it, were measured.

The article read by study participants was always about a supposed new report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — one that, it said, “provides unequivocal evidence that climate change is happening now, is caused by humans, and is producing harmful societal impacts.” However, this news was framed four different ways through the article’s text and title — using the economic, national security, stewardship, and public health frame. For instance, the public health version of the article noted:

Medical experts argue that dealing with climate change will improve our public health by reducing the likelihood of extreme weather events, reducing air quality and allergen problems, and limiting the spread of pests that carry infectious diseases—all of which increase physical and psychological health risks.

There were four articles featuring these four different framings — but there were also four more that followed these framings with a global warming doubter counterargument, which read as follows:

However, most conservative leaders and Republican politicians believe that so-called climate change is vastly exaggerated by environmentalists, liberal scientists seeking government funding for their research and Democratic politicians who want to regulate business.

Some scientists testifying at Congressional hearings are quick to point out that the Earth hasn’t actually warmed in the last decade.  Even if climate change would happen in the future, these scientists claim it would be a good thing for our agriculture, health, and overall quality of life—not something we should stop.  Further, conservative Republicans argue that trying to reduce our nation’s greenhouse gas emissions via regulations would harm our economy, national security, and national sovereignty.

Finally, there was one “control” article that contained neither any of the framings nor a counterargument — and one that contained no framing but did contain the counterargument.

The study found relatively little evidence that the four frames, standing on their own, had much impact on Americans’ climate change beliefs. Granted, the “economic opportunity” message worked when it came to making people believe it’s important to cut greenhouse gas emissions quickly. But none of the other messages had a big impact when it came to shifting people’s basic views about whether climate change is real and human-caused, and something we need to act on.

“The overall potential of these positive frames for influencing Americans’ [climate change] views is limited at best,” write the authors.

But while the positive messages weren’t particularly impactful, the negative message was considerably more powerful in changing people’s beliefs when it was present. In an overall comparison between those who read articles containing the negative message and those who read articles that didn’t, the negative message led to less belief that global warming is real or that climate science is reliable, and also lessened participants’ support for climate change solutions.

“It’s not that the denial counter-frame is more powerful when matched with one type of positive frame versus another, it just has a consistent effect over all the subjects,” McCright says.

Moreover, the message of doubt had an effect on all subjects regardless of ideology, although it was also strongest in Republicans.

“This research makes clear that ‘don’t worry’ is an inherently more compelling message than ‘you should worry about climate change for this reason’ regardless of what that reason is,” said Ed Maibach, a researcher at George Mason University who focuses on the public communication of climate change, in a comment on the study. “Unfortunately, we should all be worried about climate change, for a variety of reasons.”

The key question that the study raises is why messages that seemed, in the abstract, to make a lot of sense as communication strategies weren’t actually very effective — and why the counterargument was so much stronger across the board.

“It’s simpler, for one thing,” suggests McCright. “You don’t have to grasp any science to say, ‘scientists disagree.’ It’s always harder to change people’s opinions than it is to keep the status quo. And then for the last two decades, the message has been strong, consistent, daily” coming from the political right, he continues.

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My comment:

Was this a joke? “It’s not that the denial counter-frame is more powerful when matched with one type of positive frame versus another, it just has a consistent effect over all the subjects,” McCright says. 
 
As presented in this article, the "denial" counter-frame was far more persuasive. Nobody believes "green energy" will create jobs because we all know the only "jobs" created are government-funded and/or government subsidized, and we all know the government is borrowing billions of dollars to "create" these "jobs." 
 
The scientific reality is that the "denial" arguments are based on fact; the "positive" arguments are based on fantasy that ordinary citizens see through immediately. That's the reason why, as the article says, "the positive messages weren’t particularly impactful."

Do they believe what they're saying about climate change?

Of course not.

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James Taranto asks the question, though:

Do Obama and other politicians really believe the things they say about global warming and killer carbon dioxide? The Daily Caller reports that Obama’s flight to the Paris powwow “emitted more CO2 than driving 72 cars for a year”:

Obama’s Paris jaunt will send more CO2 into the atmosphere than 31 American homes‘ energy usage for an entire year. The president’s trip is equivalent to burning 368,331 pounds of coal or 797 barrels of oil, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon footprint calculator.

Just one leg of the president’s Sunday trip to Paris emitted 189 tons of CO2 after travelling 3,855 miles and burning 19,275 gallons of jet fuel, according to Daily Caller News Foundation calculations based on past presidential flights. Obama’s return flight to Washington, D.C., would double the amount of CO2 burned to 378 tons—more than 72 cars driving for a year.

Maybe the symbolic value of the president’s presence in Paris outweighs the purported costs of emitting all that nontoxic gas. (To those of us who are concerned about terrorism, it was good to see the president go to Paris—something he did not do after the last major attacks there, in January.) On the other hand, for the president of the United States to forgo international travel and do business by teleconference would arguably send a stronger signal of seriousness.

But Hillary Clinton also flew a lot as Obama’s secretary of state, the Boston Globe reports:

Seven months before [Mrs.] Clinton left office, a top aide suggested to her that she still had “plenty of time” to “run up the score on total countries” and set a globe-trotting goal of 110 countries, according to an e-mail released Monday.

The e-mail, sent by Clinton press aide Philippe Reines three years ago, casts a political light on one of Clinton’s core talking points as a candidate for president: that she was a nonpolitical and hard-working secretary of state, who, as she frequently notes, visited 112 countries. . . .

The subject line for the e-mail is: “100 and counting . . .”; Reines included a list of 94 countries that Clinton hadn’t yet visited for her to “choose from,” as he put it. Some of the countries had asterisks by them.

“Asterisks appear next to countries you visited prior to becoming SecState, but not since—so they would count,” Reines wrote.

Clinton replied to the e-mail by asking one of her staff members to print it out for her—her standard response to messages she deemed important.

This was purely gratuitous; Mrs. Clinton was flying to country after country for no reason other than to get there. Now she’s the inevitable Democratic presidential nominee, and her campaign declares: “We need to take bold action to combat climate change.” Maybe she actually believes this stuff, but she doesn’t practice what she preaches.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-fish-story-1448997737?tesla=y

United States of Amnesia

The climate change agenda depends on ignorance of history.

Gore Vidal famously referred to the USA as the United States of Amnesia. The late Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai put it a little more delicately, quipping, “One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.”

Here are some examples from https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/.

“Climate Is Still The Same – Memories Are To Blame”

Posted on November 15, 2015by stevengoddard

Fifty years ago, The Chicago Tribune pointed out that belief in climate change is driven by faulty memory.

November 3, 1963 – Climate Is Still the Same; Memories Are to Blame | Chicago Tribune Archive

A similar conclusion was reached in 1871 by the Pall Mall Gazette

10 Jan 1871 – IMAGINARY CHANGES OF CLIMATE. (Pall Mall Gazette.)

Posted in Uncategorized | 26 Comments

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Scientists Recycling The Identical Scam From 75 Years Ago

Posted on November 13, 2015by stevengoddard

You really can’t make this stuff up. Climate scientists are plagiarizing 75 year old scare stories for their latest alarmism.

Global warming rapidly melts massive Greenland glacier

Seventy five years ago, most of the glaciers in Northeast Greenland were on the verge of collapse. And scientists needed money to study it.

31 May 1947 – Danger Seen In Mysterious Warning Of Arctic Climate

06 May 1940 – Greenland’s Climate Becoming Milder

17 Dec 1939, Page 15

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What Drives Greenland Temperatures?

Posted on November 14, 2015by stevengoddard

NASA Fraudsters claim that melting of eastern Greenland’s glaciers is caused by increases in carbon dioxide, but there is zero evidence to back up their claim. Glacier melt there peaked 80 years ago when CO2 was very low.

01 Feb 1940 – GREENLAND GLACIERS MELTING

There is no correlation between atmospheric CO2 and Greenland temperatures.

What does drive Greenland temperatures is the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, which correlates nicely.

Amazing that these NASA crooks are willing to take a completely fraudulent story to the press.

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In their fully fraudulent “National Climate Assessment” The White House discusses fire from 1916 to 2003, and then gives a statistic from 1970 to 2003

Between 1970 and 2003, warmer and drier conditions increased burned area in western U.S. mid-elevation conifer forests by 650%

Southwest | National Climate Assessment

So why did they ignore the years before 1970? The reason is simple – those years completely wreck their climate change propaganda. Fire decreased by 90% from 1930 to 2003.

Indicator 3.16: Area and percent of forest affected by abiotic agents

The large amount of burned area in the 1930s was due to the record heat and drought.

High and Low Temperatures | Climate Change | US EPA

193407-pmdi.gif (649×502)

A fire started every three minutes in 1937. Eleven percent of the open forest burned.

October 9, 1938 – NYTimes

So who is responsible for this wildly fraudulent report? Katherine Hayhoe – of course.

 More:

11/16/2015

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time. We are already seeing its effects with rising seas, catastrophic wildfires and water shortages.

If we don’t act on climate now, this list is just the tip of the iceberg of what we can expect in years to come…

9 animals that are feeling the impacts of climate change | U.S. Department of the Interior

Sea level has been rising for the past 20,000 years., most of that time much faster than now. Saying that we are “already seeing sea level rise” is meaningless propaganda. The Neanderthals were also “already seeing sea level rise.”

Forest fire burn acreage is down 80% since the 1930’s. Blaming fires on climate change is utterly absurd.

Indicator 3.16: Area and percent of forest affected by abiotic agents

Droughts have become less common and less intense over the past century. Blaming droughts on climate change is utterly absurd.

Climate at a Glance | National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)

The DOI article is meaningless junk science. There is nothing we can do to “act on climate” The climate isn’t influenced by mindless superstition.

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More Siberian Temperature Fraud From Gavin And Tom

Posted on November 20, 2015by stevengoddard

As  I reported earlier, in order to create their fake hottest year ever – one of the cheats Tom and Gavin had to do was lower the baseline in Siberia, so that they could create large anomalies which they could then smear 1200 km across areas of missing data.

2012 version :Data.GISS: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis
2015 version: Data.GISS: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis

There aren’t many stations in Siberia, and they did the same cheat at Jakutsk as they did at Zyrjanka

2012 version: Data.GISS: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis
2015 version: Data.GISS: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis

Make no mistake about it, you are watching the largest and best financed fraud in history.

Another Milestone Of Failure By Climate Experts

Posted on November 19, 2015by stevengoddard

There has been no net change in Arctic sea ice area for 10 years.

arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/timeseries.anom.1979-2008

This represents one of the largest and most visible failures of the key members of climate mafia.

The Argus-Press – Jun 24, 2008

The Argus-Press – Google News Archive Search

Gore: Polar ice cap may disappear by summer 2014

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Arctic summers ice-free ‘by 2013’

Arctic Sea Ice Gone in Summer Within Five Years?

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Our Worst Fears About Sea Level Rise Confirmed

Posted on November 19, 2015by stevengoddard

This webcam image of a dining couple, confirms that the Maldives are now underwater.

Maldives Resort Videos | Live Videos of Anantara Kihavah Villas

This is exactly what experts predicted 30 years ago.

26 Sep 1988 – Threat to islands

Ahead of the Paris Conference, China plans to finance the world’s first underwater airport there.

HaveeruOnline – Maldives, China near pact on airport runway

You should feel guilty about this, because your SUV also caused the Maldives to drown in 1837. You were warned!

17 Feb 1837 – ACCOUNT OF THE MALDIVES.

Progressives Constantly Cranking Out Fake Statistics

Posted on November 18, 2015by stevengoddard

One more completely fake statistic :

Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, has identified at least 26 instances in which foreign-born individuals inside the U.S. were charged with or convicted of terrorism in the last year or so.

Here’s a sampling of incidents from that list:

– An immigrant brought here by his family from Kuwait at a young age, and who was later approved for U.S. citizenship, carried out the Islamist attack that recently killed 4 military personnel in Chattanooga. (July 2015)

– An Uzbek refugee living in Idaho was arrested and charged with providing support to a terrorist organization, in the form of teaching terror recruits how to build bombs. (July 2015)

– An immigrant from Ghana, who applied for and received U.S. citizenship, pledged allegiance to ISIS and plotted a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. (June 2015)

– An immigrant from Yemen, who applied for and received U.S. citizenship, along with six other men, was charged with conspiracy to travel to Syria and provide material support to ISIS. (April 2015)

– A Kazakhstani immigrant with lawful permanent resident status conspired to purchase a machine gun to shoot FBI and other law enforcement agents if they prevented him from traveling to Syria to join ISIS. (February 2015)

– A Bosnian refugee, along with his wife and five relatives, donated money and supplies, and smuggled arms, to terrorist organizations in Syria and Iraq. (February 2015)

– A college student who immigrated from Somalia who later applied for and received U.S. citizenship, attempted to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Oregon. (October 2014)

– A Moroccan national who came tot he U.S. on a student Visa was arrested for plotting to blow up a university and federal court house. (April 2014)

– The Boston bombers were invited in as refugees. The younger brother applied for citizenship and was naturalized on September 11th, 2012. The older brother had a pending application for citizenship. (April 2013)

– Two immigrants form Pakistan, who later applied for and received U.S. citizenship, were sentenced to decades-long prison sentences for plotting to detonate a bomb in New York City. (2012)

Here’s The (LONG) List Of Foreign-Born Islamists Charged With Or Convicted Of Terrorism | The Sean Hannity Show

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Sixty Years Of Cool Summers In The US

Posted on November 18, 2015by stevengoddard

Prior to 1955, hot summer afternoons were very common in the US, but they rarely happen any more. The vast majority of stations set their all-time temperature record in the 1930’s.

Much of the small post-1970 increase seen in the graph above, is an artifact of new stations being added. It has nothing to do with climate.

The US used to be much hotter, so NASA is tampering with data to make the heat disappear and hide the decline.

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Superstition Based Peer-Reviewed Science

Posted on November 18, 2015by stevengoddard

NOAA Paleoclimatology Global Warming – The Data

A few people at NOAA understand that recent warming is just background noise in the long term picture, and that Michael Mann’s hockey stick is meaningless junk science.

But they have a fundamental gap in their knowledge of science.

These older records show that climate has changed abruptly in the past, and also reveal a remarkable correspondence between carbon dioxide change and temperature change

Every geologist knows that CO2 solubility in the oceans varies with ocean temperature. When the oceans warm up, they outgas CO2. Thus a warming ocean increases atmospheric CO2, and a cooling climate decreases atmospheric CO2.

In the historical record, CO2 is a response to warming – not a driver of warming. Because climate scientists don’t understand this most fundamental scientific fact, they have built up an entire body of superstition based peer-reviewed science.

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Greenland Was Much Warmer In The Past

Posted on November 18, 2015by stevengoddard

Actual scientists (as opposed to the shameless propagandists who currently work at NASA) know that Greenland was much warmer in the past.

Scientists have long known this for a very long time.

TimesMachine: January 22, 1934 – NYTimes.com

Except for a short spike from 1990 to 2010, temperatures in southwest Greenland have been generally declining since that article was written – and are now just as cool as they were in the 19th century.

Meanwhile, the fraudsters working for NASA continue to spread propaganda ahead of Paris.

The glacier NASA is lying about in their most recent propaganda is growing, not “coming undone.”

NASA has degenerated into a mindless propaganda machine for the White House, who simply make “facts” up to serve the liar-in-chief’s political agenda.

Before He Was Pushing The Global Warming Scam, Paul Ehrlich Was Pushing The Global Cooling Scam

Posted on November 17, 2015by stevengoddard

In 1974, Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich said global cooling was going to kill us all.

31 Jul 1974, Page 7 – at Newspapers.com

Ehrlich wrote a paper with Obama’s science czar, John Holdren, predicting a new ice age.

Five years before that, he wanted to poison Africans.

A STERILITY DRUG IN FOOD IS HINTED – Biologist Stresses Need to Curb Population Growth – View Article – NYTimes.com

Ehrlich and Holdren are saying the exact same things now, only it is global warming that is going to kill us rather global cooling.

Biologist Paul Ehrlich gives dire prediction for global civilization

Progressives are completely insane, and the crazier they behave the more they are trusted by the press.

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#TemperatureFraudMatters

Posted on November 17, 2015by stevengoddard

Note that JMA has erased the global cooling they reported in 1974, which was going to destroy a “generation of peace”

10 Feb 1974, Page 108 – at Newspapers.com

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Before Global Warming Caused Terrorism, Global Cooling Caused Terrorism

Posted on November 15, 2015by stevengoddard

Last night, Bernie Sanders said terrorism was caused by global warming. Let’s test that theory out.

On September 5, 1972 – Islamic terrorists took over the Munich Olympics and murdered the Israeli wrestling team.

5 Sep 1972, Page 1 – at Newspapers.com

One week later, Britain’s top climate expert announced that a new ice age was in progress.

11 Sep 1972, Page 1 – at Newspapers.com

The CIA warned that global cooling would bring drought, famine and political unrest.

www.climatemonitor.it/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/1974.pdf

The CIA said the impacts of global cooling were “almost beyond comprehension”

9 Jun 1976, Page 4 – at Newspapers.com

Yasser Arafat was later given the Nobel Peace Prize for organizing the massacre of Jews.

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Practice Tolerance

Posted on November 14, 2015by stevengoddard

Aristotle said :

“Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society.”

Ariel Durant extend this concept further

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.

And Paris has proved both of them correct

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1923 : Scientist Warned That Glacier National Park Could Disappear Before 1950

Posted on November 13, 2015by stevengoddard

In 1923, scientists said that Glacier National Park could disappear before 1950, and  that one third of its ice had disappeared since 1905.

29 Dec 1923, Page 5 – at Newspapers.com

This rapid melting from 1905 to 1923 occurred during NASA’s coldest years on record, with CO2 below 310 PPM.

The New York Times has now granted Glacier National Park a 95 year reprieve past the original 1950 end date, and blames the melting on a “warming climate”

Climate Change Threatens to Strip the Identity of Glacier National Park – The New York Times

There is never any rational thought or science behind global warming claims. Just idiots with barely enough information to be dangerous to the civil population.

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Another Day – More Massive Fraud from NASA

Posted on November 13, 2015by stevengoddard

NASA is blaming glacier melt on global warming today, which they know is a completely fraudulent claim.

NASA knows perfectly well that Greenland was melting during their coldest years on record. Dr. Walt Meier (now at NASA) personally told me that Greenland warming was greater in the 1940’s.

2 May 1923, Page 4 – at Newspapers.com

17 Dec 1939, Page 15

And it wasn’t just Greenland.

 

21 Jul 1911, Page 1 – at Newspapers.com

Temperatures on the Greenland Ice Sheet are -45 degrees. The Guardian says they are terrified by this melting.

NASA, NOAA, the New York Times, The Guardian, The White House – they are all completely full of crap about climate. What is their agenda?

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