Hottest Year Ever? Giant Clam Reveals Middle Ages were Warmer Than Today

Source: lewrockwell.com

By Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That?

January 7, 2015

While government science and media begin the ramp-up to claim 2014 as the “hottest year ever” China’s Sea’s biggest bivalve shows that the Middle Ages were warmer than today, when Carbon Dioxide was lower.

From the Chinese Academy of Sciences:

Two recent papers, one is in Earth-Science Reviews and the other is in Chinese Science Bulletin, have studied key chemical contents in micro-drilled giant clam shells and coral samples to demonstrate that in the South China Sea the warm period of the Middle Ages was warmer than the present.

The scientists examined surveys of the ratio of strontium to calcium content and heavy oxygen isotopes, both are sensitive recorders of sea surface temperatures past and present. The aragonite bicarbonate of the Tridacna gigas clam-shell is so fine-grained that daily growth-lines are exposed by micro-drilling with an exceptionally fine drill-bit, allowing an exceptionally detailed time-series of sea-temperature changes to be compiled – a feat of detection worthy of Sherlock Holmes himself.

By using overlaps between successive generations of giant clams and corals, the three scientists – Hong Yan of the Institute of Earth Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Yuhong Wang of Fudan University, Shanghai – reconstructed a record of sea-surface temperature changes going back 2500 years.

The Roman and Mediaeval Warm Periods, both showed up prominently in the western Pacific and East Asia. Sea surface temperatures varied considerably over the 2500-year period.

Changing patterns of winter and summer temperature variation were also detected, disproving the notion that until the warming of the 20th century there had been little change in global temperatures for at least 1000 years, and confirming that – at least in the South China Sea – there is nothing exceptional about today’s temperatures.

Dr. Yan said: “This new paper adds further material to the substantial body of real-world proxy evidence establishing that today’s global temperature is within natural ranges of past changes.”  Dr. Soon added: “The UN’s climate panel should never have trusted the claim that the medieval warm period was mainly a European phenomenon. It was clearly warm in South China Sea too.”

Reprinted from Watts Up With That?.

Climate And Truth: A Tale Of Immorality?

Source: wattsupwiththat.com

Guest opinion: Dr. Tim Ball

The most recent aberration of climate science is the apparent cherry picking of ocean temperature data by government scientists, Richard Feely and Christopher Sabine. The objective is not to determine what is happening, but why it is happening, and then link it to a human cause. This, cart before the horse approach, was the raison d’etre of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from the start. In order to emphasize why it is happening, it helps to detail, for politicians, the damaging effects. In this case, it is the deleterious impact of human addition of CO2 to the atmosphere that is not only causing warming, but, they claim, also changing the acidity level of the oceans (ocean acidification). All this challenges the claim that humans are distinctive as the “moral ape” a concept explored over 2000 years ago in Aesop’s fable of, “The Apes and Two Travellers”.

Kudos goes to Marita Noon for bringing this story to our attention. Disturbing, beyond what they did, is that they see nothing wrong with their actions. Worse, they reject the explanation. This behavior in climate science appears to reflect the mentality developed in western society, and is summarized beautifully in the cartoon.

These aberrations are part of a wider trend, ironically identified by Osama Bin Laden when he said the west has lost its moral direction. The fact we don’t want his moral direction either, doesn’t make it any less true.

The problem is multiple in its forms, but simple in its trend and essentially summarized by two modern dictums.

• You only broke the law, or the rules, if you got caught. Even if you get caught, you brazen it out with the help of a lawyer and/or a public relations person.
• If you are not with me, you must be against me. Only listening to or associating with like-minded people reinforces this. A recent WUWT article underlined the degree to which this occurs, when the author opened by saying he did something unusual, he read the “alarmists” web site RealClimate.

As usual, the response by Sabine was more an attempted cover-up. It, and the original article, reveals another example of the climate scientist’s art of cherry picking and believing that the end justifies the means. Roseanne D’Arrigo was the first to put this on the public record as reported by Steve McIntyre.

“D’Arrigo put up a slide about “cherry picking” and then she explained to the panel that that’s what you have to do if you want to make cherry pie.”

D’Arrigo was preceded by the first major exposure of cherry picking in the IPCC climate science by Benjamin Santer in the 1995 Report. Only a few, including Fred Singer, Fredrick Seitz and John Daly, knew what was done. The cover-up was relatively easy, especially when the big guns of the New York Times and the Guardian were fired.

Santer’s changes were spotted early, but Nature, a journal that was freindly to the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) gang, didn’t publish the rebuttals until 5 months later (12 Dec 1996). One identified the cherry picking, the other a natural explanation for the pattern. By then the PR cover up was under way. On July 25, 1996 the American Meteorological Society (AMS) sent a letter of defense to Santer. The letter is evidence of CRU influence and a PR masterpiece. It narrowed the focus to two questions, the science, and society’s reaction. They said the only relevant science was in “peer-reviewed scientific publications – not the media. This challenged who controlled information. The Internet is the final stage of democracy, because it took information out of the hands of a few and into the hands of everybody. The AMS argued for their retention of control of information and thereby the debate.

“What is important scientific information and how it is interpreted in the policy debates is an important part of our jobs.” “That is, after all, the very reasons for the mix of science and policy in the IPCC.”

John Daly correctly called this “Scientism”.

Exposure of Santer’s cherry picking by Singer and Seitz, led to the public relations inspired use of the link with tobacco. Singer had published a well-documented analysis of an article on second-hand smoke. It was, as he identified, a terrible piece of scientific research; a fact since confirmed by others, but explained to me by a doctor, who specialized in lung cancer, when the article was first released. This paper was used to say the tobacco lobby paid Singer and then, by inference, that all “deniers” since are akin to those who deny the link between smoking and cancer. In fact, Singer has long and actively opposed smoking. He simply pointed out that bad research, when exposed, would likely give more credibility to the tobacco lobby.

I understand the dilemma that incorrect science creates, because for years I was charged with “comforting polluters”. I was not deterred, because I realized that the greater problem was in deceiving people with falsified science. When the deception is exposed, the polluters are more comforted, because they can say they lied to you. Aesop also identified this “cry wolf” problem. My greater concern over the last several years is the lost momentum and misdirection on environmental issues and declining scientific credibility.

A classic example of the climate science mentality at the CRU was exposed in a leaked email from February 2, 2005.

Mike (Mann), I presume congratulations are in order – so congrats etc !

Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? – our does! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it – thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who’ll say we must adhere to it!

This is important because people at the CRU were effectively the IPCC, beginning with Tom Wigley, the Director who preceded Jones. They controlled critical chapters. All along, Wigley was the person they went to for direction as this email reveals. Wigley is revealed in the 1990 documentary, “The Greenhouse Conspiracy”,which is remarkably relevant today. The email appears to manifest a person who has lost a moral direction.

The other “go to person” from the start was the late Stephen Schneider. He set the tone and actively influenced the direction of the climate science and the IPCC with his 1989 infamous quote in Discovery magazine.

On the one hand we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but& which means that we must include all the doubts, caveats, ifs and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists, but human beings as well. And like most people, we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we have to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This double ethical bind which we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.

Many people only quote the underlined portion, but the entire passage is revealing, especially the penultimate sentence. Schneider didn’t realize that there is no balance between being effective and being honest. Anything less is a deception. You can leave things out, but you must explain why. Schneider is apparently trying to rationalize and thus justify immoral actions. It is a feeble attempt to say, the end justifies the means. When they were in trouble after the CRU email leak, they called on Schneider to help with the Summary for Policymakers (SPM).

The active pursuit of data and use of methods to create the desired scientific, and thereby political outcome was morally and scientifically wrong. This was bolstered by what was left out, the cherry picking. It variously involved,

• Leaving out data, as in Sabine and Feely,
• Selecting start and stop points on graphs, to provide a desired trend, as in Santer,
• Omitting entire sectors of causes of climate change, such as omission of the Milankovitch Effect, or the Cosmic Theory.
• Omission began with the deliberately narrow definition of climate change that restricted the IPCC to only human causes.
• Omitting all the severe limitations of the science and computer models identified in the Working Group I Report, The Physical Science Basis from the SPM.

There are lies of commission and omission, and both fit the political and PR practices of IPCC climate science. Humans learn both types of lies as children. In fact, one of the classifications chosen by anthropologists to distinguish humans from all other animals is the ability to lie. The designation, Homo sapiens, supposedly separated us because we could think conceptually, that is we could take disparate information and link it. Then we discovered other animals making similar conceptual connections, so they decided that we were different because we could lie. This requires a double conceptual understanding. You have to know the truth and then figure out how to circumvent it, hence the current designation of humans as, Homo sapiens sapiens. How is that for a moral distinction to be proud of? Of course, the recent support of IPCC climate science by Pope Francis puts the cat amongst the moral pigeons.

Sins of omission are an important part of advertising and public relations. They justify the sin as emphasizing the positive, but it is really avoiding the negative. It is manifest in various forms in the environmental and global warming war. Identifying only benefits, instead of a balanced and realistic cost/benefit study, was used to promote alternate energy. Proponents of the human production of CO2 (AGW) hypothesis only examined what they claimed were the negative impacts. The IPCC did not look at the benefits of global warming. Equally effective in their deception was avoidance of positive benefits of CO2, not least the sustenance of all life through the production of oxygen. A measure of the inanity that results from the IPCC deceptions is the push, by activists like Al Gore and Bill McKibben, to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels. This, despite the scientific research and empirical evidence, that plants function best between 1000 -1200 parts per million (ppm), so are malnourished at the current levels of 400 ppm. All this is a result of the aberrations created by the IPCC and manifest in Sabine and Feely’s latest example. It is time to establish power of attorney for the plants and vote on their behalf against any immoral measure to reduce CO2 levels.

Bill Gates and Chemtrails – A Connection Deeper Than You Could Ever Imagine

Source: yournewswire.com

WOW… we know that Bill Gates is involved heavily in the global vaccination program, which is just a trojan horse for a massive global depopulation program (See this article from YourNewsWire).  He is also funding MASSIVE GMO food programs (also depopulation – see this YourNewsWire article), which is why the recent revelations about his connections to chemtrails (possibly more depopulation) isn’t as surprising as it should be.

In an article written by Rumor Mill News titled “Bill Gates Funding Chemtrails Program – Global Warming is a LIE” [2], the author makes some connections between Gates and chemtrails you really need to read.

The article states:

The latest scam to enter the debate about so-called “global warming” involves spending billions of dollars to spray the atmosphere with tiny particulate matter for the alleged purpose of reflecting sunlight back into space, and thus cooling the planet. But research into this controversial practice of “chemtrailing,” which has actually already been going on for quite some time now, is largely funded directly by Mr. Vaccine himself, the infamous Bill Gates.

The U.K.’s Guardian paper reports that Gates, who is a huge advocate of global intervention programs that forcibly affect large people groups whether they like it or not, has been spending untold millions of dollars from his own personal fortune to fund research into geo-engineering programs. These funds are being used to study things like how much it will cost every year to blast the skies with tiny particles of sulfur dioxide, a toxic industrial byproduct linked to serious respiratory illnesses like asthma (http://www.epa.gov/air/sulfurdioxide/).

Gates and his small cadre of allies, which include co-founder of Skype Niklas Zennstrom and owner of the Virgin Group Sir Richard Branson, reportedly spend exorbitant amounts of cash every year trying to push geo-engineering initiative across the globe. They claim that if nations like the U.S. will not cut greenhouse gas emissions by tremendous amounts, the spraying of toxic poisons into the atmosphere will be necessary to thwart impending disaster.

The entire concept of geo-engineering to save the planet is utter hogwash, of course. This is true not only because “global warming” itself has proven to be a man-made scam, but also because literally blocking sunlight for the stated purpose of reflecting the warmth of its rays back into space makes no logical or scientific sense.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/034906_Bill_Gates_geo-engineering_chemtrails.html#ixzz2TmOIr8wc [1]

Another report found here:

Bill Gates admits to chemtrails | Hang The Bankers | He Who Controls the Money Supply, Controls the World

http://www.hangthebankers.com/bill-gates-admits-to-chemtrails/ [3]

This is the man who last year told us we need to be at zero CO2 levels. He must think we are stupid as nothing would grow in a zero CO2 environment.

This is also the same man who created a “back door” for Windows Operating Systems for your computer so Big Brother can snoop on you without your permission or knowing.  Not to mention he wants you and your children to take deadly vaccine shots.

Why do you think he was allowed to become so wealthy and successful? He is one of them… that’s why.

He has to go.

3 strikes and your out Bill.

He belongs in jail where he can do no more harm to us and our planet.

Pay attention to his friends because birds of a feather flock together. 

SOURCE

[1]  http://www.naturalnews.com/034906_Bill_Gates_geo-engineering_chemtrails.html#ixzz2TmOIr8wc

[2] http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/05/bill-gates-funding-chemtrails-program-global-warming-is-a-lie-2654316.html

[3] http://www.hangthebankers.com/bill-gates-admits-to-chemtrails/

Some Perspective on the Headlining Antarctic Ice Loss Trends

Source: cato.org

By PAUL C. "CHIP" KNAPPENBERGER

The mainstream media has lit up the past few days with headlines of “alarming” news coming out of Antarctica highlighting new research on a more rapid than expected loss of ice from glaciers there.

But, as typical with blame-it-on-humans climate change stories, the coverage lacks detail, depth, and implication as well as being curiously timed.

We explain.

The research, by a team led by University of Cal-Irvine doctoral candidate Tyler Sutterley, first appeared online at the journal Geophysical Research Letters on November 15th, about two weeks before Thanksgiving. So why is it making headlines now? Probably because the National Aeronautics and Space Administration issued a press release on the new paper on December 2nd. Why wait so long? Because on December 1st, the United Nations kicked off its annual climate confab and the Obama administration is keen on orchestrating its release of scary-sounding climate stories so as to attempt to generate support for its executively commanded (i.e., avoiding Congress) carbon dioxide reduction initiatives that will be on display there. This also explains the recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration speculation that 2014 is going to be the “warmest year on record”—another headline grabber—two months before all the data will be collected and analyzed.

This is all predictable—and will essentially be unsuccessful.

Missing from the hype are the broader facts.

The new Sutterley research finds that glaciers in the Amundsen Sea Embayment region along the coast of West Antarctica are speeding up and losing ice. This is potentially important because the ice loss contributes to global sea level rise. The press coverage is aimed to make this sound alarming—“This West Antarctic region sheds a Mount Everest-sized amount of ice every two years, study says” screamed the Washington Post.

Wow! That sounds like a lot. Turns out, it isn’t.

The global oceans are vast. Adding a “Mount Everest-sized amount of ice every two years” to them results in a sea level rise of 0.02 inches per year. But “New Study Finds Antarctic Glaciers Currently Raise Sea Level by Two-Hundredths of an Inch Annually” doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Nor does the coverage draw much attention to the fact that the Amundsen Sea Embayment is but one of a great many watersheds across Antarctica that empty into the sea. A study published in Nature magazine back in 2012 by Matt King and colleagues provided a more comprehensive look at glacier behavior across Antarctica. They did report, in agreement with the Sutterley findings, that glacial loss in the Amundsen Sea Embayment was rapid, but they also reported that for other large areas of Antarctica, ice loss was minimal or even negative (i.e., ice was accumulating). Figure 1, taken from the King paper, presents the broader and more relevant perspective (note that the Amundsen Sea Embayment is made up by the areas labelled 21 and 22 in Figure 1).

 

Figure 1. Best estimate of rate of ice loss from watershed across Antarctica. The Amundsen Sea Embayment, the focus of the Sutterley study, is encompassed by areas labeled 21 and 22 (taken from King et al., 2012).

We discussed the King and colleagues study in more detail when it first came out. We concluded:

So King and colleagues’ latest refinement puts the Antarctic contribution to global sea level rise at a rate of about one-fifth of a millimeter per year (or in English units, 0.71 inches per century).

Without a significantly large acceleration—and recall the King et al. found none—this is something that we can all live with for a long time to come.

The strategically timed new findings being hyped this week do not change this conclusion.

References:

King, M., et al., 2012. Lower satellite-gravimetry estimates of Antarctic sea-level contribution. Nature, doi:10.1038/nature.

Sutterley, T.C., et al., 2014. Mass loss of the Amundsen Sea Embayment of West Antarctica from four independent techniques. Geophysical Research Letters, doi: 10.1002/2014GL061940

Global Warming Not Influencing Annual Streamflow Trends in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic United States

Source: cato.org

Climate model simulations generally predict a future with more frequent and more severe floods in response to carbon dioxide–induced global warming. Confirming such predictions with real world observations, however, has remained an elusive task.

The latest study to illustrate this point comes from the four-member research team of Anna P. Barros, Yajuan Duan, Julien Brun, and Miguel A. Medina Jr. (2014). Writing in theJournal of Hydrologic Engineering, they analyzed streamflow records at various locations throughout the southeast and mid-Atlantic United States over the past century.

In prefacing their work, the researchers note several challenges that must be overcome in order to properly assess and attribute streamflow trends to anthropogenic climate change. One key challenge pertains to “the lack of long enough observational records [that are necessary] to capture the full range of time scales of variability in hydroclimatic regimes as well as extreme events.” This is particularly true in the present case in which only about 3,000 of the 10,012 U.S. Geological Survey streamflow gauges that exist within the authors’ study region have data stretching beyond 25 years of record. In addition, there is often the added challenge of “intermittency in the spatial and temporal configuration of the observing system of stream gauges,” as different stations both enter into, and exit out of, existence over the course of the study period and within the study region.  

Another factor that must be considered are changes in land-use and land cover (LULC) that can significantly influence streamflow. This is especially apparent in regions that have undergone significant urban development, which creates impermeable surfaces and highly interconnected discharge networks that have been shown to contribute to what the authors refer to as “large flood peaks.” Nevertheless, despite the aforementioned challenges, Barroset al. proceeded to conduct various statistical analyses on streamflow data from within their region of study at various time intervals over the past century.

Among their list of findings, the authors report “an overwhelming majority of stations shows no trend” in annual peak streamflow. Quantitatively, for the period 1950–2010, 81.7% of all stations examined in this 61-year period showed no trend at the 98% confidence level, 11.4% experienced a negative trend toward decreasing streamflow, and 6.8% showed a positive trend. (See Table 1, after the jump.)

Similar trends were noticed over the shorter 31-year period of 1980–2010, albeit there is one important change that occurred: there were lower percentages of stations experiencing negative or positive trends. Thus, rather than trending toward more extreme conditions, annual peak streamflow throughout the southeastern and mid-Atlantic United States over the past 30 years has become less extreme and more representative of average conditions. Moreover, those stations exhibiting positive trends tended to be found in urban areas (affected by LULC change), while those exhibiting negative trends tended to reside downstream of reservoirs (also a LULC factor). 

Table 1.  Summary of the trend analyses performed by Barros et al. on annual peak streamflow time series from the southeastern and mid-Atlantic United States over two time intervals (1950–2010 and 1980–2010). Numbers represent the percentage of all stations examined experiencing a positive, negative, or no trend in the data at the 98% confidence level.

In discussing their findings, Barros et al. say they “are consistent with Villarini and Smith (2010) in their analysis restricted to stream gauges with at least 75 years of record, with Hirsch (2011) using 200 stream gauges, and Vogel et al. (2011) and Lins and Cohn (2011) for the [Conterminous United States].”  Given as much, it is extremely difficult to come to any conclusion other than the fact that the unanimous observations depicted in these studies do not support model-based claims that carbon dioxide–induced climate change is leading to more floods. In contrast, if anything, just the opposite appears to be the case, as annual peak streamflow has trended more toward average conditions.

References

Barros, A.P., Duan, Y., Brun, J. and Medina Jr., M.A. 2014. Flood nonstationarity in the southeast and mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. Journal of Hydrologic Engineering19, 05014014. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)HE.1943-5584.0000955.

Hirsch, R. M. 2011. A perspective on nonstationarity and water management.  Journal of the American Water Resources Association 47: 436–446.

Lins, H. F. and Cohn, T. A. 2011. Stationarity: Wanted dead or alive? Journal of the American Water Resources Association 47: 475–480.

Villarini, G. and Smith, J. A. 2010. Flood peak distributions for the eastern United States.Water Resources Research 46: W06504.

Vogel, R. M., Yaindl, C. and Walter, M. 2011. Nonstationarity: Flood magnification and recurrence reduction factors in the United States.  Journal of the American Water Resources Association 47: 464–474.

How Hot Does It Have to Be to Break a Record?

Source: cato.org

So who hasn’t seen one of the bajillion recent stories saying 2014 is going to set the instrumental record for the highest average global surface temperature? May we throw a teense of cold water on that hot news?

Annual temperatures are calculated by averaging up monthly readings, so the last data point that we have is October. The National Climatic Data Center, a part of the Department of Commerce, estimates that global average temperature was a record high of 58.46°F. The previous record was 58.45°.

The key word is “estimates.” When a scientist measures something—with a ruler, a scale, or a thermometer, for example—there’s always a measurement error owing to properties of the measuring device or even the skill of the scientist. When it comes to global temperature, scientists are averaging data from over a thousand thermometers scattered about the planet. Some are well-taken care of, and some are not. Some may have traces of urban warming in them. Nor is the number of readings exactly the same from year to year, or even from month to month.

The result is that there is a central estimate (58.46°) and a 95% confidence range as to where the “true” value lies. 

The most recent and most transparent error analysis of global temperatures has been done by a group called Berkeley Earth. For October, they find that the 95% confidence range is 0.10°F, or +/- 0.05°.

So, using the normal rules of science, is 58.46° then distinguishable from 58.45°? In a word, “NO.”