Clipmarks | willhelm's 'climate' clips

The Best States For Business Forbes Annual Listing

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:51:12 GMT

clipped by: merrie
clipper's remarks: In Forbes' annual ranking of the Best States for Business, Virginia finished first for the third straight year. But Georgia is the real story, moving from 15th to fifth place. Georgia finished in the top 10 in four of the six categories we examined (economic climate, growth prospects, labor supply and regulatory environment). Just two other states, Virginia and third-ranked Washington, managed this feat.

Our rankings measure states on six main areas of importance: business costs, labor supply, regulatory environment, current economic climate, growth prospects and quality of life. Business costs are weighted the most, but low costs were not enough to keep Louisiana and West Virginia from being the bottom two in our ranking. We look at a total of 32 data points to compile rankings of the six main categories.

Clip Source: www.forbes.com

100 Months left. Here is how to save the world

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 19:52:58 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks: Hmmm. Looks familiar.

Clip Source: tigerhawk.blogspot.com

"a structural transformation of the regulation of the financial system"

"breaking up discredited financial institutions that have only survived through the injection of vast sums of public money"

"clamping down on tax havens and obfuscatory corporate financial reporting"

"to prevent inflation, we want to see much tighter regulation of the wider financial environment"

"establishment of an Oil Legacy Fund, similar to a highly successful Norwegian government initiative, paid for by a windfall tax on the profits of oil and gas companies"

"More realistic fossil fuel prices, raised to include their cost to the environment"

"make available the low-cost capital needed to fund the UK's green economic shift whilst having controls in place to prevent inflation" [Price controls? Seriously?

Proposals like these published in supposedly serious forums give credence to the concerns of the rest of us that climate change hysteria is just the latest justification for socialism.

On the credibility of climate models

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 03:40:37 GMT

clipped by: willhelm

Clip Source: www.atypon-link.com

Geographically distributed predictions of future climate, obtained through climate models, are widely used in hydrology and many other disciplines, typically without assessing their reliability. Here we compare the output of various models to temperature and precipitation observations from eight stations with long (over 100 years) records from around the globe. The results show that models perform poorly, even at a climatic (30-year) scale. Thus local model projections cannot be credible, whereas a common argument that models can perform better at larger spatial scales is unsupported.

View PDF article (996 K)

Climate Change is racist

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:09:48 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks:

Clip Source: www.businessandmedia.org

Climate change is no longer just an environmental issue. It’s now an issue of race, according to global warming activists and policy makers.

“It is critical our community be an integral and active part of the debate because African-Americans are disproportionately impacted by the effects of climate change economically, socially and through our health and well-being,” House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., said July 29.

Emotion and Confirmation Bias

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 04:09:46 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks: Where there is no skepticism and clear-thinking, we have the emotional attachment of those worshiping theory and living in a hypothetical world. Theirs is a devotion to an idea, which is actually a faith. Hope and change, anyone? Climate Change?

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

The neuroimaging results, however, revealed that the part of the brain most associated with reasoning--the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex--was quiescent. Most active were the orbital frontal cortex, which is involved in the processing of emotions; the anterior cingulate, which is associated with conflict resolution; the posterior cingulate, which is concerned with making judgments about moral accountability; and--once subjects had arrived at a conclusion that made them emotionally comfortable--the ventral striatum, which is related to reward and pleasure.

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

Skepticism is the antidote for the confirmation bias.

Deja Vu

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 01:57:18 GMT

clipped by: willhelm

Clip Source: wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com

NYT: Expert Says Arctic Ocean Will Soon Be an Open Sea

“Catastrophic Shifts in Climate Feared if Change Occurs”

You can read the entire article in PDF form at this link

There’s just one thing wrong with this article, besides that it is flat wrong. Oh I know, there will be those that insist it may come true. However, there’s one bit of context that is worth exploring.

The article, as seen above, was published February 20th, 1969

See the date stamp at the bottom of the PDF

On the flip side, here is an article from 1922 where the ice is actually melting fast:

Deja Vu all over again: climate worries of today also happened in the 20’s and 30’s

The CO2 extractor

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 23:09:05 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks: Every living thing relies on CO2 being in the atmosphere.

That said, why do environmental alarmists oppose the CO2 scrubber? The argument that it is inefficient just doesn't fly because all technology becomes cheaper and more efficient over time.

I think we all know the reason why they oppose it. The CO2 scrubber does not allow them to control your life.

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

It has long been the holy grail for those who believe that technology can save us from catastrophic climate change: a device that can "suck" carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air, reducing the warming effect of the billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas produced each year.

Now a group of US scientists say they have made a breakthrough towards creating such a machine. Led by Klaus Lackner, a physicist at Columbia University in New York, they plan to build and demonstrate a prototype within two years that could economically capture a tonne of CO2 a day from the air, about the same per passenger as a flight from London to New York.

Evidence of Variability of Atmospheric CO2 Concentration

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 04:48:58 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks: "Conclusion: Atmospheric CO2 concentration varies with climate, the sea is the dominant CO2 store, releasing the gas depending on multi-decadal changes of temperature."

Clip Source: www.biokurs.de

More bad news for alarmists

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 05:28:36 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks: For example, the recent summary by Fred Singer and 22 expert contributors to “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate” makes some extraordinary statements about computer models. (In addition to the many excellent contributors, this summary also contains 167 references to the scientific literature).

This is important since computer models are being improperly, yet extensively, used by state legislatures as the basis of policies for greenhouse gas mitigation, rather than using actual climate data taken from the real world. These statements include:

Computer models do not consider variations of irradiance and magnetic fields of the sun

Computer models do not accurately model the role of clouds

Computer models do not simulate a possible negative feedback from water vapor

Computer models do not explain many features of the Earth’s observed climate.

Computer models cannot produce reliable predictions of regional climate change.

Clip Source: www.hawaiireporter.com

The issue of global warming rages on is some minds. Remarkably, there really hasn’t been much of a debate, not a serious science debate anyway. There have been shouting and screaming, predictions of doom, and the willingness to destroy our energy sources and our economy to “save the planet”. But as P.J. O’Rourke noted, there are a lot of people who would do anything to “save the planet”, except take a science course.

While there hasn’t been a true debate, there has been a hugely one-sided angry monologue, heaping scorn upon those who dare ask for evidence.

The world of science is moving quickly past these questionable events in an expanding universe of new evidence, which is showing that the current state of the global warming theory is in serious decline.

Fraud Against Humanity

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:01:54 GMT

clipped by: willhelm

Clip Source: www.rightsidenews.com

The oil money's paltry contribution pales in comparison to the well funded alarmist industry. (LINK)

Earth has COOLED since Hansen’s Dire Climate Warning in 1988 (LINK) See 1988 vs. 2008 temperature chart here:

Hansen’s Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis challenged by UN Scientists and new peer-reviewed studies. (LINK) & (LINK) & (LINK)

Hansen who alleged Bush administration muzzled him -- did 1,400 on-the-job media interviews (LINK)

Media Ignores Skeptical NASA Scientists' Claims of Censorship (LINK) & (LINK)

Reality Check: Senator Admits Hot Day and AC Failure during Hansen’s 1988 Testimony was ‘Stagecraft’ (LINK)

An August 2007 NASA temperature data error discovery has lead to 1934 -- not the previously hyped 1998 -- being declared the hottest in U.S. history since records began. (LINK)

Media Darling Hansen Assailed by NASA Colleagues (LINK)

Hansen conceded that use of “extreme scenarios" to dramatize climate change “may have been appropriate at one time” (LINK)

Astrophysicist Dr. Nir Shaviv

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:21:30 GMT

clipped by: willhelm

Clip Source: epw.senate.gov

recanted his belief that man-made emissions were driving climate change. "Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media. In fact, there is much more than meets the eye," Shaviv said in a February 2, 2007 Canadian National Post article. According to Shaviv, the CO2 temperature link is only "incriminating circumstantial evidence." "Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th-century global warming" and "it is unlikely that [the solar climate link] does not exist," Shaviv noted, pointing to the impact cosmic- rays have on the atmosphere. According to the National Post, Shaviv believes that even a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere by 2100 "will not dramatically increase the global temperature."

Tags: global warming, climate change

Global Warming Scientist Comes Clean

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 02:17:01 GMT

clipped by: willhelm
clipper's remarks: 1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most... We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming.

2. There is no evidence that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. ...

3. The satellites that measure the world's temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year

4. ice cores show that in the past... half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon.

Clip Source: www.powerlineblog.com

David Evans was a consultant to the "Australian Greenhouse Office" from 1999 to 2005. He is a former global warming alarmist; however, he is also a scientist who goes where the evidence leads him. In this important article in The Australian, he blows the whistle on the fraud that many of the world's governments are in the midst of perpetrating:

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

Tags: global warming, climate change, scientism

Polar Bears in Antartica?

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 18:09:16 GMT

clipped by: LoPhatt
clipper's remarks: They could be pals with the pinguins

Clip Source: www.wired.com

Last-Ditch Resort: Move Polar Bears to Antarctica?

So why not pack a few off to Antarctica, where the sea ice will never run out?

Once dismissed as wrongheaded and dangerous, assisted colonization -- rescuing vanishing species by moving them someplace new -- is now being discussed by serious conservationists. And no wonder: Caught between climate change and human pressure, species are going extinct 100 times faster than at any point in human history.

Interesting Info about Sunspots and Solar Cycles

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 18:59:36 GMT

clipped by: willhelm

Clip Source: www.intellicast.com

SOLAR CYCLES AND TEMPERATURES

When the sun is more active, it is brighter than when it is quiet. This difference in brightness or irradiance over the 11 year cycle is about 0.1%. The irradiance change though since the little ice age may be as high as 0.4 or 0.5% and has been used to explain the ice age and recovery since. Even on the shorter term, there are other solar factors at play besides simple brightness or irradiance changes.

While irradiance changes just 0.1% over the 11 year cycle, ultraviolet radiation changes 6 to 8% and shorter wavelengths even more. Ultraviolet radiation destroys ozone, an exothermic process which produces warming in the higher atmosphere in low to mid latitudes that works its way down to the middle troposphere in time.

MAUNDER MINIMUM

Since the solar cycle length correlates inversely with the magnitude and the magnitude directly with temperatures, it is not surprising that solar cycle length has been shown to correlate very well with temperatures.

Tags: global warming, climate change, solar, sun, sunspots

The world simply isn't warming

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:25:01 GMT

clipped by: amgumen

Clip Source: www.news.com.au

View the full-size graphics

Sea ice now isn't melting, but spreading. The seas have not just stopped rising, but started to fall.

Nor is the weather getting wilder. Cyclones, as well as tornadoes and hurricanes, aren't increasing and the rain in Australia hasn't stopped falling.

What's more, the slight warming we saw over the century until 1998 still makes the world no hotter today than it was 1000 years ago.

Now Prime Minister Kevin Rudd can at last stop sweating about the warming terrors he told us were coming - the horrific droughts, the dengue fever, the malaria, the devastation to our land and economy.

As for his promise this week to make your power bills go up $200 a year to stop global warming? His promise to make even food more expensive? To put gassy companies out of business, and their workers out of a job?

That's why 31,000 other scientists, including world figures such as physicist Prof Freeman Dyson, atmospheric physicist Prof Richard Lindzen and climate scientist Prof Fred

Clipmarks | willhelm's 'climate' clips

The Best States For Business Forbes Annual Listing

No. 1: Virginia

No. 2: Utah

No. 3: Washington

No. 4: North Carolina

No. 5: Georgia

No. 6: Colorado

No. 7: Idaho

No. 8: Florida

No. 9: Texas

No. 10: Nebraska

No. 11: Minnesota

No. 12: Delaware

No. 13: North Dakota

No. 14: Maryland

No. 15: New Mexico

No. 16: Oregon

No. 17: Tennessee

No. 18: Arizona

No. 19: Nevada

No. 20: New Hampshire

No. 21: Kansas

No. 22: Iowa

No. 23: South Dakota

No. 24: Montana

No. 25: Indiana

No. 26: Oklahoma

No. 27: Hawaii

No. 28: Alabama

No. 29: South Carolina

No. 30: Missouri

No. 31: Wyoming

No. 32: Arkansas

No. 33: Connecticut

No. 34: New Jersey

No. 35: Illinois

No. 36: Massachusetts

No. 36: Vermont

No. 38: New York

No. 39: Ohio

No. 40: California

No. 41: Pennsylvania

No. 42: Mississippi

No. 43: Wisconsin

No. 44: Kentucky

No. 45: Rhode Island

No. 46: Maine

No. 47 Michigan

No. 48: Alaska

No. 49: Louisiana

No. 50: West Virginia

100 Months left. Here is how to save the world

On the credibility of climate models

Climate Change is racist

Emotion and Confirmation Bias

Deja Vu

NYT: Expert Says Arctic Ocean Will Soon Be an Open Sea

The CO2 extractor

Evidence of Variability of Atmospheric CO2 Concentration

More bad news for alarmists

Fraud Against Humanity

Astrophysicist Dr. Nir Shaviv

Global Warming Scientist Comes Clean

Polar Bears in Antartica?

Last-Ditch Resort: Move Polar Bears to Antarctica?

Interesting Info about Sunspots and Solar Cycles

The world simply isn't warming