“The final analysis is: Lots of jet fuel expended but not much accomplished in getting the public alarmed enough to make themselves energy poorer. The public is not listening for good reason. They have been hearing the same thing since 1988 (27 years) and the data does not support a present or future crisis.”
To be sure, if a politician is barking about global warming, he or she has little to say about the real issues that concern Americans, from economic progress to federal budget deficit reduction. But yelp they must; the science has been going away from climate alarmism, and the economy is getting no boost from government-enabled, inferior energies (quite the opposite).
In an effort to stir up support for an economy-shrinking treaty from the UN Conference of the Parties-21 (COP-21) meeting in Paris this December, President Obama went on a whirlwind one-week tour promoting the global warming scare with many speeches, photo-ops, and newspaper columns.
New Orleans (Katrina)
President Obama visited New Orleans August 27 to mark the tenth anniversary of hurricane Katrina’s devastating the city. He preached that catastrophic climate change (global warming) is taking place owing to carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and that we must stop using our inexpensive, abundant, and geographically distributed coal, oil, and natural gas.
The implication? Increases in the number and strength of hurricanes is one of the supposed results of climate change that Americans can relate to.
Apparently no one told the President that no category 3 or higher hurricanes have struck the United States since 2005—a record for lack of hurricane activity and strength. In addition, satellite temperature measurements show no statistically significant global warming increases for 18 years.
Alaska
From August 31 to September 2, President Obama changed location to Alaska to continue spreading his story of catastrophic climate change . August 31 was a meeting of the Global Leadership in the Arctic—Cooperation, Innovation, Engagement & Resilience (GLACIER) conference in Anchorage.
The United States is currently the chair of the Arctic Council, a grouping of the eight Arctic States (Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States) plus a dozen states with permanent observer status, including China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore.
As a sign of the importance the United States placed on the Alaska forum, President Barack Obama attended and used the conference as a platform for urging swifter action to combat climate change. “Climate change is no longer some far-off problem; it is happening here, it is happening now,” President Obama opined. “We’re not acting fast enough.”
He also used his speech on the need for a global agreement at this year’s UN climate meeting in Paris. “This year, in Paris, has to be the year that the world finally reaches an agreement to protect the one planet that we’ve got while we still can.”
After the conference, the representatives of the Arctic Council members signed a joint statement affirming “our commitment to take urgent action to slow the pace of warming in the Arctic.” Even though this statement had no binding provisions, China, India, and Russia refused to be signatories.
By their refusal, these three countries—being numbers 1, 3, and 4 of the top carbon-dioxide emitting countries in the world—render the statement worthless and pose great obstacles to obtaining any meaningful treaty curbing carbon dioxide emissions from COP-21 in Paris this December.
September 1, President Obama moved to Seward in order to visit the Exit Glacier at the Kenai Fjords National Park “to view the effects of climate change firsthand.” As pointed out in the September 3 article “Obama’s Half-Baked Alaska” by Patrick Moore in The Wall Street Journal, Alaska’s glaciers have advanced and retreated many times over thousands of years—advancing in cold times like the Little Ice Age (LIA) and retreating during warm periods like the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and Current Warm Period (CWP).
A discussion of retreating glaciers since 1850 is given in Wikepdia. A discussion of glacier advance is given in “The Little Ice Age In Europe”.
In response to President Obama’s pleas for reducing carbon dioxide emissions, on September 1, Bloomberg published “Denmark’s Government Readies U-turn on Ambitious Climate Targets”. The costs of reducing carbon dioxide, in a country with the greatest concentrations of wind turbines, is too high.
On September 2, President Obama addressed residents of the population-3000 village of Kotzebue on the dangers of climate change.
Apparently, President Obama forgot September 2 was the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II (the Japanese surrender). Many in the nation celebrated this day; there are only 1 million veterans left of the original 16 million called to combat during the greatest threat to world peace in the history of the planet. Very few veterans will be around for the 80th anniversary. President Obama is the Commander-in-Chief of the U. S. military, and one may question his priorities in using the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II to promote unfounded climate change fears over honoring our gallant veterans and current men and women in uniform.
Ironies
It is ironic President Obama choose Alaska to promote global warming fears. Rising sea levels caused by catastrophic global warming (caused by increasing carbon dioxide) is one of the fears promoted by climate alarmists. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration maintains a data set of 128 tidal gauges along the coasts of the United States.
Alaska has 17 tidal gauges of which 14 shows the ocean is receding. Anchorage shows receding of 0.61 mm per year and Seward shows receding of 2.66 mm per year. Graphs of sea level change from 1990 to 2015 show no acceleration of changes due to global warming.
As a final comment, Clegg, et.al. published temperatures found from analysis of sediments from Moose Lake (61°22.45’N, 143°35.93’W) in the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve of south-central Alaska (USA)—an area about 100 miles East of President Obama’s visit to Seward. The data is presented as a graph of July temperatures for the past six thousand years.
Quoting the authors:
[I]t is instructive to note that even with the help of the supposedly unprecedented anthropogenic-induced increase in the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration that occurred over the course of the 20th century, the Current Warm Period has not achieved anywhere near the warmth of the MWP [Medieval Warm Period] or RWP [Roman Warm Period], which suggests to us that the climatic impact of the 20th-century increase in the air’s CO2 content has been negligible, for the warming that defined the earth’s recovery from the global chill of the LIA [Little Ice Age]– which should have been helped by the concurrent increase in the air’s CO2 content — appears no different from the non-CO2-induced warming that brought the planet out of the Dark Ages Cold Period and into the Medieval Warm Period.
The paper cites other measurements made in Alaska with similar results and this should show that President Obama’s choice of Alaska as proof of fossil-fuel-caused catastrophic global warming has no merit.
The final analysis is: Lots of jet fuel expended but not much accomplished in getting the public alarmed enough to make themselves energy poorer. The public is not listening for good reason. They have been hearing the same thing since 1988 (27 years) and the data does not support a present or future crisis.
—————–
James H. Rust, professor of nuclear engineering and policy advisor The Heartland Institute
The religion of “Chicken Little” and “The Boy who Cried Wolf” has failed to deliver on its prophesies of doom.
The data are bad; the “adjusted” temperatures are worse; and, the modeled scenarios are worse than that.
The climate science community is so frantic that it announced the July global mean surface temperature (not the anomaly) to two decimal places, though it did not to mention range of error or confidence levels. I guess they were concerned that temperature to two decimal places, +/- several whole degrees would not be very impressive.
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This is a stunning story about a new mechanism affecting global climate. This may haunt COP-21 in Paris this November 30 to December 11. Climategate helped stall any agreement in COP-15 in Copenhagen in December 2009.
James H. Rust
Surface Of The Oceans Affects Climate More Than Thought
Leipzig Institute for Troposperic Research, 30 September 2015
First detected abiotic source of isoprene
Lyon/ Leipzig. The oceans seem to produce significantly more isoprene, and consequently affect stronger the climate than previously thought. This emerges from a study by the Institute of Catalysis and Environment in Lyon (IRCELYON, CNRS / University Lyon 1) and the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS), which had studied samples of the surface film in the laboratory. The results underline the global significance of the chemical processes at the border between ocean and atmosphere, write the researchers in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.
Isoprene is a gas that is formed by both the vegetation and the oceans. It is very important for the climate because this gas can form particles that can become clouds and then later affect temperature and precipitation. Previously it was assumed that isoprene is primarily caused by biological processes from plankton in the sea water. The atmospheric chemists from France and Germany, however, could now show that isoprene could also be formed without biological sources in surface film of the oceans by sunlight and so explain the large discrepancy between field measurements and models. The new identified photochemical reaction is therefore important to improve the climate models.
The oceans not only take up heat and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, they are also sources of various gaseous compounds, thereby affecting the global climate. A key role is played by the so-called surface microlayer (SML), especially at low wind speed. In these few micrometers thin layer different organic substances such as dissolved organic matter, fat and amino acids, proteins, lipids are accumulating as well as trace metals, dust and microorganisms.
For the now published study, the research team took samples from the Norther Atlantic Ocean. The surface film was collected in the Raunefjord near Bergen in Norway. For this purpose, a glass plate is immersed in water and then again carefully pulled from the water. The 200 micron thin film sticks to the glass and is then scraped off with a wiper. The sample thus obtained is analyzed in the laboratory later. At the Institute of Catalysis and Environment in Lyon (IRCELYON), which belongs to the French research organization CNRS and the University of Lyon 1, the team investigated its photochemical properties during which collected samples were irradiated with light and the gases were analyzed: it became clear that isoprene was produced in magtnetudes that were previously attributed solely to plankton. “We were able for the first time trace back the production of this important aerosol precursor to abiotic sources, so far global calculations consider only biological sources,” explains Dr. Christian George from IRCELYON.
Thus, it is now possible to estimate more closely the total amounts of isoprene, which are emitted. So far, however, local measurements indicated levels of about 0.3 megatonnes per year, global simulations of around 1.9 megatons per year. But the team of Lyon and Leipzig estimates that the newly discovered photochemical pathway alone contribute 0.2 to 3.5 megatons per year additionally and could explain the recent disagreements. “The existence of the organic films at the ocean surface due to biological activities therefore influences the exchange processes between air and sea in a unexpected strong way. The photochemical processes at this interface could be a very significant source of isoprene”, summarizes Prof. Hartmut Herrmann from TROPOS.
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