Remember when we had the technology to make machines that didn't take all night to wash dishes?

Life in a free society.

//When bureaucrats make decisions “on behalf of” consumers, consumers don’t get what they want.

Exhibit A: A federal rule to cut energy use of microwave ovens when they are off (this is not a joke). To reduce energy use by two watts per oven (also not a joke) the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Office pushed manufacturers to adopt a technology that caused the ovens to fail 50 percent of the time in the Department of Energy’s own tests.

Exhibit B: Dishwashers with interminable cycle times. To save eight cents of hot water, federal mandates led to wash cycles taking much longer to complete. Two- and three-hour cycles, virtually unheard of 20 years ago, are commonplace today.//

No Global Warming for 16 Years...

...and the problem of the non-linear warming caused by CO2.

In any reasonable scenario, carbon dioxide can’t cause catastrophic global warming by itself. This is because the absorption of infrared radiation by CO2 is non-linear. The first 20 parts per million of CO2 in our atmosphere account for about one-half of the greenhouse warming from CO2. Adding more carbon dioxide has a diminishing warming effect. Doubling atmospheric CO2 from 280 ppm to 560 ppm, whether from natural or man-made causes, would by itself increase Earth’s surface temperature by only about 1.2oC.

So how do the climate models reach their alarming conclusions? They assume that positive feedback from water vapor will cause additional warming. The argument is that, since warmer air can hold more moisture, water vapor will increase in the atmosphere as Earth warms. Since water vapor is a greenhouse gas, additional water vapor will add additional warming to that caused by CO2.

The assumption of positive feedback from water vapor has been integral to the climate models since the 1960s, when Dr. Syukuro Manabe developed one of the first models. As part of his model, he assumed that global relative humidity remained constant as the atmosphere heated up. This meant that the atmosphere would hold increasing amounts of water vapor, adding additional greenhouse heating to that of carbon dioxide.

But, satellite data shows atmospheric water vapor to be relatively constant over the last 30 years. In addition, peer-reviewed papers by Lindzen and Choi (2011) and Spencer and Braswell (2010) show that climate system feedbacks are likely to be low or even negative. Rather than adding to the warming, water vapor and clouds may even act to reduce warming from rising atmospheric CO2.

Global Cooling.

Snow falls in Arkansas in May for the first time in almost 200 years.

Don't panic...

...the ozone hole over the Antarctic is the smallest it has ever been over the last 20 years.

And global warming has been flat for the last 15 years.

What is the left going to do without an existential disaster it can blame on capitalism?

Where's my global warming?

This Forbes' writer was promised shorter winters, and he's angry that no one has delivered on the promise:

By 1981 (think “Chariots of Fire“), the drum beat had taken effect. Quoting from the American Institute of Physics website: “A 1981 survey found that more than a third of American adults claimed they had heard or read about the greenhouse effect.”

So where’s the warming? Where are the gondolas pulling up to the Capitol? Where are the encroaching seas in Florida? Or anywhere? Where is the climate change which, for 33 years, has been just around the corner?

A generation and a half into climate change, née global warming, you can’t point to a single place on earth where the weather is noticeably different from what it was in 1979. Or 1879, for that matter. I don’t know what subliminal changes would be detected by precise instruments, but in terms of the human experience of climate, Boston is still Boston, Cairo is still Cairo, and Sydney is still Sydney.

After all this time, when the continuation of industrial civilization itself is on the table, shouldn’t there be some palpable, observable effect of the disaster that we are supposed to sacrifice our futures in order to avoid? Shouldn’t the doom-sayers be saying “We told you so!” backed up by a torrent of youtube videos of submerged locales and media stories reminding us about how it used to snow in Massachusetts?

Climate panic, after all, is fear of dramatic, life-altering climate changes, not about tenths of a degree. We are told that we must “take action right now before it’s Too Late!” That doesn’t mean: before it’s too late to avoid a Spring that comes a week earlier or summer heat records of 103 degrees instead of 102. It was to fend off utter disaster that we needed the Kyoto Treaty, carbon taxes, and Priuses.

With nothing panic-worthy–nothing even noticeable–ensuing after 33 years, one has to wonder whether external reality even matters amid the frenzy. (It’s recently been admitted that there has been no global warming for the last 16 years.) For the climate researchers, what matters may be gaining fame and government grants, but what about the climate-anxious trend-followers in the wider public? What explains their indifference to decade after decade of failed predictions?  Beyond sheer conformity, dare I suggest a psychological cause: a sense of personal anxiety projected outward? “The planet is endangered by carbon emissions” is far more palatable than “My life is endangered by my personal evasions.” Something is indeed careening out of control, but it isn’t the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, those of us who long for warmer weather will have to give up the dream–or move south.

Well that's awkward.

"Sorry, global warming alarmists, the earth is cooling.

Global Warming...is there nothing it can't do?

Journalist asks if asteroid fly-by is an effect of global warming.

*Double Face-palm*

Reduce Carbon Emissions...

...start a new Ice Age.

Or here is a crazy idea - maybe global temperature has something to do with the sun.

Global Warming Alert. Antarctca sets record for growth of ice.

Antarctic sea ice set another record this past week, with the most amount of ice ever recorded on day 256 of the calendar year (September 12 of this leap year). Please, nobody tell the mainstream media or they might have to retract some stories and admit they are misrepresenting scientific data. National Public Radio (NPR) published an article on its website last month claiming, “Ten years ago, a piece of ice the size of Rhode Island disintegrated and melted in the waters off Antarctica. Two other massive ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula had suffered similar fates a few years before. The events became poster children for the effects of global warming. … There’s no question that unusually warm air triggered the final demise of these huge chunks of ice.” NPR failed to mention anywhere in its article that Antarctic sea ice has been growing since satellites first began measuring the ice 33 years ago and the sea ice has been above the 33-year average throughout 2012. Indeed, none of the mainstream media are covering this important story. A Google News search of the terms Antarctic, sea ice and record turns up not a single article on the Antarctic sea ice record. Amusingly, page after page of Google News results for Antarctic sea ice record show links to news articles breathlessly spreading fear and warning of calamity because Arctic sea ice recently set a 33-year low. Sea ice around one pole is shrinking while sea ice around another pole is growing. This sure sounds like a global warming crisis to me.

More on that Global Warming "Convert" and his paper proving Global Warming.

Like I noted yesterday, there is solid research that the temperature data for ground warming is systematically biased in favor of the "warmist" conclusion.

But - wait! - there's more:

I’ve reached Dr. Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, who was a co-author of the first four BEST papers but who declined to be listed as an author of this one. She was in an airport, and has promised me more tomorrow, but in the meantime she referred me to the New York Times Dot Earth blog and her quote:

The BEST team has produced the best land surface temperature data set that we currently have. It is best in the sense of including the most data and extending further back in time. The data quality control and processing use objective, statistically robust techniques. That said, the scientific analyses that the BEST team has done with the new data set are controversial, including the impact of station quality on interpreting temperature trends and the urban heat island effect.

Their latest paper on the 250-year record concludes that the best explanation for the observed warming is greenhouse gas emissions. Their analysis is way oversimplistic and not at all convincing in my opinion.

There is broad agreement that greenhouse gas emissions have contributed to the warming in the latter half of the 20th century; the big question is how much of this warming can we attribute to greenhouse gas emissions. I don’t think this question can be answered by the simple curve fitting used in this paper, and I don’t see that their paper adds anything to our understanding of the causes of the recent warming. That said, I think there are two interesting results in this paper, regarding their analysis of 19th century volcanoes and the impact on climate, and also the changes to the diurnal temperature range.

As usual, you have to look carefully at this. Curry strongly disagreed with the conclusions of the paper, and needs to be taken seriously: she is, after all, a co-author of the previous studies. Her point is simply that:

(1) the paper does say there has been warming, but well, everyone knew that. The question is the magnitude of the warming, the part of that which is anthropogenic, i.e., human-caused, and then what part of that part is caused by CO2. They have done a lot to clean up the data set, but as Watts et. al. note, that dataset may be subject to a systematic error.

(2) the strength of the conclusion that essentially all of that is both anthropogenic and caused by CO2 is being overstated. (My own choice of words would be “wildly overstated.”)

Again, isn't it weird that journalists can't do this kind of background fact checking?

Blogs - doing the work that journalists refuse to do, and for free.

Answer: The media is a joke.
Question: Why can't the mainstream media use google?

The New York Times posts an op-ed entitled "The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic" by Richard Muller. Muller claims that he was a global warming skeptic until he recently headed a research group at Berkeley, called BEST, showing land temperature has risen. He concludes that global warming is real, significant and entirely human.

Muller's "conversion" is being touted as a klincher on the global warming debate, particularly since the conservative Koch Foundation allegedly funded the study.

The problem is that Muller was never a skeptic, and his study is old news.

The BEST study is old news. I blogged about it last October.

There are problems in the study, which I noted in my October post, and which apparently haven't been answered.

One new problem is that the BEST study is based on land temperature data, which is systematically biased in favor of warming.

In addition, Muller has never been a skeptic. In 2006, he was on record as offering 2 out of 3 odds that human activity was responsible for global warming. Back in 2001, he was touting human pollution as devastating the globe. And here is more evidence that Muller is exaggerating his conversion.

I located that within 10 minutes.

How come that kind of background research is beyond the New York Times?

Another serious question is, doesn't the media realize the game has changed with the internet? Where once we would stop at "Gee, that sounds familiar" or "I thought I read something different" - which was the genesis of this post - people can now locate data from the past and realize that the media is running a shell-game.

Why you aren't hearing about ...

...the gender gap.

So why run yet another ad with the same ridiculous claims? Reinhard says the key is in swing-state polling — which shows Barack Obama’s big lead among women shrinking substantially:

A look at the dwindling gender gap in just one of the states where the ad is running gives it away. In Virginia — ground zero for the so-called “war on women” because of anti-abortion initiatives in the state capitol — Obama was running ahead of Romney in Quinnipiac University polls in March and June, largely because of monster leads among women. The gender gap was 13 points in March and 16 points in June.

Then came July’s survey, which found the candidates deadlocked at 44 percent each. The gender gap had shrunk to only 5 points.

In the latest week-long survey results (July 16-22) from Rasmussen’s daily presidential tracking poll, which sampled 3500 likely voters, the gender gap has fallen to five points (48/43) — but it’s only down to two points in today’s three-day rolling average (46/44). Meanwhile, Romney has a 13-point lead among men, 54/41, in today’s result, and a nine-point edge from the previous weeklong results, 50/41. When leaners are included in the three-day rolling average, Romney has a twelve-point lead among men, 55/43 — and a tie among women with Obama at 47/47. Among those women “certain” of their vote, Obama only has a one-point edge, 38/37. Among men certain of their vote, Romney leads by 14, 47/33.

Romney also leads the tracking poll overall by five points, 49/44 — and that was before today’s GDP report.

It seems that Team Obama has good reason to hit the panic button, and not just in Virginia. They need to scare women back onto the Democratic reservation, and setting their own pants on fire looks like their only option, now that “Julia” has been banished to the Island of Misfit Political Mascots.

In other news, you don't hear about the ozone hole because it's getting better. You probably also didn't hear about the so-called arctic ozone hole of 2011, because that one was caused by the fact that 2011 had record cold temperatures, which is strictly inadmissible for a narrative of global warming.

Bad news for statist environmentalist doomsayers.

US carbon output shrinks:

Much to the surprise (and, one suspects, the chagrin) of the deranged doomsaying wing of the environmental movement, new forecasts of US CO2 emission are out and they point to an even steeper drop than the last set of predictions.

No cap and trade, no huge new taxes on oil, no draconian driver restrictions, no air conditioning bans, no rationing — and the US is on track to cut its CO2 emissions 17 percent below the 2005 levels by 2020 — and to keep cutting our emissions levels beyond that.

And this news doesn’t come from embattled climate skeptics banished to the fringes of the scientific community; these numbers come from the Obama administration and are sitting right up on Don Lashof’s well respected blog at the National Resource Defense Council website. Take a look for yourselves.

So, to summarize, the United States of America basically blew the global greens off completely, trampling all over their carbon tax and cap and trade agendas, and earning wails and shrieks of hatred at the Rio+20 Summit — while making huge strides toward reducing CO2 emission levels.

It’s almost as if there is no connection between the green policy agenda and environmental progress.

Is nothing melting?

First, we find out that Greenland's glaciers arent' melting.

Now, we learn that Antarctica is not melting.

Does empirical failures of predictions mean that ....well, global warming is bunkum?

We're Doooooooooooooomed!!!!!

Greenland's glaciers are melting...

...back in the 1930s.

Apparently, some long-forgotten aerial pictures of Greenland glaciers taken in the 1930s document a warming period that caused a rapid retreat of glaciers, which was then followed by a cooling period, when the glaciers returned.

The weather, it seems to change.

Here is the scientific source:

Widespread retreat of glaciers has been observed along the southeastern margin of Greenland. This retreat has been associated with increased air and ocean temperatures. However, most observations are from the satellite era; presatellite observations of Greenlandic glaciers are rare. Here we present a unique record that documents the frontal positions for 132 southeast Greenlandic glaciers from rediscovered historical aerial imagery beginning in the early 1930s. We combine the historical aerial images with both early and modern satellite imagery to extract frontal variations of marine- and land-terminating outlet glaciers, as well as local glaciers and ice caps, over the past 80 years. The images reveal a regional response to external forcing regardless of glacier type, terminal environment and size. Furthermore, the recent retreat was matched in its vigour during a period of warming in the 1930s with comparable increases in air temperature. We show that many land-terminating glaciers underwent a more rapid retreat in the 1930s than in the 2000s, whereas marine-terminating glaciers retreated more rapidly during the recent warming.

The snows of Kilimanjaro.

According to Global Warming alarmists, Kilimanjaro will be snow-free by 2016.

As with most of its predictions, this one needs a slight tweaking, in that Kilimanjaro is actually packing on snow, rather than losing it:

Constituting the highest mountain in Africa, Mount Kilimanjaro is slowly building up its snow cover, allaying the fears of prominent scientists who had predicted witnessing the eminence lose its famous white hat. The drifts are slowly thickening on the top point of this summit, giving new hopes to Mount Kilimanjaro environmental watchdogs and tourists that the peak may not lose its beautiful snowy cap, as scientific experts have long been warning.

Covered in mist for most of the day, Mount Kilimanjaro is the most tourist-attractive site in Tanzania, pulling in tens of thousands of foreigners and locals each year. The snow, which once had disappeared on some parts of the mountain, is piling up again gradually, making a beautiful picture out of the Kibo peak.

Sources from Kilimanjaro environmental groups said this precipitation could rise to cover most areas of the mountain, but the effects of climate change and global warming could still affect the peak’s snow layers, which have been becoming thinner and thinner.

So, the reason for Kilimanjaro's diminishing snow cap was "regional," rather than "global"?

File this one under - "Entrant for the Paul R. Ehrlich Prediction of Disaster Award."

Winner of the Paul Ehrlich Prize for 2012.

The Science of Global Warming is Settled!

And science is science because it makes testable predictions!

According to Watts Up With That?, in 1988, Global Warming proponent James Hansen predicted that in 40 years the West Side Highway in Manhattan would be covered by the sea. The West Side Highway is 10 feet above sea level. In 23 years, sea levels have risen only 2.5 inches.

WUWT observes:

According to the actual data, after 23 years, we’ve seen about a 2.5 inch rise. There’ s still a very long way to go to ten feet to cover the West Side Highway there.

To reach the goal he predicted in 1988, Dr. Hansen needs to motivate the sea to do his bidding, he’s gonna have to kick it in gear and use a higher octane driver if he’s going to get there.

Global Warming - is there anything it can't do?

Such as explaining why there are more home runs in our post-steroid world?

Wind farms cause warming.

Cue panic.

Global Warming Hysteria and Heresy Hunters

At Forbes, Steve Zweick vents about how Global Warming skeptics should have to pay a price for their heresy:

Let’s take a page from those Tennessee firemen we heard about a few times last year – the ones who stood idly by as houses burned to the ground because their owners had refused to pay a measly $75 fee.

We can apply this same logic to climate change.

We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn until the innocent are rescued. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let’s force them to bear the cost of rising food prices.

They broke the climate. Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?

Obviously, the ideal solution is to get our collective act together and prevent this from happening, but we need a fall-back – a mechanism that puts responsibility for damages on the shoulders of the shirkers and deniers who cause it and profit from it, and we need to build that mechanism before the damages materialize.

What we have here is the same mentality that caused people in the Middle Ages to be concerned about the presence of heretics in their communities - the presence of such people might cause God to strike the community in order to get at the skeptics.