Off Topic

The long and the short of it is that Global Warming alarmists were wrong again. They correctly predicted that the Amazon rain forest would get drier. What they didn’t predict is that it would get greener as it got drier. It seems rainforest growth is limited by sunlight. As it experienced a drought in 2006 the clouds dissipated a little, more sunlight got through, and productivity increased. The details, satellite maps, and whatnot is in the article below.

Global Warming Puzzle: Amazon Rainforest Showed Better Growth During Drought

Accepted global climate models had predicted the Amazon forest would begin to “brown down” after just a month of drought and eventually collapse as the drought progressed. Instead, drought-stricken regions of the Amazon forest grew particularly vigorously during the 2005 drought, according to new research.

“Instead of ‘hunkering down’ during a drought as you might expect, the forest responded positively to drought, at least in the short term,” said study author Scott R. Saleska of The University of Arizona. “It’s a very interesting and surprising response.”

UA co-author Kamel Didan added, “The forest showed signs of being more productive. That’s the big news.”

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The global-warming hucksters Excerpt from Buchanan’s article: Put me down as a disbeliever. Like the panics of bygone eras, this one has the aspect of yet another re-enactment of the Big Con. The huckster arrives in town, tells all the rubes that disaster impends for them and their families, but says there may be one last chance they can be saved – but it will take a lot of money. And the folks should go about collecting it, right now. This, it seems to me, is what the global-warming scare and scam are all about – frightening Americans into transferring sovereignty, power and wealth to a global political elite that claims it alone understands the crisis and it alone can Read More ›

Atlanta is becoming increasingly distressed over a drought that has reached “exceptional” level threatening to leave more than 3 million city residents without tap water if the drought persists more than a few more months. What happened to the increasingly frequent and severe Atlantic hurricanes that so-called “global warming” was supposed to produce? There’s nothing but the proverbial sound of crickets chirping in the southeast where there should be at least a few howling hurricanes or remnants thereof dumping torrential rain on the region. Meanwhile, on the western side of the Gulf coast, Texas has had an unprecedented amount of rainfall even absent hurricane activity. Lake Travis, a 20,000 acre flood control reservoir near me, has been near or into Read More ›

Says Emeritus Professor Gray:

Imagine that. One of the world’s foremost atmospheric scientists saying that scientists are afraid to say what they believe because of the personal financial consequences of going against the popular, fashionable, politically correct “scientific consensus”. Sound familiar? Atmospheric scientists are the newest victims, joining scientists who openly question evolutionary dogma, in the war against open scientific inquiry. I fear science may be a long time recovering from these shameful political agenda driven displays. It’s a good thing engineers don’t try to base technological innovation on hare-brained just-so stories like these that escape from academia to the main stream media.

William M. “Bill” Gray

(b. 1931), Ph.D., is a pioneer in the science of forecasting hurricanes. In 1952 he got a BS degree in Geography from George Washington University, in 1959 he got a MS in Meteorology from the University of Chicago, where he went on to get a PhD in Geophysical Sciences in 1964.

Gray pioneered the concept of “seasonal” hurricane forecasting — predicting months in advance the severity of the coming hurricane season. Gray’s prognostications, issued since 1983, are used by insurance companies to calculate premiums. [1]

Gray is Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University (CSU), and head of the Tropical Meteorology Project at CSU’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences. Gray is noted for his forecasts of Atlantic hurricane season activity.

Professor Gray served as a weather forecaster for the United States Air Force, and as a research assistant in the University of Chicago Department of Meteorology. He joined Colorado State University in 1961. He has been advisor of over 70 Ph. D. and M. Sc. students. His team has been issuing seasonal hurricane forecasts since 1984.

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RC Motorcycles Technical Discussion

Kudos to Anthony Sacramone over at First Things for his hilarious (and insightful) take on the latest self help super-bestseller.  See here.  http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=833  Excerpt:  “After all, who wants to believe that they’re at the whim of chance, accident, or worse—a sovereign God? The idea of being either lost in a Darwinian universe or limited by environment, genetics, and luck is much too disheartening. And the prospect of being in the hands of an unsafe Creator, who sends rain on the just and the unjust alike, is absolutely infantilizing.”

As some of you know…
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A recent survey of climate change articles in science journals finds fewer than half of the authors endorse anthropogenic global warming theories. The so-called consensus has now collapsed to a minority position. I love being right. Linked by The Drudge Report:

Breaking: Less Than Half of all Published Scientists Endorse Global Warming Theory

DAILYTECH

SURVEY: LESS THAN HALF OF ALL PUBLISHED SCIENTISTS ENDORSE GLOBAL WARMING THEORY; COMPREHENSIVE SURVEY OF PUBLISHED CLIMATE RESEARCH REVEALS CHANGING VIEWPOINTS

Michael Asher
August 29, 2007 11:07 AM

In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the “consensus view,” defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes’ work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.

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Here’s an interesting but off-topic story. A newspaper in Kuala Lumpur ran a newspaper article showing a picture of Jesus smoking (a cigar or cigarette or something). The Malay Indians have expressed outrage and asked for apologies (which the newspaper has extended). The Malay Indian Congress has threatened to have the newspaper shut down but, thus far, there has been no hint of rioting in the streets, burning cars, etc. Hmmm… Read more…

Please read the whole article at the source. There’s a lot more detail, diagrams, pictures, and basically just a lot to learn there. The excerpts below are just a few highlights I snipped out.

Global Warming and Nature’s Thermostat
by Roy W. Spencer

Roy W. Spencer received his PhD in meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981. He has been a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville since 2001, before which we was a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center where he received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal. Dr. Spencer is the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. His research has been entirely supported by U.S. government agencies: NASA, NOAA, and DOE.

A Summary, and the Future

It is now reasonably certain that changes in solar radiation cause temperature changes on Earth — for instance, the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo caused a 2% to 4% reduction in sunlight, resulting in two years of below normal temperatures. It is not so obvious, however, that small changes in the Earth’s infrared cooling from mankind’s burning of fossil fuels will do the same. This is because the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect is mostly under the control of weather systems: specifically, precipitation systems. Either directly or indirectly, these systems determine the moisture (water vapor and cloud) characteristics for most of the rest of the atmosphere.

Precipitation systems thus act as a thermostat, causing cooling when temperatures get too high (and warming when temperatures get too low). It is amazing to think that the ways in which tiny water droplets and ice particles combine in clouds to form rain and snow could determine the course of global warming, but this might well be the case.

I believe that it is the inadequate handling of precipitation systems — specifically, how they adjust atmospheric moisture contents during changes in temperature — that is the reason for climate model predictions of excessive warming from increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

I predict that further research will reveal some other cause for the warming we have experienced since the 1970’s — for instance, a change in some feature of the sun’s activity. In the meantime, a high priority research effort should be the study of changes in precipitation systems with changes in temperature — especially how they confer moisture charateristics to the atmosphere as air is continuously recycled through them.

Fortunately, we now have several NASA satellites in Earth orbit that are gathering information that will be immensely valuable for determining how the Earth’s climate system adjusts during natural temperature fluctuations. It is through these satellite measurements of temperature, solar and infrared radiation, clouds, and precipitation that we will be able to test and improve the climate models, which will then hopefully lead to more confident predictions of global warming.

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China Overtakes U.S. as No. 1 Emitter of Carbon Dioxide By Audra Ang June 21, 2007 7:54AM Excerpt: A new study by a Dutch research group said China, which relies on coal for two-thirds of its energy needs and makes 44 percent of the world’s cement, produced 6.23 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2006. In comparison, the U.S., which gets half its electricity from coal, produced 5.8 billion metric tons of CO2, it said. China has overtaken the United States as the world’s top producer of carbon dioxide emissions — the biggest man-made contributor to global warming — based on the latest widely accepted energy consumption data, a Dutch research group says. According to a report released Tuesday Read More ›

Read the sunspots The mud at the bottom of B.C. fjords reveals that solar output drives climate change – and that we should prepare now for dangerous global cooling R. TIMOTHY PATTERSON, professor and director of the Geoscience Centre, Carleton University Published: Wednesday, June 20, 2007 Excerpt: Our finding of a direct correlation between variations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate indicators (called “proxies”) is not unique. Hundreds of other studies, using proxies from tree rings in Russia’s Kola Peninsula to water levels of the Nile, show exactly the same thing: The sun appears to drive climate change. However, there was a problem. Despite this clear and repeated correlation, the measured variations in incoming solar energy were, Read More ›

High price for load of hot air by Bob Carter, June 18, 2007 12:00am Professor Bob Carter is an environmental scientist at James Cook University who studies ancient climate change. Here’s some of what he has to say: The salient facts are these. First, the accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2. Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since Read More ›

Dirty snow may warm Arctic as much as greenhouse gases

“In the past two centuries, the Arctic has warmed about 1.6 degrees. Dirty snow caused .5 to 1.5 degrees of warming, or up to 94 percent of the observed change, the scientists determined.” Read More ›

Great article by David Limbaugh which appeared in today’s Washington Times.

“Whether or not blind faith in man-made, catastrophic global warming has become a new religion, many of its adherents, ironically, embrace it with the same type of unquestioning zeal they sloppily attribute to and summarily condemn in Christians.” -David Limbaugh

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