Do the oceans show global warming?

Short answer, not so much recently. Science Bits has an interesting post on the oceans as a calorimeter. This is a question the IPCC refuses to confront in any scientific way.

Climate Depot

Check out Climate Depot by Marc Morano, this guy manages to find new information in a well discussed topic. He's like the Drudge of climate.

Renewable energy policies lead to waste

Knowledge Problem discusses Frequent negative power prices due to renewable energy:

What is with all of the negative power prices in the West region of ERCOT?

In the first half of 2008, prices were below zero nearly 20 percent of the time. During March, when negative prices were most frequent, prices were below zero about 33 percent of the time. After mostly taking the summer off, negative power prices were back to near 10 percent in October.

This seems a little crazy. During these negative price periods, suppliers are paying ERCOT to take their power. Consumers (at least at the wholesale level) are getting paid for using power, and the more power consumers use the more they get paid. These prices are a big anti-conservation incentive. You could, as a correspondent put it to me, build a giant toaster in West Texas and be paid by generators to operate it.

Interesting and good analysis! While there is some waste going on due to wind power overkill in Texas, it has nothing on the waste caused by Congress' ethanol requirements, the WP has an article about the US flex fuel fleet:

The federal government has invested billions of dollars over the past 16 years, building a fleet of 112,000 alternative-fuel vehicles to serve as a model for a national movement away from fossil fuels.

But the costly effort to put more workers into vehicles powered by ethanol and other fuel alternatives has been fraught with problems, many of them caused by buying vehicles before fuel stations were in place to support them, a Washington Post analysis of federal records shows.

Not really all that surprising, but it still sucks to learn about massive waste of money. The thing is, even if the flex fuel fleet was done right, there would still be minimal benefit.

Oreskes' shoddy science

Roger Pielke Jr. takes down Naomi Oreskes' latest op-ed article in his latest blog post, Lies Posing as History. Oreskes is most famous for a study, mentioned many times by Al Gore, claiming no papers in a survey disagreed with the consensus position on climate change, this article was questionable as well. I think its now safe to ignore anything Oreskes publishes in the future.

New Climate Blogs

A few new climate blogs have recently appeared, check them out:

Digital Diatribes of a Random Idiot

The Air Vent

Solar Science

The Unbearable Nakedness of CLIMATE CHANGE

IPCC Prediction Skill

If you haven't been paying attention, Lucia at the Blackboard has been checking IPCC predictions against temperatures to see if they falsify on a monthly basis. In short, the IPCC central tendency is currently falsifying. This is not surprising, as the BBC Reported:

So far modellers have failed to narrow the total bands of uncertainties since the first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990.

Almost 20 years with no real progress has to hurt. Relatedly, Climate Skeptic and Jennifer Marohasy defend (by invoking Roger Pielke Sr) the use of shorter periods of time to check the IPCC's work.

Recent Global Warming News

Some interesting global warming/green news:

Geothermal Probe Sinks German City: But only two weeks after contractors drilled down 460ft to extract heat from below the earth, large cracks have appeared in buildings as the town centre subsided about a third of an inch (8mm). - This is one reason why geothermal will probably never gain wide acceptance, the other being earthquakes.

93% of Home Buyers Won't Pay more for Green Home Features: 93% of all home buyers, both nationally and in the NY Metro area, ARE NOT willing to PAY MORE for green or energy efficient features when building a home. - They are willing to buy features that will pay off over the long run though, its just basic economics.

Bangladesh Gained 1,000 Square Kilometers Recently: As AFP, BBC, and others report, satellite images combined with old maps have revealed that the country has gained 1,000 squared kilometers since 1973 (more than 1 percent of the Czech Republic) and it seems to be continuing gaining landmass, roughly 20 squared kilometers per year. - This despite the alarming sea level rise predicted by the IPCC! In fact, Bangladesh is usually one of the countries cited as being screwed due to sea level rise.

Peter Foster has an amusing anecdote about consensus science, linked by A dog named Kyoto.

Love Global Warming compares the area of the recent Big Sur Fire Burn to ANWR.

Climate Skeptic details Great Moments in Alarmism, testing Hansen's early predictions against actual temperatures.

Sea Ice

A couple interesting posts on sea ice, Arctic Ice has Expanded 30% since 2007, and a post from Climate Skeptic explaining that the Antarctic Peninsula is only 2% of Antarctica and is in no way indicative of the rest of the continent. When Steve McIntyre discovered a GISS Temp error that resulted in the US temps being adjusted downward 0.25F, one of the big alarmist rebuttals was that it didn't matter since the US was about 3% of world land area.

Now we have people claiming that random areas of melting ice are a sign of global warming, despite the fact that we're talking about small areas overall and melting ice does not necessarily signal global warming, other factors may be at play, namely weather and soot.

If you find the subject of ice melting interesting, you must follow Climate Audit's Sea Ice Threads for the latest updates, just find the latest one and start reading.

Climate Blogs

Climate Skeptic has a list of Climate Blogs That Don't Necessarily Accept "the Consensus".

IPCC and bad science

Bishop Hill has a great summary of a bit of IPCC hockey stick controversy in the Caspar and the Jesus Paper. While the every thoughtful Climate Skeptic has a somewhat related post: A Quick Thought on "Peer Review"- where he compares climate science with a social science based on:

• Bad statistical methodology (a hallmark, unfortunately, of much of social science)
• Emphasis on peer review over replication
• Reliance on computer models rather than observation
• Belief there is a "right" answer for society with subsequent bias to study results towards that answer
  

I believe 3 of the 4 can be found in the Amman and Wahl paper discussed by Bishop Hill!

Blog Update

I spent a bit of time fixing up and updating the blog list and links on the right side of the blog, if you know a blog I missed, leave a comment!

Celebrities Go "Green"

I just love stories about celebrities thinking they're green and telling the world about it. From Planet Gore:

Sheryl Crow:

The singer wants to put her designs on the eco-fashion world. Sheryl has teamed up with Western Glove Works and plans to create a denim-based collection. When it comes to fashion, this eco-chick already goes green. She's known to donate bags and bags of unworn clothes to her local secondhand shop every six months.

How is buying clothes that you never wear and then donating them "green?"

From Climateer Investing:

Celine Dion and water go way back - let’s not forget that her biggest hit was about the tragic watery deaths of 1,517 people in the freezing North Atlantic.

So with a relationship like that, you’d think that Celine Dion would be allowed to use as much water as she liked. Celine Dion certainly thinks so - she’s been singled out as the biggest consumer of water in her Florida county, using 6.5 million gallons in a year.

I don't even think she lives in Florida! Doesn't she stay in Las Vegas to do her show?

Interestingly, Gore Won't Ask Wealthy Start to Save Planet, how does that make sense if you think he believes it is important to prevent global warming?

Climate change: Natural ups and downs

From Nature:

The effects of global warming over the coming decades will be modified by shorter-term climate variability. Finding ways to incorporate these variations will give us a better grip on what kind of climate change to expect.

Climate change is often viewed as a phenomenon that will develop in the coming century. But its effects are already being seen, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently projected that, even in the next 20 years, the global climate will warm by around 0.

More information is available from Jennifer Marohasy, surprisingly, Real Climate argues that this is consistent with global climate models once you figure in uncertainty.

How to get your climate model included in IPCC

The requirements for inclusion of your GCM (global climate model) into IPCC are as follows:

* be full 3D coupled ocean-atmospheric GCMs,
* be documented in the peer reviewed literature,
* have performed a multi-century control run (for stability reasons)and
* have participated in CMIP2 (Second Coupled Model Intercomparison Project).

You will notice that any sort of skill or quality is not needed. This is also true of the CMIP2 project. No hindcasting must be such and such accurate, no anything.

Why would you run things this way? If I was running the IPCC I would add criteria that require the models to meet various quality baselines (ie within 50% of global temperature 1980-2000) before inclusion. I wouldn't care how they met my baselines, just that they did. Until you do that, you can not improve upon your predictions.

Wind power growth and outages in Texas

Knowledge Problem links:

Operators of the Texas power grid scrambled Tuesday night to keep the lights on after a sudden drop in wind power threatened to cause rolling blackouts, officials confirmed Wednesday.

At about 6:41 p.m., power grid operators ordered a shutoff of power to so-called interruptible customers, which are industrial electric users who have agreed previously to forego power in times of crisis. The move ensured continued stability of the grid after power dropped to alarmingly low levels.

This comes right after the NY Times has an article about Texas wind, noting:

After breakneck growth the last three years, Texas has reached the point that more than 3 percent of its electricity, enough to supply power to one million homes, comes from wind turbines.

They run into power supply problems with a mere 3% of their power coming from wind?

Green Hypocrites 2007

Steve Milloy has a top 10 list of the greenest hypocrites of 2007, the top two:

1. Al Gore’s Inconvenient Lifestyle. While the former veep and nouveau-$100 millionaire jets around the world squawking about the “planet having a fever” and demanding that we all lower our standard of living, his own personal electricity use is 20 times the national average, including an indoor pool costing $500/month to heat.

While Gore deflected criticism of his inconvenient electric bill during March congressional testimony by saying he purchased “green” electricity, the truth is, he didn’t start doing so until 2007.

2. Google’s Sky Pig. A photo-op of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin plugging-in a hybrid car was part of the search engine giant’s June announcement promising carbon neutrality by 2008. But how this PR-fluff squares with the so-called “Google party jet” — Page and Brin’s gargantuan personal Boeing 767, which burns about 1,550 gallons/hour — is any one’s guess.

Check out the rest of the top 10.

Scafetta and West 2007

Climate Audit summarizes a recent article by Scafetta and West:

Basically they use a phenomenological approach. So instead of taking the reconstructed TSI values, plug them into a model, and find that indeed the Sun has only a minor influence (like Ammann et al. did in their PNAS paper of March 6, 2007 | vol. 104 | no. 10 | 3713-3718 ), they make no prior assumption on the total Solar forcing. They just assume, mostly rightly, that the Sun was the main driver of climate variability. Then from the solar reconstruction and the temperature reconstruction, they deduce which model of solar forcing best matches the two together.

Read up if you find this sort of stuff interesting. The Reference Frame and Jennifer Marohasy also chime in.

Roger Pielke Sr. back at it

The blog, Climate Science, by Roger Pielke Sr. has returned. More informed opinions regarding the science of global warming are always welcome.

Not surprising news for Inconvenient Truth

Inconvenient truth stretches the truth, Kerplunk and A Dog Named Kyoto are on it:

A High Court judge today ruled that An Inconvenient Truth can be distributed to every school in the country but only if it comes with a note explaining nine scientific errors in Al Gore’s Oscar-winning film.

Some are still defending the film, but the errors are identified now, lets all admit that and move on.

Record low arctic sea ice

Both Jennifer Marohasy and The Reference Frame report on the NASA release on the recent record low sea ice conditions at the north pole this year:

In a news release from NASA Monday, a group of scientists have determined that unusual winds caused the rapid decline (23% loss) in winter perennial ice over the past two years in the northern hemisphere. This drastic reduction is the primary cause of this summer's fastest-ever sea ice retreat in recorded history which has lead to the smallest extent of total Arctic coverage on record.

Nothing about global warming there. Jennifer also notes the record maximum sea ice extent in the south:

Just when you thought this season's cryosphere couldn't be more strange .... The Southern Hemisphere sea ice area narrowly surpassed the previous historic maximum of 16.03 million sq. km to 16.17 million sq. km.

And the recent Antarctica conditions do not follow climate models:

A February 2007 study reveals Antarctica is not following predicted global warming models. Excerpt: “A new report on climate over the world's southernmost continent shows that temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as had been predicted by many global climate models."

Basically the sea ice this year is not exactly following the global warming script.

Silencing the global warming critics

Jennifer Marohasy and The Reference Frame cover the resignation of the Virginia State Climatetolist, Patrick Michaels. "I resigned as Virginia state climatologist because I was told that I could not speak in public on my area of expertise, global warming, as state climatologist." The technical firing of the State Climatologists who aren't preaching doom and gloom about global warming is something that if was happening in the reverse, there would be widespread outrage. When its someone who isn't an alarmist, its not a big story.

NASA fudges the numbers again

NASA is caught again fiddling with the temperature numbers without notification and once again Steve McIntyre is on top of it. NASA has come clean since, but their reasons for the changes are unclear and undocumented, not exactly scientific:

Hansen said that the difference between 1998 and 1934 was “statistically insignificant”. But business accountants are familiar with situations where a lot of attention is paid to numbers that may be “statistically insignificant”. I’ll give you an example. For a large corporation, the difference between a small profit and a small loss can be “statistically insignificant”, but there is a big difference in how they are perceived by the public. In some cases, unscrupulous corporations (and you can think of a few, including the most famous recent U.S. bankruptcy) will do whatever they can in terms of deferring expenses or recognizing revenue to change a reported loss into a reported profit. Accounting changes are a red flag to analysts for brokerage companies; there may be “good” reasons but the analyst needs to be right on top of the situation and they will be VERY unimpressed if a company tries to slip a change in without reporting it.

Maybe NASA scientists can learn a thing or two from the business world in the future.

Carbon offsets gone wrong

Farmers evicted for offsets, then cut down the trees when they go back, offsets gone wrong, once again:

Planting trees in Mount Elgon National Park in eastern Uganda seemed like a project that would benefit everyone. The Face Foundation, a nonprofit group established by Dutch power companies, would receive carbon credits for reforesting the park's perimeter. It would then sell the credits to airline passengers wanting to offset their emissions, reinvesting the revenues in further tree planting. The air would be cleaner, travelers would feel less guilty and Ugandans would get a larger park.

But to the farmers who once lived just inside the park, the project has been anything but a boon. They have been fighting to get their land back since being evicted in the early 1990s and have pressed their case with lawsuits.

Last year, when the courts granted three border communities an injunction against the evictions, the farmers took it as permission to clear the land they consider theirs. Now a stubble of stumps - all that's left of the trees meant to absorb carbon dioxide - dots the rows of newly planted maize and budding green beans.

Hattip: Jennifer Marohasy

Oprah, another eco-hypocrite

Climateer Investing has: Oprah on Global Warming which includes pictures of her $50 million house and $47 million private jet.

Again about those offsets

At least they're just taking your money:

Co-producer Lesley Chilcott used an online calculator to estimate that shooting the film used 41.4 tons of carbon dioxide and paid a middleman, a company called Native Energy, $12 a ton, or $496.80, to broker a deal to cut greenhouse gases elsewhere. The film's distributors later made a similar payment to neutralize carbon dioxide from the marketing of the movie.

It was a ridiculously good deal with one problem: So far, it has not led to any additional emissions reductions.

Oops.