Winds of Change?

I found this little poem I had written on a scrap of the February 2, 2007, San Francisco Chronicle.

An Ode to Gavin Newsom’s San Francisco Values

San Francisco values

Permeate your life

You claim exemplary virtue

While screwing your best friend’s wife.

After doing the obligatory alcohol rehab routine, he’s now Lieutenant Governor and Democrat leaders feel he’s bound for bigger and better leadership positions.

They’re probably right, although Wiener and Spitzer found less forgiveness than the typical Democrat candidate has come to expect.

So too Jesse Jackson, Jr.

Are winds of change blowing in Democrat politics?

Chicken Little Lives!

Chicken Little is the alarmist spokesperson for climate change, so it’s no wonder that every aspect of natural climate change and weather is cast in Apocalyptic terms.

How about those hurricanes? Over the last five hurricane seasons, the US has had a total of three hurricane strikes – Irene, Issac and Sandy (Actually only two, since Sandy didn’t have hurricane force winds when it made its US landfall). This few hurricanes has happened only twice before – in 1984 and 1866. (tinyurl.com/nq6kedz)

Rising sea levels? Recent San Francisco Chronicle articles featured a full “Chicken Little”, predicting sea level rise of over three feet by 2100. However, if an intrepid reporter strolled near the Golden Gate Bridge, they could read the longest tide record in the Western Hemisphere (or go to tinyurl.com/pa957yv). There they would find that from June 30, 1854 to the present, the annual mean sea level has risen from 6950mm to 7080mm, or five inches (3.22”/century), and that the rate of rise has slowed since 1990. At the average rate, it will take over 1,100 years to increase three feet.  

In similar fashion, global temperature hasn’t increased in 17 years, tornadoes are at a low both in frequency and strength, and forest fires have diminished.

Chicken Little had more proof of calamity than today’s climate alarmists.

Unprecedented? No Way!

In an Ed. Note to my August 30 letter “Unprecedented?”, the ICO Editor erroneously stated that Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New Jersey, but by then Sandy had diminished to “post-tropical cyclone” strength. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that Sandy wasn’t a hurricane when it hit the US.

Hurricane insurance policies have deductibles that would have been triggered if Sandy had still been a named hurricane at the time of landfall, and if hurricane warnings were in effect. However, neither of those conditions were met.

The ICO compared “apples to oranges” to call Sandy the second costliest “hurricane” in US history. When adjusted not only for inflation, but for population and city growth and higher living standards, Sandy is actually only sixth in terms of dollar losses (Katrina is second). In terms of deaths Sandy doesn’t even make the US top ten, or the top 100 for Atlantic tropical cyclones since 1492.

Losses from man-made natural disasters like Katrina – human errors led to the New Orleans levee failures - can easily exceed natural disaster costs. For example, 9/11 costs are estimated conservatively at over a trillion dollars, or over 20 Sandys.  Sandy was also a man-made natural disaster due to building in a known storm-vulnerable area.

The bad news for natural climate change deniers is that, for the first time (since 2002), there have been no Atlantic hurricanes through August, and that accumulated cyclone energy in the Atlantic is about 30 percent of normal.

For “hiatus” deniers, the absence of increased global warming is now 17 years. Central England records show the 2013 temperature is about the same as 1850, at the end of the Little Ice Age. 

It’s hard to blame warming when it isn’t warming.

Hot?

Not.

Natural Climate Change Deniers Still Ranting

I agree with a frequent Liberal letter writer to our local weekly paper (The Independent Coast Observer, Gualala, CA) that rants by “deniers” on both sides have no place in the Climate Change Debate. It has obviously been warming for over the past 200 years, although not as much as in previous periods of natural climate change. A comparison of warming 1895-1945 and 1946-2013 appear almost identical, which means that current warming isn’t unprecedented even in the past century, let alone when compared to four warmer periods during the past 10,000 years. (link)

Natural climate change deniers such as Al Gore have made a mockery of the word “unprecedented” by applying it to our current period of modest warming. “Unprecedented” loses significance when modified, i.e,  “since Gore’s birth (1948).”

Gore recently said that “the hurricane scale used to be 1-5 and now they’re adding a 6.” But they’re not; a Quaternary Science Reviews paper finds 21st century central Pacific cyclone activity is at the lowest levels of the past 5,000 years, that Japan typhoons are at the lowest levels of the past 3,500 years, and that North Atlantic hurricanes were more frequent/severe than modern times during various intervals over the past 3,000 years. (link)

It’s been eight years since a major hurricane hit the US, the longest such period since 1866. Obama has had the fewest hurricanes of any president. (link)

Getting back to ranting, in an interview with the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, Gore equated his fight against global warming to the struggles against slavery, segregation and apartheid. (link) Gore said the issue is now one of right and wrong, which eliminates any basis for a Climate Change Debate. That’s not surprising since Gore will not debate about natural climate change or defend his more-than 35 science falsehoods in An Inconvenient Truth.

Gore’s just like the natural climate change deniers in our area.

We Don't Have A Planetary Emergency - Yet

Global Warming never was a planetary emergency, and then it became natural climate change (“natural” was omitted – it’s an inconvenient truth). Then it became severe weather, except that a modicum of weather history research shows current weather not nearly as severe as previous. Through it all the word “unprecedented” has been liberally sprinkled, without adding the caveats that the warming was only unprecedented if you only look back a century, or almost a millennium at most. How moderate warming can be considered an emergency, given the greater good it provides, and the economic and societal progress burning fossil fuels provides can be considered dangerous, is ludicrous. The alternative, global cooling leading into another glacial period, can be easily demonstrated to be a magnitude greater in terms of human catastrophes than warming could ever. For the past million years, 100,000-year glacial periods have alternated with 10,000-year interglacials. It’s no accident that humanity made more progress in the 10,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age than in the 100,000 years that preceded it. It won’t be long (in geological terms) before Chicago is back under a mile-thick ice sheet, and San Franciscans have to travel west 26 miles to get to the cruise ship berths. Dante was wise when he made ice the inner circle of Hell. A “Slushball” Earth is a planetary emergency to truly fear.

Useful Climate Change Alarmist Idiots

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat had another nonsensical alarmist climate change article. This one was about recent Clear Lake warming (LakesWarming Up: ‘Sentinels for climate change’, August 19, 2013), which sounded significant and ominous until near the end of the article when Thomas Smythe, Lake County’s water resource engineer for 25 years, noted that Clear Lake’s temperature declined from 1970 to 1990, but by 2008 had rebounded to the 1970 level.

Interestingly, Clear Lake cooled for twenty years during a period Al Gore called unprecedented warming, and warmed during the past 23 years, the last sixteen of which haven’t warmed.  

The article also mentioned that Clear Lake warmed at a rate of 0.09 degrees per year from 1992 to 2008, compared to 0.23 degrees per year for Lake Tahoe at the same time. More nonsense, since Lake Tahoe has an average depth of 1,000 feet, and Clear Lake averages 27 feet deep.  Being charitable, the reporter probably got the temperatures reversed. However, Al Gore was at Lake Tahoe on Monday this week, and he said it was getting clearer and never mentioned its warming. Since the warming rate reported in the article is 23 degrees per century, if that were truly the case Big Al would have been all over it.

The article also mentioned the usual panic items: rising sea levels, shrinking glaciers, decreasing snowmelt runoff, and increasing wildfires.  However, sea levels have been rising at a rate of seven inches per century since 1800 (link); glaciers shrank much faster in the 1800s than in the past century (link); Northern Hemisphere snow cover was the highest in 2013 since records began in 1966 (link); and wildfires are at a record low (link).

The Press Democrat article was typical of modern science “journalism” – useful idiots in service to alarmist agendas.

Challenge to Debate Natural Climate Change Deniers

I still haven’t watched Chasing Ice; I’ve had too much good science to read and ponder this past week to waste time on an entertainment that purports to be science by recording a short time period of glacier retreat. Where were these climate change “documentary” film makers when the Muir Glacier, Glacier Bay, Alaska, retreated 60 miles in the 1800’s and only 6 miles since?

The most interesting study I read blows away the extremely limited and misinterpreted proxies that underpinned Al Gore’s “Hockey Stick” in An Inconvenient Truth.  As we all remember from my previous letters, the Hockey Stick did not display the well-documented higher warmth of the Medieval Warm Period (850-1350AD) or the cold of the Little Ice Age (1350-1850AD), and without disclosure the Hockey Stick eliminated tree ring samples and replaced them with instrumental records when recent tree rings showed cooling when alarmist scientists wanted warming.

However, torturing tree rings to make them divulge desired outcomes can’t stand against natural evidence. Nature provides us unequivocal records of past greater warming: coral mounts rising high above current sea level. Simply, coral does not grow above water, so high-and-dry coral skeletons prove Earth has had warmer periods.  One such previous warm period was the Eemian, only 125,000 years ago; coral mounts formed during the Eemian show sea level was almost 30 feet higher, indicating temperature about 10°F above the present. Other coral mounts show sea levels up to 10 feet higher during three recent warming periods – the Holocene Climatic Optimum, Roman, and Medieval, during the past 8,000 years.

Since atmospheric CO2 never rose above 280ppm during these earlier warm periods, it would give me great pleasure to debate a natural climate change denier and begin by asking: Did CO2 cause these warmer periods?

How?