NASA scientists baffled by huge patch of GREEN ice in Antarctica – Likely massive bloom of phytoplankton
http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/779141/Green-ice-Antarctica-NASA-pictures-mystery-theory
The luminous-looking green ice already covers about 650 square miles (about 1000 square kilometres) – and it is growing by the day.
NASA scientists who spotted the bizarre green ice among the thousands of routine survey pictures taken from 700 miles up US satellite Landsat 8 by are baffled.
As ever aliens have been blamed by online conspiracy theory forums.…
Fake Weather: Weather Service Rejects Accurate Snow Forecasts — Manipulates Public Instead – Copies Tactics From Climate Debate
Climate Depot Analysis
WASHINGTON DC – What the hell!? The National Weather Service (NWS) has now officially admitted its highest mission seems to be manipulating public behavior, not informing the public of the most accurate weather forecast.
Weather Con Borrows From Climate Con! WEATHER SERVICE DECIDED LAST MINUTE NOT TO CUT SNOW FORECAST – “Out of extreme caution we decided to stick with higher amounts,” Greg Carbin, chief of forecast operations at the Weather Prediction Center in suburban Maryland, told The Associated Press. Carbin said a last-minute change downgrading snowfall totals might have given people the wrong message that the storm was no longer a threat….Dramatically changing forecasts in what meteorologists call “the windshield wiper effect” only hurts the public, said Bob Henson, a meteorologist for the private Weather Underground. (Kudos to AP’s Seth Borenstein for a hard-hitting and informative article.)
Morano: According to the NWS, informing the public about the latest downgraded snow forecast would have ‘given people the wrong message’ and telling the public the storm fizzled “only hurts the public”!” We have now officially expanded the era of “fake news” to include “fake weather.”
This line of reasoning and manipulation of forecasts is an insult to the public and to weather forecasting professional everywhere.
The NWS’s primary function is to inform the public in situations like this, not make forecasts based on how to best influence public behavior. It is not the “National Psychiatric Service”, but the National WEATHER Service. The NWS has taken it upon themselves to decide that the public was unable to hand the truth about the 2017 Blizzard Bust.
The public expects scientifically accurate and up to the minute forecasts, not calculated politically dubious forecasts that hide the truth. At least it was refreshing to know that Washington DC, local WTOP News Radio (103.5 FM) bucked the NWS trend and featured meteorologists on Tuesday admitting the storm was fizzling for DC. It was heartening that some meteorologists were more concerned about giving the public accurate forecasts, not treating us like children who need to be lied to.
NWS Aping ‘Global Warming’ Tactics!?
Sadly, the NWS has sunk to the levels now routinely seen in the “global warming” debate. The climate change debate in many instances has morphed into the attitude of “we must not reveal to the public exactly how uncertain we are about our dire ‘global warming’ forecasts because they may not …
Weather Con Borrows From Climate Con! WEATHER SERVICE DECIDED LAST MINUTE NOT TO CUT SNOW FORECAST
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Before the first snow fell, U.S. meteorologists realized there was a good chance the late-winter storm wasn’t going to produce giant snow totals in big Northeast cities as predicted. But they didn’t change their forecasts because they said they didn’t want to confuse the public. National Weather Service meteorologists in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington held a conference call Monday afternoon about computer models that dramatically cut predicted snow amounts. They decided to keep the super snowy warnings. “Out of extreme caution we decided to stick with higher amounts,” Greg Carbin, chief of forecast operations at the Weather Prediction Center in suburban Maryland, told The Associated Press. “I actually think in the overall scheme that the actions (by states and cities) taken in advance of the event were exceptional.” On Monday, the weather service predicted 18 to 24 inches of snow in New York City. By late Tuesday afternoon, Central Park was covered with a little more than 7 inches of snow with rain and sleet still falling. Other areas, including upstate New York and Connecticut, received more than a foot and a half of snow. Swaths of Pennsylvania were walloped by 20 to 30 inches of snow. Carbin said a last-minute change downgrading snowfall totals might have given people the wrong message that the storm was no longer a threat. It still was, but real danger was from ice and sleet in places like New York City and Washington, he said. Dramatically changing forecasts in what meteorologists call “the windshield wiper effect” only hurts the public, said Bob Henson, a meteorologist for the private Weather Underground. Carbin stood by the decision. “The nature of the beast is that there’s always uncertainty in every forecast and we have to get better at describing that,” Carbin said. The right amount of precipitation fell, but it came down as rain and sleet because the rain-snow line moved inland, according to Carbin and private forecasters. The rain-snow line is a 50 mile wide north-south swath where cold Arctic air from the north and west clashes with warm, moist air from the Atlantic. West of the snow line saw heavy snow while east had rain and sleet. The snow line happens to center on New York City so it was a bigger deal than if the line had been over a rural area, said |
Paper: ‘End Of The EPA? Trump Admin. Considers Crippling Cuts To EPA’
BY KASIA KOVACS
The Environmental Protection Agency has already braced itself for $2 billion in budget cuts and a loss of 3,000 employees. But more painful cuts may be coming, Axios reported Wednesday afternoon, as President Donald Trump’s administration was discussing possible further reductions to the EPA.
“They [the EPA career employees] just have to deal with it, because this was coming,” an anonymous source told Axios.
Read: Is The Republican Anti-Climate Change Agenda Killing Potential Employment Opportunities?
On the campaign trail last year, Trump spoke about streamlining government by cutting as much of the budgets for federal agencies as possible. And since taking office, Trump has seemed to focus his efforts on EPA as a sort of testing ground — hit it hard and use it as a case study on slashing regulations and budgets for other federal agencies.
The decision to focus on the EPA was no accident, either. Trump is a vocal climate change skeptic, once tweeting that climate change was a hoax invented by the Chinese, despite the fact that the vast majority of scientists believe climate change to be a real and worrying phenomenon.
Read: After Gag Orders And Freezes, What’s Going On At The Environmental Protection Agency?
“We are going to get rid of (the EPA) in almost every form,” Trump said at a Republican primary debate last March. “We’re going to have little tidbits left, but we’re going to take a tremendous amount out.”
…‘Global warming’ dominated by ‘fake news’ fueled by manipulated data
For decades, we’ve heard the Chickens Little cry that the sky is warming. Then, in 2009, a hack of climate researchers’ emails at the University of East Anglia indicated that things weren’t quite on the up-and-up, science-wise. Climatologists had massaged global temperature records to bolster their claims of man-made global warming, and they had destroyed emails to skirt FOIA requests. “Climategate,” as it came to be called, suggested that many of the alarming reports about global warming had been fake news.
It happened again about a month ago. On February 4, Dr. John Bates, “senior scientist” at NOAA’s temperature data center (until his retirement in late 2016), reported that his own organization had not quite been on the up-and-up, science-wise. He alleged that Thomas Karl, director of the temperature data center (until his own retirement earlier last year), had “breached [NOAA’s] own rules on scientific integrity when [he] published [a] sensational but flawed report” and rushed it into print in order to influence global leaders at the U.N. Climate Conference in Paris in 2015.
That paper, called the “Pausebuster,” cited new data purporting to show that the hiatus in global warming since 1998 had not occurred. According to Dr. Bates, however, Dr. Karl had put his “thumb on the scale” by releasing new data that were “misleading” and “unverified.” Furthermore, it is unlikely ever to be verified: Dr. Bates also reported that the computer used to process the data “had suffered a complete failure.” Hello, Climategate 2.0!
Oh, you’d never heard of it? I bet you’ve heard a lot about the 2015 Paris Climate Accords that were agreed to in part because of the fake “Pausebuster” data. But the mainstream media have little interest writing stories that refute liberal assumptions, so fake news becomes no news. To hear about Climategate 2.0, you’d have to follow alternative sources like Manhattan Contrarian (where I first learned of it), or Judith Curry, or Watt’s Up with That?, or the U.K.’s Daily Mail.
This pattern of fake news followed by no news has been repeated throughout the era of climate change fabulist fear-mongering. In 1989, according to the Associated Press, a director of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) predicted that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels … by the year 2000.” This was followed by no news
Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry on EPA chief Pruitt’s CO2 comments: ‘I think these two statements made by Pruitt are absolutely correct’
What Scott Pruitt actually said
Listen to what Scott Pruitt actually said on CNBC and then compare it to the portrayal in the media. Here is the key text:
I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet. We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.
Can you square what Pruitt actually said with the distorted quotes and headlines about this? I can’t.
I think that these two statements made by Pruitt are absolutely correct:
I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact
We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.
The other two statements give slightly conflicting messages:
I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet.
The main statement of controversy is:
I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.
You can interpret this in two ways:
1.Pruitt is denying that CO2 is a primary contributor to recent global warming
OR
2.Pruitt is saying that he does not accept as a ‘fact’ that CO2 is a primary contributor because we simply don’t know.
Since his subsequent statement is “But we don’t know that yet”, #2 is obviously the correct interpretation.
I think he is saying that he is not convinced that we know with certainty that humans have caused 100% of the recent warming (which is what some climate modelers are saying, see recent tweets from Gavin Schmidt), or that humans have caused ‘more than half’ of the recent warming (which was the conclusion from the IPCC AR5.
JC reflections
If I am interpreting Pruitt’s statements correctly, I do not find anything to disagree with in what he said: we don’t know how much of recent warming can be attributed to humans. In my opinion, this is correct and is a healthy position for both the science and policy debates.
Exactly what the Trump administration intends to do regarding funding climate science, energy policy and the Paris climate …
Study in journal Nature: HALF of Arctic ice loss driven by natural swings — not ‘global warming’
- Decline in ice cover due to ‘random’ and ‘chaotic’ natural changes in air currents
- The rest has been driven by man-made global warming, scientists said
The Arctic icecap is shrinking – but it’s not all our fault, a major study of the polar region has found.
At least half of the disappearance is down to natural processes, and not the fault of man made warming.
Part of the decline in ice cover is due to ‘random’ and ‘chaotic’ natural changes in air currents, researchers said.
Part of the decline in ice cover is due to ‘random’ and ‘chaotic’ natural changes in air currents, researchers said. The rest has been driven by man-made global warming, scientists said.
The rest has been driven by man-made global warming, scientists said.
The research means that although it is widely feared that the Arctic could soon be free of ice, this could be delayed if nature swings back to a cooler cycle.
Loss of the sea ice is predicted to have numerous effects on the planet: these include reflecting less light into space, potentially making the earth warmer and more predictable.
It will also reducing the habitat of animals such as polar bears.
Natural variations in the Arctic climate ‘may be responsible for about 30–50 percent of the overall decline in September sea ice since 1979,’ the U.S.-based team of scientists wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Sea ice hit a record low in September 2012 – late summer in the Arctic – in satellite records dating back to 1979, and declines by around 13 per cent each year.
The ice is now around the smallest for mid-March, rivalling winter lows set in 2016 and 2015.
The study, separating man-made from natural influences in the Arctic atmospheric circulation, said that a decades-long natural warming of the Arctic climate might be tied to shifts as far away as the tropical Pacific Ocean.
Lead author Qinghua
Report: Even deeper cuts being discussed for EPA
By Jonathan Swan & Ben Geman
The Environmental Protection Agency isn’t fighting the White House’s initial budget that proposes to cut the agency’s budget by about $2 billion — or roughly 25% — and reduce the agency’s workforce by roughly 3,000 employees.
Climate change programs would be gutted under the proposal and the workforce attached to these programs would be cleared out of the agency — in line with the aggressive vision of EPA transition head Myron Ebell.
The Trump Administration, in fact, is now discussing making even deeper cuts to the EPA, according to a source privy to the White House’s internal deliberations. Senior Trump officials consider the EPA the leading edge of the administration’s plans to deconstruct the administrative state.
The only place where the EPA administrator Scott Pruitt pushed back substantially against the initial budget proposal was over the planned cuts to environmental cleanup projects. Pruitt has voiced support for funding to cleanup brownfields, which are contaminated former industrial sites that could be redeveloped.…
A dozen groups give Gov. Brown failing environmental grade
Twelve environmental and watchdog groups published a report blasting Gov. Jerry Brown’s so-called green credentials.
Brown has been an enthusiastic supporter of solar and wind and is considered one of the country’s loudest global warming activists, second to Al Gore. One reason for the increase in natural gas power plants is the recent five-year drought that officially ended a few months ago. Many reservoirs didn’t have enough water to power hydroelectric plants, so the state turned to cleaner burning natural gas when permitting new power plants.
Power plant glut?
The report said Brown ‘encouraged’ a glut of power plants that has consumers paying for 20 percent more capacity than they need or will use. Some of the groups who co-wrote the report include the Food & Water Watch, Restore the Delta, Consumer Watchdog, and Physicians for Social Responsibility, and eight others. Restore the Delta opposes Brown’s plan to prevent freshwater from being dumped into the Pacific Ocean near the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta, approved by many residents.
Consumer Watchdog accused Brown of governmental corruption, a charge Brown has refused to comment on furthering speculation. Brown’s spokesperson said it was the “same drivel, different day,” with the claims being nothing new against the governor. Food and Water Watch was livid over Brown’s political appointees considering reopening the Aliso Canyon gas storage field but at one-third its previous levels.
“What Went Wrong At Porter Ranch?” In-depth reporting on that ginormous methane leak in southern California: http://www.laweekly.com/news/what-went-wrong-at-porter-ranch-6405804 …
Massive gas leak
The storage field is owned by Southern California Gas Co. (SoCal Gas) whose parent company is Sempra Energy, where his sister draws a six-figure salary as a board member thus creating the appearance of a conflict.
A special investigation revealed the