Reality check: In 1908, fossil fuels accounted for 85% of U.S. energy consumption. In 2015, more or less the same
…NOAA: U.S. Completes Record 11 Straight Years Without Major (Cat 3+) Hurricane Strike
(CNSNews.com) – Today marks the completion of a record-breaking 11 years without a major hurricane striking the U.S. mainland, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA).
“I can confirm that as of October 24, 2016, it will be a complete 11 years since a major hurricane has struck the United States, as defined by the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale of being a Category 3 or higher,” meteorologist Dennis Feltgen, spokesman for NOAA’s National Hurricane Center (NHC), told CNSNews.com.
“The current streak of no major hurricane landfalls onto the U.S. mainland remains intact. The last one to do so was Hurricane Wilma on October 24, 2005,” Feltgen said.
Category 3 and higher hurricanes are characterized by sustained wind speeds of 111 mph or more and strong storm surges that are capable of causing “devastating” or “catastrophic” damage.
The current 11-year stretch with no major hurricane striking the United States is the longest since record-keeping began, according to NOAA data going back to 1851.
The second-longest major hurricane drought ended 147 years ago: the 8 years, 11 months between September 1860 and August 1869. The third-longest stretch (5 years, 11 months) was between October 1900 and September 1906.
In 2005, the U.S. was pummeled by four major hurricanes – Dennis, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma – which killed nearly 4,000 people and caused nearly $160 billion in damages. That is the only year on record when four major hurricanes have struck the United States.
But since then, no major hurricanes have made landfall in the U.S. However, lower category hurricanes–such as Hurricane Matthew earlier this month and Hurricane Sandy in 2012–have killed dozens of people and caused billions of dollars’ worth of damage.
According to NHC director Rick Knabb, flooding from storm surge is responsible for 9 out of 10 hurricane fatalities in the U.S.
Hurricane Matthew, the first Category 5 hurricane to form in the Atlantic since 2007, roared through the Caribbean as a Category 4 hurricane with torrential rains and wind speeds of 145 mph, leaving 546 people dead and 128 missing inHaiti.
It was the fifth hurricane of the 2016 Atlantic hurricane season, which officially opened on June 1st
UN Paris climate deal ‘is likely to be history’s most expensive treaty’ – ‘Cost of between $1 trillion and $2 trillion annually’
http://www.wsj.com/articles/about-those-non-disappearing-pacific-islands-1476400840?mod=djemMER
Bjorn Lomborg:
Even more insidiously, doom-mongering makes us panic and seize upon the wrong responses to global warming. At a cost of between $1 trillion and $2 trillion annually, the Paris climate agreement, recently ratified by China, is likely to be history’s most expensive treaty. It will slow the world’s economic growth to force a shift to inefficient green energy sources.
This will achieve almost nothing. My peer-reviewed research, published last November in the journal Global Policy, shows that even if every nation were to fulfill all their carbon-cutting promises by 2030 and stick to them all the way through the century—at a cost of more than $100 trillion in lost GDP—global temperature rise would be reduced by a tiny 0.3°F (0.17°C).
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Tackling issues like poverty, health care, corruption and domestic violence would do even more. Those who seek to help should keep the bigger picture in mind.
Mr. Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, is the author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” (Cambridge Press, 2001) and “Cool It” ( Knopf, 2007)…
30 peer-reviewed scientific papers reveal the lack of connection between hurricanes & ‘global warming’
By on 10. October 2016
Below there are 30 peer-reviewed scientific papers that summarize the literature on the lack of connection between ocean temperatures and hurricane variability. Perhaps Sutter and Mann could find these educational.
No Trend Or Reduced Intensity Of Landfalling Hurricanes With Warming
“The impact of climate change is seen in slightly decreased intensities in landfalling cyclones.”
“[T]be global frequency of category 4 and 5 hurricanes has shown a small, insignificant downward trend [1990-2014].”
“The various SST measures only have a weak influence on TMLGP[tropical cyclones making landfall, South China] intensities. Despite the long-term warming trend in SST in the WNP, no long-term trend is observed in either the frequency or intensities of TMLGP[tropical cyclones making landfall, South China].”
“A long-term (five decade) downward trend continues to be evident primarily in the frequency of intense hurricanes. In addition, the mean maximum intensity (i.e., averaged over all cyclones in a season) has decreased, while the maximum intensity attained by the strongest hurricane each year has not shown a significant change.”
“All of the counts, lifespans, and accumulated cyclone energy of the late-season typhoons during the 1995–2011 epoch decreased significantly, compared with typhoons that occurred during the 1979–94 epoch.”
“There has been no trend towards an increase in the number of categories 3–5 cyclones over the last 30 years.”
“Extratropical cyclones cause much of the high impact weather over the mid-latitudes. With increasing greenhouse gases, enhanced high-latitude warming will lead to weaker cyclone activity. Here we show that between 1979 and 2014, the number of strong cyclones in Northern Hemisphere in summer has decreased at a rate of 4% per decade, with even larger decrease found near northeastern North America.”
“[D]ata show a decrease in the proportion of category 4-5 typhoons from 18% to 8% between the two periods of 1977-1989 and 1990-2004 (Table 1; intensity estimates in terms of sustained maximum winds first became available in RSMC-Tokyo best track data in 1977).”
…“No significant correlation was found between the typhoon activity parameters and local SST [during 1960-2003]. In other words,an increase in local
Extreme Weather Expert: ‘Incredible streak of no-US major hurricanes (Cat 3+) continues – 4,001 days & counting
…The Guardian’s “100 Months To Save The World” – Part II
The Guardian’s “100 Months To Save The World” – Part II
By Paul Homewood https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/aug/01/climatechange.carbonemissions
According to the Guardian’s Andrew Simms, we are two months away from reaching a tipping point for the beginnings of runaway climate change.
So, how much has the world’s climate changed since 2008?
Atmospheric temperatures have barely changed in the last eighteen years:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1998/plot/rss/from:1998/trend
Arctic sea ice extent in September has remained stable:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover_30y.uk.php
Winter Arctic ice extent has barely changed since 2005:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover_30y.uk.php
Antarctic sea ice has been growing rapidly: (note that data since April is spurious, due to satellite problems).
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
And global sea ice is also stable:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
Hurricanes keep on doing what hurricanes do:
http://models.weatherbell.com/tropical.php#!prettyPhoto
Tornadoes remain at historically low levels:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/climate-information/extreme-events/us-tornado-climatology/trends
Major droughts in the US are a thing of the past:
And the same in Australia:
In short, far from climate catastrophe, people would be excused for not noticing any change at all the the Earth’s climate.
Meanwhile, all of that extra CO2 in the atmosphere has contributed to a remarkable greening of the world:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2016/04/29/rise-in-co2-has-greened-planet-earth/
And global food production continues to rise in leaps and bounds:
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Green Guru James Lovelock reverses belief in ‘global warming’: Now says ‘I’m not sure the whole thing isn’t crazy’
UK Guardian – By Decca Aitkenhead – September 30, 2016
James Lovelock’s parting words last time we met were: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky, it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.” It was early 2008, and the distinguished scientist was predicting imminent and irreversible global warming, which would soon make large parts of the planet uninhabitably hot or put them underwater. The fashionable hope that windfarms or recycling could prevent global famine and mass migration was, he assured me, a fantasy; it was too late for ethical consumption to save us. Before the end of this century, 80% of the world’s population would be wiped out….
Eight years after our previous encounter, he appears to have aged not one bit. At 97, he’s conceived a beautifully illustrated book of essays described as a “tool kit for the future”, The Earth and I, and written the introduction and conclusion; he goes walking every day, his hearing is perfect, his focus forensic and his memory unimpaired….
What has changed dramatically, however, is his position on climate change. He now says: “Anyone who tries to predict more than five to 10 years is a bit of an idiot, because so many things can change unexpectedly.” But isn’t that exactly what he did last time we met? “I know,” he grins teasingly. “But I’ve grown up a bit since then.”
Lovelock now believes that “CO2 is going up, but nowhere near as fast as they thought it would. The computer models just weren’t reliable. In fact,” he goes on breezily, “I’m not sure the whole thing isn’t crazy, this climate change. You’ve only got to look at Singapore. It’s two-and-a-half times higher than the worst-case scenario for climate change, and it’s one of the most desirable cities in the world to live in.”
…
Lovelock on Fracking
Lovelock has withering contempt for environmentalists’ opposition to fracking. “You see, gas in America is incredibly cheap, because of fracking,” he says. But what about the risk of triggering earthquakes? He rolls his eyes.
“Sure enough, that’s true, there will be an increase. But they’re tiny little tremors, they would be imperceptible. The only trouble is that you can detect them. The curse of my life has been that I’ve spent a lot of time inventing devices that are exceedingly sensitive. And the moment somebody can detect …
Warmist Scientists say Paris climate accord essentially useless — it’s going to get warmer anyway
Scientists say Paris climate accord essentially useless, it’s going to get warmer anyway
Scientists: World likely won’t avoid dangerous warming mark by Seth Borenstein (AP) A team of top scientists is telling world leaders to stop congratulating themselves on the Paris agreement to fight climate change because if more isn’t done, global temperatures will likely hit dangerous warming levels in about 35 years. Six scientists who were leaders […]
— gReader Pro…
‘Hide The Decline’ Unveiled: 50 Non-Hockey Stick Graphs Quash Modern ‘Global’ Warming Claims
‘Hide The Decline’ Unveiled: 50 Non-Hockey Stick Graphs Quash Modern ‘Global’ Warming Claims
We are told the globe is rapidly and dangerously warming, and that this rapid and dangerous warming has been predominantly caused by the steep rise in anthropogenic CO2 emissions that began about the mid-1940s. We even have a widely-recognized “hockey stick” graph of the Northern Hemisphere — created by Michael Mann in the late 1990s and popularized by the IPCC (2001) — to “prove” that modern warming has been synchronously global in scale, as well as rapid, dangerous, and perhaps even unprecedented (“the warmest on record”). There is a problem with this paradigm, however. An enormous problem. That is, when scientists reconstruct sea surface temperatures (SST) and land surface temperatures and deep ocean heat content from the paleoclimate record (hundreds to thousands of years ago) using existing physical proxy evidence, and when they use this same physical evidence to reconstruct the modern temperatures, the rapid and dangerous warming trend that mysteriously forms a hockey stick shape for recent decades seems to just simply . . . disappear. In its place is a modern record of temperatures from locations all over the world that looks like anything but a rapidly warming, dangerous, and unprecedented hockey stick. Instead, the paleoclimate record reveals the opposite: large regions of the Earth were significantly warmer than they are now for most of the last several thousand years. Below is a compilation of 50 temperature graphs from peer-reviewed scientific papers. Some graphs indicate that (a) post-1940s temperatures actually declined slightly many regions of the world rather than rose rapidly — the opposite of what climate models had predicted. All the graphs show that (b) modern (post-1940s) temperatures aren’t any warmer than the decades and centuries and millennia prior to the steep increase in anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and in some locations even the Little Ice Age temperatures (1400s to 1800s AD) were warmer than modern. Finally, these 50 graphs clearly show that (c) the conceptualization of global-scale warming, or a globally synchronous rise in temperatures for the vast majority of the Earth’s land and oceanic locations in modern times . . . is not scientifically supportable. In many parts of the world, today’s temperatures are still among the coldest they’ve been in the last several thousand years according to these graphs. Sea levels, in turn, are at some of the lowest levels of the last 8,000 …
‘Consensus’ activist John Cook’s major falsehood in new paper exposed – Claims 95% + of scientists believe AGW ‘presents a global problem’
Advancing to the introduction of the “Alice In Wonderland” paper of Lewandowsky/Cook/Lloyd and already in the second sentence I bump into this (my emphasis):
… the consensus position that global warming is happening, is human caused, and presents a global problem is shared by more than 95 % of domain experts and more than 95 % of relevant articles in the peer-reviewed literature (Anderegg et al. 2010; Cook et al. 2013, 2016; Doran and Zimmerman 2009; Oreskes 2004; Shwed and Bearman 2010).
… presents a global problem …
… shared by more than 95 % of domain experts and more than 95 % of relevant articles in the peer-reviewed literature …
?!?!?!?
…
The issue that I have with the claim is this: it makes the unsupported claim that it is a problem and that it is global and that it is surveyed and found to be 95+% of the papers/experts standing behind this claim. While in reality none of the referenced papers investigated that aspect and at least one of the authors was an author in two of the referenced papers and should know that this claim was unsupported by the evidence. Yet, the claim is made in the second sentence of the introduction of a scientific paper, determining the playing field for what comes next in the paper.
I am trying to put is as politely as possible here, but I have a hard time imagining that this slipped in inadvertently and that the other authors, as well as the reviewers, just glossed over it.
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I have read the Anderegg 2010, Cook 2013, Doran & Zimmerman 2009 and Oreskes 2004 papers and at that time I found nothing of that kind. In none of those papers participants were asked whether they considered this warming to be a global problem.
Let’s look at what these papers actually investigated.
Oreskes 2004
(I wrote about this paper earlier).
Short version: Oreskes wanted to know how many papers disagreed with the position of the US National Academy of Science and the IPCC:
Human activities … are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents … that absorb or scatter radiant energy. … [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations
I have no problem with the first part. Human activities are putting CO2 in …