Free Republic

I have made an 82% correlation between the sunspot cycle and the Global Temperature Anomaly. The correlation is obtained through a non linear time series summation of NASA monthly sunspot data to the NOAA monthly Global Temperature Anomaly.

Excerpt: The Equator Principles are ten principles for lending by international banks that work to the detriment of poor nations. Under pressure from environmental groups, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and 76 other banks in 32 countries adopted the Principles. These principles demand that banks lend in an “environmentally and socially responsible manner,” which sounds good. But a top objective of the Equator Principles is “to promote the reduction of emissions that contribute to climate change.” Lending capital is restricted for coal mines, oil refineries, and other hydrocarbon projects desperately needed to build the economies of developing nations....

Theories that can be easily tested should have a high degree of consensus among researchers. Those involving chaotic and less testable questions – climate change or economic growth, physiology or financial markets – ought to have a greater level of scientific disagreement. Yet this is hardly the case for climate science. In the Paradox of Consensus, we illustrate that the greater the level of consensus for certain classes of hypotheses (those that are difficult to test) the less truth we should assign to them. ------------------------------------------------------- In our view, the fact that so many scientists agree so closely about the earth’s...

To begin with I was the only critical voice in New Zealand. Last week I attended a packed meeting of the Press Club in Wellington to hear Lord Monckton tear apart the IPCC and everything connected with it. The University scientists will not listen to him. But one of the organisers of the meeting was from the Music Department. But, surely, we are at the beginning of the end. The globe has stopped warming; even when measured by the botched-up biased system that they favour. The Kyoto Protocol is dead. Emissions by former members are in steady decline compared with...

There is so much good news about the collapse of the EU's carbon trading scam, that I'm not sure where to begin. But let's start with the fact that it has really, really annoyed Bryony Worthington - the activist from the hard-left anti-capitalist pressure group Friends of the Earth who wrote the most economically suicidal piece of legislation in British history, the Climate Change Act. ------------------------------------------------------- When Cameron came into power he took what some of us recognised straight away as a massive gamble with the UK economy: he decided to stake all on a revival driven by green jobs,...

The European Parliament just voted down a measure that would have attempted to revive its carbon market, likely dooming it to a slow and undignified death. This was a last-ditch effort to drive the EU’s carbon price back to a level that would incentivize green reforms. And it failed. --------------------------------------------------- The EU has been the global laboratory testing the green agenda to see how it works. Today’s story means that the guinea pig died; the most important piece of green intervention in world history has become an expensive and embarrassing flop. It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of this for...

More and more likely that double CO2 means <2°C: New study Yes, it warms the planet – just not as much as thought The results of a new approach to calculating the effect of CO2 – using empirical observations – suggest it has a lower impact on the climate than previously thought, and its effects are being over-estimated by the IPCC. Publishing in the American Meterological Society’s Journal of Climate, a new paper called An improved, objective Bayesian, approach for applying optimal fingerprint techniques to estimate climate sensitivity, Nicholas Lewis applies objective Bayesian techniques and uses more up-to-date observational data...

This report positively concludes that an alleged near unanimous scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), that “the science is settled”, is overstated. The report finds a robust, critical scientific discourse in climate related research, yet it highlights that a “consensus-building” approach to science might represent a politicised and unscientific belief in science – a belief in tension with the ethos of “normal science”. The report calls for a continuing questioning, critical, and undogmatic public debate over man-made global warming, and a clearer separation between science and policy. –Consensus and Controversy, SINTEF April 2013 By insisting on scientific consensus and...

From The Earth Institute at Columbia University comes another tree ring hockey stick. I have to laugh though at the choice of graphic for the press release, which shows a weather event (Euro heat wave) in 2003, rather than showing us the science, like maybe a reconstruction. I wonder what absurd assumptions or tricks (like Zombie proxies) Mr. McIntyre will find in this one that he hasn’t already – Anthony Fueled by industrial greenhouse gas emissions, Earth’s climate warmed more between 1971 and 2000 than during any other three-decade interval in the last 1,400 years, according to new regional temperature...

After a foray in a cult, one of the first steps on the path back to reality is the process of deprogramming. Could it be that this step is now being self-administered by the German mainstream media? It appears so. Now that the global mean temperature curve has drifted out of and below the IPCC’s projected range, panic is breaking out. The mother of German green weeklies, Die Zeit, appears to be taking measurements at the back of the house in preparation for the installation of a back door! Rahmstorf is back there with them, trying to talk them out...

There’s no money to run White House tours, but apparently there’s money to pull one of Al’s pet projects out of mothballs. Satellite shelved after 2000 election to now fly By SETH BORENSTEIN WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is proposing dusting off and finally launching an old environmental satellite championed by Al Gore but shelved a dozen years by his 2000 rival George W. Bush. Obama proposed Wednesday spending nearly $35 million in his 2014 budget to refurbish a satellite, nicknamed GoreSat by critics, that’s been sitting in storage after it was shelved in 2001, months after Bush took...

Some people wonder if Michael Mann is simply an activist masquerading as a scientist, this lends credence to that idea. I wonder if Dr. Mann has ever visited weather stations in China to understand what is going on there? I have. I had to laugh when I saw this quote from Mann in Seth Borenstein’s most recent AP article: “The study is important because it formalizes what many scientists have been sensing as a gut instinct: that the increase in extreme heat that we’ve witnessed in recent decades, and especially in recent years, really cannot be dismissed as the vagaries...

Following the wet summer in the UK last year, the Met Office provided the Environment Agency with a briefing document, giving an overview of the weather. This was discussed at the September Board Meeting of the Environment Agency, which Met Office officials attended. As far as I know, this document, which I obtained through FOI, has never entered the public domain. It is brutally honest in admitting how little the Met’s scientists understand about what affects our climate, and, in particular, what caused the unusual weather last year. This is in stark contrast to many of the hyped up claims,...

So, NASA’s in-house celebrity activist James Hansen says the following in explaining his departure from a lucrative perch — salary alone: $180k per year — one that proved extremely lucrative while there was a useful foil in the White House: “‘As a government employee, you can’t testify against the government,’ he told the Times.” Hogwash. Not that “Job 1″ for Hansen at NASA was attentiveness to ethics guidelines or anything, but the rules say no such thing. See 5 C.F.R. Part 6901.103 (c) and 5 C.F.R. 2635.805. Indeed, on top of that cool $1 million-plus in outside cash tossed Hansen’s...

I write in rebuttal to the March 31 letter by WWU geology faculty criticizing Dr. Don Easterbrook. I have a Ph.D in geophysics and have published research papers on climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. In 2006 I testified before the US Senate on global warming. Additionally, I am the author of a three-volume history of science. I have never met Don Easterbrook. I write not so much to defend him as to expose the ignorance exhibited in the letter authored by WWU geology faculty. Their attack on Dr. Easterbrook is the most egregious example of pompous buffoonery since...

David Rose’s October 2012 article in the MailOnline generated a multitude of responses around the blogosphere. The article was titled Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released… and here is the chart to prove it. There have been so many blog posts about the article it’s not practical to list them all. SkepticalScience—a blog run by advocates of human-induced global warming, not global warming skeptics—attempted to counter the Rose article a number of times. They included a YouTube video in their January 2013 effort 16 More Years of Global Warming. The following YouTube video On...

Freeman Dyson is a physicist who has been teaching at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton since Albert Einstein was there. When Einstein died in 1955, there was an opening for the title of “most brilliant physicist on the planet.” Dyson has filled it. So when the global-warming movement came along, a lot of people wondered why he didn’t come along with it. The reason he’s a skeptic is simple, the 89-year-old Dyson said when I phoned him. “I think any good scientist ought to be a skeptic,” Dyson said. ------------------------------------------------------ Dyson said his skepticism about those computer models...

The planet is no longer warming. The brief warming episode of the late 20th century completed its course in the mid 1990s, and is now extinct. These are now uncontroversial statements. They are based on hard data which has been available for many years on the websites of many official agencies. But somehow those agencies found ways to interpret the data differently, and to continually sidestep the elephant in the room. ------------------------------------------------------ Now the whole house of cards finally tumbled, with Rajendra Pachauri, official spokesman for the IPCC, confirming in Melbourne that global temperatures had plateaued for 17 years. ------------------------------------------------------...

A retired Western Washington University professor testified to a Republican-controlled state Senate committee Tuesday that climate change stopped in 1998 and that human-caused greenhouse gases are not responsible for fluctuations in the Earth's temperatures or melting polar ice caps. The startling testimony from emeritus professor Don Easterbrook is at odds with an apparent consensus among climate scientists and climate-science literature about human causes behind the the rise in global temperatures over the past century. His testimony came one day after the Legislature sent Gov. Jay Inslee a bill that sets up a legislative work group to study Washington's best strategy...

The new study, by Shaun Marcott, Jeremy Shakun, Peter Clark and Alan Mix, was based on an analysis of 73 long-term proxies, and offered a few interesting results: one familiar (and unremarkable), one odd but probably unimportant, and one new and stunning. The latter was an apparent discovery that 20th-century warming was a wild departure from anything seen in over 11,000 years. News of this finding flew around the world and the authors suddenly became the latest in a long line of celebrity climate scientists. The trouble is, as they quietly admitted over the weekend, their new and stunning claim...