Monday, June 11, 2018

Disaster Has Arrived for Climate Alarmists



-RW  


7 comments:

  1. Earlier this year it was reported that both Arctic and Antarctic sea ice area or extent were the lowest or second lowest on record.

    What does realclimatescience.com mean by “sea ice volume” and how is it determined? The linked article at realclimatescience.com has images saying both volume and thickness.

    If both of these statistics are true then the ice has increased in thickness so much that even with the reduction in area there is more overall ice.

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    1. There is also age of ice as well as thickness, extent, volume, air temperature, etc. There's more old ice as well. What we get in the mainstream news is whatever variable that supports warming at a particular moment. The next moment that same variable may be different. Then the media moves on to a different one. Tony Heller is often more complete showing more variables but it requires frequent reading of his blog. A particular single post will usually focus on those variables that the politically funded experts are not discussing currently or how they are lying. There's a bit of an assumption that the reader is keeping up with the experts' reports and such.

      Tony last covered arctic ice extent on may 18th: https://realclimatescience.com/2018/05/no-change-in-arctic-sea-ice-extent-for-four-days/
      If you click on the cite link it will take you today's plot. Nothing remarkably different from the last few years. There might have been a lowest for a particular day of the year since 1979 in there somewhere.





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    2. Most importantly humans are a very small part of changes in climate. Specifically about sea ice volume: all scientists, “deniers” or not, seems to agree that sea ice volume has declined and is currently lower than the mean level. Even based on the DMI graph that realclimatescience.com presents 2018 is the first year in at least five years we have seen an increase. This is no “disaster for climate alarmists.”

      What will always cause disasters is weather. That is why using facts, using data will not stop the statists and control freaks. We will always have climate changes, too hot, too cold, too extreme. The best we can do with facts and data is slow the statists down. This latest data is interesting but until it becomes a trend is pretty much a nothing burger.

      For over ten years now about 50% of the US believe in anthropogenic global warming. One year of sea ice increase is not going to change that.

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    3. What's the mean level?
      The warmists generally start with 1979 which is a known high point and use a baseline of some set of years between then and 2000.

      Going back to the beginning of space based records however doesn't have the same effect. Which is why we don't see it in mainstream discourse.

      What people believe and what is most popular is quite irrelevant to reality. Conditions could return to those of 1979 and they will still believe what suits their political agenda and desire to control their neighbors.

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    4. I agree 100%.

      When do you start the clock? Current consensus is that Earth has been in an interglacial period for 12,000 years and that there have been a number of ice ages prior to the last one. Very recently we have had minimums and maximums, a medieval warming period and a little ice age.

      Then we get into the accuracy of the data and how we compare current measurements to what we think we know about in the past. The fact is that what drives climate is extremely complex and humans do not know enough to predict short term local weather let alone long term global climate. IMO that is our best augment against those that want to use climate to control us.

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  2. Hmmmm lets see. Some extended volcanic activity of late and in a pretty quiescent solar minimum? I would imagine things are getting interesting from here.

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  3. Maybe not. It would probably require a longer trend line. Some jitter in natural signals is probably to be expected.

    James Lovelock - the original "Gaia theorist", the independent self funded scientist who first detected the ozone hole - but now a "climate skeptic" - has argued that all you need to prove global warming is sea level rise. Everything else is superfluous. No models needed. Historically ice or the absence of ice in the Arctic has been used as evidence for both global warming and global cooling. For example, in the 1970s it was argued that ice ages corresponded with an ice free Arctic. This claim was subsequently disproven by marine paleontology but it shows how everyone is skating on thin ice in this area.

    Personally I'm an agnostic on climate science. It's a discipline more reliable than para-psychology but less reliable than physics. That of course doesn't help much.

    I think a more fruitful critique is to examine the political economy of claimed policy solutions to climate change. These are often based on economic models that are plainly stacked. They advocate what is essentially "industrial policy" (i.e. picking winners) to build a 'clean' energy infrastructure whilst ignoring the massive punitive restrictions placed on nuclear power. Above that they rely on make-believe markets -"cap and trade" - that smell awfully cronyistic. Or 'carbon taxes'. So called. Technical name is pigou taxes. We actually have had carbon taxes for decades - petroleum excise taxes. Governments globally relied on excise taxes (including petrol excise) because of their price inelasticity. They are considered a good tax target because demand does not decline seriously when the tax goes up. Decades of revenue raising experience collides with pigou tax theory here. And according to Prof Pigou to work pigou taxes are supposed to be revenue neutral. That means ramping general sales taxes down across the board as fuel excise taxes go up. Governments forget that bit. No wonder this policy set doesn't work. I'm no expert in this field but one of the largest significant (if only relative) declines in CO2 production has come from North America's shift to fracked natural gas. This shift has probably been larger than anything the climate change economic (wannabe) planners has so far delivered.

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