Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The Supreme Court on Thursday issued a ruling narrowing the federal government’s authority to regulate bodies of water and effectively upending a Biden administration policy that recently went into effect.
The Supreme Court on Thursday issued a ruling narrowing the federal government’s authority to regulate bodies of water and effectively upending a Biden administration policy that recently went into effect.
The high court’s decision, which was delivered by Justice Samuel Alito, rejected the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) broad definition of Waters of the United States (WOTUS). [emphasis, links added]
The case centered on Michael and Chantell Sackett, two Idaho residents whom theEPA prohibited from building a home near a wetland years ago, citing the Clean Water Act (CWA) of 1972.
“The EPA ordered the Sacketts to restore the site, threatening penalties of over $40,000 per day,” Alito’s majority opinion stated.
“The EPA classified the wetlands on the Sacketts’ lot as ‘waters of the United States’ because they were near a ditch that fed into a creek, which fed into Priest Lake, a navigable, intrastate lake. The Sacketts sued, alleging that their property was not ‘waters of the United States.’”
The ruling ultimately held that the federal government’s WOTUS definition must be restricted to a water source with a “continuous surface connection” to major bodies of water.
While the decision was unanimous on the merits, the court split 5-4 on determining how the federal government should go about defining water sources.
“Understanding the CWA to apply to wetlands that are distinguishable from otherwise covered ‘waters of the United States’ would substantially broaden [existing statute] to define ‘navigable waters’ as ‘waters of the United States and adjacent wetlands,’” Alito wrote.
The ruling, which was cheered by Republican lawmakers and groups representing landowners, comes months after the EPA finalized and implemented a new WOTUS regulation.
On Dec. 30, the final working day of 2022, the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers quietly announced that they had approved the WOTUS regulation and that it would be implemented in March.
After announcing it, EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the rule “safeguards our nation’s waters.”
The rule opened the door for the federal government to regulate wetlands, lakes, ponds, streams, and “relatively permanent” waterways, largely mimicking a pre-2015 environmental rule set during the Obama administration that implemented the changes in an effort to curb water pollution.
The regulation was the broadest interpretation to date of which water sources require protection under the CWA.
Industry groups, Republican lawmakers in Congress, and multiple states blasted the regulation as an example of federal overreach and demanded that it be rescinded.
In April, a federal judge granted a request from 24 states and several trade groups to pause the implementation of the regulation. The House and Senate both approved a regulation rejecting the regulation.
“Today, the Supreme Court sent a loud and clear warning shot to the Biden administration about its attempts to overregulate the lives of millions of Americans,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., the ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
“By rejecting the ‘significant nexus’ test, the Court protected America’s farmers, ranchers, builders, and landowners from overreach under the Clean Water Act, and ruled President Biden’s recent WOTUS rule goes too far,” Capito added.
“I was proud to both support the petitioners on this case last year and lead a successful effort this year in Congress to overturn the Biden WOTUS rule and am thrilled with the Court’s decision today, which is a major win for individual freedom.”
This post evaluates the relationship of global CO2 with regional temperature trends during the Holocene interglacial period. Ice core records show that CO2 is strongly coupled with local Antarctic temperature and slightly lags temperature over the past 800,000 years (Luthi, 2008). Whereas the emphasis has been on CO2 and temperature lags/leads, this study focuses on Holocene millennium trends in different latitude-bounded regions.
The Contrarian Antarctic
The Holocene is fortunate to have hundreds of proxy records analyzed by Marcott, 2013, and more recently Kaufman, 2020, to establish regional and global temperature trends. The Holocene interglacial occurs approximately during the past 11,000 years. In general, global temperature trends from proxy data show a Holocene Climatic Optimum (HCO) around 6000 to 8000 years ago and a subsequent cooling trend, the Neoglacial period, culminating in the Little Ice Age (LIA). The global mean temperature is comprised of regional trends that tend to have a concave down appearance during the Holocene shown in Figure 1a.
The exception is the Antarctic shown in red which has a concave up shape. The Antarctic reached an early Holocene Climatic Optimum between 9000 to 11000 years ago. While global and most regional temperatures were warming, Antarctic cooled to a minimum around 8000 years ago. While global and other regions show progressive cooling during the Neoglacial, the Antarctic was flat and erratic. This contrary Antarctic temperature behavior during the Holocene has also been noted by Andy May here.
Figure 1: a) Regional temperature anomalies (defined by latitude) from proxy data over the Holocene after Kaufman, 2020a. Red line is Antarctic. Black solid line is the global median. b) Ice core proxy data from Vinther Greenland temperature anomalies in green and Dome C Antarctic in red. Global temperature means from Kaufman and Marcott are included. CO2 shown as dark grey dots from Bereiter are included on both graphs. Left axis is temperature anomaly (deg C) and right axis is CO2 (ppm).
Greenland and Antarctic ice core temperature anomalies derived from deuterium and/or oxygen isotopes and global proxy temperature means are shown in Figure 1b. Ice cores have high resolution over long periods of time making them a key proxy dataset. These data show similar trends to the regional compilation. However, temperature ranges tend to be larger at individual proxy sites. Smoothing of paleoclimate proxy data occurs due to averaging of multiple data types together which removes local temperature variability (Kaufman, 2023).
It’s not surprising that Antarctic temperature trends behave differently due to its unique environment. Antarctica is a continent surrounded by the Southern Ocean with a mean annual temperature of the interior between -50 to -60 deg C. Most of Antarctica is covered by a permanent ice sheet averaging 2 km in thickness. Sparse proxy data from Antarctica is predominantly from ice cores and a few marine sediments. These data comprise temperature trends in the 90oS-60oS latitude region which represent less than 10% of Earth’s surface area.
CO2 is Uniquely Synchronous with Antarctic Temperatures
CO2 gas trapped in ice bubbles show synchronous trends with local Antarctic temperature anomalies during glacial and interglacial periods over the past 800,000 years. CO2 ranges from lows of 180 ppm during glacial periods to highs of near 300 ppm during interglacial periods. Figure 2a shows the linear regression of CO2 and temperature from the EPICA Dome C ice core over the past 60,000 years that includes the Holocene interglacial and last glacial maximum. The squared regression (R2) of 0.9 is very impressive. One interesting curiosity is the Holocene interglacial period where the slope tends to flatten out and R2 decreases substantially to 0.3.
Despite the lower correlation factor for the Holocene interglacial, Figure 1a above shows that CO2 displays concave up trends like Antarctic temperature trends. CO2 reaches an early Holocene high near 275 ppm around 11,000 years ago after deglaciation. CO2 then slowly decreases by 10-15 ppm to a Holocene minimum of 260 ppm about 8000 years ago. And then, CO2 gradually increases up to 290 ppm during the Neoglacial cooling period. To note, these CO2 values are muted or smoothed due to gas trapping processes in ice and do not reflect instrumental values (Joos, 2008).
Figure 2. a) Ice core EPICA Dome C correlation of temperature anomalies with CO2 over the past 60,000 years in grey. The Holocene interglacial period is highlighted in red. b) Correlation of temperature anomalies from Antarctic proxy data 90oS-60oS with CO2. c) Correlation of temperature anomalies from Arctic 60oN-90oN and NH 30oN-60oN proxy data with CO2. d) Correlation of temperature anomalies from tropical proxy data 30oS-30oN with CO2. CO2 data from Bereiter, 2014. High resolution proxy data from Kaufman, 2020b.
Correlation plots of Holocene CO2 versus temperature anomalies from high resolution regional proxy temperatures are shown in Figures 2b-d. They are much different than the 60,000-year Antarctic CO2 relationship in Figure 2a. The Arctic and the Northern Hemisphere regions (2c) show an inverse relationship with CO2, especially during the Neoglacial period. The tropical region (2d) shows large scatter with no statistically valid trend detected. The Southern Hemisphere, not shown, also has a low correlation with CO2. No other multi-proxy region or latitude temperature trends show a strong positive correlation with CO2 during the Holocene like the Antarctic does.
Authors have noted that CO2 has a different trend compared to global and Northern Hemisphere temperature trends. Vinos, 2022, concludes that CO2 runs opposite to global temperature trends for most of the Holocene. This CO2 asynchronous behavior and/or lack of correlation to temperature seems to be true for most regions, roughly 90% of the Earth’s surface area.
Climate Models Dominated by CO2 Forcing
Climate models fail to match global Holocene proxy temperatures known as the Holocene temperature conundrum (Liu, 2014). Models basically show a gradual increase in temperatures throughout the entire Holocene as shown in Figure 3a. While temperature proxy data shows a Holocene Climatic Optimum of 0.5 deg C around 6000-8000 years ago that climate models simply do not reproduce.
Figure 3. a) Global proxy median temperature anomalies from Kaufman compared to modeled annual ensemble mean (3 models) from Liu and a model that incorporates proxy data from Osman. CO2 is shown as green dots from Bereiter. b) CO2 correlated with the global proxy median from Kaufman, and c) CO2 correlated with modeled annual ensemble mean from Liu.
Holocene global proxy temperature trends show an inverse correlation with CO2 as plotted in Figure 3b. There are two distinct inverse trends separated by the HCO. During the Neoglacial period, proxy temperatures and CO2 show a strong negative correlation with an R2 of 0.8. Basically, as CO2 increases then global temperatures become cooler.
Temperatures from model simulations are typically controlled by changes in greenhouse gases, insolation, ice sheets, and freshwater fluxes, to name a few. Modeled temperature profiles parallel the global CO2 trend with a strong R2 of 0.7 confirming CO2 is a major model control knob. Additionally, modeled Holocene temperatures tend to resemble the contrarian Antarctic temperature trends (compare Figures 1a and 3a).
Scientists have begun to investigate the effect and possible dominance of forcings other than CO2. Zhang, 2022, modeled the effect of seasonal insolation influence and found better matches to proxy data when combining insolation with ice sheet forcing, although still not perfect. Thompson, 2022, showed that more vegetation influence in the Northern Hemisphere helps models simulate a Holocene Climatic Optimum evident in proxy data. The close relationship between CO2 and Antarctic temperature suggests that millennial variations are strongly influenced by Southern Ocean processes. Only when past forcings and the timing of their dominance are more accurately incorporated into climate simulations will models be able to predict future climate change.
Observations
Climate change is routinely claimed to be largely controlled by greenhouse gases, especially CO2. This was concluded, in part, by the strong relationship between CO2 from Antarctic ice core bubbles and local Antarctic temperature trends. While CO2 mimics Antarctic temperatures very well, ninety percent of Earth’s surface temperature trends do not demonstrate a positive correlation to CO2 during the Holocene. Arctic and Northern Hemisphere temperatures become cooler during increasing CO2 levels. Tropical proxy temperatures don’t seem to be influenced by CO2.
Model simulated temperatures which are strongly influenced by CO2 do not accurately history match Holocene global proxy temperatures and tend to largely reflect Antarctic trends. The fact that CO2 correlates well to Holocene temperatures for only the Antarctic, or <10% of our planet’s surface, yet CO2 is considered as the dominant influence on climate change is a scientific dilemma.
The BBC, Britain’s public broadcaster, announced the launch of a new “disinformation” unit in its newsroom to combat claimed conspiracy theories and fake news.
The BBC, Britain’s public broadcaster, announced the launch of a new “disinformation” unit in its newsroom to combat claimed conspiracy theories and fake news.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which is funded by a statutory fee on individuals who watch live television under penalty of fine or imprisonment, stated that its news division will include a new squad branded “BBC Verify” to refute misinformation.
Deborah Turness, the CEO of BBC News, stated that BBC Verify will be composed of approximately 60 journalists “who will form a highly specialised operation with a range of forensic investigative skills and open source intelligence” and will be deployed to provide fact-checking, video verification, counter-disinformation, and “crucially – explaining complex stories in the pursuit of truth.”
Marianna Spring, the BBC’s Disinformation Correspondent, stated that “mistruths can cause really serious harm to society.” Spring, who will host the BBC podcast ‘Marianna in Conspiracyland,’ claimed she has set up some “undercover accounts” on social media to follow “polarisation online,” such as what is recommended to users.
According to the millennial journalist, she is currently studying “the UK’s conspiracy theory movement,” which she claims has “evolved and intensified” since the Chinese coronavirus outbreak. Spring identified “alternative media” as a source of so-called conspiracy theories.
“I’m looking at the way alternative media is funded, I’m looking at its impact on local communities, I’m looking at its connections with far-right figures and also its foreign links,” she said.
“Could January 6th or the German coup attempt we saw there ever happen in the UK?” Spring questioned.
The BBC, which has been restructuring to cut costs amid government threats to end the contentious licence fee from the public, may be attempting to demonstrate its value to politicians in Westminster, who have repeatedly expressed a desire to monitor the spread of ‘disinformation’ on the internet.
A separate study that same year indicated that only 44% of Britons trusted BBC journalists to be truthful in their reporting, compared to 48% who did not trust its news division to be accurate.
Recently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been issuing a raft of “Incidental Harassment Authorizations” (IHA) to offshore wind developers. The IHAs allow the developers to “harass” marine mammals – including critically endangered Right Whales – as long as the activity is “incidental” to some form of offshore wind development approved by the authorities.
Recently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been issuing a raft of “Incidental Harassment Authorizations” (IHA) to offshore wind developers. The IHAs allow the developers to “harass” marine mammals – including critically endangered Right Whales – as long as the activity is “incidental” to some form of offshore wind development approved by the authorities.
When the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) was passed by Congress the lawmakers had in mind ‘incidental’ activities such as marine research work. Wind developers, however, have been applying for these permits as part of their “preconstruction” work – primarily sonar mapping of the ocean floor to plot the placement of connector cables and wind towers. Over the last two years, 16 of these IHA’s were approved by NOAA for developers of wind generation projects up and down the East Coast. Each of them allowed “incidental” activity only for a period of one year.
Just as critics of these IHAs feared, after these permits were authorized and preconstruction activity began, dozens of dead whales and dolphins started washing up on beaches from New York to Virginia. This prompted NOAA to issue a “Notice of Unusual Mortality Event”, which didn’t suspend the sonar mapping but did indicate that NOAA finally recognized, in the famous words of Apollo 11, “Houston, we have a problem”.
Now comes the granddaddy IHA application of them all: A request by Dominion Energy for an IHA lasting five years. Why? Because it is seeking permission to harass marine mammals in conjunction with its effort to build a massive, 176 turbine, offshore wind project located 27 miles off the coast of Tidewater Virginia. If approved, it would be the largest offshore wind project in the world.
To obtain this IHA, Dominion had to “open the kimono” about its project. That is, for the first time it had to describe exactly what this so-called incidental activity might actually involve.
And it is an eye-opener.
A total of 107 different ships, some as large as 538′, would ply the waters of Virginia for five years, taking thousands of trips to and from the project and the port of Hampton Roads, thus increasing substantially the probability of ship strike fatalities, the leading cause of anthropogenic marine mammal deaths.
Whales and dolphins beware: The sonar mapping would continue non-stop, often conducted “daily”. The wind tower construction and cable dredging would take place for 6 months out of the year. In toto, it amounts to a gargantuan industrialization of the hitherto open ocean waters – a monster factory (not a “farm”) larger than Yellowstone Park that would stand in the salty, corrosive waters of the Atlantic for 20 to 30 years. Then, at the end of its useful life, it will have to be torn down – “decommissioned” – with most of the remains dumped in landfills, because the bulk of the hardware cannot be recycled.
This proposed project raises an important question: What will happen to the marine environment after this factory is installed? True environmentalists especially want to know what will happen to endangered species, such as the Right Whale, only about 350 of which still exist and whose migration path lies directly within the boundaries of the project.
NOAA states on at least three separate occasions in the IHA that “no serious injury or mortality of whales is anticipated or proposed from authorization” of the project. This is a strange way to describe their conclusion of “no impact”. Not that “there will be no human caused mortality”, nor that “there will be negligible human caused mortality”. Rather, just that human caused mortality is “notexpected”.
Upon further examination it appears Dominion may have opened its kimono a little too far.
Every endangered species on the Federal endangered species list is given a designation by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS – a subsidiary of NOAA) called the Potential Biological Removal rate (PBR). The PBR is defined by the MMPA as “the maximum number of individuals, not including natural mortality, that may be removed from a marine mammal stock while allowing that stock to reach its optimum sustainable population”.
NMFS has declared the PBR for the Right Whale to be 0.7. This means, in NOAA’s own words, that “the population cannot sustain on average over the course of a year the death or serious injury of a single individual due to human causes”.
That’s right. This massive industrialization of the Right Whale environment can not cause even one Right Whale death per year over a period of 5 years.
And here comes the stunner. Dominion recognizes the determination by NMFS that the annual human caused mortality rate for the Right Whale caused by the project iseight point one. This means that in NOAA’s own opinion there will be eight human caused dead Right Whales caused by the project every year, even though the allowable amount is zero.
The courts have found this kind of circumstance to be prima facie evidence that the regulation is “arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion”. That is, there is a fatal, internal inconsistency in this regulation which predicts one outcome (8 human caused deaths) while simultaneously mandating an outcome that is completely contrary (zero human caused deaths).
Dominion tries to save this obviously illegal result by adding language which states that the eight point one human-caused mortalities may be “from all sources combined” ( e.g. commercial fisheries, ship strikes, etc). But no amount of tortured rationale can save NOAA from its own interpretation that the project will result in human caused deaths of the Right Whale. (e.g., whale deaths caused by commercial fishing, if any, have nothing to do with the Dominion project.)
Oops. Dominion just let the cat out of the bag, and the evidence is right there in their IHA application. This project should be and will be struck down by the courts, not only because of the admitted Right Whale deaths, but also because of a host of other procedural and substantive errors committed by NOAA and BOEM while they attempt to bulldoze this project and all the other offshore wind developments through the regulatory system.
It will be good riddance. Whale-killing factories were outlawed a long time ago. This one should be too.
Johnson has spent the last four decades working in the public and private sectors in Virginia, primarily in the fields of project finance and maritime transportation.
He began his career in public service as Chairman of the Board of the Virginia Port Authority.
He was appointed by President George W. Bush, and confirmed by the Senate, as a member of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and most recently, as Administrator of the St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation.
In that capacity, he became knowledgeable in the field of climate and its impact on the Great Lakes.
He currently serves on CFACT’s Board of Advisors. Johnson holds a B.A. degree from Yale University, and a J.D. from the University of Virginia.
The climate left is fond of showing ginned-up pictures of what sea-level rise would look like in the future. We are barraged with model projections turned into images of flooded cities on a regular basis.
For example, in one of the most egregious cover articles ever, National Geographic used the Statue of Liberty to illustrate what they think future sea level rise would look like.
Of course, I had to take down their idiotic claims with some simple math in this post.
This created a discontinuity in the long temperatures series that begin around 1880, and that are used by the IPCC to measure climate variability and change. But neither the IPCC, nor NASA, nor the UK Met Office have documented the effect of this change.
It has only taken ten years, that is how long a few of us have been detailing major problems with how the Australian Bureau of Meteorology measures daily temperatures. Now, I’m informed, the Bureau are ditching the current system and looking to adopt an overseas model that it claims will be more reliable.
There will be no media release.
There was no media release when the Bureau ditched its rainfall forecasting system (POAMA) once described as state of the art, and quietly adopted ACCESS-S1 based on the UK Met Office GloSea5-GC2. (As though the British are any better at accurate rainfall and snowfall forecasts.)
Until yesterday the Bureau has claimed one-second spot temperature readings from its custom-designed resistance probes, did not need to be numerically averaged; something overseas bureaus routinely do in an attempt to achieve consistency with measurements from the more inert traditional mercury thermometers.
Consistency across long temperature series is, of course, critical to accurately assessing climate variability and change.
The Australian Bureau has long claimed numerical averaging is not necessary because its ‘thick’ probe design exactly mimicked a mercury thermometer.
Then this design was phased out and replaced with the ‘slimline’. Still no inter-comparison studies.
I welcome the switch to ‘the overseas model’ if this means that the Bureau will begin numerical averaging of spot readings from its resistance probes in accordance with World Meteorological Organisation recommendations.
But the problem of reliable temperature measurements doesn’t begin or end with numerical averaging.
The Bureau, and the Met Office in the UK, have been tinkering with how they measure temperatures since the transition from mercury thermometers to resistance probes began in the 1990s. Not only with how they average – or not, but with probe design, and also with power supply.
It is important to understand that resistance probes hooked-up to data-loggers measure temperature as a change in electrical resistance across a piece of platinum. And, this is the important bit, the voltage delivered to the probe is critical for accurate temperature measurement. Not just in Australia, but around the world. And there are no standards.
When using a traditional mercury thermometer, temperature is read from a scale along a glass tube that shows changes in the thermal expansion of that liquid, which happens to be mercury. The mercury thermometer was once the world standard.
The new, automated, and potentially more precise method for measuring temperatures via platinum resistance, is reliable in controlled environments; satellites that are measuring temperatures at different depths within the atmosphere use these resistance probes. But it gets much more complicated when trying to measure temperatures on Earth, and especially at busy places like airports, which have become a primary site for the automated electronic weather systems using platinum resistance probes from which global average temperatures are now derived.
At airports, the electrical system relied upon to measure temperatures very precisely, must be insulated from other electrical systems including radar and even chatter between a pilot wanting to land his jumbo and the control tower.
The electronics now used to measure climate change, are not only susceptible to electrical interference at these airports, but also changes in voltage that can be caused by something as simple as turning on and off runway lights – at dusk and dawn.
To know how reliable, the new system is, we need the parallel data not just for Australia, but for overseas airports including Heathrow and Cochin – in India, the world’s first airport fully powered by solar energy.
To know that warming globally has not, at least in part, been caused by a move to resistance probes, we need to see the inter-comparison data showing the equivalent temperature measurements from mercury thermometers at the same place and on the same day.
I’m reliably informed by a past Bureau employee that upgrading power supplies in 2012 caused a 0.3-to-0.5-degree Celsius increase across about 30 percent of the Australian network. (That would get us some way to the 1.5 degree Celsius tipping point, even if we closed down every coal-fired power station.)
Perth-based researcher Chris Gillham documented this uptick in Australian temperatures in correspondence to me last October, and as an abrupt change in the difference between the Bureau’s monthly mean temperature as reported from ACORN-SAT and the satellite data for Australian as measured by the University of Alabama Huntsville.
‘Australia UAH’ is the Australian component of the University of Alabama satellite monitoring. ACORN 2.1 is the official homogenised/remodelled Australian temperature series that the bureau uses for reporting climate change. More information on the extent to which electronic temperature measuring systems can cause discontinues in temperature series can be found in an important report by Chris Gillham entitled ‘Have automatic weather stations corrupted Australia’s temperature record’.
The step-up in warming in the official data for the entire Australian continent is also noted in peer-review publications by climate scientists including Sophie Lewis and David Karoly. I have written to Sophie Lewis about the problems in relying on Bureau data. But instead of attributing the change to equipment and voltage, Lewis, Karoly and other climate scientists ascribe it to anthropogenic greenhouse warming.
Because university climate scientists ignore my correspondence, and rely entire on advice from the Bureau’s current management, they could not know otherwise. The Bureau’s current management refuse to report this change documented by its technicians and communicated to me unofficially by retired former managers.
A relevant question: why did the Bureau’s Chief Executive Andrew Johnson not report the 0.3-to-0.5-degree Celsius increase across about 30 percent of the Australian network (caused entirely by a change to the power supply, not air temperatures) in its 2013-14 Bureau of Meteorology Annual Report to Federal Parliament?
In that same report Johnson does comment on the infrastructure upgrades that caused the artificial warming in the official temperature data.
Meanwhile, the Bureau’s management, including Johnson, continues to lament the need for all Australians to work towards keeping temperatures below a 1.5 degrees Celsius tipping point. Just today we are told to expect another hike in the price of electricity because of the need to transition to renewables including solar.
This headline is from today’s Courier Mail. Other newspapers report: The offers, which cover New South Wales, South Australia and south-east Queensland, indicate prices will rise between 19.6% and 24.9% for residents, similar to the draft levels announced in March. Victoria also announced a 25% rise to its default offer.
The Bureau continues to support a transition to renewable energy, without explaining the potential effect, even on the reliability of its temperature measurements. As the Bureau has not explained the effect of the transition to resistance probes more generally. (I’ve characterised the Ayers and Warne papers as fake in a 6-part jokers series, republished by WattsUpWithThat.)
An overseas colleague has explained how something as simple as applying a 100Hz frequency to a power circuit to extend the life of a battery – necessary with solar systems – can cause maximum temperatures to drift up on sunny days. To be clear, as the voltage increased the recorded temperature increased additional to any actual change in air temperature!
Go to the NASA page about temperature measuring and you will see a picture of someone atop a mountain in Montana and a solar panel. That solar panel will be supplying to a battery that will not only provide the voltage used to measure electrical resistance across the platinum wire, but also for the periodic upload of that same temperature data to a satellite.
Weather stations are set up throughout Glacier National Park in Montana to monitor and collect weather data. These stations must be visited periodically for maintenance and to add or remove new research devices. Credit: GlacierNPS, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Since the transition to the resistance probes that use voltage to measure temperature, problems at remote locations from mountains to lighthouses have included aging batteries – solar powered of course – but unable to provide sufficient current at critical times.
I’ve been shown data from such a remote location, were minimum temperatures reliably drop 2 degrees Celsius on the hour, at the same time every hour through the night, as the battery is drained with each satellite upload of temperature data.
This is the same temperature data that is being used in Australia, and around the world, to justify extreme economic and social intervention in the name of stopping climate change.
IN SUMMARY
In the 1990s, not just in Australia, but around the world, there was a fundamental change in the equipment and methods used to measure temperatures.
This created a discontinuity in the long temperatures series that begin around 1880, and that are used by the IPCC to measure climate variability and change.
But neither the IPCC, nor NASA, nor the UK Met Office have documented the effect of this change.
I’ve been asking the Australian Bureau, that provides data into the global databases, how they know that temperature measurements from the resistance probes at places like Cape Otway lighthouse are consistent with readings from mercury thermometers. (I’ve written extensively about how temperatures are measured at this lighthouse, including as part 3 of my 8-part series about hyping daily maximum temperatures.)
Now I ask, how can the bureau know that NASA and the UK Met Office are reliably measuring temperatures if they have not seen the US and UK parallel temperature datasets?
The parallel data are the recordings from the mercury thermometers measuring at the same location and the same place as the resistance probes. This data will give some indication of the extent of the many discontinuities created in the record by the change over to probes. I have estimated that the bureau is holding parallel data for approximately 38 Australian locations with on average 15 years of data.
When John Abbot first lodged a Freedom of Information request for some of this data for Brisbane Airport back in 2019, he was told that the parallel data did not exist.
Abbot took the issue to the Australian Information Commissioner, who sided with the bureau falsely confirming that it did not exist.
It was only after an appearance at the Administrative Appeal Tribunal in Brisbane on 3rd February, where I attended as an expert witness, and the drawn-out mediation process that followed, that three years of Brisbane Airport parallel data was finally made available.
As Graham Lloyd explained on the front page of the Weekend Australia thereafter, my analysis of this data shows that the resistance probes at Brisbane Airport measure temperatures that are quite different from the mercury thermometer most of the time. The Bureau has been neither able to confirm, nor deny, the statistical significance of the difference. But it doesn’t dispute the actual numbers.
John Abbot recently lodged another FOI for more parallel data for Brisbane Airport. This time around the bureau has acknowledged the existence of the data and even that some of the ‘field books’ have already been scanned, and so are available in an electronic form. But the bureau claims it will only be able to release another three years of data for this one site (Brisbane Airport), again this time – never mind the 15 years of parallel data that exists for Brisbane Airport and another 37 locations that vary geographically and electrically. We need this comparative data, including to assess the reliability of the current global warming forecasts.
I’ve been reliably informed, the Bureau is intent on drawing out provision of this parallel data to Abbot and me for Australia, while changing the ‘model’ it is using to measure temperatures as though the overseas systems are reliable.
So, I ask, again, where are these numbers for overseas locations, including the parallel data for the overseas mountains and airports – not to mention lighthouses?
It is critical for everyone to be able to see this data, especially if the Australian bureau is to adopt an overseas model for temperature measuring on the basis it must be more reliable.
*****
The feature image shows me at the Goulburn Airport weather station in late July 2017. This weather stations was shown to have had a limit set on how cold temperatures could be recorded for a period of 20 years.
Whilst CfD strike prices for offshore wind were temporarily lower than wholesale market prices for a short time last year, they are once again considerably higher.
So far this month, the average strike price is £179.74/MWh, compare to a market price of £85.98/MWh. This equates to a full month subsidy of around £100 million.
According to the OFGEM chart above, the market price assumed for the cap is about £140/MWh – the exact figure is not provided as it is deemed proprietary! However their calculations are based on the 3-month historical average, and current wholesale prices have fallen since. According to Catalyst Energy, for instance, day-ahead power prices fell to £100/MWh at the end of April, and seem to have fallen further since.
Although year-ahead prices are in the order of £130/MWh, it would seem that the price cap will be cut again come August.
All of this means, of course, that offshore wind will remain much more expensive than gas power, which usually sets the market price.
Heat Pumps
The fall in both gas and power prices has also affected the relative running costs of heat pumps v gas boilers, in favour of the latter.
Based on a typical domestic gas consumption of 15000 KWh a year, a gas boiler would cost £1200 to run, Assuming boiler efficiency of 85% and heat pump coefficient of performance (COP) of 3.0, itself an optimistic assumption, the heat pump would cost £1275 to run, even before considering the extra cost of providing hot water.
Again I am not saying I have the answer. But to ignore what should be something that raises questions and shouting down people that bring it up is no way to pursue the true answer. I may not have that answer but I darn sure have some questions
Green meadow horizon and blue sky tranquil landscape scene
We are experiencing oceanic warming which is influencing weather and temperature patterns. In the case of the interaction with the tropics and the global weather patterns, truth be told, looking at major precip and SLP patterns and their changes in the last 60 years, it is OPPOSITE of how it’s portrayed.
We all know that lower pressure is inherently more unstable, right?
We all know and love big high pressures to the north and lower pressures to the south right? Dr. Joel Myers, the founder of ACCU Weather, had a rule. Lows follow highs. Predict the High you can predict storms.
The biggest storms are when a stubborn high is moving slower than a storm advancing right at it.
It’s common sense.
Now I want you to look at the GLOBAL SLP of the tropical seasons of the 1950s. I have the same scaling for the last 10 years below it:
Look at the tropical Atlantic and Asia. That’s a lot of low pressure. High pressure is banked up in the eastern US forcing the convergence to the south in the means.
Now look at the last 10 years:
SLP pressures are running higher. That implies less, not more instability in the entire pattern.
And the precip patterns show this in no uncertain terms.
The areas of wet and dry are more vivid in the 1950s ( again same scaling):
last 10 years:
Look at the flips that have occurred in the Southern Atlantic Basin
Heaviest precip is now around land masses in Africa and Se Asia and Indonesia.
What is most remarkable is both were periods of the warm AMO yet the Atlantic feedback is much different. This goes directly to my distortion point that says you can’t use the same ideas of cold and warm AMO and PDO and weight them equally. It’s intuitively obvious something is going on there that is pulling the focus away from the tropical oceans.
And we observe it in the lack of long-tracked storms hitting the US MAINLAND near their peak.
Most of the storms that are major and hit the US become hurricanes 2 days away not 5 or more.
What does this imply? That the total energy of the storm is less despite the ACE and Saffir Simpson scale indicating otherwise Those metrics need to be expanded.
Why? Because a longer-tracked storm covers more area so there is a larger diameter of strong winds even if the wind at the center is the same as the storm matures. So when someone tries to say things are getting worse, in a true sense of bundled energy and redistribution that is plainly not the case. And the means show that.
It’s the opposite.
The drier areas are not drier and the wetter areas are not wetter.
Rising pressures imply more, not less stability. Hence the reason many of the true weather geeks that have watched this for over a half-century more than anything else every day like it was eating and breathing, are bored a lot of the time.
Can you imagine if we had the technology in the 30,40s 50s we have today? No weather nut would ever sleep there would be so much going on.
But here is the kicker. It does not matter in the end what is causing this, It matters that we research and adapt to the facts in front of us.
It is more of a problem in forecasting than it is for the human race. How do models handle situations where there may be more overall energy in the entire system, but spread out in such a way it can inhibit, not increase, total overall events?
Then there is the portrayal of the events. The easiest thing for me to do is to sell out and say yes it is getting more extreme and who is the guy that for over 50 years has had the knock ( and if right the benefit). of seeing extremes and loving them? So much so that what used to be a positive, knowing the past, is becoming a negative for people that may not know it, or may not want it revealed because of how they want the present portrayed.
But here is the fact. The good old days were more extreme. People growing up in the 30s thru 50s are leaving this life now, so their library of knowledge that has been a treasure to future generations is no longer that. And its being swept away and diminished.
And that is a shame. But instead of putting tons of money into telling us how bad it is now, or how one thing after another is doomed, why don’t we get down to the real deal, looking at what the warming is doing and how it affects us in forecasting?
This is not some cherry-pick. And any meteorologist that has any objectivity has got to understand that if the air is more stable and precipitation overall is less extreme, there is something going on that is opposite of what is being pushed, that NEEDS RESEARCH.
And Simply saying this is worse than ever or that is worse than ever when it suits you (it is a great strategy, make sure no one knows what has happened and simply use the inevitable major weather event to support your argument) is not getting to what my field NEEDS TO KNOW. The actual changes that are the result and an objective look at the good, the bad, and the ugly ( I like the last 2 best more fun to forecast)
Again I am not saying I have the answer. But to ignore what should be something that raises questions and shouting down people that bring it up is no way to pursue the true answer. I may not have that answer but I darn sure have some questions
Joe Bastardi is a pioneer in extreme weather and long-range forecasting.
He is the author of “The Climate Chronicles: Inconvenient Revelations You Won’t Hear From Al Gore — and Others” which you can purchase at the CFACT bookstore.
His new book The Weaponization of Weather in the Phony Climate war can be found here. phonyclimatewar.com
A total of 15 properties in seven German states have been searched as part of the raids conducted on behalf of the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office (LKA) and the Munich General Public Prosecutor’s Office, authorities said.
Four searches took place in Berlin, three in Bavaria and three in Hesse. There were further actions in Hamburg, Magdeburg, Dresden, and Schleswig-Holstein, authorities said.
The Prosecutor General’s Office in Munich said it had initiated a preliminary investigation “due to numerous criminal complaints from the population” against a total of seven defendants aged 22 to 38 years, “on the charge of forming or supporting a criminal organization.” The notifications had been received since the middle of 2022.https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/24/europe/german-police-raid-last-generation-climate-activists-intl/index.html
Defendants are accused of setting up organized fundraising to finance “further crimes”, such as blockades and art vandalism by advertising on the Last Generation website. They have apparently collected at least 1.4 million Euros.
Let’s hope other countries follow suit and apply the law equally and not give vandals a pass because the authorities believe in the vandals’ cause.
GBNews
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