Ken Nelson

Cool name, and a cool picture:

That is snow, ladies and gentlemen, lots of it!

I wonder how many saw the Audi Green Police advertisement ask “how long til it gets that bad”…

BTW: I looked at the A3 TDI just this week. Too small a back seat. WAY to small.

So where is Al Gore talking enough to cause this? Or is Gaia going after his TN mansion?

http://www.weather.com/newscenter/stormwatch/

New Arctic weather station installation

Well.. we could move all the thermometers:

“NOAA . . . systematically eliminated 75% of the world’s stations with a clear bias towards removing higher latitude, high altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler,” the authors say. “The thermometers in a sense, marched towards the tropics, the sea, and to airport tarmacs.”

“Scientifically” they say this is cool because they, say, take a thermometer from Toronto and “interpolate” it for what the Arctic would be.  In other words, “guess”.

Oh.. .interpolation can be useful. Most images you see, that look pretty real, have interpolated data. But… interpolation looks at past data sets and would not capture changes in the places that used to be measured but that are independent from places where stations remain.

Weather is big and complex, interpolation is guessing.

A U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) study projects that the eastern US could get 20% of its electricity from wind by 2024:

“Twenty percent wind is an ambitious goal, but this study shows that there are multiple scenarios through which it can be achieved,” said David Corbus, NREL project manager for the study. “Whether we’re talking about using land-based wind in the Midwest, offshore wind in the East or any combination of wind power resources, any plausible scenario requires transmission infrastructure upgrades and we need to start planning for that immediately.”

Do you believe them?  I don’t.   Look at their title “National Renewable Energy Lab”… would they advocate some other solution? Or are they voting for their team to win?

I don’t trust anything or anybody using “renewable” “green” “sustainable”. That means they already made their mind up.

Can wind help? Sure. But I’m very dubious it will make up 20% of eastern power unless subsidized extensively.

I’d rather have a report from the “Department of More Energy than we could ever Use”.

 
Good for South Florida’s polar bears, bad for tropical fish

Millions of dead fish float in waters of Florida

Everywhere he steered his skiff last week, Pete Frezza saw dead fish.

From Ponce de Leon Bay on the Southwest Coast down across Florida Bay to Lower Matecumbe in the Florida Keys — day after day, dead fish. Floating in the marina at Flamingo in Everglades National Park alone he counted more than 400 snook and 400 tarpon.

They died from cold, but you know, the real threat, what we should kill our economic future over, and what we should give freedom up to avoid, is a possible, unlikely, minor increase in temperature.

BTW: Why do dead fish float? Answer here.

Glenn Beck says “Get yours today on OrangeJuiceLine!”

Nah… I don’t give investment advice. Well, except I don’t think gold makes much sense if you plan for the apocalypse. I think brass does however.  But I digress….

But with this news that this is the longest cold stretch in Florida in over 100 years, my thoughts turn to orange juice:

National Weather Service Meteorologist Jason Hess said that it’s the length of the cold that is most significant.
“This is the longest stretch ever in 100 years of record keeping.”
A new daily record low temperature was set Sunday, Jan. 11, in the Crescent Communities, with the area reaching 17 degrees.
Since the beginning of January, temperatures have remained more than 20 degrees below normal. Temperatures normally should be up in the 60s during the day and the 40s at night, Hess said.

Brrr…. weather isn’t climate, but shouldn’t we be better prepared for COLD weather we have, not warm weather we wish we could get?

A job saved?  Or millions of future jobs lost?

The “stimulus” bill, which paid off Democratic constituencies and donors all over the world, didn’t skip the little guy. Nope, it reached down and lifted up none other than ClimageGates own “hide the decline” Michael Mann:

Mann is also the creator of the “Hockey Stick” graph, which purported to show a sharp increase in recent temperatures. That work has been thoroughly discredited by researcher Stephen McIntyre. Yet, in June 2009, the National Science Foundation awarded Mann a three-year $500,000 to further study the climate’s response to human activity. According to the grant award:

      The broader impacts involve supporting postdoctoral scholars and 
      graduate students and contributing to the understanding of abrupt
      climate change.

So the science seems settled and now we have to study what will happen, not what might. Right.  

First off, this isn’t appropriate for “jobs stimulus”. Second, Mann’s science is so suspect he shouldn’t be given grants at all, and we should probably try to get money back from past grants.

The Democrats fight all out war on this country and leave no stone unturned. In the unlikely event we survive their crazy policies of today, they need a firewall of climate change based laws to ensure we stay down.

Over at Ace of Spades blogger “krakatoa” keeps us up to date on ClimateGate in a daily posting. Today’s can be read here:

One IPCC scientist seems to think we are in for decades of cold.

The Gore-effect weather aside, leading Cricket aficionado and UN Climate Chief Pachauri seems to have fallen out of favor with his local papers. Seems Indians aren’t fond of hypocrisy.

His conflicts of interest are old news to those paying attention, but then, nobody has accused the Press of paying attention for quite some time.

Scientist who, to great Copenhagen fanfare, predicted 6 foot rise in sea-level has been derided as "simplistic and unsatisfactory."

We deniers are all about laying the defamatory smackdowns. Wait a sec… The Met Office said it?

Even on slow days he usually has a lengthy list of updates.

Here is a link listing all the updates.

Drudge has this headline:

and I wondered… why 14th, and why of 115 years?  Why not 10th in last 100, or coldest in 25?

The Drudge link goes here http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html

And I now see why that is used. They have data for 115 years, and this was the 14th coldest of the time they have records for. Okay, that makes sense now.

Using the sites handy chart generator I made this chart:

Which leads me to the more conventional view that Dec 2009 was the coldest in a decade.

Can Key West outrun the sea?

Try doing it when the land is moving:

"Key West has the distinction of being the Western Hemisphere’s longest sea level record. It dates back to 1846, and although it has several multi-year gaps, it shows a long-term trend of rising sea level of about +2 mm per year."

"However these very preliminary data paint a general picture for Florida and that is sea level has been rising steadily for at least 160 years, and will most likely continue to do so into the future."

http://www.fsbpa.com/documents/Florida%20Sea%20Level_rev04042008.pdf

In fact, Florida is moving west-northwest 5x faster than it is "sinking".

I don’t envy climate scientists the difficulty of their science, I just wish they would approach it more humbly, with less preconceived bias, and with less of an eye on global politics.

You are a greenie. You buy a hybrid even though the math doesn’t work out. You don’t mind, you love doing your part for Gaia.  Eventually science catches up and the math does work, likely through the creation of nifty lithium batteries.

Thorium reactors come on line, electricity becomes cheap, and every night you top off your new electric car.  Everybody joins you.

What happens?

Well it becomes quite conceivable that lithium, your new batteries most important part, becomes the new economic king maker.

And Bolivia takes top honors:

Soon the Organization of Lithium Exporting Countries (OLEC) forms a cabal to control the price of lithium and to make themselves “players”.

This scenario might work out fine. But I’m sure the typical Greenie advocating a shift to electric cars hasn’t given a whit of thought as to were the geopolitical cards will land.

More from Drudge:

It seems right, proper even, to take East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit funds away, to fund proper heating supplies for elderly currently burning books for warmth.

I look at this and first think… wow that is cold. Then I look at it again and wonder “how would I figure out an average temperature” of the US and Canada from a series of maps like this. How would I figure out if it was getting warmer or colder. It isn’t obvious and lots of problems immediately crop up.

One example being… it was 21 degrees when I woke up this morning, and it is now 46 degrees. Which temperature should I use?  Should I average the temperature taken each hour (minute, second) over 24 hours and use it for the day?  Another, is  I have two weather stations at my house… one said 21, the other 28.  Two very accurate digital yielded very different readings 50 yards apart.  I have two because I updated to a new one and never took down the old one.

This is why I don’t trust any climate science paper that will not share data and exact methods. The methods, instruments, station location, and what data is used can make a big difference!

A study by the University of Bristol finds:

In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.

I’ll believe the study that shares data, methods and programs.