Ken Nelson

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.

The models hoping to predict weather 3 months in advance got it dead wrong. So, Anthony Watts wonders:

if the climate models can’t reliably predict the next three months, what basis do they have to claim their ability to forecast 100 years out?  It is well known in the weather modeling community that beyond about three days, the models tend to break down due to chaos.

I second the question.

If they had forecasted THIS weather 8 years ago, I’d have moved somewhere else!

An amazing PDF timeline of “ClimateGate”. Click the image to see the PDF.

Via http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/climategate-30-year-timeline/

This section jumped out at me:

Hardly seems like “science”…

Apparently, spaghetti of the Counter Insurgency inter-relations in Afghanistan:

means you can’t win a war.

But spaghetti like this, of the Model E GISS climate modeling simulation source file interdependencies, should be trusted implicitly:

I know war can be complex. And I’m quite familiar with how thorny software complexity can be.

But if you have concerns about the one, shouldn’t you about the other?

I know… I ask too much!

BTW: This is not to impugn the folks at NASA who expose themselves by posting their source code on the net.  I don’t know any specific issue about the quality of the NASA software. I can, however, measure its complexity. And I can guarantee you, at the level of complexity measured, it probably has hundreds of significant bugs. As does virtually ALL software of similar complexity and size.

Software graph done by “Understand” from Scitools.

A professor at University of Waterloo (Canada) reports that cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons not CO2 cause climate change.

How?  He observef actual data. No funky tweaked data and buggy computer models needed.  Both warming and cooling can be accounted for using satellite observed data:

His conclusions are based on observations that from 1950 up to now, the climate in the Arctic and Antarctic atmospheres has been completely controlled by CFCs and cosmic rays, with no CO2 impact.

“Most remarkably, the total amount of CFCs, ozone-depleting molecules that are well-known greenhouse gases, has decreased around 2000,” Lu said. “Correspondingly, the global surface temperature has also dropped. In striking contrast, the CO2 level has kept rising since 1850 and now is at its largest growth rate.”

Man can and will act to stop damage. We did with CFC’s when science we could believe in showed they were putting us at risk.

Maybe someday climate science can regain a position of trust. It will likely require an entire generation of scientists to retire.

Just one variant of data problems. The others are even harder 

Reading through this article on how climate researchers modified and adjusted actual data from the Darwin, New Zealand station confirms my belief that historical surface measurements provide little guidance as to global temperatures.

As I mentioned in my original article, the hard part is not to find five neighboring stations, particularly if you consider a station 1,500 km away as “neighboring”. The hard part is to find similar stations within that distance. We need those stations whose first difference has an 0.80 correlation with the Darwin station first difference.
(A “first difference” is a list of the changes from year to year of the data. For example, if the data is “31, 32, 33, 35, 34″, the first differences are “1, 1, 2, -1″. It is often useful to examine first differences rather than the actual data. See Peterson (PDF) for a discussion of the use of the “first-difference method” in climate science.)

Read the whole thing if climate science and statistics interests you.   Basically, even if their motives were pure, climatologists face an intractable problem of bad instruments, faulty recording, bad locations and a variety of other data oddities when trying to look at past surface temperatures.

This makes sense right?  Take Saturday morning… I walked out of the house, which was brisk but comfortable, drove 4 miles, and was miserably cold.

Surface weather varies widely  for surface reasons. Attempts to homogenize it to create some global record just don’t make any sense.

Going forward I’m more interested in the satellite data – which by the way – shows things getting cooler.

For reading challenged friends of yours, here is part 1 of 6 of the Fox News documentary “Global Warming, or a Lot of Hot Air”:

The rest of the parts can be seen here.

Some believe the “Gore Effect”, in which cold weather smites anyplace global warming activists gather, proves the existence of God. It happened in Copenhagen this week.

Well… as Obama returns to DC from promising future American debt, he returns to a serious Gore effect:

Via surfacestations.org, a site devoted to investigating the quality of our weather reporting stations, comes this chart:

The vast majority have an error of greater than 2 degrees Celsius.  Given the error rates of the stations, how can we put any stock in a warming claim (.7 degrees Celsius) much smaller than the error for the sites providing most of the data?  Put another way, how many blue or green dots can you find?

And look around… see any dots on the oceans that cover 71% of the earth?

So we only have data for land, no data for 71% of the earth, add in data cherry picking and outright erroneous or fraudulent data adjustment and it becomes clear that we have no idea what the temperature has done over the last century.

Menhaden Herring 

Commenter Carl sent this article on the over fishing of a herring crucial as a food source for virtually all other fish off our eastern coast. It turns out this fish is also useful for making Omega 3 fish oil that many claim benefits human health:

The book’s author, H. Bruce Franklin, compares menhaden to the passenger pigeon and related to me recently how his research uncovered that populations were once so large that “the vanguard of the fish’s annual migration would reach Cape Cod while the rearguard was still in Maine.” Menhaden filter-feed nearly exclusively on algae, the most abundant forage in the world, and are prolifically good at converting that algae into omega-3 fatty acids and other important proteins and oils. They also form the basis of the Atlantic Coast’s marine food chain.

But they are in danger now due to one company:

For the last decade, one company, Omega Protein of Houston, has been catching 90 percent of the nation’s menhaden. The perniciousness of menhaden removals has been widely enough recognized that 13 of the 15 Atlantic states have banned Omega Protein’s boats from their waters. But the company’s toehold in North Carolina and Virginia (where it has its largest processing plant), and its continued right to fish in federal waters, means a half-billion menhaden are still taken from the ecosystem every year.

Science and common sense suggests we should ban further menhaden herring fishing. Immediately. But will we? Guess who protects Omega Protein?

Democrats when they are in charge:

and Republicans when they are in charge:

What can you say?  The country is clearly not in the best of hands.

Al Gore lied again. He said “increasing tree mortality” in Copenhagen. Turns out he is wrong:

Plants eat C02. Remember that coal & oil used to be a plant when  young and had 10 times the C02 to eat.  Now is a GREAT time to be a plant!

I’m sure that CO2 and Climate models have included a “tree sink” for the carbon we emit.

This goes back to the “can we trust them” question. If they share all their data, all their models, and get back to “science” as it used to be done, then maybe. But that will still leave the question of if it is warming, is it bad, and if bad, is it worse to try and stop it.