Time to recognize approaching Southern Hemisphere disaster

I warned the world before, and they ignored me, but the evidence continues to mount. The Southern Hemisphere, and maybe the entire world, is headed for a frozen doom.

All day long polar orbiting satellites fly over the Antarctic and the surrounding ocean and measure the extent of the sea ice.  The amount of ice waxes and wanes with the seasons, ranging from about 2 to 16 million square kilometers between southern summer and winter.

Thirty years of this satellite data have made it possible to calculate the average ice extent for any given day of the year.  The deviation from this average is called the “anomaly.”  It is this anomaly data that reveals the impending drastic changes in the Southern Hemisphere.

Here is the anomaly data for the last three years from the University of Illinois’ Polar Research Group…

The anomaly is increasing by half a million extra square kilometers every year!!! To put this in perspective, the Earth has a surface area of about 500 million square kilometers. Roughly speaking, an additional 1/1000th of the Earth’s surface is covered by ice each year. Consider that the Southern Hemisphere sea ice maxes out at about 16 million square kilometers each year, then 32 years of the current increase rate would double this amount.

By 2050, a mere 36 years from now, the ice encased Tierra Del Fuego on the southern tip of South America will replace Greenland as the most ironically named place on Earth.  By 2100 the dairy farms surrounding the town of Gore in the Southern Plains of the South Island of New Zealand will be a frozen mockery to the same-named purveyor of global warming alarmism.

Here is what is in store for the Southern Hemisphere…

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You can’t deny this.  This is science!  My conclusion is based on the proven analysis techniques of NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally.

Has the 21st century brought us to a tipping point?

All the best data indicates that a tipping point has already occurred.  Think about this: according to NOAA data (see here and here) 8 out of 10 years with greatest Southern Hemisphere sea ice extent have occurred since 2000!  Here they are in order…

1. 9/14/13
2. 9/24/12
3. 9/24/06
4. 9/24/09
5. 9/29/05
6. 9/28/00
7. 9/8/04
8. 9/29/07

We also now know that the all time low temperature for the Antarctic was reached in 2010.  Satellite data shows that on August 10th, 2010, the Antarctic temperature descended to 136 ºF (minus 93 ºC).  This shattered the previous record of minus 128.6 ºF (minus 89.2 ºC), set in 1983.

That is a drop in the minimum recorded temperature of 7.4 ºF in a mere 27 years.  If that continues, as indicated by Jay Zwally type analysis, then the low temperature by 2100 could be minus 159 ºF (minus 106 ºC)!!!

The effects are already being felt

It is now the warm season in the Southern Hemisphere.  Sea ice is making its seasonal retreat, yet the Russian cruise ship, Akademik Shokalskiy, is trapped in the sea ice with “52 tourists, scientists and explorers” and a crew of 22.  You would think the combined brains of all those scientists on board would have kept them out of the zone of freezing water.  While the ship’s brochure points out that “Views are excellent from the large, open decks and the Navigation Bridge'” maybe they couldn’t see the ice coming from the vantage point of the “Lounge and bar, open late afternoon and evening with a wide selection of wines and spirits” (an essential feature of all scientific research vessels).  Our prayers go out to the scientists and others on this harrowing adventure as ice breakers race to free them the frozen grip of the sea.  I hope the sauna stays warm and the booze holds out until they get there.

Why the great silence?

Where are the voices of leading scientists and environmentalists?  Why haven’t you seen anything about this impeding hemispheric disaster on the front pages of the news papers or on prime-time news reports?  A subsequent post will soon answer those questions and break this issue wide open.  

Stay tuned…

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Michael Mann’s delusional fever

Michael Mann’s fevered dream

Ever read the New York Times?  Wadda ya think, does it veer persistantly to the left?  Is the Pope Catholic?

Well, Michael Mann has been huffing and puffing at the Huffington Post that the New York Times has strayed from his approved dogmatism concerning global warming.  They dared to run an opinion piece by Richard Muller.

Richard Muller lives happily on the alarmist side of the road, but on occasion he lets his toes cross the dividing line, so that he can claim some credit for being open-minded.

In a recent op-ed he must have touched one of Mann’s extremely frayed nerves when he said…

“I worried that the famous “hockey stick” graph plotted by three American climatologists in the late 1990s portrayed the global warming curve with too much certainty and inappropriate simplicity.”

Ouch.  This was simply Muller’s demure way of stating the obvious. Of course, the main “American climatologist” who made this graph of “inappropriate simplicity” is none other than Michael Mann.  Muller’s soft punch of a statement seems to have left a big bruise on Mann’s sensitive ego.

Mann thinks The New York Times never should have let Muller engage in this attack on his crowning achievement.  But then the Times went even further and let the apostate spread even more heresy in a second op-ed about tornadoes.  Muller wrote…

Despite the recent spate of deadly twisters, including those that tore through the Midwest over the weekend, the scientific evidence shows that strong to violent tornadoes have actually been decreasing for the past 58 years, and it is possible that the explanation lies with global warming…

I am not talking about global warming per se, which I am convinced is real and caused by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases. But not everything attributed to global warming has a scientific basis…

So let’s consider only the most violent tornadoes, the ones in categories EF3 to EF5…

NOAA… shows that the number of these storms has been significantly decreasing over the past 58 years, from over 50 per year in the first half to under 40 per year in the second. The statistical significance of this decrease is extremely high: well above 99 percent confidence.

How dare Muller display such an attitude!

Mann is especially incensed that Muller quoted from an earlier HuffPost article which said…

Michael Mann, a climatologist who directs the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, agreed that it’s too early to tell.  “If one factor is likely to be favorable and the other is a wild card, it’s still more likely that the product of the two factors will be favorable,” said Mann. “Thus, if you’re a betting person — or the insurance or reinsurance industry, for that matter — you’d probably go with a prediction of greater frequency and intensity of tornadoes as a result of human-caused climate change.”

But Muller wrote

Michael E. Mann, a prominent climatologist, was only slightly more cautious. He said, “If you’re a betting person — or the insurance or reinsurance industry, for that matter — you’d probably go with a prediction of greater frequency and intensity of tornadoes as a result of human-caused climate change.”

Mann called this innocent contraction “sleight of hand.”  Touchy, touchy.

Mann uses his mighty reasoning powers to discern a conspiracy.  You can’t be too careful when even your friends are out to get you.  He warns us that this is ultimately the work of the Koch brothers, just like every other vile conspiracy against the goodness and light of global warming alarmism and the left in general.  (It used to be Dick Cheney and Halliburton, but I guess they must have passed the world control levers over to the Koch brothers.)  You see, Richard Muller now controls the New York Times, and the Koch brothers control Richard Muller.

Mann wraps his tin foil a little tighter and lectures…

The New York Times does a disservice to its readers when it buys into the contrived narrative of the “honest broker”–Muller as the self-styled white knight who must ride in to rescue scientific truth from a corrupt and misguided community of scientists. Especially when that white knight is in fact sitting atop a Trojan Horse–a vehicle for the delivery of disinformation, denial, and systematic downplaying of what might very well be the greatest threat we have yet faced as a civilization, the threat of human-caused climate change.

Shame on you New York Times. You owe us better than this.

You can get the full temperature of Mann’s paranoid delusional fever at his Huffington Post’s article, Something Is Rotten at the New York Times.

James Delingpole, please correct this mistake

The only thing that bugs me more than when climate alarmists get things wrong is when skeptics get it wrong.

A case in point is the assertion by James Delingpole that a recent volcano in Iceland put more CO2 into the atmosphere that all of human activity since 1950.

Delingpole is a vocal supporter of the skeptic community, and the fact the he has a widely viewed blog , writes for several publications and authored several books, all give his words wide dissemination.  The problem is that when a fence-sitter who is trying to make up his mind about the global warming issue realizes that somebody like Delingpole is asserting and defending an indefensible claim, well, that fence-sitter is likely to fall off the fence to the side of the alarmists.  This will happen even if Delingpole is correct on other points.  Fence-sitters don’t necessarily have the time or inclination to sort out and weigh all the arguments, and something like this can easily tip their judgement scales one way or the other.

Delingpole appeared as a guest on the Mike Rosen Show on Denver’s AM station KOA.  This is a 50,000 Watt station and tens of thousands of people probably heard this exchange.  Rosen is a pretty smart guy and usually nobody’s fool, but he let this bogus assertion slide by…

Audio version: Rosen/Delingpole 11/20/13 MP3

Rosen: 713-8585 our telephone number in Castle Rock. Cliff, you’re on 850 KOA. James Delingpole our guest. Hi Cliff.

Cliff: Mike and James, good morning.

Rosen: Morning

Delingpole: Hi Cliff.

Cliff: Hey, I finally think I have somebody who can actually answer this question.

Rosen: Alright.

Cliff: Ah, you know we’ve got, the greenies are all against cars and the exhaust, and you know, all this pollution that we put in the air. Ah, whats the equivalency of a volcano that’s erupting and spewing stuff into the air thirty miles high.

Delingpole: That’s a good question. You remember that volcano that erupted in Iceland a couple of years ago?

Cliff: Yep, that’s the one that made me start thinking about it

Delingpole: Yeah, I think that, I think that that – that volcano produced more CO2 than I think humans have produced in the last, in the last fifty years.

Cliff: Watta we gonna do about that? (…unintelligible…)

Delingpole: We should ban volcanoes.

You  can hear the entire interview (Wednesday, 10AM, 11/20/13) on KOA’s podcast

What are the facts?

The facts are well know, easily accessible, and have been presented to Delingpole before now.  Here it is summed up by the USGS…

Do the Earth’s volcanoes emit more CO2 than human activities? Research findings indicate that the answer to this frequently asked question is a clear and unequivocal, “No.” Human activities, responsible for a projected 35 billion metric tons (gigatons) of CO2 emissions in 2010 (Friedlingstein et al., 2010), release an amount of CO2 that dwarfs the annual CO2 emissions of all the world’s degassing subaerial and submarine volcanoes (Gerlach, 2011).

The published estimates of the global CO2 emission rate for all degassing subaerial (on land) and submarine volcanoes lie in a range from 0.13 gigaton to 0.44 gigaton per year (Gerlach, 1991; Varekamp et al., 1992; Allard, 1992; Sano and Williams, 1996; Marty and Tolstikhin, 1998). The preferred global estimates of the authors of these studies range from about 0.15 to 0.26 gigaton per year. The 35-gigaton projected anthropogenic CO2 emission for 2010 is about 80 to 270 times larger than the respective maximum and minimum annual global volcanic CO2 emission estimates. It is 135 times larger than the highest preferred global volcanic CO2 estimate of 0.26 gigaton per year (Marty and Tolstikhin, 1998). 

It is an embarrassment to me, as a skeptic, that the alarmist site “Skeptical Science” gets it right while Delingpole, a well know mouthpiece for skepticism, gets it wildly wrong.  This meme has been around for years and was long ago thoroughly debunked.  

I would forgive an acquaintance at a coffee shop or around the water cooler for making this mistake.  Then I would gently try to set him straight with the facts  But if you are going to put yourself forth as some kind of expert, then you need to get your facts straight.  This type of mistake may win converts to your side in the short run, but when people realize how wrong you have were, then they will not believe you even when you are right.  Worse yet, they will also be less inclined to believe other skeptics when they are right.

So, James, please fess up on this issue.  Admitting this mistake will only improve your credibility in the long run.

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By the way, this reminds me of another misinformed claim:that underwater volcanoes in the Gakkel ridge were causing reduced sea ice in the Arctic.