Showing posts with label Christopher Moncton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christopher Moncton. Show all posts

Thursday, September 25, 2014

Climate Tricks 33: UN Fooling Government Leaders to Accept Expensive Energy

Reposting here a good article written by a friend, Dr. Willie Soon, a Malaysian-American astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Boston, and Lord Christopher Moncton. Posted in Washington Times. I have met Willie twice, in NYC in 2009 and in Chicago in 2010.
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By Willie Soon and Christopher Monckton - - Thursday, September 18, 2014

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has sensibly declined to attend yet another climate summit — this time called by Ban Ki-moon for Tuesday in New York under the auspices of the United Nations — which profits handsomely from much-exaggerated climate scares. Chinese President Xi Jinping and German Chancellor Angela Merkel likewise intend to skip the event.

Environmentalists have complained about Mr. Modi's decision. They say rising atmospheric carbon dioxide will cause droughts, melt Himalayan ice, and poison lakes and waterways in the Indian subcontinent.

However, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has already had to backtrack on earlier assertions that Himalayan glaciers would be gone within 25 years, and the most comprehensive review of drought trends worldwide shows the global land area under drought has decreased throughout the past 30 years.

The spiritual yet down-to-earth Mr. Modi knows that 300 million Indians still have no electricity. His priority is to turn on the lights all over India. In Bihar, four homes in five are still lit by kerosene.

Electric power is the quickest, surest, cheapest way to lift people out of poverty, disease, subsistence agriculture and childhood death — thereby stabilizing India's population, which may soon overtake China's.

The world's governing elites, however, no longer care about poverty. Climate change is their new focus.

For instance, in late August, the Asian Development Bank predicted that warmer weather would cut rice production, rising seas would engulf Mumbai and other coastal megacities, and rainfall would decline by 10 percent to 40 percent across in many Indian provinces.

Garbage in, gospel out. In truth, rice production has risen steadily, sea level is barely rising, and even the U.N.'s climate panel has twice been compelled to admit that there is no evidence of a worldwide change in rainfall.

Subtropical India will not warm by much. Advection would take most of any additional heat poleward. Besides, globally there has been little or no warming for almost two decades. Climate models did not predict that, casting doubt on all of the U.N. climate panel's "projections." The panel, on our advice, has recently all but halved its central estimate of near-term warming.

Sea level is rising no faster than for the past 150 years. From 2004 to 2012, the Envisat satellite reported a rise of one-tenth of an inch. From 2003 to 2009, gravity satellites actually showed sea level falling. Results like these have not hitherto been reported in the mainstream news media.

More than two centuries of scientific research have failed to make the duration or magnitude of monsoons predictable. Monsoons depend on sea and surface temperatures and wind conditions in the Indian and Western Pacific oceans, the timing of El Ninos in the equatorial Pacific, variations in Eurasian and Himalayan winter snow cover, and even wind direction in the equatorial stratosphere.

In 1906, forecasts depended on 28 unknowns. By 2007, scientists from the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology were using 73. So insisting that just one variable — atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels — will drive future monsoons is unscientific.

IPCC climate models said monsoons would become more intense. Instead, they have weakened for 50 years.

Models also failed to replicate the 60-year and 200-year cycles in monsoon rainfall linked to solar cycles that are reflected in studies of ocean sediments from the Arabian Sea.

A new study led by K.M. Hiremath of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics shows a strong, possibly causative correlation between variations in solar activity and in monsoon rainfall.

Governments also overlook a key conclusion from the world's modelers, led by Fred Kucharski of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics: "The increase of greenhouse gases in the 20th century has not significantly contributed to the observed decadal Indian monsoonal rainfall variability."

Not one climate model predicted the severe Indian drought of 2009, followed by the prolonged rains the next year — a one-year increase of 40 percent in most regions. These natural variations are not new. They have happened for tens of thousands of years.

A paper for the scientific journal Climate Dynamics co-authored by B.N. Goswami, recently retired director of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, shows why the models relied upon by the U.N. climate panel's recent assessments predict monsoons inaccurately.

All 16 models examined have the same fatal flaw: They predict rain too easily, by artificially elevating air and water masses in the atmosphere.

Models are not ready to predict the climate. Misusing computers to spew out multiple "what-if" scenarios is unscientific. This approach simply means "if all our unproven assumptions are correct, this could happen."

Most of the fundamental problems in our still immature understanding of climate have remained unresolved for decades. Some cannot be resolved at all. The U.N.'s climate panel admitted in 2001 what has been known for 50 years: Because climate is a "coupled, non-linear, chaotic object," reliable long-term climate prediction is impossible.

Misuse of climate models as false prophets of doom is costly in lives as well as treasure.

To condemn the poorest of India's poor to continuing poverty is to condemn many to an untimely death. Mr. Modi is right to have no more to do with such murderous nonsense. It is time to put an end to climate summits. On the evidence, they are not needed.

Willie Soon is a solar physicist and climate scientist based in Cambridge, Mass. Lord Monckton is a former expert reviewer for the Fifth Assessment Report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2013) of the U.N.'s climate panel.
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See also::
Climate Tricks 31: High Intolerance by the Alarmist Camp, May 14, 2014
Climate Tricks 32: Yeb Sano and CCC to Save the Arctic, September 16, 2014

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Welfarism 28: Nanny State Cares Too Much for its Citizens, UK Style

A welfare and nanny state will ultimately over-extend its "care" for the citizens. Spy, stop and penalize them because it cares for them so much. This is from a Filipino-British friend living in UK, he wrote this yesterday.
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We now have a heavy police presence. There are frequent checkpoints with teams of maybe 10-20 police, their vans, cars and motorbikes spread out along the road. They randomly check motorists to make sure their papers are in order. I have never seen this as part of normal police procedure in the UK. Now it's like an every day thing.

The other day they stopped two buses and had police checking IDs and questioning passengers. It's difficult to describe how unusual this is if you've never lived in the UK. But people don't seem to care. I'm sure they are comforted by it. You have to understand that these are not like Philippine checkpoints. They have mobile computers linked to their databases where they can check your details and past history.

Last month we were all in the car with my dad driving. We were stopped because the policeman saw that my daughter wasn't using an approved child car seat. The policeman took photos of the whole car with everyone in it. He crawled around (yes, crawled around the car!) inspecting underneath, checking tire pressure and looking for other violations. (Do you see a Philippine cop doing that?) He then put my dad's ID into his computer and found a tax violation. The tax on our car had expired the week before and my dad had forgotten to renew it. Bam...two fines and a warning for a soft tire. Total cost: £160 (appox. Php12,000). You can pay online. Further, he made us to go to the nearest car shop to buy an approved child car seat before we could continue with our journey.
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I told my friend that it's indeed discomforting. As societies modernize, the degree of individual freedom -- freedom to be wise or unwise, to innovate or commit mistakes -- should expand, not decrease. Here. freedom of mobility of people is curtailed, they can be stopped by the police anytime anywhere even for no apparent traffic violation. It would seem that those in the Philippines and other developing countries have higher degree of freedom in this respect.

Two friends made these comments when I posted this in Government and Taxes, Liberty and Responsibility fb group.

(1) technology minus liberalism = orwell's worst nightmare.
a step-by-step strategy, the ultimate aim of which is to treat all citizens as potential law breakers and to criminalise as many citizens as possible? the more of this i see, the more radical my libertarian convictions become

(2) Am surprised to hear that from a brit--I've always known that compared to the US, UK has always had tighter "monitoring" of its citizenry & residents. Even pet dogs' barking is controlled in Central London!

If even a Beatles' impromptu rooftop concert at a city building was cut short by London police as it was causing some commuter distraction (not even traffic), it's not surprising that things have come to this. And these are just visible physical signs of police presence. In London, all TV and cable is registered--one cannot simply install one's own unregistered device without being found out. Even immigration keeps a close tab of all foreign residents & visitors--overstaying without being penalized is practically unheard of in this country. These are less visible signs (am not even talking about Snowden's revelations) but definite proof of tighter & more sophisticated control in a seemingly free world.

More news links that my British-Filipino friend posted. (1) From The Guardian last February 7th.

Police stopped nearly 250 drivers during a crackdown.
A total of 242 vehicles were pulled over by the police, two of which were seized, during an operation on Wednesday, February 5, in Sutton.

One driver was arrested for drink driving, one received a cannabis warning and two are due to be summonsed to court for having unroadworthy vehicles.
Another driver was fined and received penalty points for having a bald tyre and one was fined for not wearing a seatbelt.

Officers used automatic number plate recognition to target uninsured, untased and unregistered vehicles. Safer Neighbourhoods Insp Ian Hicks said: "This operation and others like it are all about catching criminals, deterring criminal activities and keeping the streets safe. These operations will continue and you will be caught if you don't have insurance or the correct insurance."

(2) From The Guardian's youtube clip, Stop and search: police battle for controlof London's streets. My friend made these two observations:

(1) As expected, the community, even while they were victimised, supported the powers as a necessary thing. Just listen to them and the cognitive dissonance is glaring.

(2) The motorist stops I described above must obviously be an extension to the 'Stop and Search' protocol. They tried it, liked it, and wanted to extend it into other areas. Anyone who says that the slippery slope fallacy is an invalid argument probably have never slipped down that slope themselves.

Meanwhile, another new development in UK. From WUWT.

UK’s only climate skeptic party crushingly wins the EU election


By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

The United Kingdom Independence Party, the only climate-skeptical party in Britain, has scored a crushing victory in Sunday’s elections to the Duma of the European Union.

Britain’s most true-believing party, the Greens, won one or two new seats, but the second most true-believing party and junior partner in the Children’s Coalition that currently governs at Westminster, the “Liberal” “Democrats” (who are neither), were all but wiped off the map.

The European Duma, like that of Tsar Nicholas II in Russia, has no real power. It cannot even bring forward a Bill, for that vital probouleutic function is the sole right of the unelected Kommissars – the official German name for the tiny, secretive clique of cuisses-de-cuir who wield all real power in the EU behind closed doors….
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See also:

Tuesday, May 06, 2014

Climate Tricks 30: On the term "CC Denial/Denier"

Have a friendly debate today in fb with a physician friend, DiVa. She showed a poster of Mr. David Koch saying he has “given $67 million to climate change denial groups since 1997.”

I commented that the term "climate change denial" is stoopid. I am a skeptic, and I do not deny climate change (CC). It is true. It has happened, it is happening, and it will continue to happen in the future. Climate changes from warming-cooling-warming-cooing-warming-cooling... in endless, natural cycles. CC is mainly natural or nature-made, not man-made.

On the contrary, climate alarmists deny that global cooling can also happen along with global warming. Alarmists deny that CC is cyclical, they deny that CC can be nature-made.

She admitted that CC is  both nature- and man-made, but “overuse of fossil fuels is reaching alarming levels…it wouldn't hurt to develop renewable energy.”

Global warming (GW) was true. It did happen -- roman warm period, medieval warm period, past century's warm period. Both GW and CC are true. What is being denied by the skeptical groups is the "man-made" adjective. It should be "nature-made GW" and "nature-made CC" and "nature-made global cooling".

Here's a good chart from Dr. Roy Spencer in a testimony at the US Senate last year. Roman WP and Medieval WP shown. They occurred more than 1,000 years ago, not a single car existed then, "man-made" CO2 emission except breathing almost zero, yet GW happened. Now the UN, Al Gore, etc. say it is mainly anthropogenic and did not mention RWP and MWP. 


I have no problem with renewables. If people put up solar panels in their houses, or windmills in their farms or backyards, fine. It's their own money. What I dislike is forcing everyone else to subsidize solar and wind, like the feed in tariff (FIT) in the PH's renewable energy (RE) Act.

Even the warming scientists cannot an answer, how much of the recent warming was man-made and nature made? 10-90%? 25-75%? 50-50? 90-10? Assuming they give such estimate (for now it's zero), what explains for the roman warm period, medieval warm period, when there was not a single car, not even bicycles?

If GW will happen even if we throw all the existing cars and planes and malls, and global cooling will still happen even if everyone in the planet is driving a car, what's the point of all those "fight man-made GW/CC" policies? I only see one goal for their activities. More politics, more government, more bureaucracies, more junkets.

In an earlier discussion, a friend Samson P. observed that Climate Variabilities and Extremes (CVEs) has been cited too often by the warming camp as “proof” of anthropogenic CC. Yes, the alarmist groups say that less rain and more rain, less flood and more flood, less snow and more snow, less cats and more cats, they are ALL proof of man-made CC. This is a very dishonest, sigurista argument. 

Many climate research have been done that point to the role of natural factors like the Sun, galactic cosmic rays (GCRs), water vapor, volcanoes and geologic movements, etc. on planet Earth's climate. The problem is people won't find what they are not looking for. If they are so preoccupied to find only anthropogenic sources, that's what they will find, no matter how small, then amplify or exaggerate it. In IPCC AR4 (2007), of the 9 factors as contributors to past century's warming, 8 of them were anthropogenic.

Meanwhile, this is very informative. How much of warming in the past century was due to nature, how much from humans? Are GHGs evil or saviour? Without those GHGs, we should need perhaps 1/4 inch thicker skin, otherwise no life as we know it is possible, simply too cold.

Putting Human-Caused Warming in Proper Perspective by Ira Glickstein, April 7, 2014.


And an update last month from Christopher Moncton of Brenchley, April 5, 2014, using global air/lower troposphere temperature data from the Remote Sensing System (RSS),


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See also::

Friday, May 31, 2013

Climate Tricks 19: Global Cooling and Resilient Society

Below is a research proposal that I submitted to the East Asia Development Network (EADN) for a regional research competition (RRC) on the theme, "Toward a More Resilient Society". Among the factors that they want to be discussed by research proponents is "disaster risk management in disaster-prone countries" and hence, is related to (man-made) climate change.

Even if I know that this kind of research competition is tailored for the climate alarmists and planet saviours, I still joined the competition. My would-be partner in the research project is my PDE classmate and now Ateneo de Manila University, Economics professor Joey Sescon.

To make the story short, our proposal was not accepted. There should be many factors why, including a big number of research contestants who submitted better-written or better-packaged proposals. Anyway, I am posting a portion of the research proposal that I submitted, below.
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How to Improve Resilience in Facing Global Cooling and Financial Turmoil

I. Research Questions and Background

How much global cooling can we expect in the coming decades?
Implications in flooding in the tropics, damages to crops, private properties, public infrastructures, civilian casualties?
Policy options both at the micro and household level, and macro and government level?

Background

Over the past 2,000 years, climate change has shifted from global warming for about six centuries during the medieval warm period (MWP) to global cooling and a little ice age (LIA) for about four centuries, and back to warming over the past century.


Source: Dr. Roy Spencer, presentation at the 2nd International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC), New York Marriott Hotel, NYC, March 8-10, 2009.
(Note: The team leader of this paper has attended that conference, as well as the 4th ICCC held in Chicago, Illinois, May 16-18, 2010)

Since the start of this century, global temperature has stagnated over the past 15 years, and showed a decline in recent years. Chart below compares temperature projections (by the UN IPCC, different models) vs. actual global air temperature, composite for Northern hemisphere + Tropics + Southern hemisphere, satellite data from 1979 to March 2013, as interpreted and plotted by the  University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and Remote Sensing System (RSS). The disconnect between projections (more warming) vs. actual data (stagnation or cooling) is getting wider.


Source: Dr. Roy Spencer,  Global Warming Slowdown: The View from Space, April 16th 2013.

And if we narrow down the reference period over the last 11 years, 2002 to 2013, using land surface temperature + sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies, from HadCRUT3 global mean data, the result is a clear cooling trend. 

  

So as the planet enters the global cooling phase, we should expect that the frequent occurrence of heavy rains/snow and flooding in recent years will become even more frequent and severe that can approximate the LIA several centuries ago. Major damages to some public and private properties, high crop damages, high casualty figures from those heavy flooding and brutal winters, can be expected.

This chart shows that the major financial and human losses since the last decade were due to severe flooding and strong hurricanes and storms, other than strong earthquakes and tsunami. Not one major catastrophe was due to severe drought.



Policy Relevance of the Research

Recognition of the reality of nature-made global cooling as opposed to anthropogenic global warming (AGW) or anthropogenic climate change will enable households and governments to institute more practical and cost-effective policies. Preliminary recommendations to improve resilience against global cooling and frequent flooding, test their practicality would include, among others:

·         Households should avoid living in low-lying areas, or leave those areas and move to higher elevation. Or if they live in one-storey bungalow houses,  consider building a second or even third floor, to their house.

·         Governments, national and local, should invest significantly in dredging creeks, rivers and lakes, big and small, to improve their water catchment capacity. Low lying areas with few residential structures may be cleared of human settlements, be dug and converted to water catchments or mini-lakes.

·         Governments to invest in more boats and amphibian vehicles for quick search and rescue work during heavy flooding. Public and private drainage system be de-clogged to minimize street flooding.

·         Subsidies or higher energy prices for renewables like wind and solar should be reviewed, encourage cheaper and more stable energy sources that do not require subsidies.

II. Review of Literature

Most literatures talk about AGW and/or anthropogenic climate change (ACC). Little or few literatures on natural climate change (NCC) and global cooling are cited or highlighted in mainstream academic studies. Fortunately, the literature on global cooling has mushroomed recently. Among the important online sources of data are:

Watts Up With That, http://wattsupwiththat.com/
No Tricks Zone, http://notrickszone.com/
Dr. Roy Spencer (famous American climatologist), http://www.drroyspencer.com/

The book, Climate Change Reconsidered: Report of the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), 2009, Chicago, published by the Heartland Institute, offers a comprehensive discussion of the physical science basis of climate change and cycles.

Another book, Climatism, deals with clarifying certain misconceptions on climate and human economic activities, and how energy policies should not be distorted.
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On another note, an interesting paper by Christopher Moncton of Brenchley in WUWT,  

HadCRUt4: revision or revisionism? (May 28, 2013) made this observation:


… On the other side of the account, terrestrial coverage has declined sharply over recent decades. For this and other reasons, the HadCRUT4 record takes explicit account of three distinct species of uncertainty: measurement and sampling, bias, and coverage. Combining the effects of these three, the 2 Ïƒ uncertainty bounds today are approximately one-sixth of a Celsius degree either side of the central estimate:


…. The discrepancy between the projections in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (red central projection bounded by orange region) and the outturn in HadCRUT4 (bright blue trend-line) is startling. The difference between the observed cooling at 0.86 Cº/century and the predicted warming of 2.33 Cº/century is equivalent to a hefty 3.2 Cº/century.
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See also:
Fat-Free Econ 20: Flooding and Global Cooling, August 13, 2012
Climate Tricks 16: On GMST, the Sun, GISS, HadCRU, and Coal, September 04, 2012 
Climate Tricks 17: STIKE Forum on CC, October 28, 2012 

Climate Tricks 18: Severe Tropical and Winter Storms as Proof of AGW, December 29, 2012 Energy Econ 9: Blowin in the Wind Folly, April 17, 2012

Monday, May 17, 2010

Chicago, 4th ICCC, day 1

Day 1, May 16, of the 4th International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC, www.heartland.org) held here in Chicago, USA, was more of networking and meeting new friends. Registration started at 3pm, cocktails at 5pm, opening dinner with speakers at 6pm. It ended past 9pm. Then another round of networking outside with open bar until 10pm.

Among those I have met yesterday were leaders of think tanks which are members of the Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change (www.csccc.info), among those which do not believe in “man-made warming” and more government environmental regulations and taxation. Like Julian Morris of the International Policy Network (IPN), Barun Mitra of Liberty Institute (India), Xingyuan Feng of CIPA (China), Martin Krause of CIIMA (Argentina), Jose Luis Tapia of ILE (Peru), Margaret Tse of IL (Brazil), Tim Wilson of IPA (Australia), Peter Holle of FCCP (Canada), Barbara Kolm of Hayek Institute (Austria), Wolfgang Mueller of IUF (Germany). Our group picture was at Jose’s camera, hope he can post or send it to us tomorrow so I can post the pics here.

Other important guys that I have met today are Dr. Willie Soon, a Malaysian-American astrophysicist as the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Boston. And Dr. Henrik Svensmark, a physicist at a Danish climate research office. Picture below with Henrik and Wolfgang Muller.



I also have a photo with Steve Goreham, author of the new book “Climatism” and Dr. Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit in Canada (www.climateaudit.com?) but the picture was blurred


Todays’s dinner speakers were Dr. Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, a geologist, former astronaut/moonwalker and former Senator, and Dr. Steve McIntyre. Jack talked about climate and environment policy and the US constitution. His conclusion is that while most energy and environmental policies may be legal, they may not be exactly constitutional as the US constitution specified certain limits on how and where the US Congress, the legislature. And Steve McIntyre talked about “climategate” and the “hide the decline” in historical climate records, and other climate data manipulations done by some scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Ressearch Unit (CRU).

The UN IPCC and the UK government got a lot of climate “data” from the CRU, along with Prof. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State U, which authored the “hockey stick” climate graph of the 20th century. What’s this graph?


Above are 2 graphs. The first is the “hockey stick” shape of data reconstruction by Prof. Michael Mann and was adopted by the UN IPCC: No warm period in the past 1,000 years, that’s why they call the current warming as “unprecedented” in history. Second graph below it is climate historical record accepted by many climate scientists showing the medieval warm period (MWP) that peaked in 1200 to 1300, a period much warmer than the warming of the past century, and the little ice age (LIA) of the “Maunder minimum” and “Dalton minimum” of the 1600 to 1800..

The “hockey stick” graph has gained notoriety for its notorious distortion of global historical climate records. Some people and groups made fun of it. Below is a sample of the graph, entitled “Mann-made global warming”, referring to a graph made by Prof. Mann. And beside the stick are the (a) program of the 4th ICCC, (b) my name badge, and (c) the book “Climatism” by Steve Goreham.


Among other materials that are distributed free in the conference are shown below. Materials from the Heartland Institute, Marhsall Institute, Pajamas Media, etc.


Other speakers that I have met tonight were Lord Christopher Moncton of the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) and former UK environmental secretary under former PM Margaret Thatcher and meteorologist Anthony Watts of www.wattsupwiththat.com.

More stories and pictures tomorrow.