After 30 Years Of Data, Global Warming Alarmism Is Proven False

It has been 30 years since the specter of global warming began to loom before the world. It was 1988 when James Hansen, a scientist at NASA, first testified before Congress about the supposed link between the greenhouse effect and observed global warming. Al Gore was late to the party when he released his Oscar-winning movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” in 2006. With three decades of predictions about warming to look back on, we can now assess the accuracy of those early claims about global warming.

I am old enough to remember the dire predictions of the late 1990s and early 2000s. There were predictions of coastal cities being flooded and drastic temperature increases that would destroy crops and cause millions to become climate refugees. Weather site Stormfax.com compiled a list of “Bad Things Attributed to Global Warming” that ranges from acne to zoonotic diseases.”  A lot of severe problems were supposed to have happened by now.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Pat Michaels and Ryan Maue of the Cato Institute’s Center for the Study of Science note that back in 1988 James Hansen presented three possible scenarios. The first scenario was “business as usual,” which showed emissions accelerating at a rate typical of the 1970s and 1980s. Hansen estimated that the current trends would cause the earth to warm by 1° Celsius by 2018. Hansen called the second scenario “most plausible.” This assumed that emissions would increase at the 1988 rate through today, which would cause the earth to be 0.7° warmer. The final scenario was constant emissions after the year 2000. This scenario would warm the earth by a few tenths of a degree before 2000 and then temperatures would level off. Hansen considered this unlikely.

As it turned out, the third scenario was the one that became reality. For almost a decade now, writers in the Journal have reported on a global warming pause. In 2014, Matt Ridley described how the pause in increasing temperatures had continued “for 16, 19 or 26 years—depending on whether you choose the surface temperature record or one of two satellite records of the lower atmosphere.”

Michaels and Maue point out that several of Hansen’s other predictions missed the mark as well. There was no “greater than average warming in the southeast US and the Midwest” in the late 1980s and 1990s as Hansen predicted in his Senate testimony. In 2007, he predicted that melting ice would cause sea levels to rise by 23 feet over 100 years. Subsequent research proved this to be impossible. In 2016, Hansen forecast stronger hurricanes, but there is no evidence of relationship between storm strength and global temperature. Hurricane damage as a percentage of GDP has also not increased.

If forecasts by Hansen and organizations such as the UN and the IPCC have been off base, the wilder predictions of Al Gore and other alarmists have had worse results. In 2006, the former vice president predicted a tipping point where global warming would be irreversible within 10 years. The United Nations warned of tipping points three times in 1989, 2007 and 2015. Decades later there is still little evidence of catastrophic warming.

Gore and climate scientists also made alarming predictions of rising sea levels that range from a few inches to more than 20 feet. Climatologist Judith Curry points out, “Sea level has been overall rising since the last ice age, with some ups and downs. Sea level has been rising for the past 200 years…. Humans are not going to stop sea level rise on the time scale of a few centuries by ceasing emissions of CO2.”

Regardless of cause, sea levels that increase even a few feet could be catastrophic for very low areas. The problem is that cutting emissions won’t stop the rising seas if the end of the ice age is to blame.

What about the polar ice caps? In 2016, Peter Wadhams, a Cambridge University scientist and an expert on Arctic ice loss, told The Guardian, “Ice-free means the central basin of the Arctic will be ice-free and I think that that is going to happen in summer 2017 or 2018.” Wadham’s prediction was obviously incorrect.

The predictions of the experts have been off base for decades. Michaels and Maue say that the reason is that most scientific models do not include the effect of aerosols in countering the warming caused by greenhouse gases. “Several newer climate models account for this trend and routinely project about half the warming predicted by U.N. models, placing their numbers much closer to observed temperatures,” they write.

For whatever reason, the global warming forecasts have not been accurate for the past 30 years. The scientific method says that when a prediction based on a hypothesis is not correct, then it’s time to reevaluate the hypothesis. In this case, most scientific models have been observed to be inaccurate and fail to explain the pause in global warming.

While there has been a modest increase in world temperature, the alarmist predictions have failed. Scientists owe it to the public to tone down the apocalyptic rhetoric until they can develop models that accurately account for what is happening in the real world.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Actual Scientists School Bill Nye on Hurricanes

Bill Nye is a science guy. But, as the trope went for an old commercial, he isn’t a scientist, he just plays one on T.V. From time to time, Nye’s limited understanding of science can get him into trouble. One of those times was last week Nye talked about how global warming affected hurricanes.

On Radio Andy, a Sirius XM show, Nye told Dan Rather, “It’s the strength [of hurricanes] that is almost certainly associated with global warming.”

“Global warming and climate change are the same thing,” Nye said. “As the world gets warmer and there is more heat energy in the atmosphere, you expect storms to get stronger. You also expect ocean currents to not flow the way they always have and that will make some places cooler and some places warmer.”

“The more heat energy in the atmosphere strengthens the storms, Dan, that’s what you’d expect,” the science guy concluded.

Ryan Maue, a meteorologist whose Twitter bio also identifies him as a “think tanker” for the Cato Institute, took to Twitter to point out what should be obvious to a climate scientist, the fact that hurricanes draw their strength from the ocean not the atmosphere. “Bill Nye confuses the oceans with the atmosphere,” Maue tweeted, adding the hashtag, “#FakeScience.”

Bill Nye confuses the oceans with the atmosphere.  #FakeScience

— Ryan Maue (@RyanMaue) September 7, 2017

As most weather-watchers know, the ocean feeds hurricanes. They draw strength from warm tropical ocean water and grow while at sea. Once a hurricane makes landfall, the storm begins to weaken and dissipate, no matter how warm the atmosphere is.

That begs the question of whether global warming caused warmer ocean waters to feed the current crop of killer storms. Cliff Mass, a climate scientist at the University of Washington, says “no” on his blog.

“Hurricane Harvey developed in an environment in which temperatures were near normal in the atmosphere and slightly above normal in the Gulf,” Mass wrote. “The clear implication: global warming could not have contributed very much to the storm.”

“OK, let me go out on a limb,” Mass continues. “Let us assume that all of the .5 C warming of the Gulf was due to human-caused global warming.  That NONE of it was natural.  And that the air was warmed by the same amount. Using the scaling described above implies an increase of 3.5% in the extreme precipitation of this storm.  So, for places that received 30 inches, perhaps 1 inch resulted from global warming. Not much.  Immaterial regarding impacts or anything else.”

“The bottom line in this analysis is that both observations of the past decades and models looking forward to the future do not suggest that one can explain the heavy rains of Harvey by global warming, and folks that are suggesting it are poorly informing the public and decision makers,” Mass concludes.

NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory agrees in a statement on its website. “It is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity,” the agency points out.

NOAA’s statement does include a qualifier that climate change may cause worse storms in the future.  “Anthropogenic warming by the end of the 21st century will likely cause tropical cyclones globally to be more intense on average (by 2 to 11% according to model projections for an IPCC A1B scenario),” the statement notes. “This change would imply an even larger percentage increase in the destructive potential per storm, assuming no reduction in storm size.”

Nye did make a second point that was more valid. “The problem in the Southeast United States and Mexico is that these hurricanes are very powerful,” the science guy said, “and, as I say all the time, they are very expensive. We are all going to pay for Harvey. We are all going to pay for Irma one way or the other.”

Mass agrees here, saying, “What the media SHOULD be discussing is the lack of resilience of our infrastructure to CURRENT extreme weather.   Houston has had multiple floods the past few years and poor planning is a major issue.  When you put massive amounts of concrete and buildings over an historical swamp, water problems will occur if drainage and water storage is not engineered from the start.”

Hurricane Harvey, a category three storm, was not the strongest hurricane on record. The biggest problem was the that storm stalled over Houston rather than moving through quickly. This caused Houston’s Depression-era drainage system to overload. The area’s rapid growth and lack of planning have contributed to the problem.

Hurricanes Harvey and Irma were very damaging, but there is no evidence that they were the result of climate change. In fact, the storms were weaker and less damaging that the category four hurricane that killed 12,000 people in Galveston, Texas. If you don’t remember that one, it is because it happened in 1900, long before the advent of global warming.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Amelia Earhart Photo Debunked, But History Channel May Have Debunked Global Warming Concern

The History Channel special on Amelia Earhart this week fell flat with respect to finding the fate of the famed aviatrix, but, in addition to discrediting The History Channel, the special may have also helped debunk a major concern of climate change alarmists. The evidence for the survival of Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan was largely based on photograph. Ironically, it is a History Channel photograph that, if accurate, causes problems for the climate change crowd.

The “lost evidence” for Earhart’s survival consisted of a photograph that showed people who resembled Earhart and Noonan on a dock on Jaluit Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The History Channel’s assumption, based on the resemblance of the people in the photo to Noonan and Earhart, was that the pair had survived their last flight and were taken prisoner by the Japanese and later executed.

In a post on July 9, Japanese military history blogger Kota Yamano challenged the History Channel claim. Yamano said that an internet search for the picture revealed that it was taken too early to be Earhart and Noonan. The picture was originally published in a travelogue, “The Ocean's ‘Lifeline’: The Condition of Our South Seas,” in 1935, two years before the disappearance of Earhart and Noonan.

“The photo was the 10th item that came up,” Yamano said in an interview with The Guardian. “I was really happy when I saw it. I find it strange that the documentary makers didn’t confirm the date of the photograph or the publication in which it originally appeared. That’s the first thing they should have done.”

There were other problems with The History Channel theory as well. The Daily Beast points out that when Charles Lindbergh made an emergency landing in Japan in 1931, he was given a hero’s welcome. The Daily Beast also cites a Japanese book from 1982 that detailed the story of a crewman on the Japanese navy ship in the picture. According to the testimony of Japanese veterans, the Japanese navy was instructed to join the search and rescue effort for Earhart. The ship’s log contains no mention of Earhart or Noonan.

Earhart and Noonan disappeared on July 2, 1937. At that time, relations between the US and Japan were still good. The attack on Pearl Harbor was four years away. Even though fighting in the Pacific predated America’s entry into World War II, the region was still largely peaceful at the time. Japan’s war with China began five days after Earhart’s disappearance with a battle between Japanese and Chinese forces at Marco Polo bridge in Beijing. At the time, Earhart disappeared, the Japanese had not motive to keep her rescue a secret.

The theory that Earhart went off course on her way to Howland Island and wound up crash landing in the Marshall Islands also strained credulity. The Marshall Islands are 1,000 miles away from Earhart’s intended target. To end up there, Earhart and Noonan would have had to fly to the vicinity of Howland Island, realize that they were lost, and then, low on fuel and disoriented in bad weather, fly past numerous other islands for another thousand miles.

On the other hand, Steve Milloy of Junk Science claims that a graphic used in The History Channel’s documentary undermines the argument for rising sea levels due to climate change. The graphic shows Mili Atoll, an island in the Marshall Islands, with markings that say “area between blue lines was shore in 1937.” The blue lines on the photo show a forested area in 2017. If the History Channel photo is accurate, Mili Atoll has grown since 1937 instead of getting smaller due to rising seas.

The History Channel documentary does point out that coral islands can change shape over time. A 2015 report by New Scientist found that, even if sea levels rise, many islands are rising faster.

If the History Channel expose’ was truly a bust on the scale of Gerado’s unveiling of Al Capone’s vault, what really happened to Earhart and Noonan? Sometimes the simplest and most obvious explanation is also the correct one. The pair were using primitive navigation methods to Howland Island, a small, isolated speck of land. The Pacific is a very big ocean and Earhart and Noonan are most likely at the bottom of it.

Read the full article on The Resurgent

Logical Thoughts About Climate Change

In the wake of President Trump’s long awaited decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate nontreaty (at least according to the Obama Administration), the liberal left has broken out into hysteria on the assumption that the slowdown in the rise of the sea levels that was brought about by the election of Barack Obama has been reversed by President Trump. Reports of the Earth’s demise due to the US exit from the “executive agreement” are likely to be greatly exaggerated.

The full text of the president’s speech seems to indicate that he is not opposed to a climate treaty in principle, but is chiefly opposed to the cost in American jobs and productivity through the agreement’s call for strict regulations on the United States, but more permissive approach to other countries.

In fact, Mr. Trump called upon climate activists to negotiate a new deal that he would be willing to sign and presumably submit to the Republican-controlled Senate for formal ratification. “I’m willing to immediately work with Democratic leaders to either negotiate our way back into Paris, under the terms that are fair to the United States and its workers, or to negotiate a new deal that protects our country and its taxpayers,” Trump said.

If President Trump is truly skeptical of the danger of climate change, then it seems unlikely that any deal that he could negotiate would be fair to the United States and its taxpayers. If climate change is a hoax, as the president has been known to charge, then any deal would not be beneficial to the American workers that President Trump represents. As a service to the president, I would like to present a logical framework for determining whether a future deal would be fair to the United States… or is necessary at all.

Is climate change real? The first point to consider is whether climate change is actually happening. I will concede that it is. In fact, as the NASA website notes, “Earth's climate is always changing. There have been times when Earth's climate has been warmer than it is now. There have been times when it has been cooler. These times can last thousands or millions of years.”

Is the world climate actually warming? This is a more difficult question to answer. There is debate on whether warming is still occurring. In November 2016, Dr. David Whitehouse wrote on the Global Warming Policy Forum, “Satellite data indicates a large fall in the temperature of the lower Troposphere back to pre-El Nino levels. This decrease has reinstated the so-called ‘pause’ in lower atmosphere temperature.”

If the assumptions that the world is still warming are wrong, it would help to explain why predictions by the global warming alarmists have been so far off the mark. Reason pointed out last year that James Hansen predicted in 1986 that global temperatures would rise by two degrees in 20 years. The actual increase in that time was 0.2 degrees. Hansen’s predictions were off by a factor of 10.

In 1988, Hansen forecast that global temperatures would rise by 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit from the year 2025 to 2050 causing sea levels to rise by one to four feet. By 2007, the estimates had been reduced to “8 to 16 inches above 1990 levels by 2090.” Most of the long-term predictions about warming seem to have fallen short.

Is warming caused by human activity? It seems likely that at least some warming is the result of human activity, but warming that occurred prior to the industrialization of the late 20^th century cannot be legitimately blamed on human production of carbon dioxide since humans were not big emitters of CO2 in the early 1900s. Patrick Michaels, a climate scientist at the Cato Institute, estimates that about half of the 0.9 degrees in warming since the Industrial Revolution can be attributed to humans.

Is warming a bad thing? If the Earth warms, some parts of the globe will suffer, but other parts will benefit. A warmer Earth could mean longer growing seasons, lower energy costs and fewer cold-related deaths for much of the world. Loss of land from rising sea levels may well be offset by bountiful crops from areas where agriculture is not currently efficient.  

A common claim is that climate change causes more severe weather and worse storms than in the past. However, data from Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer, do not support claims that climate change has led to more losses from severe weather. The trend has been mostly flat for the past 25 years even as warming supposedly reached critical levels.  

Can we stop warming if it is catastrophic? It is an unknown whether global warming can be stopped, but it is generally acknowledged even among environmentalists that the Paris agreement would not do it. Bjorn Lomborg estimates that the Paris promises would reduce warming by only 0.05 degrees Celsius over doing nothing. This is a miniscule gain at an enormous price.

Even if we can stop climate change, there are other indirect costs to be considered. Third world nations that are in the process of industrializing may pay the biggest price. Citizens of these nations may lose the opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty because fears of climate change stop development and economic growth. Given that many of the dire forecasts of the alarmists have not come to pass, the cure for climate change may be as bad as the disease.

A better solution is to allow businesses to adapt to the changing climate. Technological innovation is reducing emissions as well as helping people to become more prosperous. Oil companies are now predicting that world consumption of oil will peak and begin to decline in the next few decades even without a top-down mandate from the United Nations.

If we want to enter into a treaty to protect the climate, then negotiate one that will actually acomplish its goal. And actually send it to the Senate for ratification. 

President Trump can take comfort from history as well. When President Bush decided to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. The left predicted disaster then as well. Fifteen years later, however, we are still waiting on the apocalypse. 

Originally published on The Resurgent

Energy Department 'Scrubbed' Climate Change References Before Trump Took Office

Federal employees at the Department of Energy allegedly spent the last days of the Obama Administration scrubbing documents of the phrase “climate change.” The purpose of the “cleansing” was to prevent the Trump Administration from cutting projects that believers in man-made climate consider important.

The report in the Daily Caller is based on claims made in a podcast called “This American Life” dated Jan. 20, President Trump’s inauguration day. A DOE employee identified only as “Laura” told the podcast producer how she and others had been “going through all their internal documents that describe ongoing projects and just scrubbing them, deleting the parts where it says ‘and here’s how this can help us combat climate change.’” David Kestenbaum, the producer of the podcast, described how renewable energy programs were being rebranded as “a jobs program.”

“Most federal projects have a reason for their existence,” Kestenbaum said, “Why draw attention to something by putting the words ‘climate change’ in the description?”

This may actually be a corrective action. For years, climate change has been incorporated into a broad variety of scientific studies. Many critics charge that scientists try to find a tenuous link between climate change and their field of study in order to gain access to grant money.

Several industrious skeptical sites have put together lists of the things that climate change has been blamed for. One of the most comprehensive is the “Not Quite Complete List of Things Supposedly Caused by Global Warming” on WhatReallyHappened.com. The list provides links to articles blaming global warming, which has since been rebranded as “climate change,” for a variety of bad – and some good – conditions. Among them are hotter summers, colder winters, Antarctic ice shrinking, Antarctic ice growing, rainfall increases, droughts, beer shortages, better beer, the Arab Spring and Hitler.

The move by the DOE employees may actually be in line with Trump Administration policy. Reuters reports that the Trump Administration instructed the EPA communications team to remove the agency’s climate change web page. The page contained links to climate research and detailed data on emissions.

More action on the climate may be coming soon. Mr. Trump was critical of the Paris agreement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that was negotiated by the Obama Administration. According to The Hill, Rex Tillerson said in his confirmation hearings that the US should not withdraw from the deal in order to keep its “seat at the table.” Nevertheless, since Congress never ratified the treaty, it does not have the force of law and the Trump Administration could ignore the agreement with no consequences. 

Originally published on the Resurgent

The climate change conspiracy

Today we don our tinfoil hat to look at the issue of climate change. While climate change, previously referred as global warming, isn’t usually considered a conspiracy theory, it does share many conspiracy characteristics.

One obvious parallel between climate change and conspiracies is that proponents of climate change have made numerous predictions about the effects of climate change. Like predictions about martial law and FEMA camps, very few of these predictions have come true.

The numerous doomsday predictions of climate scientists are well-documented, although few media sources compare the actual climate events to the sensational headlines from between 10 and 30 years ago. Partial lists can be found in sources as varied as the Washington Times, Townhall.com, and Daily Tech. A more complete list can be found on WattsUpWithThat.com. These failed predictions include:

· In 1989, a senior UN climate scientist said that nations could be destroyed by climate change by the year 2000.

· In the late 1980s, Dr. James Hansen of NASA predicted that New York’s West Side Highway would be underwater in 20-30 years and that severe droughts would lead restaurants to serve water by request only.

· In 2000, Dr. David Viner said that snow would soon be “a very rare and exciting event” and that “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” Recent winters in both the UK and the US have set records for snowfall and low temperatures.

· In 2005, the UN warned that there would be 50 million climate refugees by 2010.

· In 2007, scientists feared that Arctic ice would be entirely gone by 2013. Yet less than a decade later, ice coverage in the Arctic has dramatically increased in both thickness and area.

· In 2006, Al Gore predicted in “An Inconvenient Truth” that sea levels would rise enough to threaten Pacific island nations. This was merely one of many fallacies in Gore’s movie.

· In 2006, Al Gore said that we had “10 years” to act on global warming.

Like proponents of other conspiracy theories, global warming alarmists are undaunted when their predictions fail. Like believers in martial law and FEMA concentration camps, global warming proponents simply revise their theory to explain the delay and change the dates on their predictions.

Perhaps because of the inaccuracy of these predictions, the term “global warming” has largely been replaced by the more ambiguous term “climate change.” Climate change can be blamed for a number of weather phenomena that global warming cannot. While denying that cold weather is proof against global warming, proponents simultaneously blame both hot and cold weather on climate change. The Daily Caller and the Daily Signal have both compiled lists of things that alarmists attribute to climate change. As other conspiracy theorists twist news stories to fit their theory, climate change proponents also frequently find a climatological angle to events of the day. Some of the things attributed to global warming include droughts, Ebola, rape, and the Syrian civil war.

The term “climate change” probably also entered the vernacular because global warming apparently stopped about 20 years ago in the late 1990s. Climate scientists who disagreed with the “consensus” wrote as early as 2006 that warming had plateaued. No computer models predicted this pause in warming and climate change theorists initially did not even admit that it was occurring. Today the response ranges from denial that there is a global warming hiatus to adjusting theories to fit the new facts. Revising theories is true to the scientific method, but climatic computer models should be taken with a grain of salt until they can accurately predict future climate changes, rather than simply explaining what has already happened.

Recent revelations that 2014 was the “hottest year in recorded history” often fail to note that recorded climate observations only go back to 1880, notes Robert Tracinski in The Federalist. Also missing from the stories is that the increase in 2014 was 0.02 degrees Celsius, which is far less than the margin of error of 0.10 degrees Celsius. Rising sea levels can be explained by the fact that sea levels have been rising since before the 20^th century. In fact, a NASA graph shows that sea levels have been rising since the last glacial maximum 25,000 years ago. Rising temperatures and rising seas are both far less than predicted by global warming alarmists.

Although warming proponents widely believe that humans are contributing to climate change, they do not claim that this is being done purposefully to destroy the world. Where is the conspiracy that turns the theory of climate change into a conspiracy theory?

Alarmists might argue that the conspiracy comes from a conspiracy of oil companies to undercut climate change activists, presumably selling out the world’s future for short-term oil profits. To the alarmists, this excuses ad hominem attacks against skeptics, commonly derided as “deniers.”

The reality is that there is a proven conspiracy to silence climate change skeptics. In 2009, a hacker stole 1,000 emails and 3,000 documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and posted them online. Another 5,000 emails were hacked and released in 2011. As James Taylor wrote in Forbes, the emails show that many scientists who contribute to IPCC reports engaged in deception and tried to conceal how weak the data supporting manmade climate change really was. Additionally, the emails showed that researchers were at a loss to explain both the recent global warming hiatus and the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period from the 9^th to the 13^th centuries when the Earth was warmer than it is today.

Alarmists use several methods to stifle dissent. A popular claim is that there is a strong scientific consensus on global warming and that 97 percent of scientists are in agreement. Joseph Bast and Dr. Roy Spencer found the 97 percent claim baseless when they examined it in a 2014 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. In 2013, Forbes reported that a peer-reviewed study of earth scientists, engineers, and meteorologists found that only 36 percent considered global warming a crisis. The majority believed that global warming was a natural phenomenon and/or not a serious problem.

Many scientists may not want to publicly identify as skeptics. There are numerous reports of harassment of scientists and public figures who are skeptical of climate change alarmism. As far back as 2005, there were indications that skeptical papers were not being published in the prestigious, peer-reviewed scientific journals. The bias against skeptical papers may well explain the small number of papers published by skeptical scientists. Earlier this year, NPR reported on harassment of skeptics by Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.). Some, such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., have called skepticism “treason” and called for skeptics to be jailed. In another recent case, Western Washington University students tried to have the college degree of self-proclaimed “climate agnostic” Doug Erickson, a state senator from Washington, revoked by the university.

The bottom line of the debate may be whether climate alarmists put their money where their mouths are. There seems to have been no exodus of wealthy, liberal, climate refugees from low-lying coastal cities such as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco to higher ground in “flyover country.” In fact, in 2010 Al Gore purchased an ocean-view mansion in California. In Florida, people will learn about climate change – and irony - at the new Frost Museum of Science, a $300 million facility located in Miami at about eight feet above sea level.

 

Read the full article on Examiner.com

Solar storm diverts flights

The Earth is currently experiencing the impact of a massive solar storm that experts believe may be strong enough to impact aviation and commonly used electronic devices. GPS satellites, power grids, and telecommunications are a few of the areas that might be affected by the storm on the sun. The current solar storm is expected to be the largest in at least five years.

According to NASA, solar storms are caused by solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that erupt from the sun. The flares and CMEs send billions of tons of magnetic radiation hurtling through space and occasionally planets and spacecraft travel through its path. NASA further states that solar activity rises and falls on cycles that last about 11 years. In 2009, NASA forecast that the current solar cycle would peak in May 2013.

Since solar radiation collects around the poles, storms can affect transoceanic flights. Because the Earth is round, the shortest distance between two widely separated points often looks curved when plotted on a flat map. Flights between the United States and Europe or Asia often travel north over the Arctic rather than straight across the ocean, the route that seems obvious on a map. These are called Great Circle routes.

To see the difference, use a globe to measure the distance between two points on different continents, first straight across the ocean and then over the pole. You can also see great circle routes using gcmap.com. On a sample flight from New York to Hong Kong, the great circle route over the North Pole is 8,072 miles and the airplane would fly northwest initially. If the aircraft flew more westerly to follow the flat map route, the distance would increase to as much as approximately half of the 24,900 mile circumference of the Earth. Obviously the flight would last much longer and use more fuel.

Last month, Aviation News reported that Delta Air Lines was diverting flights between its Detroit hub and destinations in Asia. The longer route reportedly only added about 15 minutes to the flight time. United reported diverting one flight and American Airlines said that its operations were not impacted. The increased fuel used for longer routes can add significantly to the cost of operating the flight.

It is highly unlikely that the solar radiation would cause any direct danger to humans, but it could affect electronic navigation and communications. Aircraft on long overwater flights where fuel and navigation are critical would be particularly susceptible to the storms. Even more vulnerable are communications satellites that are not protected from the radiation by the Earth’s atmosphere. Likewise, astronauts in orbit would need to keep to heavily shielded areas of their spacecraft.

On rare occasions, a solar storm can be powerful enough to cause more serious problems on the surface of the Earth. In 1859, a massive solar storm caused telegraph wires to short out, starting numerous fires according to Space.com. This storm made the aurora borealis, the Northern Lights, visible as far south as Cuba. A smaller storm cut power to the entire province of Quebec in 1989. As the world becomes more dependent on electronic devices, it is also more vulnerable to solar storms. Advance warning from astronomers allows power grids and satellites to be shut down or otherwise protected from the cosmic radiation.

Solar storms might affect aviation and the world in general in other ways as well. Many scientists believe that solar activity has a direct affect on the Earth’s weather. Often solar inactivity corresponds with colder terrestrial temperatures while periods of high activity on the sun lead to high temperatures and stormy weather on Earth. A NOAA graph of the solar cycle appears to correspond closely to globally averaged satellite-based temperatures. As the sun approaches the height of its cycle, the solar maximum, the Earth may experience warmer average temperatures and severe storms.

For the most part however, most people with not notice any effect from most solar storms. Your flight to China might be marginally longer, but it will just give you more time to admire the Northern Lights while enroute.

Originally published on Examiner.com:http://www.examiner.com/aviation-in-national/solar-storm-diverts-airline-flights

Georgia Tech plays role in Climategate 2.0

Two years ago, before a UN climate conference in Copenhagen, an anonymous hacker revealed a trove of private emails in which climate scientists apparently colluded to cover up the lack of scientific evidence for global warming and discredit climate change skeptics. Several investigations of the emails in the US and the UK did not find wrongdoing on the part of the scientists. Under the Obama Administration, the scandal had little effect on federal climate policy.

Recently, just before the climate conference in Durban, South Africa, history repeated itself. A hacker calling himself “FOIA,” a reference to the Freedom of Information Act, released another bundle of more than 5,000 hacked emails. Many of the same figures from the 2009 release figure prominently in the 2011 release as well. The emails from both releases are compiled on the FOIA2011.org website in a searchable database. The emails span over ten years with the most recent dated November 10, 2009. Few media outlets in the US have picked up the story of the 2011 release.

The emails contain many examples of climate scientists making unguarded comments that are starkly different from their normal public statements. One scientist, Tommy Wils of the University of Swansea, cast doubt on the notion that climate science is settled: “Scientists talk about probabilities, not about truth or knowledge….” He continued, “What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal [sic] natural fluctuation? They'll kill us probably...” (1682).

Several scientists acknowledged the flaws in current climate models. Phil Jones, a prominent climatologist at the University of East Anglia, wrote that the “basic problem is that all models are wrong - not got enough middle and low level clouds” (email 4443). Rob Wilson of Edinburgh University wondered whether the sun might be responsible for warming. He wrote that “by weighting the solar irradiance more strongly in the models, then much of the 19th to mid 20th century warming can be explained from the sun alone” (2267). He worried that “Jeez - I sound like a sceptic [sic] - this is not my intension [sic].”

The Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period from the 9^th to the 13^th century when temperatures were warm enough to allow limited agriculture in Greenland, was difficult for the climatologists to rationalize. Edward Cook of New York’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory wrote that the MWP “was more regionally extreme (mainly in terms of the frequency and duration of megadroughts [sic]) than anything we have seen in the 20^th century, except perhaps for the Sahel. So in certain ways the MCA [Medieval Climatic Anomaly] period may have been more climatically extreme than in modern times.”

In another email, a Chinese scientist, Rean Guoyoo, wrote that “we did some analyses of the urban warming effect on surface air temperature trends in China, and we found the effect is pretty big…” (0044). Guoyoo went on to say, “Unfortunately, when we sent our comments [on how urban heat skews temperature readings] to the IPCC AR4 [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report], they were mostly rejected.” Guoyoo’s research seems to support anthropogenic warming locally, rather than globally.

In another email from 2004 that preceded the common usage of the term “climate change,” Asher Minns of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and Bo Kjellen of the European Institute for Policy Studies discuss how “global warming freezing,” the idea that global warming might lead to a colder climate, causes public relations problems (4141). They discuss rebranding global warming as “climate change” to provide “a new story for the old news.”

A number of the emails refer to Georgia Tech. A Tech student, Jun Jian, requested and received climate data from East Anglia’s Phil Jones (1320). The email containing the data was also sent to Dr. Peter Webster, a professor at Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Dr. Webster apparently told Canadian mathematician and climate change skeptic Stephen McIntyre about the data. At the time, McIntyre was performing a statistical analysis of the famous “hockey stick graph.”

When McIntyre asked Jones for a copy of the data supplied to Georgia Tech, Jones apparently refused to supply it. According to one email (125676554), McIntyre then submitted a request for the data under the Freedom of Information Act and was again refused. When Jones refused requests for the data citing confidentiality agreements, readers of McIntyre’s blog, ClimateAudit.org, submitted requests for the agreements and only a few were found to exist. Neither Webster nor McIntyre were immediately available for comment.

This is not necessarily conclusive proof that global warming is not real. As the Atlanta Creationism Examiner wrote in a recent article, there is still strong evidence that the human activity is warming the earth. However, the comments in many of the emails do show that the data is not as convincing as many would have it appear.

Some hardliners evidently took pains to hide this doubt. Phil Jones himself wrote that “one way to cover yourself… would be to delete all emails” (2440). Jones also said, “I've been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts.” Further, Jones wrote that “Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get - and has to be well hidden” (1577). Duke University’s Thomas Crowley assured Jones that “there will be no dirty laundry in the open” (2733). Crowley continued in another email (4693) that “truth” may not always be “worth reaching if it is at the cost of damaged personal relationships.” This attitude of secrecy and hiding data is at odds with the scientific ideal of objectively making predictions that can be verified and tested in the future.

 

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Nobel Prize winner beat scientific consensus

When the 2011 Nobel Prize winners were announced this week, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Israeli scientist, Dan Shechtman. Shechtman’s prize was the culmination of thirty years of struggle against conventional scientific wisdom.

According to a profile of Shechtman’s discovery in Business Week, Shechtman’s discovery was originally made on April 8, 1982 at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology. After Sheckman rapidly chilled a molten mixture of manganese and aluminum, he noticed, while looking through an electron microscope, that concentric circles of ten dots each had formed. The formations violated the laws of nature.

When he reported his findings to his fellow scientists, most did not believe him. Shechtman was ridiculed. The head of his laboratory suggested that he read a textbook on crystallography to understand why what he saw could not be. A two-time Nobel Prize winner, Linus Pauling said at a conference, “Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense. There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists,” according to Shechtman’s recollection in Haaretz.

Shechtman said in an interview reported in the Atlanta Journal, "I was thrown out of my research group. They said I brought shame on them with what I was saying. I never took it personally. I knew I was right and they were wrong."

Shechtman persisted and published his findings in 1984. Soon, other crystallographers were discovering previously unheard of crystal patterns. In 1992, ten years after Shechtman’s discovery of quasicrystals, the International Union of Crystallography changed its definition of crystals. In 2009, naturally occurring quasicrystals were discovered in Russia.

In Shechtman’s case, there was a scientific consensus that quasicrystals could not exist. This is not the first time that a scientific consensus has been wrong, nor will it be the last. Men of reason and logic once believed that the Earth was the center of the universe. The science of medicine once involved bloodletting to heal the sick. Astronomers mapped Martian canals that were not really there. The theory of eugenics, which was once widely accepted, held that some races were naturally inferior to others.

As Shechtman said in an MSNBC article, “A good scientist is a humble and listening scientist and not one that is sure 100 percent in what he read in the textbooks."

Being wrong occasionally doesn’t mean that scientists are bad or that science is not valuable. It does mean that scientific claims should be questioned and verified. In two of today’s most controversial scientific topics, evolution and global warming, one side tries to shut down debate by arguing that there is a scientific consensus. Those who are skeptical of this so-called consensus are ridiculed. Scientific journals blacklist scientists who question the consensus and refuse to publish their papers.

As Shechtman said in Haaretz, “In the forefront of science there is not much difference between religion and science. People harbor beliefs.”

Science is based on seeking the answers to questions about our world. To shut out skeptics of the consensus is contrary to the whole purpose of science. Many of the greatest discoveries in human history would remain unknown if independent thinkers had not questioned the consensus of their day. As in the case of Shechtman’s crystallography text, science books often have to be rewritten when the consensus changes. Not all skeptics are destined to win a Nobel Prize as Shechtman did, but those who would close off scientific debates are decidedly ignoble.

Thanks to Don Thornton for providing the idea for this article.

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http://www.examiner.com/conservative-in-atlanta/nobel-prize-winner-beat-scientifc-consensus

Meet the candidates: Jon Huntsman

Jon Huntsman was born in California, but grew up in Utah. His father is the founder of Huntsman Corp., a global chemical company.

Huntsman dropped out of high school in his senior year in order to pursue a music career as keyboard player for his band, “Wizards.” His website notes that with “priorities adjusted,” he earned a G.E.D. and entered the University of Utah the next fall. After taking two years to serve as a Mormon missionary to Taiwan, Huntsman returned to enroll at the University of Pennsylvania where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in International Politics.

His political career began almost immediately, first as an intern for Senator Orrin Hatch and then as a staff assistant to President Reagan. Huntsman has served in a variety of appointed diplomatic positions beginning with the first Bush administration. He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Trade Development, and Ambassador to Singapore for President George H. W. Bush. In the administration of George W. Bush, he was a Deputy Trade Representative and a Trade Ambassador. He also served as President Obama’s Ambassador to China until he resigned to run for president. While in China, Huntsman’s name was censored from internet searches by the Chinese government after he was captured on video at a Jasmine Revolution protest.

Huntsman has also held elected office, serving two terms as governor of Utah. He was a very popular governor, winning re-election with more than 70 percent of the vote. According to the Deseret News, his approval ratings were as high as 90 percent.

Huntsman’s tenure as governor was marked by business-friendly policies and tax cuts. He introduced an optional flat tax with a lower rate and cut the state sales tax on food according to the Cato Institute. The institute also notes that spending increased 10 percent annually during his tenure, however.

Huntsman also has a business experience with the family firm. According to Project Vote Smart, he has served as CEO of the Huntsman Family Holdings Company and the Huntsman Cancer Foundation as well as Chairman of Huntsman Corp. He has also served as a board member for numerous charitable organizations.

Huntsman has a strong record on diplomacy and economic policy, but his record on social issues will cause problems with many Republican voters. He is a supporter of civil unions for homosexual couples, although he does believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. He has also stated in a tweet that he believes in evolution and global warming. In a 2007 video clip, Huntsman also said that he was “comfortable” with a “requirement” for health insurance.

Huntsman does have a conservative position when it comes to abortion. He supports a right-to-life amendment according to the Salt Lake Tribune. As governor, he signed several bills that limited abortions including a parental notification law and a law that required that women be informed that a fetus can feel pain.

In the most recent Real Clear Politics average of polls, Huntsman placed second to last with 2.2 percent of respondents supporting him. The only candidate to fare worse was former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum. In an Insider Advantage poll of Georgia voters, Huntsman received only one percent. He may boost his numbers in Georgia when he comes to Atlanta this week. He will attend fundraisers on August 23 and meet with Georgia Republican leaders on August 24.

Jon Huntsman has a strong economic and foreign policy background, but his moderately liberal stance on social issues is troubling for conservatives. He would likely appeal to libertarian-leaning Republicans if Ron Paul were not already in the race and more well known. Nevertheless, his deep pockets make it possible for him to continue the race even with little support.

 

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http://www.examiner.com/elections-2012-in-atlanta/meet-the-candidates-jon-huntsman

What about chemtrails?

Fir0002/Flagstaffotos (http://www.flagstaffotos.com.au/gallery2/main.php)

 

 

This week we once again don our tinfoil hats to investigate a long-lived conspiracy theory.  For years, some people have charged that airline pilots are spraying toxic chemicals into the air high above the United States.  The nature of these chemicals and the purpose of the spraying is a matter of conjecture, but a recent version of the theory holds that the chemicals are intended to combat global warming.  The theory even received mainstream attention recently in a new story featured on CBS Atlanta.

C-141 leaving contrails

As a pilot of both airline and corporate jet aircraft for years, I can now step forward to resolve the mystery.  The mysterious chemical trails seen in the sky are made up of dihydrogen monoxide.  This substance is colorless and odorless.  It can cause death even when inhaled in small quantities.  Dihydrogen monoxide has been linked to destructive weather including deadly hurricanes and massive blizzards.  Further, the substance causes soil erosion, it corrodes metals, and if exposed to electrical systems can cause short circuits.  Perhaps most disturbing, dihydrogen monoxide is found in biopsies of pre-cancerous tumors and lesions.  Dihydrogen monoxide is also known by the generic term “water.”

Yes, that’s right.  “Chemtrails” are actually composed of water vapor.  More accurately they are known as contrails, or condensation trails.  These trails occur when the cold air at high altitudes is meets the warm exhaust of an aircraft’s engine.  The fuel burned by the engine contains water.  As the water in the exhaust cools, it forms ice crystals or water droplets, forming a cloud.  This is similar to how fog comes from a car’s exhaust on a cold day.  Keep in mind that even if the temperature is hot on the ground, it is very cold at high alititudes where jets fly.  There are many pictures of WWII bombers with piston engines leaving contrails in the sky.  These pictures predate jet airliners and global warming theory by decades.

Vapor trails behind an L1011

If you watch airplanes landing on a damp day, you might also see a different kind of vapor trail.  On some occasions, you can see vapor trails streaming from a plane’s wingtip close to the ground.  These trails can be caused by the wing of the airplane changing the pressure of the air it flies through.  Vortices from the wingtips reduce pressure and allow the already humid air to condense.

There are some airplanes that really do spray chemicals.  These are known as crop dusters and if you live in an area with a lot of agriculture, you may have seen one.  I have watched a number of crop dusters spraying fields in rural Georgia over the years.

If you watch a crop duster, you will notice two things about the spraying operation.  First, the airplane only sprays very close to the ground.  The higher the chemical is released, the greater the chance that will disperse or be blown away before settling on to the crop.  A crop duster normally flies and dusts from altitudes lower and telephone and power poles.

Contrails left by B-17s in WWII.

Second, you can also see that crop dusters have a lot of plumbing on the trailing edge of the wings.  These lines and nozzles are where the chemical is sprayed from.  Airliners and military jets have no such apparatus.  A typical jet’s wing has many moving parts such as flaps, slats, and spoilers that are designed to improve handling, especially at low airspeeds, and to slow the airplane down for landing.  They have nothing in the way of pipes and nozzles, however. 

Additionally, fuel is a major component of the weight of an airplane, especially one that travels for long distances.  If an airliner were to carry enough fuel to fly across the country or the ocean as well as a heavy load of chemicals to spray, there would be no room left for passengers or baggage.  

Crop dusters have been considered as a possible terrorist weapon.  It is not outside of the realm of possibility that a terrorist group could launch a chemical or biological attack.  This would require not only flying the airplane low over an urban area, but also the technical knowledge necessary to get the proper mixture of the chemical or biological agent to work with the spraying equipment.  This makes such a scenario unlikely.

Crop duster spray nozzles (Jenni Jones)

There have been attempts to modify the weather with aviation, typically through cloud seeding.  Cloud seeding is an attempt to control where rain falls by dropping materials such as dry ice or silver iodide into clouds to promote the formation of rain.  In WWII, the British experimented with cloud seeding and may have caused a flood that killed 35 people.  In June 2010, Smithsonian Air & Space magazine detailed a US effort to divert hurricanes.  Project Stormfury began in the 1940s and lasted until the 1980s when the experiment was deemed ineffective.  In 2008, the Chinese attempted to seed clouds to prevent rain during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

After the 9/11 attacks, when all flights above the US were grounded for three days, scientists did have a rare opportunity to conduct a study of how contrails affect climate.  They did determine that contrails affect temperature, just as other clouds do.  Scientists believe that contrails help to reduce the temperature range between daytime highs and nightly lows.  Some scientists believe that, because contrails are more prevalent when the sun is out, that they may actually help to reduce global warming. 

Airliners do not have spray equipment.

It is not surprising that conspiracists would find many “chemtrails” in the skies over Georgia.  Atlanta is the home of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, which is a major hub for both Delta and Airtran, as well as a destination for many other airlines from around the world.  A lot of airplanes means a lot of contrails.

In the end, there really is a chemtrail conspiracy.  Like many other conspiracy theories, it is a conspiracy to separate gullible people from their money.  The sites that promote the chemtrail conspiracy often sell documentaries that purport to tell the “truth” about chemtrails and other conspiracies.  Save your money.

For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open. – Luke 8:17

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