Los Angeles Community College District's Green Energy Program

Surprise. This was a front page story, page 1 of the Los Angeles Times March 6, 2011 regarding the Los Angeles Community College District's green energy program?

See "Grand dream loses sheen in glare of daylight" at http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-build6-20110306,0,4909175.story.

I could goal: "Not only would the nine colleges sever ties to the grid, saving millions of dollars a year, they would make money by selling surplus power. Thanks to state and federal subsidies, construction of the green energy projects would cost nothing upfront."

There was a giveaway that they were spending somebody else's money: "cost estimates for taking the nine campuses off the grid ranged as high as $975 million — this for a college system that in 2010 spent less than $8 million on power bills."

The article doesn't connect the dots with our national policy, but I think you can replace "Larry Eisenberg" with the name "Barack Obama" and that's basically what the President is doing to the United States.

Regional Nuclear War Offsets Global Warming

See National Geographic February 22, 2011 article at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/02/110223-nuclear-war-winter-global-warming-environment-science-climate-change/
Small Nuclear War Could Reverse Global Warming for Years
Regional war could spark "unprecedented climate change," experts predict.

by Charles Q. Choi

"Even a regional nuclear war could spark "unprecedented" global cooling and reduce rainfall for years, according to U.S. government computer models.
Widespread famine and disease would likely follow, experts speculate."

"To see what climate effects such a regional nuclear conflict might have, scientists from NASA and other institutions modeled a war involving a hundred Hiroshima-level bombs, each packing the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT—just 0.03 percent of the world's current nuclear arsenal."
"The global cooling caused by these high carbon clouds wouldn't be as catastrophic as a superpower-versus-superpower nuclear winter, but "the effects would still be regarded as leading to unprecedented climate change," research physical scientist Luke Oman said during a press briefing Friday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C."


Also a very interesting comment / question:
erikleeolson
February 28, 2011
I have a question about the "Scenario" where 100 15KT bombs are used in this war. I'm just wondering about the numbers. That would be 1.5 Megatons of energy, whereas many above-ground atomic tests had a much higher yield, such as the 5,000Kt Tsar Bomba which was 1,400 10 times the combined energy of all explosives used in WWII, yet just one quarter of the estimated yield of the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. Did any of these events change the climate of the whole planet?

Climategate U-Turn as Scientist at Centre of Row Admits: There Has Been No Global Warming Since 1995

See U.K. Daily Mail February 14, 2010 article "Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995" by by Jonathan Petre at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html#

- Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
- There has been no global warming since 1995
- Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes

"Professor Phil Jones admitted his record keeping is 'not as good as it should be'

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made.

Professor Jones has been in the spotlight since he stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after the leaking of emails that sceptics claim show scientists were manipulating data.

The raw data, collected from hundreds of weather stations around the world and analysed by his unit, has been used for years to bolster efforts by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to press governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Following the leak of the emails, Professor Jones has been accused of ‘scientific fraud’ for allegedly deliberately suppressing information and refusing to share vital data with critics.

Discussing the interview, the BBC’s environmental analyst Roger Harrabin said he had spoken to colleagues of Professor Jones who had told him that his strengths included integrity and doggedness but not record-keeping and office tidying.

Mr Harrabin, who conducted the interview for the BBC’s website, said the professor had been collating tens of thousands of pieces of data from around the world to produce a coherent record of temperature change.

That material has been used to produce the ‘hockey stick graph’ which is relatively flat for centuries before rising steeply in recent decades.

According to Mr Harrabin, colleagues of Professor Jones said ‘his office is piled high with paper, fragments from over the years, tens of thousands of pieces of paper, and they suspect what happened was he took in the raw data to a central database and then let the pieces of paper go because he never realised that 20 years later he would be held to account over them’.

Asked by Mr Harrabin about these issues, Professor Jones admitted the lack of organisation in the system had contributed to his reluctance to share data with critics, which he regretted.

But he denied he had cheated over the data or unfairly influenced the scientific process, and said he still believed recent temperature rises were predominantly man-made.

Asked about whether he lost track of data, Professor Jones said: ‘There is some truth in that. We do have a trail of where the weather stations have come from but it’s probably not as good as it should be.

‘There’s a continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then issue improved data, so it can be very difficult. We have improved but we have to improve more.’

He also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.


He further admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming, although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend.

And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

Sceptics believe there is strong evidence that the world was warmer between about 800 and 1300 AD than now because of evidence of high temperatures in northern countries.

But climate change advocates have dismissed this as false or only applying to the northern part of the world.

Professor Jones departed from this consensus when he said: ‘There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.

‘For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

‘Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm than today, then the current warmth would be unprecedented.’

Sceptics said this was the first time a senior scientist working with the IPCC had admitted to the possibility that the Medieval Warming Period could have been global, and therefore the world could have been hotter then than now.

Professor Jones criticised those who complained he had not shared his data with them, saying they could always collate their own from publicly available material in the US. And he said the climate had not cooled ‘until recently – and then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend’.

Mr Harrabin told Radio 4’s Today programme that, despite the controversies, there still appeared to be no fundamental flaws in the majority scientific view that climate change was largely man-made.

But Dr Benny Pieser, director of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said Professor Jones’s ‘excuses’ for his failure to share data were hollow as he had shared it with colleagues and ‘mates’.

He said that until all the data was released, sceptics could not test it to see if it supported the conclusions claimed by climate change advocates.

He added that the professor’s concessions over medieval warming were ‘significant’ because they were his first public admission that the science was not settled."

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - IPCC Process is Started and Finished by Political Officials Who Steer the Information

See February 11, 2010 Best of the Web Today by James Taranto
"Hot Enough for You? Global warmists used to love talking about the weather" at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703382904575059270348147154.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

"To be sure, the global warmists are right to distinguish between weather and climate. A short-term condition sometimes can run counter to a long-term trend".

"The problem is that for years, global warmists have claimed that the weather proved their claims about the climate. This is a New York Times story from June 24, 1988:

"The earth has been warmer in the first five months of this year than in any comparable period since measurements began 130 years ago, and the higher temperatures can now be attributed to a long-expected global warming trend linked to pollution, a space agency scientist reported today.
Until now, scientists have been cautious about attributing rising global temperatures of recent years to the predicted global warming caused by pollutants in the atmosphere, known as the "greenhouse effect." But today Dr. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told a Congressional committee that it was 99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere.
Dr. Hansen, a leading expert on climate change, said in an interview that there was no "magic number" that showed when the greenhouse effect was actually starting to cause changes in climate and weather. But he added, 'It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here'."

"the classic of the genre is a piece from the Boston Globe, dated Aug. 30, 2005, which begins: 'The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming'."
The author, Ross Gelbspan, writes "For years, the fossil fuel industry has lobbied the media to accord the same weight to a handful of global warming skeptics that it accords the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change--more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries reporting to the United Nations."

London's Guardian, a left-wing paper that has long been squarely in the global-warmist camp, carried a damning report titled "How to Reform the IPCC" see Fenruary 10, 2010 article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/10/ipcc-reform :
"The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] says its reports are policy relevant, but not policy prescriptive. Perhaps unknown to many people, the process is started and finished not by scientists but by political officials, who steer the way the information is presented in so-called summary for policymakers [SPM] chapters. Is that right, the Guardian asked?

'The Nobel prize was for peace not science . . . government employees will use it to negotiate changes and a redistribution of resources. It is not a scientific analysis of climate change,' said Anton Imeson, a former IPCC lead author from the Netherlands. 'For the media, the IPCC assessments have become an icon for something they are not. To make sure that it does not happen again, the IPCC should change its name and become part of something else. The IPCC should have never allowed itself to be branded as a scientific organisation. It provides a review of published scientific papers but none of this is much controlled by independent scientists'."

Global Warming Alarmists Adjusted Raw Temperature Data and Then Threw It Away - Now It's Trust Us

From Best of the Web Wall Street Journal Monday, November 30, 2009; see http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574567780798946274.html

From The Sunday Times November 29, 2009 "Climate change data dumped" at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece

"Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years. . . .
The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals--stored on paper and magnetic tape--were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building. . . .
Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. 'The CRU is basically saying, 'Trust us.' So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,' he said."

Al Gore Used Michael Mann's Global Warming Hockey Stick Chart in "An Inconvenient Truth"

See Hockey Stick Hokum, a July 14, 2006 Editorial at the Wall Street Journal at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115283824428306460.html?mod=opinion_main_review_and_outlooks

It includes:
■ The assertion "that the 1990s were the 'warmest decade in a millennium' and that 1998 was the warmest year in the last 1,000. … is often recited without qualification, and even without giving a source for the 'fact'."
■ "The claim originates from a 1999 paper by paleoclimatologist Michael Mann. Prior to Mr. Mann's work, the accepted view, as embodied in the U.N.'s 1990 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was that the world had undergone a warming period in the Middle Ages, followed by a mid-millennium cold spell and a subsequent warming period -- the current one. That consensus, as shown in the first of the two IPCC-provided graphs nearby, held that the Medieval warm period was considerably warmer than the present day."
■ "Mr. Mann's 1999 paper eliminated the Medieval warm period from the history books, with the result being the bottom graph you see here. It's a man-made global-warming evangelist's dream, with a nice, steady temperature oscillation that persists for centuries followed by a dramatic climb over the past century. In 2001, the IPCC replaced the first graph with the second in its third report on climate change, and since then it has cropped up all over the place."
■ "Al Gore uses it in his movie."
■ "In 2003, two Canadians, Ross McKitrick and Steven McIntyre, published an article in a peer-reviewed journal showing that Mr. Mann's methodology could produce hockey sticks from even random, trendless data."
■ "three researchers -- Edward J. Wegman of George Mason University, David W. Scott of Rice University and Yasmin H. Said of Johns Hopkins University -- are not climatologists; they're statisticians. Their task was to look at Mr. Mann's methods from a statistical perspective and assess their validity. Their conclusion is that Mr. Mann's papers are plagued by basic statistical errors that call his conclusions into doubt."
■ "Mr. Wegman brings to bear a technique called social-network analysis to examine the community of climate researchers. His conclusion is that the coterie of most frequently published climatologists is so insular and close-knit that no effective independent review of the work of Mr. Mann is likely. 'As analyzed in our social network,' Mr. Wegman writes, 'there is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis.' He continues: 'However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility'."
■ "published climatologists is so insular and close-knit that no effective independent review of the work of Mr. Mann is likely. 'As analyzed in our social network,' Mr. Wegman writes, 'there is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis.' He continues: 'However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility'."
■ "climate research often more closely resembles a mutual-admiration society than a competitive and open-minded search for scientific knowledge. …the dismissive reaction of the climate-research establishment to the McIntyre-McKitrick critique of the hockey stick confirms that impression."

Michael Mann Hockey Stick Chart and Embarrassing Global Warming Emails

See Steven McIntyre's web site http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7810 and post about the embarrassing emails regarding global warming "Mike’s Nature trick" written by by Jean S on November 20, 2009. It shows a November 16, 1999 email from Prof. Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia to including Mike Mann. The email includes "I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline."

Who is Michael Mann? A Professor at Pennsylvania State University, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._Mann "Michael E. Mann (born 28 December 1965) is an American climatologist, and author of more than 80 peer-reviewed journal publications. He has attained public prominence as lead author of a number of articles on paleoclimate and as one of the originators of a graph of temperature trends dubbed the "hockey stick graph" for the shape of the graph. The graph received both praise and criticism after its publication in an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report."

Did Mike Mann use a trick to manipulate the data? I bet he did. He was mentioned in a Wall Street Journal editorial "Kyoto by Degrees" way back on June 21, 2005 See http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111931466624264760,00.html It includes:
■ "Most global warming alarms are based on computer simulations that are largely speculative and depend on a multitude of debatable assumptions."
■ "there's the famous "hockey stick" data from American geoscientist Michael Mann. Prior to publication of Mr. Mann's data in 1998, all climate scientists accepted that the Earth had undergone large temperature variations within recorded human history. This included a Medieval warm period when the Vikings farmed Greenland and a "little ice age" more recently when the Thames River often froze solid. Seen in that perspective, the slight warming believed to have occurred in the past century could well be no more than a natural rebound, especially since most of that warming occurred before 1940."
■ "Mr. Mann, who suggested that both the history books and other historical temperature data were wrong. His temperature graph for the past millennium was essentially flat until the 20th century, when a sharp upward spike occurs -- i.e., it looks like a hockey stick. The graph was embraced by the global warming lobby as proof that we are in a crisis, and that radical solutions are called for."
■ "But then, in 2003, Canadian mathematician Stephen McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick published a critique calling Mr. Mann's work riddled with "collation errors, unjustifiable truncations or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal components, and other quality control defects." Correct for those errors, they showed, and the Medieval warm period returns."
■ "Mr. Mann has never offered a serious rebuttal to the McIntyre-McKitrick critique. He has refused to fully explain his methodology, claiming he's the victim of "intimidation." That's odd when you consider that the sine qua non of real science is independently verifiable and reproducible results."
■ "There's also the matter of the alleged melting of the Antarctic ice cover, threatening a catastrophic sea level rise. In fact, recent data suggest the ice is thickening and temperatures are dropping in most of the continent. Finally, an increasing number of scientists are concluding that variations in solar radiation associated with sun spots -- that's right, the heat of the sun -- play a major role in Earth's climate."

Global Warming Alarmists Ignore and/or Manipulate the Facts

I wrote this letter to the editor October 16, 2007.

Concerned and want to be informed about global warming? Where can one get accurate information?

See linked to the NASA website at http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=17087 It says” The high temperatures of 2004 make it the fourth hottest year since the late 1800s, the time that most scientists recognize as the start of accurate meteorological record keeping.” But that was written February 9, 2005. What does NASA say now?

See the NASA website http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environment/2005_warmest.html It says “The year 2005 was the warmest year in over a century, according to NASA scientists studying temperature data from around the world.” But that was written January 24, 2006. What does NASA say now?
From http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/2007/08/1998_no_longer_the_hottest_yea.html “Steve McIntyre, of Toronto operates www.climateaudit.org and began to investigate the data and the methods used to arrive at the results that were graphed by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies”.
See http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=/Culture/archive/200708/CUL20070816b.html “on Aug. 4, 2007 blogger Steve McIntyre of the ClimateAudit.org website, sent an email to NASA asserting that the data collected by the agency after 1999 was not being adjusted to allow for the times of day when readings were taken or the locations of the monitoring stations”. “NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt …said the data analysis was then adjusted accordingly, and a note of thanks emailed to McIntyre”. Corrected data is at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt

“According to the new data published by NASA, 1998 is no longer the hottest year ever. 1934 is. Four of the top 10 years of US CONUS high temperature deviations are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999).”
Well, at a minimum, it’s complicated.