Thursday, December 03, 2015



Is there no limit to the utter nonsense poured out in the name of global warming?? And it's not just some Al Gore type. It's coming from NASA's chief scientist



Isn't the blonde Ellen Stofan gorgeous?  Maybe she is just NASA's token female

I quote Ms Stofan:  "Photosynthesis declines rapidly at temperatures above about 95 degrees Fahrenheit".  Has the good woman never heard of the tropics?  I was born in the tropics and temperatures there are very commonly above 95F, quite a bit above sometimes.  So were the plants around me all dying?  Not on your Nelly!  You've never seen such vigorous growth. They'll almost leap out and grab you and yours if you let them. So they were all photosynthesizing like mad, in other words. I think the woman must be mad.


Climate change due to human activity is causing visible shifts on our planet, and NASA is uniquely positioned to observe these effects.  “If we continue on our current course, it’s going to be hard to feed this planet because it’s so hot,” Ellen Stofan, NASA’s chief scientist, told Business Insider.

In fact, photosynthesis — the process all plants use to convert carbon dioxide into carbohydrates — declines rapidly at temperatures above about 95 degrees Fahrenheit, Stofan explained during a talk October 16 at The James Beard Foundation Food Conference, a meeting to discuss the future of food.

And the evidence suggests that we could reach too-high temperatures too soon.

Stofan has spent most of her career studying Venus, a planet with a major greenhouse effect — a fancy term for a planet’s atmosphere trapping the sun’s heat and warming its surface.

Here on Earth, NASA satellites are seeing a similar trend, and it’s veering toward dangerous levels. This warming trend is bad news for our ability to grow food.

This wouldn’t be the first time human-caused climate change has affected our ability to grow food, Stofan pointed out. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s, which had a devastating effect on agriculture in the US and Canada, can be traced to poor farming practices and severe drought brought on by climate change. [Whoa!  I thought anthropogenic global warming started in the second half of C20, not the first half!  She doesn't even have her Warmist gospel straight]

SOURCE





Fiorina: ‘It Is Delusional’ to Say Climate Change Is Our Most Severe Security Threat

Obama and the Left are just using Warmism to divert attention from a problem they have no clue how to solve, if indeed they want to solve it. The problem?  Islam

 GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina told “Fox News Sunday” that it is “delusional” to suggest that “climate change is our near-term most severe security threat.”

“It is delusional for President Obama and Hillary Clinton and anyone else to say that climate change is our near-term most severe security threat. It is ISIS, period, followed closely by Iran and perhaps Russia,” said Fiorina.

President Barack Obama has said on multiple occasions – including in his State of the Union address in January - that climate change is the greatest threat. In May, he even linked Islamic terrorism to climate change. In 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry calledclimate change “the biggest challenge of all that we face right now.”

“Your reaction to the summit and to the contention by some in the Obama administration that climate change is, if not the biggest, certainly the most immediate threat to our national security?” host Chris Wallace asked Fiorina.

“Well, that's delusional. It is delusional for President Obama and Hillary Clinton and anyone else to say that climate change is our near-term most severe security threat. It is ISIS, period, followed closely by Iran and perhaps Russia,” said Fiorina.

“President Obama continues to think that somehow our behavior causes terrorism, so he says the climate change summit is a powerful rebuke. No, it's not,” she said.

Obama is taking part in the latest UN climate change summit in Paris, also known as the COP21 event. In a speech last week, he linked the summit to the war on terror, saying, “What a powerful rebuke to the terrorists it will be when the world stands as one and shows that we will not be deterred from building a better future for our children.”

“The terrorists don't care that we're gathering in Paris other than it provides a target, just as he said, well, Republicans are giving terrorists a recruiting tool when we don't think Syrian refugees should be allowed to enter this country if we cannot properly vet them,” Fiorina said.

“President Obama is delusional about this. He’s delusional about the threat, which apparently is why he won't do anything about it,” she said.

“Do you think it's worthwhile for him to go to Paris, to go to this international summit and try to work out emissions limits?” Wallace asked.

“Well, look, if you read the fine print of the science, what the scientists tell us, all those scientists who say climate change is real and manmade, they also tell us that a single nation acting alone can make no difference at all. that it would take a concerted global effort over 30 years, costing trillions of dollars. I think the likelihood of that is near zero,” Fiorina said.

“So, no, I don’t think it’s particularly productive,” she said. “I think it would be far more productive if President Obama instead was there leading an international coalition to stop human trafficking or an international coalition for humanitarian relief for the refugees or an international coalition to defeat ISIS. All those would be more useful than time in Paris spent talking about climate change.”

SOURCE





Paris climate summit: The doom-mongers should look at the science

In Paris, 147 heads of government will give speeches on what they agree is the world’s most pressing problem: climate change

So, the problem they are discussing - not warming, but dangerous warming - has not yet manifested itself. It lies in the future. The climate has changed, for sure, as it always does, but not yet in a way that is harmful or unprecedented. As far as we can tell from satellites, global average temperatures are less than half a degree warmer than they were in 1979, when satellite data became available, though surface thermometers suggest a bit more warming.

This year looks likely to be a lot warmer than last, though still not as warm in both standard satellite data sets as 1998, the last time that a strong El NiƱo in the Pacific Ocean boosted the global air temperature a lot (surface thermometers say it will be warmer than 1998, once adjusted in various ways). The average trend over the past 35 years is 0.1 degrees of warming per decade according to the satellite data, less than 0.2 per decade according to the surface thermometers. Neither trend is fast enough to produce significantly dangerous climate change even by the latter part of this century.

The warming has been much slower than was predicted when the scare began. Nor is it evenly spread. The Antarctic continent has warmed hardly at all, and the entire southern hemisphere has warmed about half as fast as the northern. The Arctic has warmed more than the tropics, night has warmed more than day and winter has warmed more than summer. Cities have warmed faster than the countryside, but that’s because of local warming factors, not global ones: buildings, vehicles, industry, pavements and people trap warmth.

How unusual is today’s temperature? As I did this weekend, you have no doubt had conversations along the following lines recently: “Hasn’t it been mild? End of November and we’ve hardly had a frost yet!” All true. But then be honest: can you not recall such conversations throughout your life? I can. And here’s what the Met Office, the UK’s national weather service, had to say about November 1938, long before I was born: “The weather of the month was distinguished by exceptional mildness: at numerous places it was the mildest November on record.” In 1953 November was even milder and there was no air frost recorded in Oxford in the last four months of the year at all.

I am not saying it has not generally become warmer, but that the variation dwarfs the trend. Let’s go back a little further, to the Middle Ages. It used to be argued by some that the “medieval warm period” of about a thousand years ago, when mountain glaciers retreated, vines grew further north and Iceland was widely cultivated, was confined to Europe. We now know from multiple sources of evidence that it was global. Tree lines were higher than today in many mountain ranges, for example. Both North Pacific and Antarctic Ocean water temperatures were 0.65C warmer than today.

Go back yet further, still within the current interglacial period, to the so-called Holocene Optimum of 6,000-9,000 years ago. Ocean temperatures were up to two degrees warmer than today, the Arctic Ocean was nearly or completely ice-free at the end of summer in many years, and the boreal forest in Siberia extended 150 miles further north than today. July temperatures were up to six degrees warmer than today in the Siberian Arctic.

Was this Holocene Optimum a horrible time of droughts, storms, disease and famine? Not especially. It was the period in which agriculture spread rapidly across the globe from five or seven centres of invention. Abundant rainfall in Africa led to lakes in the Sahara with crocodiles and hippos in them, surrounded by green vegetation in the monsoon season.

Today’s gentle warming, progressing much more slowly than expected, is also accompanied by generally improving conditions. Globally, droughts are declining very slightly. Storms are not increasing in frequency or intensity: this year has been one of the quietest hurricane seasons. Floods are worse in some places but usually because of land-use changes, not more rainfall. Death rates from floods, storms and droughts have plummeted and are now far lower than they were a century ago. Today, arid areas such as western Australia or the Sahel region of Africa are getting generally greener, thanks to the effect of more carbon dioxide in the air, which makes plants grow faster and resist drought better.

Besides, we have to make allowance for a human tendency to read far too much into short-term weather changes - and to assume that all change is bad. Consider this newspaper cutting: “The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot. [There are] hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone.” It’s not from recent decades at all, but from 1922. Or this one: “The ice of the Arctic Ocean is melting so rapidly that more than one third of it has disappeared in fifty years”. From 1940.

In fact, the Arctic, and the world as a whole then cooled between 1950 and 1970, which then led to these headlines, all from 1970: “Scientists See Ice Age in the Future” (The Washington Post), “Is Mankind Manufacturing a New Ice Age for Itself?” (Los Angeles Times), “Scientist predicts a new ice age by 21st century” (The Boston Globe), “US and Soviet Press Studies of a Colder Arctic” (The New York Times) and (my favourite) “Dirt Will Bring New Ice Age” (The Sydney Morning Herald).

The 40,000 people meeting in Paris over the next 12 days are committed to the view that the weather is certain to do something nasty towards the end of this century unless we cut emissions. In this, they are out of line with scientists. A survey of the members of the American Meteorological Society in 2012 found that only 52 per cent agree that climate change is mostly man-made, and as to its being very harmful if unchecked, only 34 per cent of AMS members agree. The rest said they think it will be either not harmful or not very harmful.

Are we certain we are not overreacting?

SOURCE





Britons warned to watch out for RATS invading their homes this winter as odds are slashed on it being the coldest winter in a century

But actual weather doesn't matter, of course. According to NOAA, the November just past will be the warmest ever. See if I am right. When you have Warmists in charge of the temperature record, it's like employing a fox to guard the hen house

Britons have been warned to watch out for rats invading their homes after the odds were slashed on it being the coldest winter in a century.

Pest controllers say rodents are responsible for causing millions of pounds of damage to properties across the UK by gnawing their way indoors to escape freezing weather.

The warning comes after temperatures plummeted as low as -6C over parts of Britain last week - sparking fears the country will experience its coldest winter in decades.
Britons have been warned to watch out for rats invading their homes after the odds were slashed on it being the coldest winter in a century

Britons have been warned to watch out for rats invading their homes after the odds were slashed on it being the coldest winter in a century

Pest control firms normally see a 40 per cent rise in call-outs for rodent infestations at this time of year and have offered advice on how to stop rats from finding their way indoors.

A spokesman for Cleankill Environmental Services said today: 'With forecasters predicting the harshest winter the UK has seen in half a century, pest controllers are now advising people to make sure their homes are fully protected against invading rodents.

'At a time when we feel like bolting our doors and keeping winter cold outside, it is hardly surprising that mice, rats and squirrels are trying to join us in our sanctuaries of warmth.

'They will not only scratch, gnaw and rip items apart to make nesting materials but they will also chew beams and joists, causing structural damage, and through electrical cables, which can cause fires.'

Tips for avoiding an infestation this winter include clearing out stair cupboards, checking pipework for holes and checking in the loft for signs of rats.

The firm also suggests checking brickwork to make sure air bricks, which allow ventilation, are intact as larger Victorian ones have gaps large enough for rodents to sneak through.

Other tips include cleaning under kitchen units and keeping a tidy garden and putting brush strips on doors.

Mother- of-two Rosie Spears, of Tunbridge Wells, Kent, said she had been 'invaded' by rats for the past three years before getting a pest controller in to kill them off.

The 43-year-old said: 'The whole experience was horrid. They kept me awake at night with their scuttling around and gnawing, but whenever we set traps they just ignored them.

'We put up with it for three years and then got someone in and they were gone within a month, so hopefully this year they won't come back as we've plugged all the gaps we can see.'

Ladbrokes has cut their odds from 4/1 to 7/2 on Britain experiencing its coldest winter in more than 100 years after sleet, snow and ice continued to sweep across the country.

There have been reports temperatures could drop around the end of December and fears that more than 40,000 sick and elderly could die as a result of the cold.

SOURCE





Expedition To Study Global Warming Put On Hold Because Of TOO MUCH ICE

An expedition to study the effects of global warming was put on hold Wednesday. The reason? Too much ice.

The CCGS Amundsen, a Medium Arctic icebreaker and Arctic research vessel operated by the Canadian Coast Guard, was to travel throughout Hudson Bay, a body of water in northeastern Canada, but was rerouted to help ships who were stuck in the icy water.

A Coast Guard officer said the conditions were the “worst he’s seen in 20 years,” reports CBC news.

“Obviously it has a large impact on us,” says Martin Fortier, executive director of ArcticNet, which coordinates research on the vessel. “It’s a frustrating situation.”

ArcticNet is a network of scientists who study “the impacts of climate change and modernization in the coastal Canadian Arctic.”

The vessel is one of only two icebreakers in the Arctic, leaving the ship obligated to reroute their travel plans to help break ice for resupply ships.

Johnny Leclair, an assistant commissioner for the Coast Guard, said there should be two more icebreakers headed to the Arctic in the next week, which would free up their ship to continue on their originally planned trip.

Fortier is hopeful the season will still be productive.

“The people planning the large expeditions have a plan B,” Fortier said. “We have already curtailed or either moved to a later date some of the stations and some of the areas we were suppose to sample.”

The ship even has a blog post that it has been updating. Here is an excerpt:

“Meanwhile, we’ve run into ice and out of darkness. During our night of action, the sun didn’t set, so only the face of my watch was there to tell me that it was 3 AM as we were tying down incubators. At five thirty in the morning, as the sun rose — or, rather, got a bit brighter in the sky — filling the world with a deep pink, and the waves turned glassy and viscous and bright, our fingers finally fell numb and our setup was finally done, just in time for a quick nap before breakfast. Tonight, likely, well see the stuck ships.”

SOURCE





Obama talks the talk

His speeches sound good -- until you  check his facts

In opening remarks Monday at the climate change conference in Paris, France, President Barack Obama again tied the terrorist attacks in Paris to climate change, saying the conference is a “rejection of those who would tear down our world.”

“We stand united in solidarity to deliver justice to the terrorist network responsible for those attacks but to protect our people and uphold the enduring values that keep us strong and keep us free, and we salute the people of Paris for insisting this crucial conference go on – an act of defiance that proves nothing will deter us from building the future we want for our children,” Obama said.

“What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than marshaling our best efforts to serve it?” he added.

Obama said the world leaders have “come to Paris to show our resolve,” and he offered “condolences to the people of France for the barbaric attacks on this beautiful city.”

“One of the enemies we’ll be fighting at this conference is cynicism – the notion we can’t do anything about climate change,” the president said.

Obama echoed comments he made while visiting Alaska this summer, saying he saw a “a glimpse of our children’s fate if climate keeps changing faster than our efforts to address it.”

“This summer I saw the effects of climate change firsthand in our northernmost state Alaska where the sea is already swallowing villages and eroding shorelines, where permafrost thaws and the tundra burns, where glaciers are melting at a pace unprecedented in modern times,” he said at Monday's summit.

“It was a preview of one possible future – a glimpse of our children’s fate if the climate keeps changing faster than our efforts to address it: submerged countries, abandoned cities, fields that no longer grow, political disruptions that trigger new conflict, and even more floods of desperate peoples seeking the sanctuary of nations not their own,” Obama added.

“Earlier this month in Dubai, after years of delay, the world agreed to work together to cut the super pollutants known as HFCs. That’s progress. Already, prior to Paris, more than 180 countries representing nearly 95 percent of global emissions have put forward their own climate targets. That is progress,” the president said.

Obama said the U.S. is already on track to reach emissions targets he set six years ago in Copenhagen to reduce carbon emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2020, so he set a new target last year to reduce emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 in 10 years.

SOURCE

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2 comments:

slkTAC said...

Did you ever notice how many Venus worshippers there are at NASA—and the token female is one of them. I think it's because they can create science fiction, call it science and then name-call anyone who disagrees. I suppose we should be happy they don't throw the unbelievers in the volcano as in past primitive societies. At least now, there are lawyers and the punishment is a slow, painful one to any who oppose the Gods of Global Warming.

Anonymous said...

"Photosynthesis declines rapidly at temperatures above about 95 degrees Fahrenheit".- ignorant NASA airhead, (...or should I say vacuum head?)

My Dad was in the S. Pacific during WWII. He said that if you clear a path through the jungle one day, it may not be clear anymore the next because of the rapidity with which the vegetation regrows.

NASA under Obama - boldly going nowhere.