November 2008

(This is laugh out loud material–note the GISS temperature anomalies from Russia for 2008 in the chart below! –Julie)

From Watts Up with That

October 2008 “warmest” October on record (according to GISS)
2005 temperature revised upward

Update: Thanks to an email from John S. – a patron of climateaudit.org – we have learned that the Russian data in NOAA’s GHCN v2.mean dataset is corrupted. For most (if not all) stations in Russia, the September data has been replicated as October data, artificially raising the October temperature many degrees. The data from NOAA is used by GISS to calculate the global temperature. Thus the record-setting anomaly for October 2008 is invalid and we await the highly-publicised corrections from NOAA and GISS.

GISS (Goddard Institute of Space Studies) Surface Temperature Analysis (GISSTemp) released their monthly global temperature anomaly data for October 2008. Following is the monthly global ?T from January to October 2008:

Year J  F  M  A  M  J  J  A  S  O
2007 85 61 59 64 55 53 53 56 50 54
2008 14 25 62 36 40 32 52 39 50 78

Here is a plot of the GISSTemp monthly anomaly since January 1979 (keeping in line with the time period displayed for UAH). I have added a simple 12-month moving average displayed in red.

The addition of October has changed some of the temperatures for earlier months:

GISS 2008   J  F  M  A  M  J  J  A  S  O
As of 9/08  14 25 62 36 40 29 53 50 49 ..
As of 10/08 14 25 62 36 40 32 52 39 50 78

The 0.78 C anomaly in October is the largest ever for October, and one of the largest anomalies ever recorded. Although North America was cooler than normal, Asia apparently suffered from a massive heat wave.

Also, after several months of being downgraded to a 0.61 C anomaly, 2005 has been lifted back to 0.62 C.

Why bother getting elected officials’ votes when you can accomplish your purposes by presidential fiat?

An article in yesterday’s Washington Post reveals just what the future will look like under the new president.

The president-elect has said, for example, that he intends to quickly reverse the Bush administration’s decision last December to deny California the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles…California had sought permission from the [2] Environmental Protection Agency to require that greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles be cut by 30 percent between 2009 and 2016, effectively mandating that cars achieve a fuel economy standard of at least 36 miles per gallon within eight years. Seventeen other states had promised to adopt California’s rules, representing in total 45 percent of the nation’s automobile market.

Since twenty-one percent of new cars are sold in California, this means that the auto makers would need to spend billions of dollars to comply. According to the WSJ, “The auto industry is the nation’s largest manufacturing sector, accounting for almost 4% of U.S. gross domestic product. It employs about 2.5 million people directly or indirectly, and spends tens of billions of dollars a year in research and development.” Yet granting California’s waiver would certainly significantly harm if not sink this industry, since actions to increase the CAFE standard in the past have [4] caused many of the problems Detroit is now having.

[click to continue…]

Richard Courtney provides an excellent refutation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s breathless claim—“Current warming sharpest climate change in 5,000 years.”

A key – and blatantly misleading – statement in the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of AR4 says; “The linear warming trend over the last 50 years is nearly twice that for the last 100 years”. But this statement was not in the drafts provided for peer review. It was inserted into the final draft of the report and that final draft was only submitted to government representatives for comment…(Also, the IPCC’s non-peer reviewed) published graph (Page 104 on this link) shows the slope over the last 25 years is significantly greater than that of the last 50 years, which in turn is greater than the slope over 100 years. This is said to show that global warming is accelerating….Thus, policymakers who only look at the numbers (and don’t think about the different timescales) will be misled into thinking that global warming is accelerating. Of course, the IPCC could have started near the left hand end of the graph and thus obtained the opposite conclusion!  In case this is not obvious, I provide the following graph that does it together with an explanation of the presentation of the data. (Parentheses added)

Ha! So using the IPCC’s misleading shifting of time scales, one could also say that the linear warming trend over the first 50 years of the twentieth century is nearly twice that for the whole century, too!

First, it was called “global warming.” But then it stopped warming, so alarmists changed it to “climate change.” But that’s insufficiently scary, especially when it goes head to head with the much more ominous sounding “financial crisis" that has relegated global warming/climate change to the backburner over the last two months.

Catchy!

Problems ensure whenever governments substitute targets for a viable strategy. This is oft evident in climate policy, where talk is cheap and targets even cheaper. Consider the United Kingdom’s goal of getting 15% of its electricity from renewable energy like wind power by 2020. On paper, bureaucrats and regulators no doubt composed a smashing plan to achieve the UK’s wind energy targets. In real life, these best laid plans are falling apart.

According to the Guardian, “Executives say difficulties in building [wind] farms and connecting them to the national power grid, unwillingness by investors to fund them and a shortage of turbines could stop Britain hitting its target of generating 15 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020.”

No funds, no farms, no turbines, no towers…Really, could anything else possibly go wrong?