Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Fact check on science deniers Henry Waxman, Ed Markey, they deny longtime US CO2 drop, failure of cap & trade to lower CO2, decades of US climate 'action' across 13 federal agencies, and current science on the Arctic and Antarctic. Updated, more on Aug. 2012 Arctic storm

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Congratulations, Congressmen, you won and it's all over! Whatever weather the US has had in 2012, it can't be due to CO2 because US CO2 has plunged and is heading lower. The same cannot be said of other countries despite billions spent on cap and trade and extra taxes.

9/25/12, "House Dems tally violent weather in push for climate action," The Hill, B. Geman

"Two senior House Democrats are circulating a detailed tally of extreme weather in the U.S. and worldwide as they seek to rebuild political support for congressional action to battle global warming.

Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) – authors of the big climate-change bill that narrowly passed the House in 2009 – released a report Tuesday about record-setting heat waves, droughts, violent storms and other costly disasters.... 


While the Republican-led House of Representatives refuses to take climate action, carbon pollution is mixing a deadly cocktail of heat and extreme weather that is costing lives and billions of dollars in damages,” Markey, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement."...
  • [Ed. note: What is "carbon pollution?"]
continuing: "The report also looks at global weather and trends, such as the new record-low in Arctic sea ice measured in mid-September. Overall, it states that global weather has been “extreme over the last several years.”"...
continuing: "Waxman said the report shows “overwhelming” evidence that climate change is under way and should prompt a change of course on Capitol Hill. He criticized Republicans who “deny the science and block action.”

We don’t have any more time to waste,” said Waxman, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Democratic staff for the energy and resources panels prepared the report."


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For those unaware of the good news, US CO2 emissions have dropped steadily since at least 2006 and are going lower! This has even been acknowledged in the NY Times. Other countries' CO2 hasn't dropped, despite hundreds of billions spent on Waxman-Markey favored cap and trade and extra taxes.

This isn't to say US taxpayers haven't become partners with the 'climate' industry. Trillions have been taken from taxpayers for climate expenses via agency budget allocations, tax subsidies, diversion of US military to climate or green projects, countless federal regulations, vast sums shipped out in foreign aid for 'climate' endeavors, etc. Devoting 13 federal agencies to 'climate' matters is hardly 'lagging' in action!  

Global Warming 'action' was institutionalized in US government in 1990 by George Bush the 1st in the "U.S. Global Change Research Act of 1990." (He mentions CO2 near the end). The US even exports fuel now.!

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6/4/12, "Climate change stunner: USA leads world in CO2 cuts since 2006," Vancouver Observer, Saxifrage






"Not only that, but as my top chart shows, US CO2 emissions are falling even faster than what President Obama pledged in the global Copenhagen Accord."...

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NASA says summer 2012 Arctic Ice melt was largely due to a big storm:

9/21/12, "NASA says Arctic cyclone played "key role" in record ice melt (0:47)," Reuters

"Weather data collected by NASA suggests that this summer's record Arctic ice melt may have been partially due to a powerful cyclone that scientists say ''wreaked havoc'' on ice cover during the month of August. Rob Muir reports."

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More on the science of the 2012 Arctic storm:

9/24/12, "NASA finally admits it Arctic cyclone in August 'broke up' and 'wreaked havoc' on sea ice -- Reuters reports Arctic storm played 'key role' in ice reduction," Climate Depot, Marc Morano 

"NASA: 'The cyclone remained stalled over the arctic for several days...pushing [sea ice] south to warmer waters where it melted'"

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How the 2012 Arctic summer storm effected the ice:

8/9/12, "A Closer Look at Ice Impacts of a Rare Arctic Summer Storm,
" Dot Earth, Andrew Revkin

"I got in touch with William Chapman, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, researcher who maintains the Cryosphere Today Web site, which was a source for some of the content on the Arctic Sea Ice blog. Below you can read his “Your Dot” description of the storm and analysis of its possible repercussions."...

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12/26/12, "Record Arctic Storm Melted Sea Ice," LiveScience.com, B. Oskin

"Months before Hurricane Sandy hurled the Atlantic Ocean into houses and cities along the East Coast, another record-breaking cyclone battered North America, helping push this year's Arctic sea ice to a record low, a new study finds.

Arctic sea ice has been declining for decades, reaching a record low in September 2007 and hitting that record again in 2012

"The Great Arctic Cyclone of August 2012" arose in Siberia on Aug. 2 and crossed the Arctic Ocean to Canada, lasting an unusually long 13 days. The cyclone hit a pressure minimum of 966 millibars on Aug. 6, the lowest ever recorded for an Arctic storm, professors Ian Simmonds and Irina Rudeva of the University of Melbourne in Australia report in the Dec. 15 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The pressure reading is only 26 mb higher than Hurricane Sandy's record low of 940 mb. (A typical low-pressure system usually hits around 1,000 mb.) 

"This pressure minimum and cyclone longevity are very atypical of Arctic storms, particularly in August," the authors write in the study. "We conclude that [the storm] was the most extreme August Arctic cyclone."

In terms of key properties, including pressure and radius, the Arctic cyclone ranks 13 out of all 19,625 Arctic storms on record since 1979, Simmonds and Rudeva report. "This storm truly deserves the title of 'The Great Arctic Cyclone of August 2012'," they said.
 
Impact on sea ice

Simmonds and Rudeva report that the storm greatly affected the record low sea ice in the Arctic this September.

"[A]nalyses we have conducted indicate [the storm] caused the dispersion and separation of a significant amount of ice, while its removal left the main pack more exposed to wind and waves associated with [the storm], facilitating the further decay of the main pack," they write in their report.

Scientists with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., agree, saying that thinner Arctic sea ice cover this summer made the ice more vulnerable to weather. "Because the ice was thin and already decaying by the time of the storm, it was quickly broken up and melted by winds and waves," they write in an October report on record-breaking Arctic summer.

The storm cut off a large section of sea ice north of the Chukchi Sea near Alaska and pushed it south to warmer waters that made it melt entirely, NASA said in a statement published Sept. 19. It also broke vast extensions of ice into smaller pieces more likely to melt, NASA said.

Frigid storms

Every year, there are thousands of cyclones in the Arctic, some with hurricane-force winds. Unlike typical hurricanes, however, these storms tend to be smaller and are shorter-lived. [Infographic: How, When & Where Hurricanes Form]

However, other than the August storm, the weather pattern in 2012 does not appear to have been as favorable in promoting sea ice loss as in 2007, according to the National Snow & Ice Data Center.

Early summer storms over the central Arctic can bulk up sea ice, studies have found. The low-pressure systems create a wind pattern that keeps the ice in colder water, and the storms can bring cool temperatures. Conversely, in years when the weather in the Arctic is calm, more ice is lost by the end of the Arctic summer.

Weather during 2012 was near average, with the exception of the August storm, the data center said. In contrast, the summer of 2007 — the last sea ice record low — featured warm southerly winds along the shores of the East Siberian and Chukchi seas, favoring strong ice melt in these sectors and pushing the ice away from the coast, leaving open water."

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AMA paper finds Antarctic Sea Ice models have underestimated recent observations:

2012, "An Initial Assessment of Antarctic Sea Ice Extent in the CMIP5 Models," Journal of Climate, American Meteorological Assn. John Turner, Tom Bracegirdle, Tony Phillips, Gareth J. Marshall, and J. Scott Hosking,  British Antarctic Survey, National Environment Research Council, Cambridge, UK.

The paper is summarized below including a relevant graph:
finds that most climate models erroneously predict that Antarctic sea ice extent decreased over the past 30 years, which "differs markedly from that observed."  As noted in the abstract, Antarctic sea ice has confounded the models by instead increasing over the satellite era. In fact, it is currently at a record extent that is more than 2 standard deviations above the 1979-2000 average. The authors lament, "The negative [Antarctic sea ice] trends in most of the model runs over 1979 - 2005 are a continuation of an earlier decline, suggesting that the processes responsible for the observed increase over the last 30 years are not being simulated correctly." (graph below, NSIDC via HockeySchtick)
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9/21/12, "Polar sea ice could set ANOTHER record this year," UK Register, Lewis Page

"The world's media is extremely excited at the thirty-year record low extent of sea ice at the North Pole which occurred just days ago: but almost nobody is reporting on the fact that something almost equally unusual is going on down around the coasts of Antarctica.

Even as the Arctic sea ice starts to grow again from its summery shrunken condition, the austral ice at the planet's other pole may have yet to reach its wintery peak extent. As the graph [below] shows, at the moment it is much larger than normal for the time of year, and depending on what happens in the next week or so it might hit a record high. There has already been a point at which a record for that date occurred, and only a handful of higher daily satellite readings have ever been taken.

The sea ice around the coasts of Antarctica on average covers roughly the same amount of sea as the north-polar sea ice does: it's just as important, though you wouldn't know it by looking at the world's press right now. Another thing not everyone knows is that even as Arctic ice has been on a long decline since satellite measurements began, the Antarctic ice has been growing steadily (this despite well-publicised ice shelf losses around the Western Antarctic peninsula, bucking the overall continental trend)....

There are some other things to bear in mind, too: melting sea ice, of course, doesn't mean rising sea levels the way melting glaciers or ice sheets on land might. Then there's the fact that the satellite record is so short and the polar regions so little known: longer term variations like the one we're seeing may be entirely normal."...(NSIDC graph via UK Register)

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8/16/12, "CO2 emissions in U.S. drop to 20-year low," AP via Politico

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Above, Antarctic Sea Ice as of August 2012, dating from 1979, NSIDC. (As stated above, this short a time span isn't meant to prove or disprove CO2 terror, but should be considered along with other information).
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It will be hard breaking the news to Goldman Sachs:

CO2 endangerment has been the justification for diverting hundreds of billions of hard-earned tax dollars for over 2 decades at the expense of human beings.

The entire theory of catastrophic human-caused climate change/global warming rests on the notion that humans are creating too much CO2 and that it's killing people. A commodity trading market was even created just to trade carbon dioxide "offsets" for the alleged purpose of lowering CO2 in the atmosphere. This hasn't happened but CO2 traders still have billions at stake in it. Without the US as a practical and philosophical partner in "CO2 terror," world carbon markets would likely go bankrupt. This would be bad news for Goldman Sachs and many others.


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12/28/10, "Fresno, Zimbabwe," IBD editorial

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7/15/12, "Recession Special: Cleaner Air," NY Times, Matthew Wald

"What the government has not mandated, the economy is doing on its own: emissions of global warming gases in the United States are down.
 
According to the Energy Department, carbon dioxide emissions peaked in this country in 2005 and will not reach that level again until the early 2020s."...
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US CO2 has plunged and is going lower:

6/26/12, "The Incredible Shrinking Carbon Pollution Forecast - Part 2," switchboard.nrdc.org, Dan Lashof

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6/29/12, "US Carbon Output Forecasts Shrink Again," American Interest, Walter Russell Mead

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A 2011 report noted EIA results through 2009, US CO2 emissions dropped steadily since 1999. If, hypothetically, US temperatures have been on the increase, they couldn't possibly be related to US carbon dioxide emissions:

4/14/11, "Biggest Drop in U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions," World Climate Report

"In 2009, greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. experienced their biggest drop since the U.S. Energy Information Administration began tracking them during the 1990-2009 timeframe."

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Congressmen, why are you cutting back on greenhouse gas measurements? Trillions of dollars rested on these measurements or at least what they were said to be.

"NOAA has stopped measuring greenhouse gas levels at a dozen ground stations, eliminated some aircraft monitoring and cut the frequency of remaining measurements in half."... Researchers' protest published in Science Mag.

9/4/12, "NOAA: Budget woes force a halt to climate monitoring at 12 ground stations," eenews.net, Lauren Morello

"The federal government is cutting back its ability to monitor greenhouse gas emissions, and scientists are crying foul.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spends roughly $6 million per year to sample carbon dioxide, methane and nearly 20 other gases using a global network of ground stations, tall towers and aircraft.

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1/25/2009, "Global warming industry becomes too big to fail," Timothy Carney, Washington Examiner

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9/25/12, Democrat Climate Report on alleged climate change

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5 tools for destroying the US were provided by Republicans:

1990,
The
U.S. Global Change Research Act of 1990, by Pres. George Bush the first, which spoke of human induced "global warming"

1970, The EPA was created by Richard Nixon

1970, The Clean Air Act signed by President Richard Nixon

1970,
NOAA was created by Richard Nixon.

1973,
The Endangered Species Act was created by Richard Nixon





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