Arctic Ice Takes Revenge

Science Matters

Vessels Kapitan Dranitsyn and Admiral Makarov ‘marooned’ in east for the rest of winter after getting trapped off Chukotka.

Russian Convoy Takes Advantage of Reduced Arctic Ice Extent

In the first such crossing since Soviet times, the convoy had earlier delivered supplies for the world’s first floating heat and power plant to be assembled in Chukotka, Russia’s most easternmost region, after a successful journey from Arkhangelsk to Pevek lasting from 14 December to 7 January.

The ease of the sailing was seen as a sign that climate warming in the Arctic can open up shipping lanes even in midwinter.  From the Siberian Times, Blow to Northern Sea Route as voyages of two icebreakers are… broken by ice

Reports of Arctic Ice Demise Prove Premature

But, despite significant temperature rises across the northern latitudes in recent years, the vessels became quickly stuck in thick, compressed ice on their return journey.

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Come off it, Offit!

Watts Up With That?

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

When a medical doctor with no prior record of publication in the learned journals of climate science wanders off the reservation and writes for a collectivist website about the totalitarians’ favorite Trojan horse, global warming, one expects nonsense.

One is not disappointed by: When Scientists Hate Science

Paul Offit

Paul Offit is a paediatrician. Yet, in an article for one of the sillier groupthink websites, he considers himself qualified to state that the “climate denialists” President Trump and his appointees to EPA and Energy, Scott Pruitt and Rick Perry, “deny the fact that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the environment have trapped heat, causing an increase in the Earth’s surface temperature … and consequent climate disruption”.

Offit loses ten points for his deliberate and malicious likening of those who disagree with him to Holocaust deniers. This is mere hate speech – and it…

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Gore gets bitten again by another factual blunder

Watts Up With That?

Gore again, this time it is about mosquitoes, malaria, and elevation. Some history checking by mosquito epidemiologist Paul Reiter reveals he’s wrong about Nairobi. Turns out that some species can live as high as 10,000 feet. Even as far back as 1927 in this letter to Time Magazine, people knew of mosquitoes at the snow line. A 1960 study shows mosquitoes in the California Sierra Nevada mountains and another shows mosquitoes in the mountains of Africa. Of course those aren’t malaria carrying anopheles mosquitoes, but I’ll point out that Gore was not specific about which mosquitoes were “climbing”.  And if there is indeed a mosquito borne malaria problem in Nairobi, there’s this contradictory evidence: In a presentation during the 8th International Conference on Urban Health, held in Nairobi 18–23 October 2009, it was stated that of nearly one thousand Nairobi residents tested, none were positive…

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New book holds the EPA’s feet to the fire

Watts Up With That?

by Charles G. Battig

Steve Milloy is one persistent gentleman. Combining his legal and statistics education, he has spent most of his years ferreting out the false use of statistical techniques in the field of epidemiology. He continues the same quest in his latest book “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA” (2016) Bench Press . This is his sixth such book since “Science-Based Risk Assessment: A Piece of the Superfund Puzzle” (1995).

Just what is epidemiology? One definition:

“the science concerned with the study of the factors determining and influencing the frequency and distribution of disease, injury, and other health-related events and their causes in a defined human population for the purpose of establishing programs to prevent and control their development and spread.”

Milloy notes that “The key to the value of epidemiology as an investigative tool is that a researcher must be looking…

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NOAA Jumps The Shark In Tampa Bay

Watts Up With That?

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach [see Update at the end]

I thought I might write about how I research a subject. Over at Dr. Judith’s excellent website, she periodically puts out a list of interesting papers that she has come across. This time it was “Week In Review: Water Edition”. She gave a link to an article from a Tampa Bay news station headlined Study: Sea level rise may severely impact Tampa by 2040.

Why did I pick this article? To me it’s obviously bogus. Sea level is rising around the world at something like 8-12 inches (200 – 300 mm) per century. It’s only twenty-four years until 2040, call it a quarter century. So by then Tampa will likely see on the order of 2 – 3 inches of sea level rise. That will not have a “severe impact” anywhere. So I went off to read the…

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Skin in the game

Climate Etc.

by Judith Curry

Some reflections on my transition from academic climate research to private sector weather forecasting and regional climate change assessments.

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George Will: Academia may now be beyond satire

Watts Up With That?

Note to readers: This Sunday column by George Will appeared in my local newspaper this week, and I thought it relevant to repeat the headline and excerpts of it here, because what Will discusses is relevant to the fractured state of climate science. Peer review has turned into “pal review” due to the small population of qualified researchers in climate, and many of the same lessons taught by an exercise in taunting the peer review process in 1996 are germane to the publication of climate science today, where there seems to be an air of “anything goes as long as it goes with our thinking”. On the opposite side, we have garbage papers accepted by people who transposed their names to get past what they feared would be gatekeeping.

Publishing a paper in a peer reviewed journal is by no means a guarantee of accuracy. Just look what happened…

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Atmospheric river to take aim on California with major storm

Watts Up With That?

A 1 in 10 year storm event is expected to hit Northern California this weekend. Rainfall totals could easily be twice the average precipitation for January.

An atmospheric river will take aim with heavy precipitation, high snow levels and soils that are already saturated from recent storms. Precipitation starts Saturday, but the brunt of the storm will be Sunday & Monday. Forecasters say this will exceed stream and river flood levels last seen in 2005.

Snowfall ahead of the storm will be significant, then likely melt with the second warmer event Sunday:

Rainfall amounts over the weekend are likely to be heavy in the Sierra Nevada Foothills and higher mountain areas.

This is going to be some of the more significant flooding we’ve seen in the past decade. Areas may flood that haven’t seen impacts for several years.

According to Dr. Ryan Maue:

If this isn’t the end of the…

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The Recursive Cost Of Carbon

Watts Up With That?

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

I see that Andrew Revkin continues to try to keep the climate pot bubbling. In this case, he’s issued dire warnings about reducing the so-called “Social Cost of Carbon” (SCC). He starts by defining the SCC

This value is the government’s best estimate of how much society gains over the long haul by cutting each ton of the heat-trapping carbon-dioxide emissions scientists have linked to global warming. 

Currently set at $36 per ton of carbon dioxide, the metric is produced using a complex, and contentious, set of models estimating a host of future costs to society related to rising temperatures and seas, then using a longstanding economic tool, a discount rate, to gauge how much it is worth today to limit those harms generations hence. (For context, the United States emitted about 5.1 billion tons of CO2 in 2015, out of a global total of…

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The William Happer Interview

Watts Up With That?

William Happer is the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, Emeritus, in the Department of Physics at Princeton University. A long-time member of JASON, a group of scientists which provides independent advice to the U.S. government on matters relating to science, technology, and national security, Happer served as Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science from 1991–1993.

Best known to the general public as a vocal critic of the U.N. IPCC “consensus” on global warming, he has been called frequently to give expert testimony before various U.S. congressional committees on the subject of global warming (climate change). In 2015, he found himself at the center of a new controversy involving a so-called “sting” operation organized by Greenpeace.

A list of some of Professor Happer’s major research publications may be accessed here.

These excerpts have been taken from the interview, and appear here without quotes. (h/t…

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