Posts Made By: Dave Snope

PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago -- Caribbean nations face "very, very scary" rises in sea level and intensifying hurricanes, and Florida, Louisiana and even northern California could be overrun with rising water levels due to global warming triggered by carbon-based greenhouse gases, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Saturday.

...

"I think the Caribbean countries face rising oceans and they face increase in the severity of hurricanes. This is something that is very, very scary to all of us. The island states in the world represent -- I remember this number -- one-half of 1 percent of the carbon emissions in the world. And they will -- some of them will disappear," he added.

Chu said the United States would not be spared, either.

"Let me state what the official IPCC (the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) prediction is: It (sea levels) could go up as much as three-quarters of a meter in this century, but there is a reasonable probability it could be much higher than that," Chu said.

He said a rise in levels of one meter, coastal areas around Florida around Louisiana would move much farther inland.

"Lots of area in Florida will go under. New Orleans at three-meter height is in great peril. If you look at, you know, the Bay Area, where I came from, all three airports would be under water. So this is -- this is serious stuff. The impacts could be enormous," he said.


http://www.foxnews.com/politics/first100days/2009/04/19/energy-secretary-offers-dire-global-warming-prediction/

I hope you are sufficient scared from what this Nobel Prize winning laser physicist said.

Wha-wait. Laser physicist?

It's hard to choose which part of his speech is worse. It's either the long-ago discredited idea of intensifying hurricanes, or the idea that he is making political speeches disguised as science backed by his Nobel prize credibility (in lasers).

I'm all for LED lighting for reducing energy consumption, heat, toxins, batteries, and cost. They're becoming viable for display backlights, a great sign of cost progress because I when I worked out the economics a few years ago it was a no go. I can't wait to skip right past the compact flourescent craze as the LEDs become economically viable. But, once I hurdled the minefield of artificial economics in this article, I learn that that LED lights are a problem for astronomers. Hopefully they'll be able to make improvements.
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Fourteen miles east of San Jose on Mount Hamilton, the astronomers at the Lick Observatory have another concern: The bright white light of LEDs illuminate the night sky and obscure views of planets and stars. The scientists helped San Jose select its sodium lamps in the 1980s because the observatory can filter out yellow light. "Going to any other kind of lighting is detrimental," says Burt Jones, the observatory's assistant director.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124035903357241327.html

This shouldn't be news, because it had been reported at the end of 2006 that he had upped his net worth from $1M to $100M from he AGW enterprise. It looks like he is still worth about the same, two years later, what with the bad economy and all. I know he has been earning $200,000 - $500,000 per speech for most of this decade, and he has been making a lot of speeches all over the world at $2000/plate and it's always easy to get 100 guests to start the show. At one speech per week, it adds up quickly, and then you move to his green business interests, books and movies ... I don't think we should nose into how much people make, but one has to wonder and admire the nerve of the man who says THIS to congress on Friday:

But every penny that I have made, I have put right into a non-profit, the Alliance for Climate Protection, to spread awareness about why we have to take on this challenge. And Congresswoman, if you're, if you believe the reason I have been working on this issue for 30 years is because of greed, you don't know me.

Yet he has not had the nerve to engage in one single debate or forum where an AGW skeptic was present. He pulls out at the last minute if he senses any critic will be there. In the latest example, congress had his back, and cancelled Lord Monkton's joint participation in the Gore session after Monkton's plane had landed in D.C., then finally replaced him with the infinitely less qualified and more AGW friendly Newt Gingrich.

‘House Democrats don’t want Gore humiliated'
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/23/monckton-not-allowed-to-debate-with-gore-today/#more-7315

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Which brings us to another new estimate of his net worth:

So just what has Al Gore gained from his Big Green escapades? According to public disclosure information, Gore was worth somewhere between $1 million and $2 million in 2000. Not quite eight years later, Gore is estimated to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million. While I ordinarily would applaud such financial gains from such a short period of time, I can’t help but to question just how it happened. When you look out at what Al Gore has done, it’s evident that he figured out on a way to capitalize on the creation of Big Green while becoming the official doomsday prophet that has helped to build Big Green into the monetary powerhouse that it has become.
http://arclightzero.wordpress.com/2007/11/28/following-the-big-green-money-trail-part-2/

Anthony Watt posts photos of two U.S. nuclear submarines meeting in open water at the north pole in 1959, and asks:

What would NSIDC and our media make of a photo like this if released by the NAVY today? Would we see headlines like “NORTH POLE NOW OPEN WATER”? Or maybe “Global warming melts North Pole”?

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/26/ice-at-the-north-pole-in-1958-not-so-thick/#more-7368

If Al Gore was around back then, he would have warned "The polar caps will be gone in 5 years if we don't act now (I mean it for real this time), buy my book and see my movie".

8-year AMSR-E arctic sea ice extent graph, updated as of April 24. The red line is 2009.
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm

2009 vs. 1979 - 2000 average
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_a58ZSF6fzpI/SfZkFemYXAI/AAAAAAAAAQo/1WNawAi6oFQ/s1600-h/N_timeseries.png

The Central England surface air temperature series is the longest existing meteorological record. Recorded temperatures start in 1659.

I wouldn't read too much into this as a global indicator, unless you have some depth of understanding of the climate of Great Britain and how it is moderated by ocean temperatures. Then you have to get into the ocean temperature patterns. In which case please share. It has a coarse scale so looks like a flattened version of temperature plots from other sources which usually show tenths of a degree C scale units.

Here is the longest existing temperature record.
http://climate4you.com/CentralEnglandTemperatureSince1659.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) — Jack Kemp, the ex-quarterback, congressman, one-time vice-presidential nominee and self-described "bleeding-heart conservative" died Saturday. His spokeswoman Bona Park and longtime friend and former campaign adviser Edwin J. Feulner confirmed that Kemp died after a lengthy illness.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g8-DEMtAE9q4i4ySQ0eV_qZefmRQD97UG8VG0

Ooops, wasn't I just saying in that other Gore thread that the 1995 stuff is bad? Even the NY Times has to admit it when caught by scientists.


Washington, DC – The New York Times has issued a “climate correction” for an “error” in its April 24, 2009 (posted online April 23) high profile front page global warming article that was touted by former Vice President Al Gore during his Congressional testimony as evidence that industry was clouding the science of climate change. [ See: Gore Mouthing-Off About Make-Believe Madoffs ]

But just little more than a week after publishing the front page article, The New York Times and reporter Andrew Revkin have now admitted the article “erred” on a key point. Revkin wrote about the now defunct Global Climate Coalition and documents that suggest the group had scientists on board in the 1990's who claimed “the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.” Revkin's article came under immediate fire from scientists and others who called into question the central claims and the accuracy of the story.

In a May 2, 2009 post titled “A Climate Correction”, Revkin and the New York Times wrote: “The article cited a 'backgrounder' that laid out the coalition's public stance, published in the early 1990s and distributed widely to lawmakers and journalists. However, the article failed to note a later version of the backgrounder that included language that conformed to the scientific advisory committee's conclusion. The amended version, which was brought to the attention of The Times by a reader, acknowledged the consensus that greenhouse gases could contribute to warming. What scientists disagreed about, it said, was 'the rate and magnitude of the 'enhanced greenhouse effect' (warming) that will result.'"

He executed a wheelchair bound man who was happily celebrating his wedding anniversary and ordered him shoved in his chair over the side of a ship. Because he was a Jew and American. Wanna place a bet on whether or not al-Molqui is reformed? I'd like to see his reading list for the last 23 years.


ROME - One of the Palestinians who hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship and killed a U.S. passenger in 1985 has been released after more than 23 years in jail in Sicily, officials said yesterday.

Youssef Magied al-Molqui, a member of the four-man team that hijacked the ship off Egypt, had been serving a 30-year sentence, which was reduced for good behavior.

He was convicted of shooting Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly Jewish man from New York, and ordering him to be dumped in the sea while in his wheelchair. Klinghoffer's daughters and the Anti-Defamation League condemned Molqui's early release.
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/world_us/20090501_In_the_World.html

Posted today on WUWT, Professor Wang, a key researcher of Jones et al fame (the group already of some notoriety for hiding data), has some explaining to do.
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From the Scientific Misconduct Blog, 2 May 2009
by Dr.Aubrey Blumsohn

Professor Wei-Chyung Wang is a star scientist in the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center at the University at Albany, New York. He is a key player in the climate change debate (see his self-description here). Wang has been accused of scientific fraud...

Doug Keenan, the mathematician who raised the case of Wang is on the “sceptic” side of the climate change debate. He maintains that “almost by itself, the withholding of their raw data by [climate] scientists tells us that they are not scientists”.

Below is my own summary of the straightforward substance of this case. I wrote to Wei-Chyung Wang, to Lynn Videka (VP at Albany, responsible for the investigation), and to John H. Reilly (a lawyer at Albany) asking for any correction or comments on the details presented below. My request was acknowledged prior to publication, but no factual correction was suggested.

Fraud Case Summary at:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/03/climate-science-fraud-at-albany-university/#more-7554