Now, Al Gore Blames Record Cold On Global Warming
In this newsletter:
1) NOAA Predicts Its Third Warm Winter In A Row
Wired, 23 October 2017
2) Al Gore: ‘Bitter Cold’ Is ‘Exactly What We Should Expect From The Climate Crisis’
Marc Morano, Climate Depot, 4 January 2018
3) Failed Polar Bear Predictions Have Climate Change Community In A Panic
Susan Crockford, Polar Bear Science, 4 January 2017
4) How Apocalyptic Language In Politics Messes With Our Morals
Futurity, 3 January 2017
5) UK Advertising Regulator Upholds GWPF Complaint
William Powell, Natural Gas World, 5 January 2017
Money CNN, 3 January 2018
7) China's Largest Shale Gas Field Production Hits Record High In 2017
Xinhua, 4 January 2018
8) LOL: California’s Largest Solar Power Plant To Extract Oil
The Engineer, 30 November 2017
Wired, 23 October 2017
Eric Niler
This year, government scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are placing their bets on a warmer-than-average winter. In the East and southern two-thirds of the country, temperatures will be higher than normal, while Southern California, Texas, and Florida will be drier than usual.
At first glance, this pattern looks a lot like the past two years: 2015's record-breaking winter was followed by a season that ranked sixth warmest since record-keeping began in 1890. So do three warm winters in a row mean the planet is warming faster, or is the trend just part of normal seasonal variability?
NOAA climate scientists incorporate heat-trapping carbon dioxide levels when they run the models that produce their seasonal climate predictions (these ones came out on Thursday, October 19). But they note that there are other global forces that have a bigger impact on their winter prediction—namely the poorly-understood El Niño and La Niña phenomena.
“These forecasts deal with climate variability at a far larger extent than climate change,” says Mike Halpert, deputy director of NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.
“There is a lot of natural climate variability in the system that can trump any kind of background signal.”
Full story
2) Al Gore: ‘Bitter Cold’ Is ‘Exactly What We Should Expect From The Climate Crisis’
Marc Morano, Climate Depot, 4 January 2018
Former Vice President Al Gore has weighed in on the record cold and snow in the U.S. “It’s bitter cold in parts of the US, but climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann explains that’s exactly what we should expect from the climate crisis,” Gore wrote on January 4 on Twitter.
Gore linked to one of his organizations’ articles on the brutal winter weather written by Climategate professor Michael Mann: The Climate Reality Project: A ‘PERFECT STORM’: EXTREME WINTER WEATHER, BITTER COLD, AND CLIMATE CHANGE
In the Gore touted article, Mann linked the cold and “lots of snow” to “climate change.”
Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth did not warn of record cold and increasing snowfalls as a consequence of man-made global warming. And as recently as 2009, Gore was hyping the lack of snow as evidence for man-made global warming. Source: “Gore Reports Snow and Ice Across the World Vanishing Quickly.”
Other climate activists warned of less cold and snow as well.
Flashback 2000: ‘Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past’ – ‘Children just aren’t going to know what snow is’ – UK Independent
But as the snow piled up, the climate change claims were adjusted and cold and snow were added to the list of things caused by “global warming.”
See: Warmists Wheel Out “Record Cold Due To Global Warming” Argument Again
In 2010, Gore claimed “increased heavy snowfalls are completely consistent with… man-made global warming.”
Reality Check: But scientists are not buying the claims of Gore and Mann and others linking the record cold and snow to “global warming.”
WeatherBell Meteorologist Joe Bastardi on January 4, 2018: “This is flat out insanity and deception now To tell the public that events that have occurred countless times before with no climate change attribution, is now just that, is not science, its witchcraft. NO PROOF AT ALL. Its climate ambulance chasing, nothing more.”
Bastardi added: “This has happened countless times before and it wasn’t global warming then and is not now. Solid use of past patterns predicted major early cold from OCTOBER! I have tweeted that dozens of times showing the analog years I used, No co2 then.”
Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. also weighed in, explaining: “For those who claim USA/Canada nor’easter is stronger because of ‘global warming’, they apparently do not realize that it’s so strong because of especially strong horizontal temperature gradient in troposphere. It ‘bombed’ because of usually cold air!”
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3) How Apocalyptic Language In Politics Messes With Our Morals
Futurity, 3 January 2017
While evoking the apocalypse can let politicians rouse people to action, it’s a risky strategy in political language because it can create false moral clarity, argues political scientist Alison McQueen.
“Apocalyptic rhetoric fills a need in troubled times.”
McQueen says that apocalyptic language can comfort people during crises, making wars or economically troubled times, for instance, easier to understand, though that comfort comes with costs. McQueen’s research suggests that when people see themselves as engaged in a classic “good vs. evil” struggle, they are more likely to justify the use of terrible means, including war, torture, genocide, and nuclear annihilation, to achieve desired ends.
In her new book, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge University Press, 2017), McQueen focuses on the works of political realists who lived during times of heightened tensions: Renaissance political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli; Thomas Hobbes, a 17th-century English political philosopher; and Hans Morgenthau, a 20th-century international relations theorist.
As realists who perceived politics through power and interest rather than ideology, each criticized apocalyptic rhetoric. But each also embraced it to some extent. The study of political realists reminds us, McQueen believes, that true political change is hard work.
In the following interview, McQueen talks about her new book and about the United States’ history of apocalyptic rhetoric in politics, ranging from the Puritans, who invoked the apocalypse in fleeing England, to former Vice President Al Gore, who used biblical allusions in describing the effects of climate change.
Full interview
4) Failed Polar Bear Predictions Have Climate Change Community In A Panic
Susan Crockford, Polar Bear Science, 4 January 2017
Polar bear experts who falsely predicted that roughly 17,300 polar bears would be dead by now (given sea ice conditions since 2007) have realized their failure has not only kicked their own credibility to the curb, it has taken with it the reputations of their climate change colleagues.
This has left many folks unhappy about the toppling of this important global warming icon but ironically, consensus polar bear experts and climate scientists (and their supporters) were the ones who set up the polar bear as a proxy for AGW in the first place.
I published my professional criticisms on the failed predictions of the polar bear conservation community in a professional online scientific preprint journal, which has now been downloaded almost 2,000 times (Crockford 2017; Crockford and Geist 2017).
My paper demonstrates that the polar bear/sea ice decline hypothesis, particularly the one developed by Steven Amstrup, is a failure. I’m not the only one who thinks so, as emails obtained from the US Fish and Wildlife Service show. The argument the paper lays out and the facts it presents have not been challenged by any one of the consensus polar bear experts who object to it so strenuously. Instead, they have chosen to misrepresent my work, and publicly belittle my credentials and scientific integrity in the published literature (Harvey et al. 2017) and online.
Harvey and colleagues suggest in their paper that I and others use polar bears as a proxy for AGW as part of a deliberate plan to undermine the public’s confidence in global warming…
I do not recall ever stating or implying that if polar bear predictions of doom were wrong, then general climate change models must also be wrong. But if any other bloggers have done so, they can hardly be blamed.
A bit of reflection shows it was the climate science community itself — in collaboration with Arctic researchers and the media — who by the year 2000 (below left) set the polar bear up as an icon for catastrophic global warming. They made the polar bear a proxy for AGW.
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5) UK Advertising Regulator Upholds GWPF Complaint
William Powell, Natural Gas World, 5 January 2017
The ASA told NGW January 4 that during its investigation, it approached Greenpeace with its concerns about whether an advertised claim could be substantiated: “The advertiser agreed not to use such claims in future advertising, so we considered the case to have been resolved informally.”
Greenpeace told NGW: “Our posters were up in the Westminster tube [metro station] for two weeks in September, as planned. We then had a second two-week slot in November where we added the word ‘future’ to the text of the posters to make it even clearer that these prices are from contracts for future energy supply, rather than payments already made for past energy supply.”
GWPF director Benny Peiser told NGW the same day that he nevertheless remained dissatisfied with the new wording of the advert. He said that the new reference to the auction strike price is “still misleading in that they give the impression that the bid prices are firm, and immediate, whereas the truth is that the contracts do not become effective until the early 2020s. They are unlikely ever to be implemented given that these prices are at present completely uneconomic. Something very similar has been happening in Germany in recent months. There, the grid operator was forced to raise the prices after the auction out of fear that wind projects with low auction prices would never be built.”
Therefore the wording of the advert is still misleading, and GWPF has submitted a further complaint about this advertisement, which ASA is now investigating, he said.
Greenpeace told NGW that it “absolutely” stood by the message. “It celebrates a breakthrough moment for our energy system – the government signing contracts for new offshore wind farms which will provide electricity at half the price agreed in the previous auction, held in 2015. However, not everyone is aware that the contracts are signed and prices agreed before the wind farms are built, rather than afterwards, so we were happy to clarify that.”
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6) America Could Be Crowned Oil King Of The World In 2018
Money CNN, 3 January 2018
Surging shale oil output should allow the United States to dethrone Russia and Saudi Arabia as the planet’s leading crude oil producer, Rystad predicted in a recent report. The U.S. hasn’t been the global leader, nor ahead of both Russia and Saudi Arabia, since 1975.
“The market has completely changed due to the U.S. shale machine,” said Nadia Martin Wiggen, Rystad’s vice president of markets.
The prediction shows how the fracking revolution has turned America into an energy powerhouse — a transformation that President Trump has vowed to accelerate by cutting regulation. This long-term shift has allowed the U.S. to be less reliant on foreign oil, including from the turbulent Middle East.
U.S. oil production slipped — but didn’t completely collapse — after Saudi-led OPEC launched a price war in late 2015 aimed at reclaiming market share lost to shale and other players. A massive supply glut caused crude to crash from around $100 a barrel to a low of $26.
Cheap prices forced shale companies in Texas, North Dakota and elsewhere to dial back. Domestic output bottomed at 8.55 million barrels per day in September 2016, down 11% from the recent peak in April 2015, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Full story
7) China's Largest Shale Gas Field Production Hits Record High In 2017
Xinhua, 4 January 2018
CHONGQING, Jan. 4 (Xinhua) -- Fuling, China's largest shale gas field, generated more than 6 billion cubic meters of shale gas in 2017, according to its developer Sinopec.
The field's gas sales reached nearly 5.8 billion cubic meters last year, an increase of 20 percent year on year.
By 2017, the Fuling shale gas field, developed by China's leading oil refiner Sinopec in the southwest municipality of Chongqing, had produced more than 15 billion cubic meters.
The new industry has helped the region improve its energy structure and shift away from traditional energy sources such as coal in recent years.
It is estimated that 3 billion cubic meters of shale gas is equivalent to burning 6 million tonnes of coal, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 4.2 million tonnes.
China has made breakthroughs in shale gas exploration both in capacity and drilling techniques, making it one of the top shale gas suppliers in the world.
By 2020, proven reserves of shale gas will surpass 1.5 trillion cubic meters, according to plans released by authorities in 2017.
8) LOL: California’s Largest Solar Power Plant To Extract Oil
The Engineer, 30 November 2017
Solar technology is set to help with the extraction of crude oil following an agreement to build California’s largest solar energy plant.
Belridge Solar
GlassPoint Solar will supply Aera Energy, one of California’s largest oil and gas producers, with an integrated solar plant that will be the first of its kind to use solar steam and solar electricity to power oilfield operations. It is claimed that the finished Belridge Solar project will deliver the largest peak energy output of any solar plant in California.
GlassPoint’s solar technology will be used for the extraction of heavy oil, which accounts for half of California’s crude oil production. Heavy oil is produced by injecting steam into the reservoir to heat the oil so it can be pumped to the surface. This process – thermal Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) – typically generates steam using natural gas.
According to GlassPoint’s website, the company’s enclosed trough technology houses curved mirrors inside a greenhouse that track the sun throughout the day, focusing heat on pipes containing oilfield water.
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