Top Climate Porn: All-Women Photo
The Bates/Karl affair is having all kinds of ramifications, with the usual suspects falling over themselves to defend Karl, sometimes with the interesting argument that his correction is so trivial as to be hardly worth talking about. Stefan Rahmstorf at RealClimate asks: “Could the difference of a few hundredths of a degree have duped world […]
via Climate Scepticism http://cliscep.com
February 10, 2017 at 02:56AM
Europe Reminded Of Its Power Grid Vulnerability As Brussels Blacks Out!
Much has been written about growing power grid instability in Europe as more and more volatile wind and solar energy have come online over the years.
Earlier today European news outlets reported how Brussels, a major centre of the European Union, plunged into darkness late yesterday evening.
So far it’s not known what’s behind the outage. The New York Post writes that the cause is a “mystery”, but according to the BBC here that “a spokesperson for Brussels’ power supplier, Sibelga, later told The Sun that the blackout was the result of an electric network distribution problem”.
City gripped by fear
It’s one thing if some rural area blacks out, but quite another when a center of political power like Brussels gets paralyzed and is left totally vulnerable. The UK Mirror wrote of a “security alert” after a “massive blackout” plunged the “entire centre of EU capital into darkness“, adding:
The loss of electricity across the Belgian capital has sparked terror attack fears, although the cause of the outage has not been confirmed.”
Brussels has been the target of terror attacks and is still considered a hotbed of potential terrorists. The Mirror writes that the blackout had Belgian security forces scrambling to boost their manpower at main sites around Brussels.
Volatile wind and sun wreak havoc on grid stability
Although it may turn out that the Brussels blackout problem had little to do with the haphazard supply from wind and solar energies, the outage once again highlights the European power grid’s growing instability the since greater amounts of the volatile energy have been getting fed in.
The following chart, for example, shows just how irregular the supply from wind and sun can be in Belgium’s neighbor, Germany:
German wind and solar power supply compared to German total demand over the past 15 days. Source: Agora.
The upper curve depicts Germany’s total consumption. Keeping the grid stable is becoming an increasingly formidable challenge, and the likelihood of overloads is ever higher. Blackouts like the one in Brussels, and the disruptions they cause, will likely become a part of Europe’s future.
There’s one positive aspect about the blackouts: they could serve to help a bit to alleviate one big problem in Europe. The OE24 here writes: “In the social media networks, jokes were made about a possible boost in the birthrate in 9 months.”
Strangely, Germany’s mainstream media is totally absent with the news of the blackout.
via NoTricksZone http://notrickszone.com
February 10, 2017 at 02:32AM
Friday Funny: In California, ‘children just aren’t going to know what drought is’
Long-time WUWT readers will recognize the title as being a spoof on the infamous line about snow uttered by Dr. David Viner of the University of East Anglia some years ago in the Independent (now deleted, but preserved here) where he claimed in an article Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past by Charles […]
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via Watts Up With That? http://ift.tt/1Viafi3
February 10, 2017 at 02:00AM
U.S. Congress Investigates Federal Climate Study After Whistleblower Exposes Fake Science
Congress is ramping up its investigation into a key climate study, now under further scrutiny after a federal whistleblower raised more questions about it this week. The scandal some are referring to as “Climategate Two” (you can learn about the first Climategate here) is quickly escalating after Dr. John Bates, a former top scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), exposed how an ex-colleague mishandled a report on global warming right before a major international climate conference in 2015.
House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith said during a Tuesday hearing that NOAA “has deceived the American people by falsifying data to justify a partisan agenda.” He will now push for all documents related to the climate study, materials he requested via subpoena in 2015 after Obama Administration officials refused to disclose them.
The explosive allegations from Dr. Bates were detailed in the Daily Mail and on the scientific blog, Climate, Etc. on February 5. Bates accuses Tom Karl, former director of the NOAA office responsible for climate data, of manipulating temperature readings, failing to archive data, and ignoring agency protocols to rush publishing his study that debunked the well-known pause in global warming at the beginning of this century.
At the time, climate activists were in a panic because the premier scientific body in charge of climate science—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—admitted the rise in global temperatures had basically stalled from 1998 to 2012. This bombshell was included in the IPCC’s 2013 report, which would serve as the main primer leading up to the United Nations’ Climate Conference in Paris two years later.
World leaders were poised to obligate their countries (er, taxpayers) into paying hundreds of billions to ease climate change. The inconvenient truth that plenty of evidence showed the planet was not significantly warming would be hard to climatesplain away. To give the climate leaders a big assist, Karl worked with a team of scientists to prove the pause didn’t happen, and claim global temperatures were rising just as fast as they had been at the end of the twentieth century.
Karl specifically cites the IPCC report in the introduction of his paper published in Science in June 2015, a few months before the Paris conference. Under the headline, “Walking back talk of the end of warming,” the authors said, “Here, we present an updated global surface temperature analysis that reveals that global trends are higher than those reported by the IPCC. These results do not support the notion of a slowdown in the increase in global surface temperatures.”
The paper concludes that “the IPCCs statement is no longer valid.” In other words: settled.
But Bates says the researchers “put a thumb on the scale” to reach their conclusions. He reveals other alarming details, like how the computer used to process the data suffered a complete failure. Chairman Smith responded immediately to Bates’s allegations, thanking him for “exposing the previous administration’s efforts to push their costly climate agenda at the expense of scientific integrity.”
Shortly after Bates’ exposé was posted, climate skeptics and conservative outlets began reporting on it—including Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Times (my piece in NRO is here). And of course it wasn’t long before climate activists and their media propagandists seized on Bates, attacking his credibility and motives while insisting Karl’s report was indeed credible and backed up by other scientists.
True to form, the same media that helped promote Karl’s study before the Paris climate conference overlooked key parts of Bates’s account. Neither the Washington Post, New York Times, nor the Associated Press mentioned IPCC as the source for the global warming pause, the main reason for Karl’s rebuke. Nor did they mention Bates’ shocking claim that the computer used to process the data had crashed.
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via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com
February 10, 2017 at 01:09AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 