One Of America’s Biggest Solar Companies Files For Bankruptcy

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
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April 20, 2017 at 12:51AM

Pruitt Takes Steps To Roll Back Obama’s Fracking Rules

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
http://www.thegwpf.com

The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday took a new step in enacting President Trump’s executive order to roll back Obama-era energy regulations by granting industry petitions to reconsider methane emission rules for fracking.

“EPA is continuing to follow through with President Trump’s Energy Independence Executive Order,” said EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. “American businesses should have the opportunity to review new requirements, assess economic impacts and report back, before those new requirements are finalized.”

Pruitt announced that the agency is halting the effective date of the new source performance standard for methane. It also will open a new period so the energy industry and other interested groups can comment on the rule.

The EPA sent a two-page letter to industry groups, such as the American Petroleum Institute, that formally requested that the rule be reconsidered by the administration. The industry has argued that the regulations are duplicative and not necessary, given the industry’s own standards for eliminating methane releases as a good business practice

The letter, signed by Pruitt, said that the industry raised at least one objection on the emission reporting requirements, while stating that a number of unanswered questions still remain regarding how the rules would actually work. Businesses also had complained that they did not have enough time to comment on some of the provisions. Those are all grounds for reconsidering the regulation under the Clean Air Act, the letter said.

The rule will be halted for 90 days after the June 3 effective date for the industry to comply with the standards.

Full post

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

April 20, 2017 at 12:44AM

Proof the New York Times Stealthily Revises its Articles after Publication

via Climate Change Dispatch
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NY Times regularly revises its articles after publication. The revisions are substantial, undisclosed, and are nothing like real time updates in developing stories. These are regular articles that undergo dramatic changes that appear as if NY Times editors received a commissar’s call stressing the party line and demanding the article matches it exactly, with the […]

via Climate Change Dispatch http://ift.tt/2jXMFWN

April 20, 2017 at 12:40AM

New Paper Asserts ‘Biased’ Climate Models Underestimate Natural Variability And The Warmth Of The Past

via NoTricksZone
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Climate Models Fail To Simulate

Past & Present NH Temperatures

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Reconstructions Of Northern Hemisphere Temperatures Indicate Medieval Period Was As Warm As Recent Decades

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Abrantes et al., 2017 

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Otto and Roberts, 2016

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Other NH Reconstructions Indicate Pre-Industrial Temps Were Highly Variable, 1940s As Warm As 2000s

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Schneider et al., 2015

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Stoffel et al., 2015

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New Paper: Models Need ‘Forcing’ Adjustment…Underestimate Past Warmth, Internal Variability…Instrumental Record ‘Biased’

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Büntgen et al., 2017

Spanning the period 1186-2014 CE, the new reconstruction reveals overall warmer conditions around 1200 and 1400, and again after ~1850. The coldest reconstructed summer in 1258 (-4.4°C wrt 1961-1990) followed the largest known volcanic eruption of the CE. The 20th century is characterized by pronounced summer cooling in the 1970s, subsequently rising temperatures until 2003, and a slowdown of warming afterwards. Little agreement is found with climate model simulations that consistently overestimate recent summer warming and underestimate pre-industrial temperature changes.

[W]hen it comes to disentangling natural variability from anthropogenically affected variability the vast majority of the instrumental record may be biased. … Although the causes of the recently measured slowdown in global and regional warming during the last decade are still debated (Karl et al. 2015; Fyfe et al. 2016), our study provides the first long-term proxy evidence for this temperature decline over the western Mediterranean basin. This finding is in line with local, regional and sub-continental meteorological observations, and consistent with the observations by Gleisner et al. (2015) that the post-2003 pause in rising mean surface temperatures is most strongly expressed at mid-latitudes.

The reconstructed long-term variability exceeds the pre-industrial multi-decadal to centennial variability in four state-of-the-art climate model simulations. This mismatch between the proxy reconstructions and the four model simulations is in line with a general tendency of state-of-the-art climate model simulations to underestimate the amplitude of reconstructed natural low-frequency temperature variability during the last millennium (Bothe et al. 2013; Fernández-Donado et al. 2013; Phipps et al. 2013; Luterbacher et al. 2016; Ljungqvist et al. 2012). Such disagreement might indicate that the role of internal unforced variability is greater than expected (Goosse 2017; Matsikaris et al. 2016), and/or that the climate sensitivity to the prescribed forcings needs adjustment. … [S]tate-of-the-art climate models are usually driven by a relatively dampened amplitude of long-term changes in solar activity (Schmidt et al. 2011,2012).

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April 20, 2017 at 12:36AM