Each week, I’ll pull together a range of items that have attracted my attention. I hope you will find the variety of topics covered both interesting and enlightening. Please remember to read the comments, as the information (and the links) contained in them often put the main article into context.. If you follow a site that is, maybe, a bit off the beaten track and think it would be of interest, please contact me and I’ll take a look.
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“We are plagued by drought and science says, we must not accuse nature but man…”
Posted on April 24, 2013 by My Garden Pond
“… who, by altering the surface of the earth has changed the course of the atmosphere and thence the influence of the seasons.” Antoine-Alexis Cadet de Vaux, “Observation sur la sécheresse actuelle, ses causes, et les moyens de prévenir la progression de ce fléau,” Moniteur Universel, 26 August 1800.
This quotation is from a paper by Fabien Locher and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, Modernity’s Frail Climate: A Climate History of Environmental Reflexivity published in Critical Inquiry in 2012. Locher and Fressoz make a valuable contribution by placing the current climate debate in historical perspective, and in this post I attempt to summarise their paper. I can only find a paywalled source, but quote rather extensively from the paper in my post.
In their paper, Locher and Fressoz (henceforward L&F) argue that current scholars of climate have a too simplistic view of the past that emphasizes “our own excellence and reflexivity”. By reflexivity, they mean the idea that humans can both affect and be affected by the climate. L&F say: “There is an assumption shared by most postmodern thinkers today that for about two generations we have been experiencing a complete transformation of our relationship with the environment. After three centuries of frenetic modernism, we entered, at last, an enlightened era of environmental awareness.”
Click here to read the full article
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Scientific Frauds Project Their Anti-Science And Display Unfathomable Ignorance — Word of the Day — “Empirical”
Posted on April 24, 2013 by suyts
Recently, a few blogs have brought attention to an article and graph which I thought I’d expand upon. Real Science being the first place I saw this, but Climate Depot and Junk Science have also briefly covered this. There may be others.
The article, Denying sea-level rise: How 100 centimeters divided the state of North Carolina is nothing but projection and smear job of skeptics. It was written by anti-science nutjobs Alexander Glass and Orrin Pilkey.
Click here to read the full article
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Three years of the Sun in three minutes
Posted on April 24, 2013 by Anthony Watts
In the three years since it first provided images of the sun in the spring of 2010, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has had virtually unbroken coverage of the sun’s rise toward solar maximum, the peak of solar activity in its regular 11-year cycle. This video shows those three years of the sun at a pace of two images per day.
SDO’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) captures a shot of the sun every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths. The images shown here are based on a wavelength of 171 Angstroms, which is in the extreme ultraviolet range and shows solar material at around 600,000 Kelvin. In this wavelength it is easy to see the sun’s 25-day rotation as well as how solar activity has increased over three years.
Click here to read the full article
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OPEC fracked
Posted on April 24, 2013 by Peter C. Glover and Michael J. Economides
Since its inception in 1960, OPEC has never been shy in flexing its energy-fuelled power over the West. But those days are done. To put it bluntly, you could say that OPEC power has been well and truly fracked. And it’s not just the US and Israeli shale gas and oil revolutions which threatens OPEC’s decline. OPEC is already grappling with a whole bunch of serious energy problems that are colluding to hasten its demise.
Let’s just focus on the OPEC kingpin and world’s leading oil producer, Saudi Arabia. Even as the Saudis and other OPEC leaders have played down the nascent impact of US shale development on global production (especially America’s growing self-sufficiency), the signs are that the Saudis are increasingly desperate to keep their world number one ranking in oil production. But the runes are not falling their way.
In the last decade OPEC has seen a net increase in its total oil production: in 2002 it was 28.97 million barrels per day (mbpd), by 2012 that had risen to 36.64 mbpd. This year OPEC production had been expected to remain stagnant. But a Dow Jones Newswire survey in October 2012 revealed that OPEC production had actually fallen to 31.32 mbpd, and by January 2013 was down to 30.34mbpd. While the Energy Information Administration (EIA) expects production to rise in the coming year, it anticipates the level will remain below that reported in 2011 and well below the high of 2002.
Click here to read the full article
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Cold and snow wave grips the USA, nearly 10,000 cold and snow records set in the last six weeks
Posted on April 23, 2013 by Anthony Watts
Paging Seth Borenstein! 9787 new cold and snow records since March 13th
If this were a month of a heatwave across thus USA, like last July, you can bet it would be MSM headlines all over the place and breathless stories from AP’s Seth Borenstein and pronouncements from the Mannian climate cartel about how all this is connected to global warming, er climate change, er climate disruption.
Click here to read the full article
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UK Daily Rainfall Extremes
Posted on April 24, 2013 by Paul Homewood
Following last year’s wet weather in the UK, Julia Slingo had this to say:-
The trend towards more extreme rainfall events is one we are seeing around the world, in countries such as India and China, and now potentially here in the UK. The long-term trend towards wetter weather is likely to continue as global air temperatures rise.
But what have been the trends in the UK?
The Met Office provide daily rainfall data back to 1931 for England & Wales, from which I have extracted the top 50 rainfall days. (This equates to days of 21.92mm or more).
The distribution of these events is shown in Figure 1.
Click here to read the full article
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Recent Energy And Environmental News – Late April 2013
Posted on April 24, 2013 by John Droz, Jr.
The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy & environmental policies. Our basic position is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using real science.
Instead of a science-based approach, our energy and environmental policies are typically written by those who stand to economically or politically profit from them. As a result, anything genuinely science-based in these policies is usually inadvertent and accidental.
A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. Towards that end, every 3 weeks we put together a newsletter to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and environmental matters. We appreciate MasterResource for their assistance in publishing this information.
Click here to read the full article
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