Global tropical cyclone energy remains near 30-year lows !

Global tropical cyclone energy remains near 30-year lows !

Florida State University - Ryan N. Maue's Seasonal Tropical Cyclone Activity Update

Global and Northern Hemisphere Tropical Cyclone Activity remains near 30-year historical lows -- three years in a row now of considerably below-average activity globally

Upside Down Mann Hockey Stick

From Climate Audit Oct 29, 2009
Upside Down Mann

The issue with Mann's use of the Tiljander proxies isn't just that he used them upside down (which he did). The problem is worse than that. The Tiljander sediments are the combination of two unrelated processes: a presumably climatically driven process in which narrow sediments are interpreted by the authors as "warm" and thick sediments as "cold" and a nonclimatic process in which sediments are produced by ditches, bridges and farming.

It is definitely and incontrovertibly upside down.

The reason why it is upside down is the spurious correlation between the nonclimatic sediments from bridges and farming and temperature, which confuses the Mannian meatgrinder algorithm.

Perhaps Connolley is gradually realizing that the problem is not just the upside down proxy, but a package of issues including modern contamination and spurious regression.

Dr. Pielke Oct 31, 2009

Excerpts include:
There is an informative post titled Biofuel woes by Katharine Sanderson on the Nature.com/climatefeedback website.
Biofuels derived from the cellulosic, woody parts of plants are not having their greenhouse gas emissions properly accounted
those biofuels would be shown to actually cause more greenhouse gases to be released than fossil fuels.

Timothy Searchinger from Princeton University
They say that the assertion that fuels made from biomass can be counted as carbon neutral is wrong. “

Alternative Energy Sources Offer Minimal Promise

From Environment and Climate News Nov 1, 2009
Discussion of unrealistic expectations of alternative energy sources.

For example:
"A single 555 megawatt gas-fired power plant in California generates more electricity per year than all 13,000 of the state’s wind turbines. The gas-fired plant occupies just 15 acres. The 300-foot-tall wind turbines affect 106,000 acres, destroy scenic vistas, and kill tens of thousands of birds and bats every year, to provide expensive, tax-subsidized, intermittent, insufficient electricity."

Temp Data Glitches

How bad is the global temperature data?
Watts UP With That 10/13/09

Excerpts Include:
The world’s climate data has become increasingly sparse with a big dropoff around 1990. There was also a tenfold increase in missing months around the same time. For many, many stations, you will see the data set in a monthly tabular form has many missing data months mostly after 1990

Most of the stations that dropped out were rural. More of the missing data points are having their missing months filled in with more urban data in the grid boxes.

Numerous peer review papers suggest an exaggeration of the warming by 30%, 50% or even more

One example.. from Maine. Volunteers completed surveys....The survey determined that every one of the stations in Maine was subject to microclimate or urbanization biases.

One station especially surprised the surveyors, Ripogenus Dam, a station that was officially closed in 1995. Despite being closed in 1995, USHCN data for this station is publicly available until 2006!

Part of the USHCN data is created by a computer program called “filnet” which estimates missing values.

How can we trust NOAA/NASA/Hadley assessment of global changes given these and the other data integrity issues? Given that Hadley has destroyed old original data because they were running out of room in their data cabinet, can we ever hope to reconstruct the real truth?

Daring to Question Al Gore

From McIver Institute Oct 9, 2009

"However, the former Vice President of the United States was not in the mood to answer any questions from skeptics of global warming. His appearance was highly scripted, and when one filmmaker dared ask a tough question...well, just watch this report."

Key point at the end of the video is challenging what is the role of journalists? To be cheerleaders or skeptics?

What happened to global warming?

BBC Friday, 9 October 2009

Excerpts include:
For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.