There is NO climate emergency! by Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris

There is NO climate emergency!

Climate models predict disaster – but real world evidence shows no such thing

Dr. Jay Lehr & Tom Harris

Speaking at the 13th International Conference on Climate Change, held July 25 in Washington, DC, Dr. Roy W. Spencer of the University of Alabama in Huntsville said: “There is no climate crisis. Even if all the warming we’ve seen in any observational dataset is due to increasing CO2 (carbon dioxide), which I don’t believe it is, it’s probably too small for any person to feel in their lifetime.”

And yet, that same month, Democrat Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Earl Blumenauer and Democrat Senator Bernie Sanders introduced a non-binding resolution that demands a “national, social, industrial and economic mobilization” – to “halt, reverse, mitigate and prepare for the consequences of the climate emergency, and to restore the climate for future generations.” Six Democrat presidential candidates immediately supported the resolution, as a way to spur “sweeping reforms” to stem a “dangerous rise in global temperatures.”

In their view, apparently, asserting a climate emergency makes it a reality and justifies national or even global control and transformation of our energy, social, industrial, economic, legal and social systems.

Thus, in an effort to drum up support for its costly “carbon tax,” the Liberal government of Canada has also declared a climate emergency. So has Britain’s Parliament, to back up a call by opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn for “rapid and dramatic action” to protect the environment , following weeks of protests by the Extinction Rebellion climate movement, the Reuters News Agency reported.

The Climate Mobilization group proclaimed that “Over 790 local governments in 17 countries have declared a climate emergency and committed to action to drive down emissions at emergency speed.”

In considering whether this makes any sense, let’s take a page out of Blumenauer’s book and, as he put it, “tell the truth about the nature of this threat.”

The so-called emergency is based on nothing but the over-active imaginations of activists who put too much faith in computer model forecasts, while ignoring historic records and observational data that tell us nothing extraordinary or unprecedented is happening – and demonstrate that the models are wrong.

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies asserts that between 1880 and 2017 there has been only slightly more than 1 degree C (1.8 F) rise in the so-called global average temperature, despite a supposed 40% rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) database of state-wide extreme weather records, arguably the best of its kind in the world, shows that so far in 2019 only one weather record has been set: the lowest temperature in Illinois history.

In 2018, the only records set were: the largest hailstone in Alabama history; the most rainfall in a 24-hour period in Hawaii; and the most precipitation in one year in Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and West Virginia. Many of these records broke, sometimes barely, records that had stood for many decades. 

In 2017, the only record set was for the fastest wind gust in California. No records were set in 2016. In 2015, only two records: the most precipitation in a year in Arkansas and the largest hailstone in Illinois history. In 2014, only one record: the most rainfall in a 24-hour period in New York.

And so it goes, year after year, as we move into the past with the occasional state record set, as one would expect due to natural climate variability. In the first 18+ years of the 21st century, only two states recorded their maximum temperatures: South Carolina in 2012 and South Dakota in 2006. Contrast that with 1936, when 15 states set their all-time maximum temperature records.

Meanwhile, NOAA’s updated coastal sea level tide gauge data for 2016 show no evidence that the rate of sea level rise is accelerating. Seas are rising no faster than they have for many decades.

NOAA’s hurricane records go back to 1851. The data show that for almost 12 consecutive years – October 24, 2005 (after Wilma) until August 25, 2017 (Harvey) – not one major or moderate (Category 3-5) hurricane made landfall in the continental United States. That is the longest such period in history. In 2018, for the first time ever, not one “violent” (F4-5) tornado touched down in the United States.

To the great frustration of climate alarmists, the real-world instrumental record clearly shows that, not only is no climate emergency underway, but today’s climate is actually quite stable. Aside from the drive for world socialism, the climate scare is based on only one thing: computer model forecasts of what some say could happen someday if we do not restrict our use of fossil fuels to reduce CO2 emissions.

However, the models do not work. That’s because they focus predominantly on greenhouse gases, and because scientists do not understand planetary climate processes well enough to know what mathematical equations to program into the models. Observations demonstrate that the actual rate of warming between 1979 and 2017 is one-third of what the average of 102 different climate models predicted. In fact, that climate model average is now almost one full degree Fahrenheit above what satellites have measured!

It is also important to realize that your own local weather forecasts just one week ahead are accurate only half the time. Let’s drill a bit deeper into this scandal.

For the better part of three decades, governments have financed more than one hundred efforts to model our planet. They continue to do so even though none of the models has been able to recreate (hindcast) the known past, or after a decade of study accurately predict what was to happen just ten years later.

People are led astray, because generally speaking, the public has no clue what mathematical models actually are, how they work, and what they can and cannot do. To provide a simple insight into this complex subject, before we build airplanes or buildings, we make small scale physical models and test them against the stress and performances that will be required of them when they are actually built.

When dealing with systems that are totally beyond our control, we try to describe them with computer programs or mathematical equations that we hope may give answers to questions we have about how the system works today and in the future. We attempt to understand the variables that affect the system’s operation. Then we alter the variables and see how the outcomes are affected. This is called sensitivity testing and is the very best use of mathematical models.

Historically, we were never foolish enough to make economic decisions based on predictions calculated from equations we think might control how nature works. Perhaps the most active area for mathematical modeling is the economy and stock market. No one has ever succeeded in getting it right, and they have far fewer variables than Earth’s climate, which is governed by many powerful natural forces.

Yet, today, in the climate sphere, we are doing just that – and using the models to justify massive changes in our energy and economic systems. While no one knows all the variables affecting climate, there are likely hundreds of them. Here are some important factors for which we have limited understanding:

1) seasonal, annual and decadal changes in solar irradiation; 2) energy flows between the ocean and atmosphere; 3) energy flows between the air and land; 4) balance between Earth’s water, water vapor and ice; 5) the impacts of clouds, both trapping heat below and preventing solar radiation from reaching Earth; 6) understanding the planet’s ice; 7) changes in mass among ice sheets, seal levels and glaciers; 8) our ability to factor in hurricanes and tornadoes; 9) the impact of vegetation on temperature; 10) tectonic movements on ocean bottoms; 11) differential rotation between Earth’s surface and its core; and 12) solar system magnetic field and gravitational interactions.

Despite this vast uncertainty, today’s modelers claim they can forecast our planet’s climate for decades or even a century in the future – by looking primarily or solely at “greenhouse gases.” And they want our leaders to manage our energy, economic, agricultural, transportation and other systems accordingly.

Yes, there is a climate-related emergency. It is the threat to our way of life in the free democratic world – imposed on us by climate alarmists, many of whom do not really care about climate change, people or the environment. It is an assault no less frightening and damaging than the wars that have plagued mankind since the dawn of time. It’s time for people and governments to stand up to the power-hungry alarmists.

Dr. Jay Lehr is Senior Policy Advisor with of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) and former Science Director of The Heartland Institute, in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Tom Harris is Executive Director of ICSC and a policy advisor to Heartland.    

NASA and NOAA Continue to Fudge the Surface Temperature Data

Tony Heller at The Deplorable Climate Science Blog shows how NASA and NOAA have altered the surface temperature data once again to greatly exaggerate global warming.  The maintenance of an appearance of catastrophic man-made global warming requires a continuous program of outright fraud and data fudging.  Here is the comparison of three sets of claimed unaltered temperatures as recorded:

Keep cooling the older temperature readings and keep warming the more recent temperature readings and one can create the appearance of catastrophic man-made global warming.  It is even worse than this comparison graph shows because even the 2000 temperature record had been tampered with in a most unscientific way to exaggerate a warming trend.

For further discussion of the surface temperature data fraud see Paul Matthews' article on climate scientists fiddling the data.

The federal government swamp continues to function in NOAA and much of NASA even two years into the Trump administration.

Overheated claims on temperature records by Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris

It’s time for sober second thoughts on climate alarms

Now that the excitement has died down over the news that Earth’s surface temperature made 2017 one of the hottest years on record, it is time for sober second thoughts.

Did the January 18 announcement by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that 2017 was our planet’s third-hottest year since 1880, and NASA’s claim that it was the second hottest year, actually mean anything?

Although the Los Angeles Times called 2017 “a top-three scorcher for planet Earth,” neither the NOAA nor the NASA records are significant. One would naturally expect the warmest years to come during the most recent years of a warming trend. And thank goodness we have been in a gradual warming trend since the depths of the Little Ice Age in the late 1600s! Back then, the River Thames was covered by a meter of ice, as Jan Grifier’s 1683 painting “The Great Frost’ illustrates.

Regardless, recent changes have been too small for even most thermometers to notice. More important, they are often less than the government’s estimates of uncertainty in the measurements. In fact, we lack the data to properly and scientifically compare today’s temperatures with the past.

This is because, until the 1960s, surface temperature data was collected using mercury thermometers located at weather stations situated mostly in the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom and eastern Australia. Most of the rest of the planet had very few temperature sensing stations. And none of the Earth’s oceans, which constitute 70 percent of the planet’s surface area, had more than an occasional station separated from its neighbors by thousands of kilometers or miles.

The data collected at the weather stations in this sparse grid had, at best, an accuracy of +/-0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit). In most cases, the real-world accuracy was no better than +/-1 deg C (1.8 deg F). Averaging such poor data in an attempt to determine global conditions cannot yield anything meaningful. Displaying average global temperature to tenths or even hundreds of a degree, as is done in the NOAA and NASA graphs, clearly defies common sense.

Modern weather station surface temperature data is now collected using precision thermocouples. But, starting in the 1970s, less and less ground surface temperature data was used for plots such as those by NOAA and NASA. This was done initially because governments believed satellite monitoring could take over from most of the ground surface data collection.

However, the satellites did not show the warming forecast by computer models, which had become so crucial to climate studies and energy policy-making. So bureaucrats closed most of the colder rural surface temperature sensing stations – the ones furthest from much warmer urban areas – thereby yielding the warming desired for political purposes.

Today, virtually no data exist for approximately 85 percent of the earth’s surface. Indeed, fewer weather stations are in operation now than in 1960.

That means surface temperature computations by NOAA and NASA after about 1980 are meaningless. Combining this with the problems with earlier data renders an unavoidable conclusion: It is not possible to know how Earth’s so-called average surface temperature has varied over the past century and a half.

The data is therefore useless for input to the computer models that form the basis of policy recommendations produced by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and used to justify eliminating fossil fuels, and replacing them with renewable energy.

But the lack of adequate surface data is only the start of the problem. The computer models on which the climate scare is based are mathematical constructions that require the input of data above the surface, as well as on it. The models divide the atmosphere into cubes piled on top of each other, ideally with wind, humidity, cloud cover and temperature conditions known for different altitudes. But we currently have even less data above the surface than on it, and there is essentially no historical data at altitude.

Many people think the planet is adequately covered by satellite observations, data that represents global 24/7 coverage and is far more accurate than anything determined at weather stations. But the satellites are unable to collect data from the north and south poles, regions that the IPCC, NOAA and NASA tout as critical to understanding global warming. Besides, space-based temperature data collection did not start until 1979, and 30 years of weather data are required to generate a single data point on a climate graph.

So the satellite record is far too short to allow us to come to useful conclusions about climate change.

In fact, there is insufficient data of any kind – temperature, land and sea ice, glaciers, sea level, extreme weather, ocean pH,  and so on – to be able to determine how today’s climate differs from the past. Lacking such fundamental data, climate forecasts cited by climate activists therefore have no connection with the real world.

British Professor Hubert Lamb is often identified as the founder of modern climatology. In his comprehensive 1972 treatise, Climate: Past, Present and Future, he clearly showed that it is not possible to understand climate change without having vast amounts of accurate weather data over long time frames. Lamb also noted that funding for improving the weather database was dwarfed by money being spent on computer models and theorizing. He warned that this would result in wild and unsubstantiated theories and assertions, while predictions failed to improve. That is precisely what happened.

Each and every prediction made by the computer models cited by the IPCC have turned out to be incorrect. Indeed, the first predictions they made for the IPCC’s 1990 Assessment Report were so wrong that the panel started to call them “projections” and offered low, medium and high “confidence” ranges for future guesstimates, which journalists, politicians and others nevertheless treated as reliable predictions for future weather and climate.

IPCC members seemed to conclude that, if they provided a broad enough range of forecasts, one was bound to be correct. Yet, even that was too optimistic. All three ranges predicted by the IPCC have turned out to be wrong.

US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt is right to speak about the need for a full blown public debate among scientists about the causes and consequences of climate change. In his February 6 television interview on KSNV, an NBC affiliate in Las Vegas, Mr. Pruitt explained:

“There are very important questions around the climate issue that folks really don’t get to. And that’s one of the reasons why I’ve talked about having an honest, open, transparent debate about what do we know, and what don’t we know, so the American people can be informed and they can make decisions on their own with respect to these issues.”

On January 30, Pruitt told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that a “red team-blue team exercise” (an EPA-sponsored debate between climate scientists holding differing views) is under consideration. It is crucially important that such a debate take place.

The public needs to understand that even the most basic assumptions underlying climate concerns are either in doubt or simply wrong. The campaign to force America, Canada, Europe and the rest of the world to switch from abundant and affordable coal and other fossil fuels – to expensive, unreliable, land intensive alternatives – supposedly to control Earth’s always fluctuating climate, will then finally be exposed for what it really is: the greatest, most damaging hoax in history.

Dr. Tim Ball is an environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba. Tom Harris is executive director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition.

My Note:

I added the yellow highlighting.  This is a point I have also long made.  I will add another point, much of the historical data has been "corrected" in recent times and the corrections are very substantial compared to the temperature trends and somehow almost always make the older temperatures colder.  If the older data really does need to have such large corrections, then the older data is worthless as scientific data and should be treated as such.  There is no point in making the corrections on such a wobbly, uncertain base.

NOAA Fudges Temperatures in My Backyard to Bolster Failed Man-Made Warming Hypothesis

Tony Heller at Real Science has once again shown how our federal government through NOAA has provided a faked data plausibility for the failed catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis.  This example of NOAA data fudging is from my own backyard.  It is amazing what can be done to take advantage of very local urban heat island (UHI) effects.  Having taken advantage of UHI, NOAA then adds further corrections to temperature measurements to lower those of the past, when population densities were generally lower, instead of lowering recent measurements to compensate for increasing UHI contributions to present temperatures.  I wrote a post long ago showing that rural temperature measurements showed no significant temperature increase for a long time.

Of course, since the "settled", "consensus" physics said to cause carbon dioxide to warm the surface of the Earth is wrong, it is hardly surprising that the many special interests dependent upon the catastrophic man-made global warming fraud are manufacturing data to hide the lack of warming in the last 18 years.  It is disgusting that many scientists are active participants in this fraud.

Supporting the Open Evaluation of NOAA Scientists' Scientific Claims of Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming

I am one of the scientists who has signed the following letter to Representative Lamar Smith, Chairman of the Science, Space and Technology Committee of Congress.  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), an agency of the federal government, has refused to share the scientific data which NOAA scientists have used to adjust the surface temperature records of the Earth.  This is a clear violation of federal law and it is a clear thumbing of the noise by NOAA of representative government.  Rep. Lamar Smith is simply trying to perform due diligence in evaluating data and scientific methods being used to justify drastic governmental regulations.  There is very substantial evidence that much of the surface temperature record has been fudged to support the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis.  NOAA is unwilling to submit its scientific claims to critical and rational scientific evaluation.

The letter in support of exposing this NOAA data and scientific methodology to open examination was signed by 300 scientists and follows:

January 8, 2016

Chairman Lamar Smith

Committee on Science, Space and Technology

House of Representatives

Congress of the United States

Dear Chairman Smith,

We, the undersigned, scientists, engineers, economists and others, who have looked carefully into the effects of carbon dioxide released by human activities, wish to record our support for the efforts of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology to ensure that OMB and NOAA guidelines for Peer Review for Influential Scientific Information and Highly Influential Scientific Assessment are followed by federal agencies.

We remind you that controversy previously arose over EPA’s apparent failure to comply with these guidelines in connection with its Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding, which was the subject of a report by the EPA Office of the Inspector General in 2011, see http://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-10/documents/20110926-11-p-0702.pdf and contemporary discussion http://climateaudit.org/2011/10/04/epa-the-endangerment-finding-was-not-a-highly-influential-scientific-assessment/.  In that case, EPA had not complied with peer review requirements for a “highly influential scientific assessment” and argued that the Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding was not a “highly influential” scientific assessment.  If it wasn’t, then it’s hard to imagine what would be.

In our opinion, NOAA ought to have observed the OMB (and its own) guidelines for peer review of “influential scientific information” and “highly influential scientific assessments” in respect to  Karl et al 2015 and its associated data.  But NOAA seems not to have done this.

We urge you to focus on these important compliance issues. For your consideration we attach a draft letter which directly connects these issues to your committee’s prior request for documents.

Sincerely,

List of signatories 

More context for this letter is provided in this Daily Caller article.

Obama NOAA Refused to Provide Research Documents to House Science Committee

Rep. Lamar Smith, Texas Republican and chairman of the House Science Committee subpoenaed NOAA for research documents related to their adjustments of the temperature record.  These adjustments were recently used to remove all evidence of the pause in surface temperatures from 1998 to 2013 and replace that pause with a temperature surge.  NOAA refused to hand the documents on the adjustments over, in direct violation of law. Smith's committee wants to know why.

According to Rep. Smith: 

The American people have every right to be suspicious when NOAA alters data to get the politically correct results they want and then refuses to reveal how those decisions were made.

As a recent editorial in Investors Business Daily says:

Taxpayers pay for this research, which is being used to justify massive new federal spending and regulation. They deserve to know what NOAA and other federal agencies are doing — and whether they're being honest or serving an unspoken extreme political agenda.

Indeed, it is way past time that the Obama administration should be stopped from exaggerating claims of catastrophic man-made global warming simply by manipulating the data to systematically lower past temperatures and to raise recent temperatures.  NOAA and NASA GISS have both long been engaged in this fraud and have not been held responsible for their corruption of science and their lawless activities.  These activities have then fed the data mill that the Obama EPA has used to claim that CO2 is a terrible pollutant.  It is no such thing.  It is in fact absolutely necessary for life on Earth by virtue of the need of plants for it and our need of plants.  It is the use of CO2 by plants that produces the oxygen in the atmosphere that animals, including man, require.  Yet the Obama EPA has the gall to call this life-essential molecule a pollutant based on the fudging of data by NOAA and NASA GISS!

An Update on the Temperature Record Fudging Scandal

James Rust, a retired professor of nuclear engineering and now a Heartland Institute adviser, has written a good summary of the Earth surface temperature record fudging scandal.  NOAA (USHCN) and NASA GISS in the USA and the University of East Anglia with the MET office (Hadcrut) in the United Kingdom have basically adjusted earlier temperature records downward and increased the more recently measured temperatures despite increased urban heat island effects systematically to support the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis.  Yet, even with these unjustified temperature record adjustments, there has been no increase in temperatures since 1998 even as the computer models for the climate have predicted major temperature increases based on a continued rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations.  What is more, the adjusted surface temperature record over the satellite monitored lower troposphere temperature record period do not now agree well at all and the satellite record is clearly more reliable.

As the ClimateGate e-mails clearly revealed, there is a conspiracy to destroy the science of the climate with fraudulent data and fraudulent and vague theories in order to support a grab by governments for evermore political power.  Scientists with the integrity to oppose this destruction of science and its reputation are being brutally hunted down and subjected to character assassination and career destruction.

Those politicians who are opposing the catastrophic man-made global warming alarmist fraud are being opposed with great vigor by those political organizations seeking to impose draconian restrictions on the use of fossil fuels as well.  Obama's Organizing for Action non-profit and community organizing project has named the politicians it is most interested in going after because they are skeptical of catastrophic man-made global warming.

Obama's Climate Action Plan is given here.

The European Union is backing a plan that calls for a 60% reduction in "greenhouse gas" emissions compared to 2010 by the year 2050 throughout the world.  One of the many absurd results of this policy is that even if the developed nations reduced their emissions to zero, developing nations would have to reduce their emissions 38% below current levels!  The alarmists are completely divorced from all aspects of reality, both scientifically and economically.  If the developing nations are to have any chance of improving their standard of living, it will have to depend upon an increased use of fossil fuels.

Maintaining Climate Change Alarmism: Replacing Cool Weather Station Data with Warm Station Data

Steven Goddard at Real Science has lately had a series of posts on the effects of a very large reduction of temperature data reported from many weather stations since 1990.  The effect of the data loss and its replacement with massaged data, turns out to be a considerable artificial warming effect.  His most recent post is here.

The following plot by Steven Goddard of the older and generally complete temperature data in the USHCN temperature record kept by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) until 1990 shows the separated data from the stations still reporting complete data and compares that to the temperature data, then complete, of the stations which are missing much of their temperature data since 1990:

Clearly the stations reporting complete data since 1990 are the stations that were warmer prior to 1990 than those which have been reporting incomplete data since 1990.  The temperature differences between the two data sets prior to 1990 are very substantial.

In an earlier post, Goddard presented the percentage of the NOAA USHCN temperature data for which there was no raw data in the record by year:

Note the increase in the missing raw temperature data since 1990, which became a particularly rapid increase in lost raw temperatures after 1994.  The rate of loss of raw data is really remarkable in the recent years of stagnant temperature reports, indicating that there is a greater and greater need by the alarmists to hide the cooling that must really be going on of late.

Steven Goddard then presents the data as reported since 1990 from these same two sets of stations on the basis of the raw data that actually was reported in the raw data record.

So it becomes very clear that NOAA is preferentially losing the raw temperature data since 1990 from the cooler stations.  The final massaged data that they report to everyone replaces the missing cooler temperatures with temperatures interpolated geographically from the warmer data from the stations with complete raw temperature data records.  That is, NOAA is not just losing cooler raw temperatures, but it is adding in warmer temperatures as though that comes from the cooler stations!

It is clear that many of the NOAA warm stations are warm because of urban and suburban locations, airport locations, and massive heat absorbing or even heat-emitting objects at the immediate site.  The Urban Heat Island Effect has corrupted much of the NOAA weather station network data.  Far from correcting the data from overly warm sites downward, NOAA is correcting the cooler and usually better station data upward.  See Anthony Watts' recent evaluation of the USHCN weather stations.

Over and over, I am asked scornfully by believers in the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis if I believe that the government and many climate alarmist scientists are lying to us.  There are many temperature records that have clearly been adjusted with great bias of heart to exaggerate or manufacture a warming trend to support this hypothesis.  I have discussed this in many prior posts.  This very interesting sleuthing by Steven Goddard into the NOAA USHCN temperature data and what NOAA has villainously and corruptly done to the temperature record makes it very clear that our government and its scientists are very determinedly lying to us.  Apparently, the lust for power is overwhelming for many government scientists and for many scientists funded by the power lusting government.

NOAA Surface Temperature Changes Show Little Correlation to CO2 Changes Since 1880

Prof. Karl Erdman provided this surface temperature record to me from his search of government data files.  The orange dots are the change in the annual global temperature anomaly from year to year. The blue line is the 10-year average of the change in the annual global temperature anomalies.  The gray vertical bars are the average annual CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.  Since CO2 concentrations increase almost every year, if the temperature is increased by increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, then the change of temperature each year should have a strong tendency to be positive since the CO2 concentration change is positive almost every year.  The only years the CO2 concentration did not increase were from 1941 to 1946.

The sub-heading says that annual CO2 levels have little impact on the annual temperature change.  Looking at this data objectively, it is very difficult to claim that there is any correlation between the changes of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and the changes in the surface temperature!  This states the real lesson of the data better than the sub-heading of the graph does.

This is consistent with my understanding of the basic physics of the Earth's climate as I have discussed it numerous times.  The effect of atmospheric CO2 is very, very small.  It is probably actually a cooling effect, just as that of water vapor certainly is.

The data plotted is based on three data sources:

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/annual.land_ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat

The changes in the temperature anomaly from one year to the next are the differences between a year's temperature anomaly and that of the next year from this data set.

ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_annmean_mlo.txt

Measurements of atmospheric CO2 concentrations from 1959 to 2012.

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/trends/co2/lawdome.smoothed.yr20

Historical CO2 record derived from a spline fit (20 year cutoff) of the Law Dome DE08 and DE08-2 ice cores June 1998 Source: D.M. Etheridge L.P. Steele R.L. Langenfelds R.J. Francey Division of Atmospheric Research, CSIRO, Aspendale, Victoria, Australia J.-M. Barnola Laboratoire of Glaciologie et Geophysique de l'Environnement, Saint Martin d'Heres-Cedex, France V.I. Morgan Antarctic CRC and Australian Antarctic Division, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

Once again there is little reason to be concerned about the emissions of CO2 due to using fossil fuels.  So why is the Obama regime, and his EPA in particular, claiming that carbon dioxide is a pollutant.  Plants certainly do not think it is anything of the sort.  Increased crops and natural vegetation provide us many benefits:

• Increased food supplies for people and livestock
• A decrease in arid land areas
• Moderation of day to night temperature variations
• Increased oxygen production

I would like to thank Harry Dale Huffman for comments that lead to improvements in this post.

NOAA's U.S. Standard Atmosphere Tables of 1976: Who Needs Greenhouse Gas Warming?

The U.S. Standard Atmosphere 1976 long ago explained why the Earth's surface temperature is 33K warmer than the Earth's radiative temperature as seen from space.  The reason is the effect of gravity acting on the atmosphere.  It takes a very corrupt mind to supplant this long-known explanation with a greenhouse gas explanation using highly faulty physics concepts to create a looming catastrophe from nothing.  The essence of the proper explanation was known long ago to James Clerk Maxwell even.  The U.S. Standard Atmosphere went through several refinements.  These were the standard tables of 1958, 1962,1966, and 1976 as a collaboration between NOAA, NASA, and the U.S. Air Force.  Soon after the last refinement, James Hanson began the great greenhouse gas fraud.

An improved version of this post has been submitted for publication in a book, so this post had to be removed.  The book, soon to be published, is:

Satellite Temperature Record Now Unreliable

I have written many posts that our ground surface temperature record based on the collapsing network of weather stations around the world, is biased upward with the urban heat island effect and by obviously bad grid interpolation schemes.  I had thought that the only reliable temperature records were the satellite and ocean buoy temperature records.  I was wrong.  It now appears that since at least 2005, the satellite temperature records have not been reliable.

This revelation began with John O'Sullivan being informed that data on the temperatures across northern Lake Michigan which were automatically provided by satellite to a NOAA website operated by the Michigan State University had ridiculously high surface water temperatures widely distributed over the lake.  In fact, they implied many areas were under super-boiling conditions!  A commenter to O'Sullivan's website noted that the entire lake surface was coded in black, meaning that the cloud cover was too extensive for the satellite to produce meaningful temperatures.  He implied that this would keep these temperatures from being used in any other way in generating the satellite temperature record.  However, O'Sullivan came back with Lake Michigan maps which were not coded black and showed that many of the temperatures in the grid over the lake were differing too much locally and changing too rapidly in time.

This led to questions to NOAA, which generates the primary temperature records in the U.S. and supplies its raw data to NASA and the CRU at the University of East Anglia in the UK.  NOAA has not been very forthright with what is going on, but it has admitted that the NOAA-16 satellite has severe sensor problems.  Then they also admitted that other satellites have suffered degradation of their sensors.  Finally, Charles Pistis, Program Coordinator of the Michigan Sea Grant Extension admits that satellite data going back to 2005 may have been corrupted by bad data.  He instructs us that the NOAA-16 satellite uses IR sensors and provides a temperature which is either the surface temperature or the temperature at the top surface of a cloud.  The temperature of 604F found in one grid on a cloudy day is not likely to be either the temperature of the surface of Lake Michigan or of a cloud over it.

It is a wonder to me how one can use data from IR sensors to contribute to the global temperature record if the temperature measured is either that of the ground or of the top of a cloud or just total nonsense.  Let us suppose that the data is examined against independent cloud coverage measurements, which it is not clear is carefully done.  But, if it were, then all the temperature data would be shifted systematically to higher temperatures.  Ground and water areas under clouds are cooler during the day and will also be cooler at night more often than not if the day was also cloudy.  Charles Pistis has evaded the repeated question of whether the temperature measurement data from such satellites has gone into the NOAA temperature record.  This sure suggests this is an awkward question to answer.

The satellite data is fed automatically into records and apparently as long as it showed high enough temperatures to satisfy the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (AGW) advocates, those numbers were not given careful scrutiny going back as far as 2005.  It is, of course, hard to believe that no one did notice the errors.  One has to marvel at either the scientific incompetence this reveals or the completely unethical behavior of NOAA and its paid researchers that is laid open before us.  Possibly, in time, NOAA will provide an adequate answer to what has been going on with the satellite temperature record, but it is off to a very bad start in reassuring those of us who are not religious environmentalists, but are just interested in an objective understanding of the environment.  But, at this time, that appears to be an unlikely outcome.

Given the taxpayer money spent on the satellite and the ground station temperature records and the great importance claimed by the catastrophic AGW alarmists for the unprecedented warming of the globe they have claimed was going on, these failures in generating an accurate satellite temperature record are unfathomable.  What is worse, the raw data is known not to be available to reconstruct the ground station temperature record and one suspects it is not available for the satellite records either.  This is a catastrophe.  It is now perfectly clear that there are no reliable worldwide temperature records and that we have little more than anecdotal information on the temperature history of the Earth.  There is clearly no basis for the claims that the Earth has warmed at unusual rates in recent times or that we know anything more than some local temperatures, mostly from urban heat effect zones.