Tuesday, August 11, 2015

 

Translating Holthaus

There is a meteorologist named Eric Holthaus who seems a true believer in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. Thus, he is one of many involved in the $1.5 Trillion dollar global warming enterprise. Good work if you can get it. I can't tell if he has an MS in meteorology and a PhD in Geography and Development, or if he's just working on those. He did get an MA in Climate and Society (whatever that is) from Columbia and wrote for a little less than three years for the Wall Street Journal on weather related subjects.

What causes me to bring him up is this piece he wrote for Rolling Stone, which has become a left wing political publication with some coverage of music. Let's go to the first paragraph:

Historians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan. Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people. In Washington state's Olympic National Park, the rainforest caught fire for the first time in living memory. London reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest July day ever recorded in the U.K.; The Guardian briefly had to pause its live blog of the heat wave because its computer servers overheated. In California, suffering from its worst drought in a millennium, a 50-acre brush fire swelled seventyfold in a matter of hours, jumping across the I-15 freeway during rush-hour traffic. Then, a few days later, the region was pounded by intense, virtually unheard-of summer rains. Puerto Rico is under its strictest water rationing in history as a monster El Niño forms in the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifting weather patterns worldwide.
Let me put that in plainer English. This Summer it got really hot in Pakistan, India and London. There is a drought along the West Coast of America with the usual Summer fires which often occur in drought stricken areas. There is also drought in Puerto Rico. A so-far normal El Nino is forming in the Pacific (which will probably end the drought in California and Nevada and along the coast above California).

No one has satisfactorily tied a single one of these routine events to CO2 having a presence in the atmosphere of 400 ppmv. Through out the history of the Earth, it is hotter in the Summer than in the Winter; and sometimes it is really, really hot in Summer in some areas of the world. Sometimes there is too little rain in an area and sometimes there is too much rain and flooding occurs.

On July 20th, James Hansen, the former NASA climatologist who brought climate change to the public's attention in the summer of 1988, issued a bombshell: He and a team of climate scientists had identified a newly important feedback mechanism off the coast of Antarctica that suggests mean sea levels could rise 10 times faster than previously predicted: 10 feet by 2065.

This "study" was pretty much laughed at by properly skeptical scientists and even criticized by fellow true believers. But let's look at the reliability of the prediction: 10 feet by 1065 (50 years away). Currently, NASA has the sea level rising at 3.21 mm per year. I think, for a lot of reasons, that's too high and most tidal gauges have it lower, around 2mm/yr but let's use the higher figure. 50 years times 3.21mm/yr is 160.5mm which, converted to inches, is 6.32 inches, which is a lot less than 10 feet. There is nothing in the tidal records or in the raw Jason database which indicate a rise in the rate of sea level rise. So this is hooey.

Last fall, in northern Alaska, in the same part of the Arctic where Shell is planning to drill for oil, federal scientists discovered 35,000 walruses congregating on a single beach. It was the largest-ever documented "haul out" of walruses, and a sign that sea ice, their favored habitat, is becoming harder and harder to find.
All the walruses in the area winding up in a close packed group on the beach is so common and well know a phenomenon that it has a name--"haul out." They happen all the time and we've only seen a few of them and even fewer have been photographed from the air. Saying, as Mr. Holthaus does, that a 30,000 plus walrus haul out has anything to do with global warming, is very similar to saying the 400,000 plus humans at Woodstock, NY in 1969 had something to do with the global cooling that was being predicted back then. His connection of the big haul out to global warming is just stupid.

But there is more.

In July, another major study concluded that acidifying oceans are likely to have a "quite traumatic" impact on plankton diversity, with some species dying out while others flourish. As the oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it's converted into carbonic acid — and the pH of seawater declines.

The Ph scale of basic to acidic goes from 0 to 14 with 7 as neutral and more than 7 basic and less than 7 acidic. The further you are from 7 in either direction the more concentrated the acidic or basic solution will be. The ocean, many feel, has had a Ph of 8.2 for a long time on average; and since 1750 or so, the Ph has gone down from 8.2 to 8.1. Many of the sharper readers here will notice that the ocean is therefore basic and has become in nearly 3 centuries slightly less basic. The ocean remains basic and use of the word acidic doesn't enter into it at all. If anything it's getting less basic but that is a long, long way from becoming more acidic. You have to be below Ph 7 to be properly talking about acidic at all. But it sounds worse if the true believers say acidic, acidify, ocean acidification rather than remain basic, become less basic, ocean neutralization, which are the proper terms to use regarding a basic Ph moving oh so slightly down.

There is no mention in the article what the numbers on the Ph scale are for ocean water and what has happened in the past 3 centuries. I wonder why that is?

Enhanced evaporation from the warmer oceans will create heavier downpours, perhaps destabilizing the root systems of forests, and accelerated runoff will pour more excess nutrients into coastal areas, further enhancing dead zones. In the past year, downpours have broken records in Long Island, Phoenix, Detroit, Baltimore, Houston and Pensacola, Florida.
Rather than cherry pick a few cities here and there, let's look at the real downpour records. Here's one. And here's another (most of these records took place in the 40s with one in the 50s and one in the 70s--so much for increasing downpours).

Evidence for the above scenario comes in large part from our best understanding of what happened 250 million years ago, during the "Great Dying," when more than 90 percent of all oceanic species perished after a pulse of carbon dioxide and methane from land-based sources began a period of profound climate change.


There are no facts regarding what caused the Permian-Triassic extinction event, only guesses. It was 250 million years ago and all the evidence has been long lost. The greenhouse gas theory has only been discussed in seriousness since the Global Warming Scare started 25 years ago, as it falsely supplies a historical precedent to the theory of catastrophic global warming being pushed at this time. Repeat, no one knows; and there are several very sound theories regarding causation, any one of which could be all or part right. CO2 and CHhave a one in 5 chance of being even partly the culprit.


I could go on and on about what a load of propaganda this is. As the populace tunes the true believers out, the chicken littles have to be ever more shrill in their predictions of doom. As they become ever more shrill, we tune them out more completely. Still, it falls on each of us to speak the truth when we see people with a harmful agenda not speaking it.







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