Letters to the Editor

Warmth supports life — cold kills

quill pen

To the Editor
Climate Conversation

24th Month 2016

Texas blizzards recently killed 47,000 cattle — cold kills.

Wild animals and nomadic herders know this and move to avoid the cold.

Reindeer follow the sun — they spend summers grazing on the treeless tundra, but when the snows start they head south into the protective forests. Continue Reading →

Visits: 51

Figueres leaves top climate job – world sighs with relief

UN climate chief Christiana Figueres has stepped down. Climate Depot has an excellent summary of reaction and Figuere’s record on climate.

Christiana Figueres, anti-democratic, cold-hearted.

“The world can smile today that Figueres will soon be out of power.” – Marc Morano Continue Reading →

Visits: 55

Letters to the Editor

Get fair dinkum

quill pen

To the Editor
Climate Conversation

15th February 2016

If governments truly believed that man’s production of carbon dioxide causes dangerous global warming, they would ban the use of motor cars, motor trucks, tractors, motor homes, motor bikes, motor mowers, motor launches and petrol-driven chain saws. These all pump out the two dreaded greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide and water vapour. Horses, bullocks, wagons, bicycles, scythes, row-boats and axes are the true green tools. All were good enough for our pioneers. Continue Reading →

Visits: 124

Slate reads too much into new temperature paper

A paper on US temperature adjustments was published in Geophysical Research Letters on February 5. Download full text here, (pdf, 1.5MB). The University of York has information about the paper including handy links to data.

The paper examines and offers improvements to adjustments to the continental US surface temperature record. The abstract is easy to read and understand:

Numerous inhomogeneities including station moves, instrument changes, and time of observation changes in the US Historical Climatological Network (USHCN) complicate the assessment of long-term temperature trends. Detection and correction of inhomogeneities in raw temperature records have been undertaken by NOAA and other groups using automated pair-wise neighbour comparison approaches, but these have proven controversial due to the large trend impact of homogenization in the United States. The new US Climate Reference Network (USCRN) provides a homogeneous set of surface temperature observations that can serve as an effective empirical test of adjustments to raw USHCN stations. By comparing nearby pairs of USHCN and USCRN stations, we find that adjustments make both trends and monthly anomalies from USHCN stations much more similar to those of neighbouring USCRN stations for the period 2004-2015 when the networks overlap. These results improve our confidence in the reliability of homogenized surface temperature records.

Slate’s response is straight out of the “I told you so” playbook but they haven’t actually read the paper. Continue Reading →

Visits: 44

Met Office shock forecast: warming to continue

No warming for up to 25 years, but now…

The indomitable, indefatigable, never-say-die UK Met Office (under the spell of the IPCC) predicts that warming is set to “continue”, even though there’s been no global warming to speak of for about 25 years. Wonderful. In fact, the entire UAH satellite dataset from December 1978 to November 2015 (37 years) shows global warming at a yawn-inducing rate of just 1.14°C per century, well within natural variability. Stupendous. Continue Reading →

Visits: 193