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No No No. Co2 is a trace gas with a very beneficial role in chemical process of photosynthesis converting radiant light from the sun into energy for plant growth. Co2 has no noticeable climate effect and there is certainly no evidence that it makes the climate too warm.The **best evidence** (Learn More About Climate Change) is that anthropogenic global warming is modest and benign, and rising CO2 levels are beneficial, rather than harmful, for both mankind and most natural ecosystems.“That’s why over 30,000 American scientists (including me DAVE BURTON) have signed the “**Global Warming Petition** (http://www.petitionproject.org/)” attesting to the fact that:***“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”***Dave Burton (Dave Burton), IPCC AR5 WGI expert reviewerI doubt the conventional wisdom espoused by the UN IPCC, mainstream media, and Al Gore that people can change the climate. Trace amounts of C02 emissions from fossil fuels are irrelevant to global warming because the Greenhouse gas heat forcing hypothesis discarded long ago is wrong.The scientific method is driven by a process of hypothesis experiment and revision not organization’s executive consensus to placate government funding. The alarmist’s predictions all fail, including the end of snow, dramatic sea rise, unusual glacier melting, Pacific island sinking and polar bears extinction have all been false. This means the global warming hypothesis fails and is false.The best introductory answer to this question comes from Nobel Laureate Dr. Ivar Giaever PhysicistNobel Laureate Smashes the Global Warming Hoax“Physics Nobel Laureate; "Global Warming" is PseudoscienceProfessor Ivar Giaever, the 1973 Nobel Prizewinner for Physics trashes the global warming/climate change/extreme weather pseudoscientific clap-trap and tells Obama he is "Dead Wrong". This was the 2012 meeting of Nobel Laureates. The 2015 speech by Prof Giaever is here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCy_U...1,710,019 viewsDr Giaever presents a very cogent and compelling analysis more true every year as the predictions of the alarmists continue to fail.”The greenhouse gas effect is “bunk”The earth is not a greenhouse. The metaphor is is bad science.The original warming theory invented in 1824 by Fourier was only limited to water vapour that is 95% of the total gases and refuted in 1909 by RW Wood a famous American physicist and inventor. Wood based his refutation on a better understanding of how a real greenhouse works and it is not by back radiation. It is the fact the glass panel prevent the trapped air being cooled by the atmosphere. The earth is an open system there are no glass panel and Co2 plant food at 0.1% (near zero) of the atmosphere could not have such large effects on the climate is impossible to even image. There is only one molecule of Co2 emissions between Vancouver and Hope 130 K away.Looking at all the gases in the atmosphere 76% Nitrogen and 20.5% Oxygen shows the so called greenhouse gases are only < 4%. The largest greenhouse gas is water vapour at 95%. Most of the Co2 in the atmosphere comes from natural sources at 4% this leaves only minute amounts of industry produced Co2 too small to measure.Make up of invisible radiative gases misnamed greenhouse gases.This is a key graph of all Greenhouse gases that shows detailed percentages of where the source of C02 in the atmosphere and human emissions are miniscule at only 0.117%. Human activities contribute slightly to greenhouse gas concentrations through farming, manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. However, these emissions are so dwarfed in comparison to emissions from other natural sources it is foolish to think humans make any difference. Even the most costly efforts to limit human Co2 emissions if they succeeded would have a very small-- undetectable-- effect on global climate.it may be a little hard to picture just how minute the fossil fuel emissions across the globe are. Please take 3 minutes to view this helpful Australian Rice video that helped Australia’s public decide to axe the futile carbon http://tax.It is hard to imagine, but essential to realize they have no effect on the climate, just how small the Co2 emissions from fossil fuels are.Co2 so small drawn to scale it is invisible.Climate alarmists ignore this evidence that GHG are trace gases with water vapour at 95% and Co2 near zero from human fossil fuels. are too small a portion of the atmosphere to matter because it takes the punch out of their hypothesis.The saddest part of the debate over global warming is the fact alarmists like Al Gore and Barack Obama say the science is settled when there are so many leading scientists and research papers offside. The claim of certainty about a science hypothesis about minor Greenhouse Gases is terrible and obviously wrong.Because we think in pictures and our conceptual system is steeped in metaphor the bad greenhouse metaphor used in climate science distorts our understanding of climate reality.Greenhouse is a misleading word, a bad metaphor and a delusion claiming that Co2 from human emissions have a major effect on the climate? Is the claim of heat forcing or back radiation from the greenhouse effect false?Does the fact human Co2 emissions are near zero or minuscule at 0.1% of the atmosphere make it physically impossible for us to have any influence on our chaotic and variable climate? Co2 gas is only 1 molecule of 2,600 other molecules.History proves that vivid metaphors with false science in the hands of the media, politicians and mass hysteria can be devastating. The popular book, SILENT SPRING written by Rachel Carson is a tragic example of environmentalism gone mad.Bad METAPHORS from shoddy science are deadly“THE SILENT SPRING AND THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT EXAMPLES“While excellent literature, however, Silent Spring was very poor science…Carson wrongly claimed DDT Endangered U.S. Birds with Extinction. According to Rachel Carson, DDT was so harmful to birds that someday America’s springs would be silent, as all the birds that might enliven them with song would be dead. Indeed, it was from this poignant image that she drew the title for her http://book.An examination of actual data, however, thoroughly debunks Carson’s claim… In the case of the robin, singled out by Carson as “the tragic symbol of the fate of the birds,”[40] the population count increased twelvefold.Many other studies show the same pattern of sharp increase of some bird populations during the DDT years.THE DDT LIE IN PHOTO BY THE NEW YORKER JUNE 23, 1962Silent Spring—IITo only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. It has contributed to the great increase in agricultural productivity, while sparing countless humanity from a host of diseases, most notably, perhaps, scrub typhus and malaria. Indeed, it is estimated that, in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that would otherwise have been inevitable.. By some estimates, the death toll in Africa alone from unnecessary malaria resulting from the restrictions on DDT has exceeded 100 million people.[26]”Robert Zubrin is a New Atlantis contributing editor. This essay is adapted from his new book — the latest volume in our New Atlantis Books series — Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism.”https://www.thenewatlantis.com/p...I submit that Al Gore’s slide show and subsequent movie, THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH is sadly a remake of Rachael Carson’s SILENT SPRING and by denying fossil fuels to > 2 billion living off the grid the result will be just as devastating..Leading scientists do not support the notion that the most beneficial trace gas on the planet Co2 ,that is invisible and non toxic could physically be the control knob of our climate. The claim surely feels like a hoax.Why Global Warming?Despite the overwhelming evidence against human-caused global warming, why is actual temperature data consistently ignored? Current climate fluctuations are trivial and well within historical limits. It is a fact that it has been warmer than today for a majority of time in the earth’s climate past.The earth’s climate is symmetry between millions of years as a hot box and then as an ice box. Global warming and global cooling are the imperceptible nonlinear driving forces causing climate scientists to be fooled by randomness. No one knows in their lifetimes what direction the chaotic climate is trending.“Green Guru James Lovelock now says we may ‘enjoy’ global warming: I was ‘led astray’ by the ice cores that seemed to imply changes in carbon dioxide were the dominant cause of changes. Lovelock regrets that huge sums have been 'squandered on the renewable energy sources”, many of which are “ugly and hopelessly impractical” and threaten a “green satanic change” to Britain’s landscape.”Earth has been cooling for 64 million years as shown above. It will continue to cool. Is the current warming just a dead cat bounce? This is worth worrying about as global warming seems to be morphing into global cooling.Historical temperature data shows the alarmists alleged current ‘unprecedented global warming’ is a fantasy or a hoax. Though all the information presented here is publicly available and well known in both scientific and political circles, why does this false notion prevail that mankind is destroying the planet? Could the motive behind such madness be something other than saving the Earth?Geologists are one science discipline steeped in climate history that is not fooled by the AGW false crusade.December 13, 2013“American Institute of Professional Geologists (AIPG) national president Ronald Wallace and Tennessee Section president Todd McFarland (Nashville office of AMEC Earth and Environmental, Inc.) visited Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) on December 5th for an AIPG section meeting. ..“From an education perspective, one of the differences between AIPG and two of the other major geoscience societies, the Geological Society of America and the American Geophysical Union, is that a substantial number of AIPG members have expressed skepticism about the extent to which human activity is to blame for global warming during the last 150 years....“I do not know a single geologist who believes that (global warming ) is a man-made phenonomon.”Peter Sciaky Senate testimony, Oct. 29, 2007, Congressional Record, Senate, Vol. 153. Pt. 20Science organizations who follow Al Gore’s flawed inconvenient truth about the climate change are wrong. Because geologists are steeped in climate history (it is essential to their livelihood) they are much better informed on this issue . Also the American Association of State Climatologists who are not like the alarmists deniers of natural forces dominating the earth’s climate.Tuesday, 06 January 2015“Is Global Warming a Hoax?Written by Ed Hiserodt and Rebecca TerrellIn our information age, we’re bombarded with statistics on every danger the number crunchers can conjure — people struck by lightning, airplane vs. automotive deaths, and even drownings in bathtubs. But one statistic is curiously missing from the list. Even though President Obama and other global-warming alarmists warn of a looming climate apocalypse, they avoid giving a metric to prove their claims. They blame man-made climate change for a vast array of ills, including floods, droughts, wildfires, and tornados. But they never quantify what they say is the driving force behind it all: temperature.They have a very good reason. Actual temperature data doesn’t cooperate with their party line that mankind is ruining the planet with its addiction to so-called fossil fuels and its appetite for ample, affordable energy. Too few taxpayers are demanding proof, and too many are willing to accept global-warming fictions on blind faith, opening the door for federal regulators to foist irrational energy restrictions on the public. Understanding Earth’s climate fluctuations will make us much less willing to let them stifle our economic, industrial, and social progress, while understanding environmentalists’ true motives may incite us to expose their deceit.The Holocene PeriodPaleoclimatologists are scientists who study Earth’s climate history, and two specific studies outshine others in their field in terms of scope and consensus in the scientific community. The multinational European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) lasted from January 1996 until December 2006, earning the European Union’s 2008 Descartes Prize for Research. Investigation at the Russian Vostok Station in Antarctica has been going on since the 1970s. Both groups have studied ice cores as deep as two miles, establishing climate chronology from changes in layering thickness and measuring historic temperature data from varying ratios of oxygen isotopes in entrapped air bubbles.Figure 1 (below) plots ice core data, covering the past 11,700 years — an age known as the Holocene period — with present day included at the far right of the graph. The thick black line traces the average of eight different temperature reconstructions. It highlights the Holocene Optimum, which occurred between 4,000 and 8,000 years ago. Climate alarmists conveniently overlook evidence during the Holocene optimum where there were extended periods of temperatures exceeding the averages by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius above present temperatures.Though temperatures have been falling ever since, the decline hasn’t been steady. About 3,300 years ago temperatures peaked during the Minoan Warm Period, and again during the Roman Warm Period some 2,000 years ago. The Medieval Warm Period occurred 1,000 years ago, when wine vineyards dotted the landscape in Great Britain and Vikings grew corn and barley in Greenland. Each of these eras was warmer than today. Additionally, two significantly low dips are the 8200 Cold Period and the Little Ice Age, 400 to 500 years ago.The Little Ice Age, Greenland, and Some GlaciersThe Little Ice Age is troublesome for global-warming alarmists, since historical evidence suggests the period had extremely low global temperatures, which began recovering only as recently as the mid-19th century. During this era, the Thames River in England froze solid during the winter with ice so thick Londoners held “frost fairs” on it. Noted 17th-century English diarist John Evelyn described what he saw at the fair of 1683-84:Coaches [carriages] plied from Westminster to the Temple, and from several other stairs too and fro, as in the streets; sleds, sliding with skeetes, a bull-baiting, horse and coach races, puppet plays and interludes, cooks, tipling and other lewd places, so that it seemed to be a bacchanalian triumph, or carnival on the water.There were five winters during the Little Ice Age when the Thames froze thick enough to hold a frost fair: 1683-84, 1716, 1739-40, 1789, and 1814. According to Tom de Castella, writing for BBC News Magazine in January 2014, during the last of these, carnival-goers watched an elephant tramp across the river…In this 1677 painting by Abraham Hondius, “The Frozen Thames,looking Eastwards towards Old London Bridge,” people are shown enjoying themselves on the ice. In the 17th century there was a prolonged reduction in solar activity called the Maunder minimum, which lasted roughly from 1645 to 1700. During this period, there were only about 50 sunspots recorded instead of theusual 40-50 thousand. Image credit: Museum of London.Like Greenland and the Little Ice Age, glaciers aren’t cooperating with climate alarmists either, though glacier retreat is supposedly a harbinger of doom for our warming planet. On the contrary, it has been following the pattern you would expect during recovery from the Little Ice Age. The website for the U.S. Geological Survey’s Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center (NOROCK) offers the example of Glacier National Park (GNP) in Montana. An estimated 150 glaciers blanketed the land in 1850, most of which still existed in 1910 when the park was established. “In 2010, we consider there to be only 25 glaciers larger than 25 acres remaining in GNP,” reads the site.But the exciting news is what’s popping up from underneath these retreating ice rivers. “Ancient trees emerge from frozen forest ‘tomb,’” reported the Juneau Empire in September 2013, quoting a University of Alaska Southeast geology professor who dates tree stumps from under the Mendenhall Glacier between 1,400 and 2,350 years old, corresponding to both the Medieval and Roman Warm Periods.Forests aren’t the only finds. In 2003, Swiss archaeologists discovered clothes, weapons, and animal remains at the edge of the retreating Alpine Schnidejoch Glacier. According to German newspaper Tages Spiegel, the researchers were excited about the relics from a time when the glacial zone began roughly 700 meters higher than it does today, the “timber line had climbed substantially,” and “temperatures in the Swiss Alps were up to two degrees over today’s.”It’s clear such evidence and scientific consensus don’t play along with the climate-change charade. Instead, they free mankind from blame for climate fluctuations.Satellite vs. SurfaceWe rely on ice core analysis to discover temperature trends of the past millennia because there was no reliable measurement system prior to 1714 when Daniel Fahrenheit invented the first mercury-in-glass thermometer. His device came into general use in the late 1800s, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) confirms that “there was a net global warming of about 0.4º Celsius between the 1880s and 1970s.”The year 1979 saw the launch of the first temperature-gauging satellites, and suddenly we were not limited to data from ground stations, sea buoys, merchant vessels, and weather balloons. Research by environmental economist Dr. Ross McKitrick of Canada’s University of Guelph explains the drastic effect satellites had on how global temperatures are measured.He found that pre-satellite data is inconsistent because monitored portions of Earth’s surface have changed continuously since the late 1800s, with scant attention to the Southern Hemisphere, and that even by 2000 only 50 percent of the Earth’s surface had thermometer coverage. To add to the confusion, “about 90 percent of the land-based data now being used to construct global averages are sampled in cities,” contaminating readings with an “urban heat island” effect. This issue became the subject of two independent studies: Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable? published in 2009 by the Heartland Institute and the 2011 critique by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), Climate Monitoring: NOAA Can Improve Management of the U.S. Historical Climatology Network. The studies revealed incomplete and erroneous reporting of temperature data and, even more shocking, that nearly 90 percent of U.S. locations are in violation of the National Weather Service’s siting requirements that recording devices must not be placed near sources of artificial or radiated/reflected heat such as exhaust fans, asphalt or concrete surfaces, or rooftops. McKitrick reported urbanization in Europe has produced the same phenomenon.Violations such as these generated the sharp upward spike on the right portion of Figure 2 (below). This graph charts global surface temperatures recorded by four separate agencies: NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Met Office (which is the United Kingdom’s weather service), and the Japanese Meteorological Agency…Ironically, NASA data from this same graph sparked the “coming ice age” scare of the 1970s. Note the temperature change of -0.2 degrees Celsius between 1940 and 1980. This two-tenths difference brought on a storm of ice age predictions by major media and government agents. In 1971, the Washington Post reported that research based on climate modeling developed by NASA scientist James Hansen predicted that glaciers would cover much of the globe within 50 years — by 2021 — because of mankind’s fossil-fuel dust blotting out the sun. (Hansen, who later became director of GISS and retired in 2013, continues to make headlines, advocating a steep carbon tax on fossil fuels to stave off global warming, reported the Des Moines Register last October.)Obviously, Hansen has ignored satellite measurements in favor of faulty surface readings. Since 1979, 14 satellite instruments have daily been recording global temperatures throughout different layers of the atmosphere by monitoring thermal emissions. In contrast to surface monitoring, McKitrick reports that satellites cover 95 percent of the Earth with continuous and consistent measurement techniques. The data are available at the University of Alabama in Huntsville website, and anomalies are plotted in Figure 3 (below). The red line is the running average over 13 months while the data points are monthly. What a difference between this and the four-agency surface temperature records! No sharp upward trends, and nothing to cause the public backlash that fear-mongering climate alarmists crave.It Gets Even CoolerAdding to the anti-climax of satellite data are findings from a fleet of more than 3,500 Argo floats launched by a collaboration of 30 United Nations members beginning in 1999. Designed to profile the temperature and salinity of ocean water, these buoys are scattered around the Earth’s oceans, covering nearly three-quarters of the globe. Yet you don’t hear much of the Argo floats because so far they have recorded cooling, not warming. Researchers published findings in the 2010 International Journal of Geosciences, reporting that rates of change in ocean heat content are “preponderantly negative.”This is particularly significant because many climate-change alarmists conjecture that the reason global temperatures of the 21st century are lower than their faulty climate models originally predicted is that the Earth’s oceans are absorbing all the excess heat. On the contrary, Argo researchers concluded that the data did “not support the existence of either a large positive radiative imbalance or a ‘missing energy.’” In other words, the notion that Earth’s oceans are sponging up all the heat just doesn’t hold water.NOAA’s U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) has also revealed a cooling trend. Established in answer to criticism about NOAA’s site violations, the USCRN is comprised of 114 temperature stations in pristine locations throughout the United States. Meteorologist Anthony Watts plotted the raw USCRN data as shown in Figure 4 (below), which reveals a cooling of 0.72 degrees Fahrenheit since the network began operating in January 2005.Of course, satellites, Argo floats, and USCRN stations are so new, they should be considered still in their pilot phases. In fact, even surface temperature readings since 1880 are a mere blip on the Holocene radar. If you add to Figure 1 data from any of the subsequent charts shown here, you would not be able to discern a difference in the updated graph. Regardless, even temperatures from the most contaminated sources fall well within natural variations. Taken in the broader Holocene context, the modern-day hubbub over climate change is a tempest in a teapot.Why Global Warming?Despite the overwhelming evidence against human-caused global warming, why is actual temperature data consistently ignored? Current climate fluctuations are trivial and well within historical limits. They prove that catastrophic global warming is a hoax. Though all the information presented here is publicly available and well known in both scientific and political circles, why does this false notion prevail that mankind is destroying the planet? Could the motive behind such madness be something other than saving the Earth?Realizing that the USCRN is part of Obama’s own federal agency, NOAA, consider his remarks during a televised address from the September 2014 UN Climate Change Summit in New York City:There’s one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other, and that is the urgent and growing threat of a changing climate.… We cannot condemn our children, and their children, to a future that is beyond their capacity to repair.Is the president ignorant of USCRN data? Are United Nations members who applauded his remarks oblivious to their own Argo research? Have none of them heard of the weather satellites orbiting our globe? Or could their implausible climate-change claims have more to do with a lucrative global carbon market in which corporations buy permits to emit greenhouse gases? Reuters financial analysts estimate the 2014 market was worth around $87 billion. Perhaps globalists’ “green” agenda involves cash, not climate or some altruistic moral cause.While business enterprises worldwide are footing the global carbon market bill and passing the extra costs along to consumers, Obama is fleecing taxpayers back home. In a recent report by the Science and Environmental Policy Project, Ken Haapala outlined U.S. federal spending on climate change over the past decade, which totaled more than $165 billion. In 2013 alone “government expenditures on alternative energy sources were 78% greater than [National Institutes of Health] expenditures on all categories of clinical research on known threats to human health.”White House and Homeland Security Department reports reveal global warming received nearly twice as much in 2013 tax funding as did border security. Representative Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) chided the president for spending “30 times as much money on global warming research as he does on weather forecasting and warning,” calling it a “gross misallocation” of tax dollars. Haapala reproached, “The fear of climate change has distorted spending priorities in the Federal government.”If Obama does not want to “condemn our children” to a future beyond repair, why is he ignoring real threats, hiding real data, and wasting billions blaming an uninformed public for a fictitious problem that he says can only be solved by bigger government and more taxation?In his speech at the climate summit, he claimed, “Our citizens keep marching. We cannot pretend we do not hear them. We have to answer the call.” What call? The latest Pew Research polls reveal that most Americans identify human-caused climate change as a fraud. Surveys conducted in 2013 and 2014 found a majority of Americans do not see global warming as a major threat and rank it near the bottom of the list of priorities for the president and Congress.If America and other developed nations want to maintain their high standards of living, and if developing nations hope to improve theirs, we must realize that climate-change politics are diametrically opposed to these goals. A “high standard of living” doesn’t mean driving nice cars and wearing designer clothes. It refers to ample food supplies, a dependable infrastructure, employment-generating industry, adequate medical services, and decent education levels. The reliable, affordable power sources responsible for such prosperity — especially coal, oil, and natural gas — sit in the crosshairs of “green” policy restrictions.Radical environmentalists tout so-called renewables such as wind and solar, but “renewable energy” effectively means no energy at all. Wind and solar will never be able to power an industrial economy. These technologies only “generate electricity when their resource is available, not when it is needed,” writes electrical power engineer Bryan Leyland for the industry journal EnergyCentral. “In any power system, the generation must match the demand on a second-by-second basis.” That means when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing, the lights go out, unless renewables have reliable power sources as back-up. These are termed base-load providers, and it’s an expensive process for them to ramp up and down in answer to the variability of wind and solar.Forcing power companies to include renewables in their energy mix is a costly mistake. Germany, a world leader in aggressive renewable policies, faces an industrial exodus and economic recession, with electricity prices that have risen approximately 60 percent since 2007. The German Chambers of Commerce report that 25 percent of heavy industrial users are considering relocating abroad.In the United States, where renewable portfolio standards vary from state to state, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that electricity prices broke all-time rec­ords in July 2014, and the U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasts even higher rates this winter. A report published in November by consulting firm Energy Ventures Analysis, Energy Market Impacts of Recent Federal Regulations on the Electric Power Sector, predicts that commercial and industrial customers’ power and gas bills will rise 60 percent over the next five years. Individuals will pay for these costs through higher prices for consumer goods, while their own utility bills will also experience a 60-percent increase between now and 2020.Why are we imitating Germany’s folly? Because, while the Obama administration is forcing renewables into the power portfolio, it is squeezing base-load providers out. EPA-mandated emission limits on conventional sources of electricity, especially coal-fired power plants, are so restrictive that current technology cannot meet their demands. Paul Loeffelman, director of Corporate External Affairs for utility giant American Electric Power, states that the EPA’s regulations will force more than 50 gigawatts of coal generation — about 300 power plants — to be retired by 2016. The EPA is also poised to impose similar restrictions on new power plants, prompting U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (http://D-W.Va.) to complain, “Never before has the federal government forced an industry to do something that is technologically impossible. If these regulations go into effect, American jobs will be lost, electricity prices will soar, and economic uncertainty will grow.”He could have said economic uncertainty will skyrocket, which is exactly what happens to society when access to adequate, affordable electricity is restricted. Figure 5 (below) illustrates that countries with strong gross domestic products — the value of goods and services produced within a country annually — boast correspondingly high electrification levels (the percentage of households with electricity). The first 10 countries listed are top in the world ranked by GDP, and the remaining nations represent areas with relatively low electrification levels in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Note the marked difference in GDP between countries with ample electricity and those without.Obviously, energy poverty breeds economic stagnation and vice versa. The International Energy Agency (IEA), an intergovernmental policy advising organization, explains that “access to electricity is particularly crucial to human development” and “cannot easily be replaced by other forms of energy.” IEA claims, “Individuals’ access to electricity is one of the most clear and undistorted indications of a country’s energy poverty status.”But just as Obama’s climate-change cronies turn a blind eye to factual weather data, so do they ignore the need for reliable access to energy. The president’s senior science and technology advisor, John Holdren, advocates transferring billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to developing countries annually, supposedly to combat climate change. Of course, the climate policies our tax dollars help enact will further shackle those energy-impoverished nations.Nonetheless, Obama is fulfilling Hol­dren’s wishes. At November’s G20 Summit in Australia, the president pledged $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund, a wealth redistribution mechanism established under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush entangled our nation in this international treaty, setting the stage for UN control of our energy sources in the name of “sustainable development.” If that sounds far-fetched, consider that the treaty’s main architect was former UN diplomat Maurice Strong, who declared at its unveiling, “We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrialized civilization to collapse.”UN officials still toe the same party line. In November the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — another brainchild of globalist billionaire Strong — published the final volume of its latest assessment report. Full of grim projections, the study says, “Decarbonizing (i.e., reducing the carbon intensity of) electricity generation is a key component” of IPCC’s recommended climate policies and recommends that carbon-emitting fossil fuel power generation be “phased out almost entirely by 2100.”Radical environmentalists know that human-caused global warming is a hoax. Temperature data shows no catastrophic warming trend, and archaeological evidence proves the planet has undergone periods of much more intense warming and cooling than our modern age has experienced. The purpose of the manufactured environmental crisis is not to save the Earth but to enslave it by restricting access to reliable, affordable energy.“Partisans for world government take advantage of any contrived crisis to aid them in their drive to rule the planet,” John McManus, president of The John Birch Society (JBS), told The New American. “The global-warming/climate-change hysteria was created to empower a few who intend to dominate all mankind.”But JBS Vice President Marty Ohlson offers a solution. “Concerned citizens should outreach to others to overcome the engineered ignorance about this subject,” he said, pointing to the “treasure trove” of information available at the organization’s website: Environment. The key, Ohlson says, is education. “Tree-huggers of good character will likely re-think the issue after seeing it through the prism of truth.””MY PUBLISHED COMMENTJames Matkin • 8 months agoThe climate alarmists overconfidence about their hypothesis that small amounts of CO2 emissions (0.117%) from fossil fuels added to large amounts of water vapour (95%) in Green House Gases will destabilize the climate has not been proven. The science is therefore pseudoscience like alchemy. This article is very pertinent to show the correlation in many countries of electrification and economic success. Without grid electricity there is devastation. We must stop the immoral vilifying of coal for developing countries living in energy poverty based only on fear mongering from our weak climate science about carbon dioxide.http:// https://www.thenewameric...[2]Harvard Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon gives compelling evidence that the motives of the alarmists are biased by social justice opportunities leveraged by climate fear mongering, not science -Soon refers to two most revealing quotes from alarmist leaders.“No matter if the science is all phony; there are collateral environmental benefits…. Climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.”Christine Stewart, former Minister of the Environment of CanadaOttmar Edenhofer, lead author of the IPCC’s fourth summary report released in 2007 candidly expressed the priority. Speaking in 2010, he advised, “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”Or, as U.N. climate chief Christina Figueres pointedly remarked, the true aim of the U.N.’s 2014 Paris climate conference was “to change the [capitalist] economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”That Paris conference agenda got a useful boost from U.S. government agency scientists at NASA and NOAA who conveniently provided “warmest years ever” claims. Both have histories of stirring overheated global warming stew pots with alarming and statistically indefensible claims of recent “record high” temperatures.http://www.climatedepot.com/2017...“The Green House Gases theory invalidated by its history.“That theory, which underpins the anthropogenic global-warming hypothesis and the climate models used by the United Nations, was first proposed and developed in the 19th century.However, the experiments on which it was based involved glass boxes that retain heat by preventing the mixing of air inside the box with air outside the box.The experiment is not analogous to what occurs in the real atmosphere, which does not have walls or a lid, according to Nikolov and Zeller.”Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2017/07/study...R.I.P. Greenhouse Gas Theory: 1980-2018Published on January 15, 2018Written by John O'SullivanFresh analysis of government scientific records reveals the idea of ‘long-settled’ science in the greenhouse gas theory is a myth. The claim human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) act as a control knob on climate only appeared in consensus science since the 1980’s. Prior to that time, official records show the theory as “abandoned.”Famously, on June 24, 1988 the whole world first heard about the dreaded “greenhouse effect” (GHE) from NASA’s new champion of the theory, James Hansen. Hansen had breathed life into an old and “abandoned” theory drawing from new space research into Venus and Mars. Thanks to Hansen’s role, climate fear prevailed for a generation.Hansen is a rogue famous for exaggeration and radical protests against the establishment.Recently, Russian scientists have declared the GHE dead as global cooling sets in; while a team of Italian scientists called for a “deep re-examination” of the failing theory. Other new papers readily dismiss the CO2 climate hypothesis. Below we present the stark evidence and encourage readers to engage in their own research.Consensus as Science?Of course, we should begin by stating real scientists avoid reliance on consensus opinion to determine the validity or otherwise of any theory. But so often, non-scientists in the general public and media (and certain corrupt national science institutes) cite consensus claims to quell discussion and debate.In that regard, we show that for the greater part of the 20th century consensus science, itself, rejected the idea that carbon dioxide causes global warming.The so-called greenhouse gas theory (GHE) was first famously debunked by Professor H. W.Woods in 1909. Establishment scientists usually never decry the Woods debunk. Instead, they gloss over it and the long hiatus that followed (1909-1980).Concocting a Strong NarrativeSpencer R. Weart, director of the Center for the History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics is pre-eminent among establishment science historians in splashing gloss. Weart’s book, ‘The Discovery of Global Warming’ is compulsory reading for modern students in this field.Weart plugged Hansen’s comparison of Mars and Venus with Earth, asserting life as being very fragile and vulnerable to any climate shifts. Weart writes:“In the 1960s and 1970s, observations of Mars and Venus showed that planets that seemed much like the Earth could have frightfully different atmospheres. The greenhouse effect had made Venus a furnace, while lack of atmosphere had locked Mars in a deep freeze. This was visible evidence that climate can be delicately balanced, so that a planet’s atmosphere could flip from a livable state to a deadly one.” (id.)Like James Hansen’s ‘fixing’ of history, Weart is masterful at making evidence fit the narrative.. Professor Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University in Japan, sums it up succinctly:“CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or the other – every scientist knows this, but it doesn’t pay to say so.”The author of the above extract is CEP Brooks. He and the publisher, the American Meteorological Society, unequivocally advise that the old CO2 climate theory of Arrhenius, Fourier, et al:“was never widely accepted and was abandoned when it was found that all the long-wave radiation absorbed by CO2 is also absorbed by water vapour.”Brooks (+AMS) then addresses the rise in atmospheric CO2 due to human industrial activity:“In the past hundred years the burning of coal has increased the amount of CO2 by a measurable amount (from 0.028 to 0.030 per cent), and Callender [7] sees in this an explanation of the recent rise in world temperature.”Continuing, Brooks (1951) makes the same inescapable argument made by skeptics today:“But during the past 7000 years there have been greater fluctuations of temperature without the internvention of man, and there seems no reason to regard the recent rise as more than a coincidence. This theory is not considered further.”Thus, the greenhouse gas theory was well and truly dead and buried in 1951 – according to settled consensus science (if you are a believer in it)…Canadian space scientist, Joseph E Postma summarizes why bias, group think and incompetence helped sustain the discredited greenhouse gas theory for so long when proper examination shows it is literally ‘flat earth physics.’NASA Boss: Hansen “Embarrassed” UsHansen is an unstable radical prone to exaggeration and misleading data.But time is not the friend of climate fraudsters. And Hansen’s beloved greenhouse gas theory is consistently and monotonously being refuted in peer-reviewed journals rendering him – and other alarmists – disgraced. NASA’s Mass/Gravity Equations contradict the GHE and retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist Dr. John S. Theonm James Hansen’s former supervisor at NASA, has declared on government record that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” and “was never muzzled.” [6]The failure, after 30 years of prophesy, for a climate catastrophe to unfold, has left James Hansen a somewhat chastened man. In a recent paper Hansen shows he has now flip-flopped again on the climate forcing properties of aerosols. Returning to his old DIM science idea Hansen now says aerosols are part of the control knob for a planet’s energy content. But contrary to what he claimed before, he now says they cause cooling, not warming.In 2018 the null hypothesis awaits the greenhouse gas theory. In 1951, the AMS and Britain’s best climate scientist and head of the UK Meteorological Office, CEP Brooks said it all (id.)See -R.I.P. Greenhouse Gas Theory: 1980-2018 | Principia Scientific InternationalMuch of the public have been fooled by fudged data from the likes of Dr. James Hansen and from chance and randomness finding trends in the chaotic climate history of the short run that fail overtime.Seehttps://www.academia.edu/3363838...Daniel Helman answered this QUORA question IS GLOBAL WARMING A HOAX in the affirmative. He denies AGW is a hoax. He presents the conventional view that because 8 key alarmist predictions are true the theory must be true. I disagree. I will rebut with evidence each Helaman key prediction showing they are false.” Helman’s predictions are in italics.1. Sea Level Rise: Global sea level rose about 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) in the last century. The rate in the last decade, however, is nearly double that of the last century.2. Global Temperature Rise: All three major global surface temperature reconstructions show that Earth has warmed since 1880. Most of this warming has occurred since the 1970s, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years. Even though the 2000s witnessed a solar output decline resulting in an unusually deep solar minimum in 2007-2009, surface temperatures continue to increase.3. Warming Oceans: The oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 700 meters (about 2,300 feet) of ocean showing warming of 0.302 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969.4. Shrinking Ice Sheets: The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost 150 to 250 cubic kilometers (36 to 60 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2002 and 2006, while Antarctica lost about 152 cubic kilometers (36 cubic miles) of ice between 2002 and 2005.5. Declining Arctic Sea Ice: Both the extent and thickness of Arctic sea ice has declined rapidly over the last several decades.6. Glacial Retreat: Glaciers are retreating almost everywhere around the world — including in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Alaska and Africa.7. Extreme Events: The number of record high temperature events in the United States has been increasing, while the number of record low temperature events has been decreasing, since 1950. The U.S. has also witnessed increasing numbers of intense rainfall events.8. Ocean Acidification: Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of surface ocean waters has increased by about 30 percent. This increase is the result of humans emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and hence more being absorbed into the oceans. The amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the upper layer of the oceans is increasing by about 2 billion tons per year.THE FACTSSea levels are fallingIn the global warming crusade by the UN IPCC and Al Gore dramatic sea levels rise has been their primary fear mongering prediction. Ridiculous exaggerations have been blamed on fossil fuel Co2 emissions without any evidence.‘For example, Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water,’ Booker noted.Global sea level data is more fiction than fact because of the limited tide stations and natural variations at the regional level. Scientists deride the alarmist fearmongering on sea rise and admit over the past 130 years 7″ rise is imperceptible.Sea-level rise is not accelerating, and has not accelerated since the 1920s.There are about sixty good-quality, 100+ year records of sea-level around the world, and they all show the same thing: there has been no statistically significant acceleration (increase) in the rate of sea-level rise in the last 85 years or more. That means anthropogenic CO2 emissions do not measurably affect sea-level rise, and predictions of wildly accelerated sea-level rise are based on superstition, not science.Here are two very high quality sea-level measurement records, one from the Pacific and one from the Atlantic:They show no activity that could be related to increase fossil fuel emissions.A fortiori as lawyers would say is the fact that recently the global sea level data has gone negative to the point that NASA has been forced to explain falling sea levels -On a NASA page intended to spread climate alarmism (https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-s...), NASA’s own data reveal that worldwide ocean levels have been falling for nearly two years, dropping from a variation of roughly 87.5mm to below 85mm.Here is the same data presented in a shorter timeline.This is too short to say it is a trend but it certainly rebuts the fictional and wildly ridiculous claims of Al Gore et al.It is relevant that sea levels today are the lowest in the history of our planet and yet they are very stable.Nils-Axel Mörnervia NoTricksZone By P Gosselin on4. February 2018 (Climatism bolds & links added) :SEA LEVELS ‘ABSOLUTELY STABLE’World Leading Authority: Sea Level “Absolutely Stable”… Poor Quality Data From “Office Perps”…IPCC “False”German-speaking readers will surely want to save the text of an interview conducted by the online Baseler Zeitung (BAZ) of Switzerland with world leading sea level expert Prof. Nils-Axel Mörner.Few scientists have scientifically published as much on sea level as Mörner has.Yet because he rejects the alarmist scenarios touted by the media and alarmist IPCC scientists, the Swedish professor has long been the target of vicious attack campaigns aimed at discrediting him – yet to little effect.Mörner, who headed of the Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics (P&G) Department at Stockholm University from 1991 to 2005, has studied sea level his entire career, visiting 59 countries in the process.Sea level hijacked by an activist agendaIn the interview Mörner tells science journalist Alex Reichmuth that climate and sea level science has been completely politicized and hijacked by an activist agenda and has become a “quasi religion”.According to the BAZ, recently Mörner has been at the Fiji Islands on multiple occasions in order “to study coastal changes and sea level rise”, and to take a first hand look at the “damage” that allegedly has occurred due to climate change over the past years.IPCC is falseThe Swedish professor tells the BAZ that he became a skeptic of alarmist climate science early on because “the [UN] IPCC always depicted the facts on the subject falsely” and “grossly exaggerated the risks of sea level rise” and that the IPCC “excessively relied on shaky computer models instead of field research.”He tells the BAZ: “I always want to know what the facts are. That’s why I went to the Fiji Islands.”“Very poor quality data” from “office perps”Mörner also dismisses claims by the Swiss ProClim climate science platform who recently announced that the Fiji Islands are seeing a rapid sea level rise. According to Mörner the data were taken from poor locations. “We looked over the data, and concluded that they are of very poor quality” and that the researchers who handled the data were “office perps” who were “not specialized in coastal dynamic processes and sea level changes”.“Many of them have no clue about the real conditions.”Sea level “absolutely stable”Mörner tells the BAZ that sea level at the Fiji islands was in fact higher than it is today between 1550 and 1700. Coral reefs tell the story and “they don’t lie,” the Swedish professor said. He added he was not surprised by the data because “it is not the first time the IPCC has been wrong”.Over the past 200 years: “The sea level has not changed very much. Over the past 50 to 70 years it has been absolutely stable”.“Because they have a political agenda”Not only is sea level rise due to climate change at the Fiji Islands exaggerated, but the same is true worldwide as a rule. When asked why are we seeing all the warnings from scientists, Mörner tells the BAZ: “Because they have a political agenda.”Mörner warns readers that the IPCC was set up from the get-go with the foregone conclusion man was warming the globe and changing the climate: Mörner says: “And it is sticking to that like a dogma – no matter what the facts are.”When asked if sea level rise poses a problem for the islands, Mörner answers with one simple word: “No.”Strong evidence solar activity impacts sea levelThe Swedish professor also tells the BAZ that the rates of water rushing into the ocean due to glacier melt are exaggerated and that thermal expansion of the ocean is minimal. Mörner adds:“Sea level appears to depend foremost on solar cycle and little from melting ice.”Junk surveys produce “nonsense”When asked by the BAZ why he became skeptical, Mörner recalls the “great anger” from an IPCC representative when he spoke at a 1991 sea level conference in the USA. He was surprised by the reaction, alluding to the fact that it is normal to have different views in science. And as the years followed, he became increasingly aware of the falsehoods made by the IPCC and the organization’s refusal to admit to them.On the subject of publishing research results:“Publishers of scientific journals no longer accept papers that challenge the claims made by the IPCC, no matter the paper’s quality.”In his decades long career, Mörner has authored some 650 publications, and he tells the BAZ that he has no plans to stop fighting. “No one can stop me.”Near the end of the interview Mörner calls the claim that 97% of all climate scientists believe global warming is man-made “nonsense” and that the number comes from “unserious surveys”.“In truth the majority of scientists reject the IPCC claims. Depending on the field, it’s between 50 and 80 percent.”F. Cooling over the next decadesMörner also sees little reason to reduce CO2 emissions, and calls the belief in man-made climate change a religious movement driven by public funding.In conclusion Mörner tells the BAZ that he thinks solar activity will likely decrease and that cooling will ensue over the coming decades.“Then it will become clear just how wrong the global warming warnings are.”The declining reality is strong enough that science articles now try to explain the reason for falling seas.Climate change makes sea levels fall, not rise, new NASA study showsAndre Mitchell 16 February 2016“Here's another shocking discovery about global climate change: It contributes to the falling of sea levels, and not to the rising of the seas as previously thought.Using two satellites, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)'s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in cooperation with the University of California at Irvine recently found out that water with a measured volume of 3.2 trillion tons has already seeped through land over the past decade.This figure amounts to the rate of sea level rise slowing by 22 percent, according to the new research. This means that previous fears that certain islands will be inundated in coming years can already be allayed.The study's lead author, J.T. Reager of the JPL, explained that because of growing demand for water due to global warming, the surface of the Earth has become more parched, with less groundwater underneath.As a result, water from melting glaciers earlier believed to be causing sea level rise is said to "being absorbed" by lakes, rivers and underground aquifers, similar to the way a sponge absorbs water.”This explanation is hard to believe when the more obvious answer is that original fears were nonsense as the largest glaciers are not melting the earth’s climate is not too hot. Here is a more credible explanation for no rise in seas from Marc Morano -“Marc Morano, a famous global warming sceptic, said these findings prove his belief all along that climate change cannot be directly connected to supposed sea level rises."There is no evidence of an acceleration of sea level rise, and therefore no evidence of any man-made effect on sea levels. Sea level rise is primarily a local phenomenon related to land subsidence, not carbon dioxide levels," Morano said in a separate article on http://WND.com.”Climate change makes sea levels fall, not rise, new NASA study showsYes ,to see just how local (regional) see levels are see the data on major falling seasChurchill Manitoba the primary home of thousands of polar bears hunted by InuitMean sea level trends Churchill, Canada.The mean sea level trend is -9.48 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.57 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from 1940 to 2011 which is equivalent to a change of -3.11 feet in 100 years.https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.go...There are many other examples of sharply falling sea levels in regional coasts.2. Global temperatures are declining from declining solar radiation.Solar Flares and Sun SpotsHabibullo Abdusamatov, head of the space research laboratory at the St. Petersburg-based Pulkovo Observatory, said global warming stems from an increase in the sun’s activity.“Global warming results not from the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but from an unusually high level of solar radiation and a lengthy – almost throughout the last century – growth in its intensity,”“Instead of professed global warming, the Earth will be facing a slow decrease in temperatures in 2012-2015. The gradually falling amounts of solar energy, expected to reach their bottom level by 2040, will inevitably lead to a deep freeze around 2055-2060,” he said, adding that this period of global freeze will last some 50 years, after which the temperatures will go up again.http://en.rian.ru/russia/2007011...The past 20 years confirms that temperature change correlates with solar radiation as temperature flattens or falls despite sharp increase in fossil fuel Co2 emitted.3. Oceans are cooling3. Cooling Oceans12 New Papers: North Atlantic, Pacific, And Southern Oceans Are Cooling As Glaciers Thicken, Gain MassBy Kenneth Richard on 11. September 2017Graph Source Duchez et al., 2016Contrary to expectations, climate scientists continue to report that large regions of the Earth have not been warming in recent decades.According to Dieng et al. (2017), for example, the global oceans underwent a slowdown, a pause, or even a slight cooling trend during 2003 to 2013. This undermines expectations from climate models which presume the increase in radiative forcing from human CO2 emissions should substantially increase ocean temperatures.The authors indicate that the recent trends in ocean temperatures “may just reflect a 60-year natural cycle“, the AMO (Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation), and not follow radiative forcing trends.Dieng et al., 2017 We investigate the global mean and regional change of sea surface and land surface temperature over 2003–2013, using a large number of different data sets, and compare with changes observed over the past few decades (starting in 1950). … While confirming cooling of eastern tropical Pacific during the last decade as reported in several recent studies, our results show that the reduced rate of change of the 2003–2013 time span is a global phenomenon. GMST short-term trends since 1950 computed over successive 11-year windows with 1-year overlap show important decadal variability that highly correlates with 11-year trends of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation index. The GMST 11-year trend distribution is well fitted by a Gaussian function, confirming an unforced origin related to internal climate variability.4.5. 6. Glacier ice is expanding not shrinkingSix Decades of Glacial Advance in the Western Ross Sea, AntarcticaPaper ReviewedFountain, A.G., Glenn, B. and Scambos, T.A. 2017. The changing extent of the glaciers along the western Ross Sea, Antarctica. Geology 45: 927-930.Climate alarmists have long anticipated Earth's polar regions to symbolize the proverbial canary in the coal mine when it comes to witnessing the impacts of CO2-induced climate change. In these high latitudes, temperatures are predicted to warm so fast and to such a degree so as to cause unprecedented melting of ice that even the most ardent of climate skeptics would be forced to concede the verity of global warming theory. Consequently, researchers pay close attention to changes in climate in both the Arctic and Antarctic.The most recent work in this regard comes from the scientific team of Fountain et al. (2017), who analyzed changes in glacier extent along the western Ross Sea in Antarctica over the past 60 years. More specifically, using digital scans of paper maps based on aerial imagery acquired by the U.S. Geological Survey, along with modern-day satellite imagery from a variety of platforms, the authors digitized a total of 49 maps and images from which they calculated changes in the terminus positions, ice speed, calving rates and ice front advance and retreat rates from 34 glaciers in this region over the period 1955-2015.In discussing their findings, Fountain et al. report that "no significant spatial or temporal patterns of terminus position, flow speed, or calving emerged, implying that the conditions associated with ice tongue stability are unchanged," at least over the past six decades. However, they also report that "the net change for all the glaciers, weighted by glacier width at the grounding line, has been [one of] advance" (emphasis added) with an average rate of increase of +12 ± 88 m yr-1(see Figure 1 below).In pointing out the significance of the above findings, it is important to note that, over a period of time in which the bulk of the modern rise in atmospheric CO2 has occurred, not only have the majority of glaciers from this large region of Antarctica not retreated, they have collectively grown! This stark reality stands in direct contrast to climate-alarmist predictions for this region; and it reveals that if there is any canary in the coal mine to be seen, it is in the failure of global warming predictions/theory to match real-world observations. What will it take for climate alarmists to concede this fact?Arctic Sea Ice Increasing For Eleven YearsPosted on 14 Oct 2017 by Iowa Climate Science EducationDay 285 Arctic sea ice extent has been increasing since the start of MASIE records in 2006. This year is fifth highest since 2006.fmasie_4km_allyears_extent_sqkm.csv“Meanwhile, criminals in the press and scientific community continue to report the exact opposite of what the data shows.”Global sea ice extent rising.7. Severe weather has declined not worsened.Analysis: It’s not just droughts, but nearly all extreme weather is declining or at or near record lowsEXTREME WEATHER Expert: “World Is Presently In An Era Of Unusually Low Weather Disasters”Posted: August 6, 2017 | Author: Jamie SpryOn Eve of DC climate march, drought drops to record lows in U.S. as nearly all extreme weather is either declining or at or near record lows (See: Climate Bullies Take to the Streets for ‘People’s Climate March' in DC on April 29th’)"It is not just droughts that are at or near record levels. On almost every measure of extreme weather, the data is not cooperating with the claims of the climate change campaigners. Tornadoes, floods, droughts, and hurricanes are failing to fit in with the global warming narrative."By: Marc Morano - Climate DepotApril 27, 2017 3:27 PMClimate Depot Special ReportThe federal government has just released yet another key piece of scientific data that counters the man-made global warming narrative. The federal U.S. Drought Monitor report shows that droughts in the U.S. are at record lows in 2017. See:Feds: U.S. drought reaches record low in 2017 as rain reigns – Sees lowest levels of drought ever monitored“Drought in the U.S. fell to a record low this week, with just 6.1% of the lower 48 states currently experiencing such dry conditions, federal officials announced Thursday. That’s the lowest percentage in the 17-year history of the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor report,” USA Today reported on April 27. (Ironically, climate activists had declared California to be in a permanent drought: Flashback 2016: Warmist wrong claim: ‘Thanks El Niño, But California’s Drought Is Probably Forever’)Former Vice President Al Gore has made extreme weather warnings a staple of his climate change activist. See:Al Gore on the Weather: ‘Every night on the news now, practically, is like a nature hike through the book of Revelations’But it is not just droughts that are at or near record levels. On almost every measure of extreme weather, the data is not cooperating with the claims of the climate change campaigners. Tornadoes, floods, droughts, and hurricanes are failing to fit in with the global warming narrative.Below is a complete rundown of the very latest on extreme weather conditions: Update data from the 2016 Climate Depot report:Skeptics Deliver Consensus Busting ‘State of the Climate Report’ to UN SummitExtreme Weather: Scientist to Congress in 2017: ‘No evidence’ that hurricanes, floods, droughts, tornadoes are increasing – Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. of University of ColoradoTornadoes: NOAA Tornado data revealing 2016 as ‘one of the quietest years since records began in 1954’ and below average for 5th year in a rowHurricanes: 1) Inconvenient NOAA report: ‘It is premature to conclude (AGW has) already had a detectable impact on’ hurricanes & 2) NOAA: U.S. Completes Record 11 Straight Years Without Major (Cat 3+) Hurricane Strike & 3) 30 peer-reviewed scientific papers reveal the lack of connection between hurricanes & ‘global warming’Floods: ‘Floods are not increasing’: Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. slams ‘global warming’ link to floods & extreme weather – How does media ‘get away with this?’ – Pielke Jr. on how extreme weather is NOT getting worse: ‘Flood disasters are sharply down. U.S. floods not increasing either.’ “Floods suck when they occur. The good news is U.S. flood damage is sharply down over 70 years,” Pielke explained.Heavy Rains: 1000 year rainfall study suggests droughts and floods used to be longer, worseExtreme weather used to be blamed on ‘global cooling’ in the 1970s and early 80s Flashback NOAA 1974: ‘Extreme weather events blamed on global cooling’ – NOAA October 1974: ‘Many climatologists have associated this drought and other recent weather anomalies with a global cooling trend and changes in atmospheric circulation which, if prolonged, pose serious threats to major food-producing regions of the world’5 New Papers: Climate And Weather Events Become LESS Erratic And Severe During Warming PeriodsBy Kenneth Richard on 14. December 2017Cooling, Not Warming, Leads ToWeather and Climate Instability1. Significant Decreasing Trend In Severe Weather Since 1961Zhang et al., 2017Based on continuous and coherent severe weather reports from over 500 manned stations, for the first time, this study shows a significant decreasing trend in severe weather occurrence across China during the past five decades. The total number of severe weather days that have either thunderstorm, hail and/or damaging wind decrease about 50% from 1961 to 2010. It is further shown that the reduction in severe weather occurrences correlates strongly with the weakening of East Asian summer monsoon which is the primary source of moisture and dynamic forcing conducive for warm-season severe weather over China.2. Most Frequent Climate Instability During Global Cooling/Reduced CO2 PeriodsKawamura et al., 2017Numerical experiments using a fully coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation model with freshwater hosing in the northern North Atlantic showed that climate becomes most unstable in intermediate glacial conditions associated with large changes in sea ice and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Model sensitivity experiments suggest that the prerequisite for the most frequent climate instability with bipolar seesaw pattern during the late Pleistocene era is associated with reduced atmospheric CO2 concentration via global cooling and sea ice formation in the North Atlantic, in addition to extended Northern Hemisphere ice sheets.3. Hurricane Activity Is ‘Subdued’ During Warm Periods (1950-2000)Heller, 2017The hurricane analysis conducted by Burn and Palmer (2015) determined that hurricane activity was subdued during the [warm] Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) (~900-1350 CE) and became more produced during the [cold] Little Ice Age (LIA (~1450-1850 CE), followed by a period of variability occurred between ~1850 and ~1900 before entering another subdued state during the industrial period (~1950-2000 CE). In general, the results of this study corroborate these findings … [W]hile hurricane activity was greater during the LIA, it also had more frequent periods of drought compared to the MCA (Burn and Palmer 2014), suggesting that climate fluctuations were more pronounced in the LIA compared to the MCA. The changes in the diatom distribution and fluctuations in chl-a recorded in this study starting around 1350 also indicate that variations in climate have become more distinct during the LIA and from ~1850-1900.[C]limate variability has increased following the onset of the Little Ice Age (~1450-1850 CE), however it is difficult to distinguish the impacts of recent anthropogenic climate warming on hurricane activity from those of natural Atlantic climate regimes, such as ENSO.4. Surface Warming Weakens Cyclone ActivityChen et al., 2017Results indicate that the midlatitude summer cyclone activity over East Asia exhibits decadal changes in the period of 1979–2013 and is significantly weakened after early 1990s. … Moreover, there is a close linkage between the weakening of cyclonic activity after the early 1990s and the nonuniform surface warming of the Eurasian continent. Significant warming to the west of Mongolia tends to weaken the north–south temperature gradient and the atmospheric baroclinicity to its south and eventually can lead to weakening of the midlatitude cyclone activity over East Asia.5. More Hydroclimatic Variability During Cold Periods…Models Say Warming Causes More Instability, So The 21st Century Will Be Like The Little Ice Age, With More Instability/MegadroughtLoisel et al., 2017Our tree ring-based analysis of past drought indicates that the Little Ice Age (LIA) experienced high interannual hydroclimatic variability, similar to projections for the 21st century. This is contrary to the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA), which had reduced variability and therefore may be misleading as an analog for 21st century warming, notwithstanding its warm (and arid) conditions. Given past non-stationarity, and particularly erratic LIA, a ‘warm LIA’ climate scenario for the coming century that combines high precipitation variability (similar to LIA conditions) with warm and dry conditions (similar to MCA conditions) represents a plausible situation that is supported by recent climate simulations. … Our comparison of tree ring-based drought analysis and records from the tropical Pacific Ocean suggests that changing variability in El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) explains much of the contrasting variances between the MCA and LIA conditions across the American Southwest. The Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA, ~950–1400 CE) is often used as an analog for 21stcentury hydroclimate because it represents a warm (and arid) period. The MCA appears related to general surface warming in the Northern Hemisphere, prolonged La Niña conditions, and a persistent positive North Atlantic Oscillation mode. It has been referred to as a stable time interval with ‘quiet’ conditions in regards to low perturbation by external radiative forcing. In this study, we demonstrate that the Little Ice Age (LIA, ~1400–1850 CE) might be more representative of future hydroclimatic variability than the conditions during the MCA megadroughts for the American Southwest, and thus provide a useful scenario for development of future water-resource management and drought and flood hazard mitigation strategies.Reasonabel Skeptic14. December 2017 at 6:46 PM | Permalink | ReplyAt a macro level warming world and decreasing storminess makes sense.In a warmer climate, the poles warm more than the equatorial regions. This will reduce the temperature gradient north to south and storms happen when cold and warm air masses meet. Ergo lower gradient would suggest less violent storms.http://notrickszone.com/2017/12/...8. Ocean acidification bogey man.“Ocean acidification: yet another wobbly pillar of climate alarmismA paper review suggests many studies are flawed, and the effect may not be negative even if it’s realJames Delingpole30 April 2016There was a breathtakingly beautiful BBC series on the Great Barrier Reef recently which my son pronounced himself almost too depressed to watch. ‘What’s the point?’ said Boy. ‘By the time I get to Australia to see it the whole bloody lot will have dissolved.’The menace Boy was describing is ‘ocean acidification’. It’s no wonder he should find it worrying, for it has been assiduously promoted by environmentalists for more than a decade now as ‘global warming’s evil twin’. Last year, no fewer than 600 academic papers were published on the subject, so it must be serious, right?First referenced in a peer-reviewed study in Nature in 2003, it has since been endorsed by scientists from numerous learned institutions including the Royal Society, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the IPCC. Even the great David Attenborough — presenter of the Great Barrier Reef series — has vouched for its authenticity: ‘If the temperature rises up by two degrees and the acidity by a measurable amount, lots of species of coral will die out. Quite what happens then is anybody’s guess. But it won’t be good.’No indeed. Ocean acidification is the terrifying threat whereby all that man-made CO2 we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere may react with the sea to form a sort of giant acid bath. First it will kill off all the calcified marine life, such as shellfish, corals and plankton. Then it will destroy all the species that depend on it — causing an almighty mass extinction which will wipe out the fishing industry and turn our oceans into a barren zone of death.Or so runs the scaremongering theory. The reality may be rather more prosaic. Ocean acidification — the evidence increasingly suggests — is a trivial, misleadingly named, and not remotely worrying phenomenon which has been hyped up beyond all measure for political, ideological and financial reasons.Some of us have suspected this for some time. According to Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, long one of ocean acidification theory’s fiercest critics, the term is ‘just short of propaganda’. The pH of the world’s oceans ranges between 7.5 and 8.3 — well above the acid zone (which starts below ‘neutral’ pH7) — so more correctly it should be stated that the seas are becoming slightly less alkaline. ‘Acid’ was chosen, Moore believes, because it has ‘strong negative connotations for most people’.Matt Ridley, too, has been scathing on the topic. In The Rational Optimist he wrote, ‘Ocean acidification looks suspiciously like a back-up plan by the environmental pressure groups in case the climate fails to warm.’ I agree. That’s why I like to call it the alarmists’ Siegfried Line — their last redoubt should it prove, as looks increasingly to be the case, that the man-made global warming theory is a busted flush.To the alarmist camp, of course, this is yet further evidence that ‘deniers’ are heartless, anti-scientific conspiracy theorists who don’t read peer-reviewed papers and couldn’t give a toss if the world’s marine life is dissolved in a pool of acid due to man’s selfishness and greed. Unfortunately for the doom-mongers, we sceptics have just received some heavy fire-support from a neutral authority.Howard Browman, a marine scientist for 35 years, has published a review in the ICES Journal of Marine Science of all the papers published on the subject. His verdict could hardly be more damning. The methodology used by the studies was often flawed; contrary studies suggesting that ocean acidification wasn’t a threat had sometimes had difficulty finding a publisher. There was, he said, an ‘inherent bias’ in scientific journals which predisposed them to publish ‘doom and gloom stories’.Ocean acidification theory appears to have been fatally flawed almost from the start. In 2004, two NOAA scientists, Richard Feely and Christopher Sabine, produced a chart showing a strong correlation between rising atmospheric CO2 levels and falling oceanic pH levels. But then, just over a year ago, Mike Wallace, a hydrologist with 30 years’ experience, noticed while researching his PhD that they had omitted some key information. Their chart only started in 1988 but, as Wallace knew, there were records dating back to at least 100 years before. So why had they ignored the real-world evidence in favour of computer-modelled projections?When Wallace plotted a chart of his own, incorporating all the available data, covering the period from 1910 to the present, his results were surprising: there has been no reduction in oceanic pH levels in the last -century.Even if the oceans were ‘acidifying’, though, it wouldn’t be a disaster for a number of reasons — as recently outlined in a paper by Patrick Moore for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. First, marine species that calcify have survived through millions of years when CO2 was at much higher levels; second, they are more than capable of adapting — even in the short term — to environmental change; third, seawater has a large buffering capacity which prevents dramatic shifts in pH; fourth, if oceans do become warmer due to ‘climate change’, the effect will be for them to ‘outgas’ CO2, not absorb more of it.Finally, and perhaps most damningly, Moore quotes a killer analysis conducted by Craig Idso of all the studies which have been done on the effects of reduced pH levels on marine life. The impact on calcification, metabolism, growth, fertility and survival of calcifying marine species when pH is lowered up to 0.3 units (beyond what is considered a plausible reduction this century) is beneficial, not damaging. Marine life has nothing whatsoever to fear from ocean acidification.Given all this, you might well ask why our learned institutions, government departments and media outlets have put so much effort into pretending otherwise. Why, between 2009 and 2014, did Defra spend a whopping £12.5 million on an ocean acidification research programme when the issue could have been resolved, for next to nothing, after a few hours’ basic research?To those of us who have been studying the global warming scare in some detail, the answer is depressingly obvious. It’s because in the last decade or so, the climate change industry has become so vast and all encompassing, employing so many people, it simply cannot be allowed to fail.According to a report last year by Climate Change Business Journal, it’s now worth an astonishing $1.5 trillion — about the same as the online shopping industry. If the scare goes away, then all bets are off, because the entire global decarbonisation business relies on it. The wind parks, the carbon sequestration projects, the solar farms, the biomass plantations — none of these green schemes make any kind of commercial sense unless you buy into the theory that anthropogenic CO2 is catastrophically warming the planet and that radical green measures, enforced by governmental regulation, must be adopted to avert it.It’s no coincidence that the ocean acidification narrative began in the early 2000s — just as it was beginning to dawn on the climate alarmists that global temperatures weren’t going to plan. While CO2 levels were continuing to rise, temperatures weren’t. Hence the need for a fallback position — an environmental theory which would justify the massively expensive and disruptive ongoing decarbonisation programme so assiduously championed by politicians, scientists, green campaigners and anyone making money out of the renewables business. Ocean acidification fitted the bill perfectly.Does this prove that global warming is not a problem? No it doesn’t. What it does do is lend credence to something we much-maligned sceptics have long been saying: that in many environmental fields, the science is being abused and distorted to promote a political and financial agenda. Perhaps it’s about time our supposed ‘conspiracy theories’ were taken more seriously.”James Matkin •James is right. "Matt Ridley, too, has been scathing on the topic. In The Rational Optimist he wrote, ‘Ocean acidification looks suspiciously like a back-up plan by the environmental pressure groups in case the climate fails to warm.’ It is dubious science pushed to engender fear. "• The oceans have a huge capacity to resist being destabilised by changes in temperature or composition of the atmosphere. Whenever there is a change, the reactions of other chemicals or life in the sea act to moderate and even reverse those changes. Oceans cover about 71% of the Earth’s surface and the hydrosphere contains over 300 times the mass of gases in the atmosphere. The oceans thus have a huge capacity to buffer any variations in heat content or gas content emanating from the thin veil of atmospheric gases. The effect of man’s supposed 3% contribution to the tiny 0.039% of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s thin atmosphere would not register a long-term effect in the massive oceans." http://carbon-sense.com/201...https://www.spectator.co.uk/2016...Ocean Acidification – the Castle GhostOcean acidification is like the Castle Ghost – everyone is scared of it but no one has seen it.Dozens of learned articles and millions of media words tell us that ocean acidity has increased alarmingly since man started using carbon fuels. The worry is that the carbon dioxide being generated by man’s industry is dissolving in the ocean thus creating acidic water. And the computer models forecast that, by some future date, sea shells and corals will be dissolved or killed by the acidic ocean and/or the associated global warming.However a close look at the chemistry of the oceans and the evidence provided by past records and present observations reveals that the open ocean is alkaline and never acidic, except locally near active submarine volcanic vents. It is deceptive to suggest that sea life is threatened by “the rising acidity of the oceans”. The oceans are still quite alkaline. Nothing unusual or abnormal has yet been detected. Other conclusions are:The pH of the oceans varies naturally from place to place and time to time, depending on temperatures and the activities of plant and animal life. It is impossible to determine a meaningful figure for “average” ocean acidity (pH). It is also impossible to say with any certainty that average ocean pH has changed because of man’s use of carbon fuels. Such “measurements” are an exercise in guided guess-work. (“What would you like the answer to be?”)It is a myth that acidic waters necessarily kill aquatic life. Rain water is slightly acidic and many fresh water lagoons, swamps and reed beds are also acidic. Nevertheless, aquatic life flourishes in these wetlands.The oceans have a huge capacity resist being destabilised by changes in temperature or composition of the atmosphere. Whenever there is a change, the reactions of other chemicals or life in the sea act to moderate and even reverse those changes. Oceans cover about 71% of the Earth’s surface and the hydrosphere contains over 300 times the mass of gases in the atmosphere. The oceans thus have a huge capacity to buffer any variations in heat content or gas content emanating from the thin veil of atmospheric gases. The effect of man’s supposed 3% contribution to the tiny 0.039% of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s thin atmosphere would not register a long-term effect in the massive oceans.Cold ocean currents from the deep ocean periodically up-well to the surface. These currents are rich in dissolved carbon dioxide and other chemicals and decayed organic matter. Where this cold nutrient-rich water surfaces, there is a staggering profusion of aquatic life.Oceans have an unlimited ability to remove carbon dioxide from their waters and store it in thick beds of shells and corals, limestone, chalk, dolomite, magnesite, siderite, marls, methane hydrate and oil shales. Fresh water swamps and lakes on land have also laid down massive deposits of coal and lignite formed from carbon dioxide extracted from the atmosphere. Many of these deposits were laid down when the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere was far higher than it is today.Carbon dioxide present in the oceans is essential to plant life and current very low levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the ocean are limiting plant growth. All animal life depends on these plants. Man’s mining and industrial activities are harmlessly recycling some of this valuable carbon dioxide from natural limestones and hydrocarbons buried in the dead lithosphere, back to the living biosphere.Corals are hardy and adaptable and have survived for 500 million years. During that time they have had to cope with warm eras, ice ages, extinction events, eras of massive volcanic activity, dramatic rising and lowering in sea levels and eons of time when levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide were far higher than today.A very recent extensive study of the Great Barrier Reef concluded that the changes forecast under the “business as usual greenhouse gas emissions” were unlikely to cause great harm to the reef.Any change in global temperature or the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere will cause life on land and in the ocean to adjust and adapt. However, on balance, a warmer world with more plant food in the atmosphere and a more vigorous water cycle is very beneficial for the biosphere. The killer climates are associated with ice ages when the atmosphere is cold and dry, the sea levels are much lower and much of Earth’s fresh water is locked up in vast lifeless sheets of ice.There is no justification to use the baseless fear of “acidification of the oceans” as an excuse for a massive dislocation of our transport, food and energy industries. We should instead be focussing on real pollution problems (such as man’s rubbish floating in the oceans) and/or on preparing to cope with real and likely natural disasters (such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, floods, fires, cyclones and droughts).To see a full report on “The Acid Ocean Bogey Man” by Viv Forbes with illustrations and explanations see: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-conte... [PDF, 1.2 MB]Further reading: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/...http://carbon-sense.com/2012/05/...The End of the Ocean Acidification Scare for CoralsFollow @co2sciencePaper ReviewedMcCulloch, M.T., D'Olivo, J.P., Falter, J., Holcomb, M. and Trotter, J.A. 2017. Coral calcification in a changing world and the interactive dynamics of pH and DIC upregulation. Nature Communications 8: 15686, DOI:10.1038/ncomms15686.The global increase in the atmosphere's CO2 content has been hypothesized to possess the potential to harm coral reefs directly. By inducing changes in ocean water chemistry that can lead to reductions in the calcium carbonate saturation state of seawater (Ω), it has been predicted that elevated levels of atmospheric CO2 may reduce rates of coral calcification, possibly leading to slower-growing -- and, therefore, weaker -- coral skeletons, and in some cases even death. Such projections, however, often fail to account for the fact that coral calcification is a biologically mediated process, and that out in the real world, living organisms tend to find a way to meet and overcome the many challenges they face, and coral calcification in response to ocean acidification is no exception, as evidenced by findings published in the recent analysis of McCulloch et al. (2017).Writing in the journal Nature Communications, this team of five researchers developed geochemical proxies (δ11B and B/Ca) from Porites corals located on (1) Davis Reef, a mid-shelf reef located east-northeast of Townsville, Queensland, Australia in the central Great Barrier Reef, and (2) Coral Bay, which is part of the Ningaloo Reef coastal fringing system of Western Australia, in order to obtain seasonal records of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) and pH of the corals' calcifying fluid (cf) at these locations for the period 2007-2012. And what did those records reveal?As shown in the figure below, coral colonies from both reef locations "exhibit strong seasonal changes in pHcf, from ~8.3 during summer to ~8.5 during winter," which "represents an elevation in pHcf relative to ambient seawater of ~0.4 pH units together with a relatively large seasonal range in pHcf of ~0.2 units." These observations, in the words of McCulloch et al., "are in stark contrast to the far more muted changes based on laboratory-controlled experiments" (as shown in the dashed black line on the figure), which laboratory-based values are "an order of magnitude smaller than those actually observed in reef environments."With respect to DICcf (also depicted in Figure 1), McCulloch et al. report that the "highest DICcf (~ x 3.2 seawater) is found during summer, consistent with thermal/light enhancement of metabolically (zooxanthellae) derived carbon, while the highest pHcf (~8.5) occurs in winter during periods of low DICcf (~ x 2 seawater)."The proxy records also revealed that coral DICcf was inversely related (r2 ~ 0.9) to pHcf. Commenting on this relationship, the marine scientists say it "indicate[s] that the coral is actively maintaining both high (~x 4 to x 6 seawater) and relatively stable (within ± 10% of mean) levels of elevated Ωcf year-round." Or, as they explain it another way, "we have now identified the key functional characteristics of chemically controlled calcification in reef-building coral. The seasonally varying supply of summer-enhanced metabolic DICcf is accompanied by dynamic out-of-phase upregulation of coral pHcf. These parameters acting together maintain elevated but near-constant levels of carbonate saturation state (Ωcf) of the coral's calcifying fluid, the key driver of calcification."The implications of the above findings are enormous, for they reveal that "pHcf upregulation occurs largely independent of changes in seawater carbonate chemistry, and hence ocean acidification," demonstrating "the ability of the coral to 'control' what is arguably one of its most fundamental physiological processes, the growth of its skeleton within which it lives." Furthermore, McCulloch et al. say their work presents "major ramifications for the interpretation of the large number of experiments that have reported a strong sensitivity of coral calcification to increasing ocean acidification," explaining that "an inherent limitation of many of these experiments is that they were generally conducted under conditions of fixed seawater pHsw and/or temperature, light, nutrients, and little water motion, hence conditions that are not conducive to reproducing the natural interactive effects between pHcf and DICcf that we have documented here." Given as much, they conclude that "since the interactive dynamics of pHcf and DICcf upregulation do not appear to be properly simulated under the short-term conditions generally imposed by such artificial experiments, the relevance of their commonly reported finding of reduced coral calcification with reduced seawater pH must now be questioned."And so it appears that alarmist claims of near-future coral reef dissolution, courtesy of the ever-hyped ocean acidification hypothesis, have themselves dissolved away thanks to the seminal work of McCulloch et al. Clearly, the world's corals are much more resilient to changes in their environment than acidification alarmists have claimed them to be.Figure 1. Seasonal time series of coral calcifying fluid pHcf and DICcf. (a) Porites spp. coral calcifying fluid pHcf derived from δ11B systematics for colonies D-2 and D-3 from Davies Reef (18.8°S) in the Great Barrier Reef, Queensland. Shading denotes the summer period when pHcf and seawater pHsw values are at a minimum. Dashed line shows pH*cf expected from artificial experimental calibrations (pH*cf = 0.32 pHsw + 5.2) with an order of magnitude lower seasonal range than measured pHcf values. (b) Same as previous for Porites colonies from Coral Bay (CB-1 and CB-2) in the Ningaloo Reef of Western Australia (23.2°S) showing seasonal fluctuations in pHcf and seawater pHsw. The blue shading denotes the anomalously cool summer temperatures in 2010. (c) Enrichments in calcifying fluid DICcf (left axis; coloured circles) derived from combined B/Ca and δ11B systematics together with synchronous seasonal variations in reef-water temperatures (right axis; black line) for Porites colonies from Davies Reef (GBR). The strong temperature/light control on DICcf is consistent with enhanced metabolic activity of zooxanthellae symbionts in summer. (d) Same as previous but for Porites from Coral Bay (Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia). Source: McCulloch et al. (2017).CO2 ScienceThe Acid Ocean BogeymanIf pictures or diagrams are missing you can download a print-ready copy of this article from:http://carbon-sense.com/wp-conte...

Well, it’s definitely not easy, but can be done if you are as dedicated and relentless as this guy was:Andrew Therrien wanted payback. He got it—and uncovered a conspiracy.December 6, 2017, 2:00 AM PSTOn the morning a debt collector threatened to rape his wife, Andrew Therrien was working from home, in a house with green shutters on a cul-de-sac in a small Rhode Island town. Tall and stocky, with a buzz cut and a square, friendly face, Therrien was a salesman for a promotions company. He’d always had an easy rapport with people over the phone, and on that day, in February 2015, he was calling food vendors to talk about grocery store giveaways.Therrien was interrupted midpitch by a call from his wife. She’d gotten a voicemail from an authoritative-sounding man saying Therrien was in some kind of trouble. “I need to verify an address to present you with your formal claim,” the man had said. “Andrew Therrien, you are officially notified.”A few minutes later, Therrien’s phone buzzed. It was the same guy. He gave his name as Charles Cartwright and said Therrien owed $700 on a payday loan. But Therrien knew he didn’t owe anyone anything. Suspecting a scam, he told Cartwright just what he thought of his scare tactics.Cartwright hung up, then called back, mad. He said he wanted to meet face-to-face to teach Therrien a lesson.“Come on by, asshole,” Therrien says he replied.“I will,” Cartwright said, “and I hope your wife is at home.”That’s when he made the rape threat.Therrien got so angry he couldn’t think clearly. He wasn’t going to just let someone menace and disrespect his wife like that. He had to know who this Cartwright guy was, and his employer, too. Therrien wanted to make them pay.At the same time, he worried that the call might not be a swindle. What if some misinformed loan shark really was coming for them? But Therrien didn’t have any real information he could take to the police.Then he remembered Cartwright had left a number with his wife.He dialed.Somewhere—at the top of a ladder of dirty debt collectors that Therrien would spend the next two years relentlessly climbing—a man named Joel Tucker had no idea what was coming.“You’ll never get your money back. You might as well get blood out of it”Earlier this year, I met Therrien, 33, at a Panera Bread restaurant in central Providence. He had reluctantly agreed to be interviewed, on the condition that I not reveal his hometown or his wife’s name.Therrien had been caught up in a fraud known as phantom debt, where millions of Americans are hassled to pay back money they don’t owe. The concept is centuries old: Inmates of a New York debtors’ prison joked about it as early as 1800, in a newspaper they published called Forlorn Hope. But systematic schemes to collect on fake debts started only about five years ago. It begins when someone scoops up troves of personal information that are available cheaply online—old loan applications, long-expired obligations, data from hacked accounts—and reformats it to look like a list of debts. Then they make deals with unscrupulous collectors who will demand repayment of the fictitious bills. Their targets are often poor and likely to already be getting confusing calls about other loans. The harassment usually doesn’t work, but some marks are convinced that because the collectors know so much, the debt must be real.The problem is as simple as it is intractable. In 2012 a call center in India was busted for making 8 million calls in eight months to collect made-up bills. The Federal Trade Commission has since broken up at least 13 similar scams. In most cases, regulators weren’t able to identify the original perpetrators because the data files had been sold and repackaged so many times. Victims have essentially no recourse to do anything but take the abuse.Most victims, that is. When the scammers started to hound Therrien, he hounded them right back. Obsessed with payback, he spent hundreds of hours investigating the dirty side of debt. By day he was still promoting ice cream brands and hiring models for liquor store tastings. But in his spare time, he was living out a revenge fantasy. He befriended loan sharks and blackmailed crooked collectors, getting them to divulge their suppliers, and then their suppliers above them. In method, Therrien was like a prosecutor flipping gangster underlings to get to lieutenants and then the boss. In spirit, he was a bit like Liam Neeson’s vigilante character in the movie Taken—using unflagging aggression to obtain scraps of information and reverse-engineer a criminal syndicate. Therrien didn’t punch anyone in the head, of course. He was simply unstoppable over the phone.When Therrien dialed the number Cartwright had left, a woman answered and said she worked for Lakefront Processing Solutions in Buffalo. She’d never heard of Charles Cartwright, though, and implied he must be some kind of freelancer or bounty hunter. Regardless, she said, Therrien could clear everything up by making a payment. Her records indicated that he owed a payday lender called Vista.Therrien had indeed once taken out a loan, but he didn’t think it was from Vista. He’d been selling copiers at the time, and when his boss stiffed him on a $20,000 commission, he turned to an online lender to make a car payment. Therrien says he paid back the debt promptly. He was offended by the Lakefront woman’s suggestion that he was a deadbeat. “I’m a person who believes in personal friggin’ responsibility,” Therrien tells me. “I signed an agreement. And I fulfilled my obligation.”On his laptop, Therrien started digging. He found a securities filing saying Vista had merged with a company called That Marketing Solution Inc. After paying a few dollars to an online people-search service, he got its president on the line. “You sold my personal information to a bunch of thugs,” Therrien recalls telling the man. “I want to know why, and I want to know what you’re going to do about it.” Within hours, the company provided a letter saying that Therrien had never borrowed from Vista.Armed with proof the debt was invalid, Therrien turned back to Lakefront. More searches yielded a corporate parent, owned by two Buffalo men. Therrien called them, then their lawyer. When the lawyer stalled, Therrien bombarded him with more calls, at home and on his cell—enough to put Lakefront off him for good. (The parties eventually reached a confidential settlement, and Lakefront—whose name I found in a public record—declined to comment.)By the morning after Cartwright’s call, Therrien’s fears of a psycho collector had been assuaged—no one had showed up at his house. But swatting down Lakefront turned out to be just the first round in a game of whack-a-mole. More collection agencies contacted him, his wife, his brother, even his grandparents. The calls made it clear to Therrien that an overarching force was at play. His name had to be getting on these lists somehow.Each night, after his wife went to sleep, he cracked open his laptop to comb lawsuits, unearth filings, and uproot the owners of the agencies calling him. When he got names, he’d phone them, often surprising them at home, and make clear that he wouldn’t go away until they’d revealed who supplied their debt portfolios. “Here’s the deal,” he’d say. “I don’t really care about you. There’s a million guys like you out there. You’ll never get your money back. You might as well get blood out of it. Tell me what I need to know to put these guys in jail.”Sometimes, Therrien would make a small payment on the fake debt, then check bank records to see where it went. He found people with convictions for counterfeiting, stock fraud, drug dealing, and child molestation. He started a spreadsheet, Scums.xlsx, to keep track. On weekends he’d harangue them from his couch while watching New England Patriots games. He used persuasion techniques he’d learned selling copiers, some drawn from a book called Getting Into Your Customer’s Head. On the phone, Therrien is a savant. He has an instinct for when to be a friend—one gruff payday lender tells me, sheepishly, that he simply doesn’t know why he speaks with Therrien so frequently—and when to be a bully.Therrien would threaten to report the collectors to regulators unless they helped him figure out what was going on. “You are either with me in this, or you are against me,” he wrote to one man. Others he tried to shame. “If my intentions are right, I’ll have God on my side,” Therrien emailed one source. “You may not love poor people, but He does.”The targets were shocked by Therrien’s doggedness. In their world, complaints are common, but most victims give up after being promised they won’t be called again. One shady-debt player tells me he suspected Therrien was an undercover federal investigator because he’d gathered so much information on his business. “It’s an obsession, it’s unbelievable, an outright vigilante crusade,” another says. “It doesn’t seem to equal the harm that was done to him.”Therrien knew his fixation seemed odd. He didn’t tell his friends and family much about his nighttime activity. But the collectors’ threats brought back feelings of rage and fear that he’d struggled to suppress since childhood. He grew up in working-class Connecticut, where his father was a factory man and his mother had a series of part-time jobs. Therrien says they mistreated him and his brother, and he moved out at 16 after an incident he won’t discuss. He told me he regrets not doing more to protect his brother. (Therrien’s father is dead, and his mother denies she did anything wrong.)In college, Therrien worked at a J.Crew store, where a customer spotted his talent for sales and offered him a job. Therrien makes a good living now, and he takes pride in being a more responsible person than his parents—paying his bills on time, going to church on Sunday, and taking care of those close to him. “If it’s just about me, I don’t particularly give a f---,” he tells me, with an incongruous laugh. “You call my wife, and you call my grandparents? You just opened up a door that got really f---ing ugly, and now I’m going to make sure that I just ruin your life.”As more collectors yielded to Therrien’s persistence and talked, he dropped his pursuit of Charles Cartwright, concluding that it was an untraceable alias, and focused on understanding their business. Phantom debt, he learned, is blended with real debt in ways that are almost impossible to untangle.Americans are currently late on more than $600 billion in bills, according to Federal Reserve research, and almost one person in 10 has a debt in collectors’ hands. The agencies recoup what they can and sell the rest down-market, so that iffier and iffier debt is bought by shadier and shadier individuals. Deception is common. Scammers often sell the same portfolios of debt, called “paper,” to several collection agencies at once, so a legitimate IOU gains illegitimate clones. Some inflate balances, a practice known as “overbiffing.” Others create “redo” lists—people who’ve settled their debt, but will be harassed again anyway. These rosters are actually more valuable, because the targets have proved willing to part with money over the phone. And then there are those who invent debts out of whole cloth.Portfolios are combined and doctored until they contain thousands of entries. One collector told Therrien that he’d paid cash at a diner for a thumb drive with a database containing Therrien’s name. Some collectors told him they thought the files were partially legitimate; others knew their paper was completely falsified. Yet they continued to trade it, referring to the people they pursued as deadbeats and losers. The more Therrien learned, the more disgusted he grew with everyone involved.His search for the ur-source rarely traveled in a straight line. For a time, Therrien focused on Buffalo,one of the poorest cities in the U.S. and a hub for the collections industry—home to agencies that work the oldest, cheapest paper. Debt collector is a more common job there than bartender or construction worker, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As Therrien wore down as many Buffalo collectors as he could, one name kept surfacing: Joel Tucker, a former payday-loan mogul from Kansas City, Mo. By the summer of 2015, Therrien was convinced he’d found his guy.“Who are you?”“A person that you f---ed with too many times”Therrien needed an ally inside the Kansas City racket. He found one in Frampton “Ted” Rowland III, a middle-aged insurance-broker-turned-predatory-lender whose company was listed as the original creditor for one of Therrien’s supposed loans. When Therrien called, Rowland said he was sorry—and kept talking. His life was falling apart. He’d been sued by the FTC over his lending practices, he’d lost all his money, and his wife was leaving him. Therrien sympathized. He sensed Rowland was a good man who’d made a bad choice out of a desire to provide for his family. They started to speak regularly, and Rowland told Therrien he blamed Tucker for everything.Tucker had created the local industry with his two brothers. Scott, the oldest, was the brains. He’d served time in prison for a scam in which he’d pretended to work for JPMorgan Chase & Co. The middle son, Blaine, was popular and a talented musician. Joel, tall and handsome, was a natural salesman. But when he was 21, he was selling furniture and working at a mini-mart, so hard up that he got arrested for bouncing a $12 check. (The case was dismissed.)In the mid-1990s, Scott opened a payday-loan store and gave his brothers jobs. Lending money to people who don’t have any is surprisingly profitable. In states where such stores are legal, such as Missouri, they’re more common than McDonald’s franchises. But in the 15 states where such stores are against the law, there are millions of desperate people willing to pay for fast cash and no one to give it to them. Scott pioneered what he thought was a clever legal loophole that would give him access to that market: He created websites that were owned on paper by an American Indian tribe, which could claim sovereign immunity from regulators. Those sites charged as much as $150 interest on a two-week, $500 loan—an annualized interest rate of about 700 percent.The loophole was ridiculously lucrative. Scott’s operation generated $2 billion in revenue from 2003 to 2012. He bought a private jet and spent more than $60 million to start his own professional Ferrari racing team. Around 2005, Joel split to start a company that would allow anyone to get into online payday lending—supplying software to process applications and loans and offering access to a steady stream of customers. All the clients had to bring was money and a willingness to bypass state law. Word spread around Kansas City’s country clubs and private schools that if you wanted to get rich, Joel Tucker was your man.With Tucker’s help, one property management executive and his son, a general contractor, started a lender that saw $161 million in revenue over eight years. An investor presentation from that period shows that Tucker was personally clearing tens of millions of dollars in profit per year.One of his clients was Rowland, until the gravy train crashed in 2013. Under pressure from regulators, banks stopped doing business with the sketchiest payday lenders, making it hard for them to issue loans and collect payments. In 2014 federal authorities raided Rowland’s office, and the FBI began investigating the Tucker brothers. Blaine committed suicide by jumping off a parking garage in 2014; Scott was charged two years later with racketeering, and prosecutors called his tribal arrangement a sham. (He declined to comment.)By the time Therrien came looking for Joel Tucker in the fall of 2015, he’d become a hard man to find. Twice divorced, he was moving from place to place, ducking his creditors. A booking photo from the time when he was briefly imprisoned for failing to show up for court in an unrelated lawsuit shows him with bristly gray hair and dark circles under deep-set blue eyes. Therrien couldn’t find a working phone number for him—not even when he reached his 81-year-old mother, Norma. She claimed not to know where he was.Therrien’s tactics grew more intense, mirroring those of the debt collectors he loathed. As he had in Buffalo, he developed a network of sources in Kansas City, figuring out who hated whom and playing them off each other. He got a burner app that provided disposable numbers for his smartphone, with any area code he wanted. He called wives, widows, business partners, even a waitress who’d once worked at a restaurant the Tuckers owned. He’d have his sources drive by places where he thought Tucker might be living, to look for his car. He told one broker’s mother-in-law that she should investigate who her daughter was married to. Therrien acknowledges that sometimes he went too far.By November 2015 he developed a simple theory. Tucker’s business had given him access to a huge database of people who’d applied for loans—including, just maybe, the one Therrien had taken out in his copier-selling days. What if, when Tucker was broke and needed money, he’d taken applicants’ personal information, invented loan balances, and sold the list as a portfolio of delinquent debt?Therrien took his hypothesis to the FBI and FTC. His emails were breathless and confusing, but the authorities were patient, taking his calls and talking to him at length. It was clear they knew about Tucker, but Therrien got frustrated by what he saw as inaction. “There are millions of people out there being threatened daily by these actions and I’m doing my part to try and stop it,” he wrote to an FTC investigator in early 2016, begging him to hold Tucker accountable.“I’m giving you the opportunity to come clean”January 2016 saw a breakthrough: A former employee of Tucker’s agreed to arrange a call between him and Therrien to clear the air. Therrien couldn’t believe his unseen antagonist was willing to talk. So anxious he couldn’t sit down, he set up a recording device in his home office, put his phone on speaker, and called.Tucker seemed hyper and defensive, telling Therrien that if any of the portfolios he’d sold now contained phantom debt, they must have been doctored after leaving his hands. “F---ing shame on them,” he said. “Wasn’t me. It had to have been them.”Therrien was trying to hold back his anger, but his voice wavered. He wanted to impress Tucker, mentioning tidbits he knew about his business. Tucker didn’t understand why Therrien, this guy he’d never met, was so extravagantly invested.“I’ll tell you why I care,” Therrien said calmly. “I’ll tell you why I care. I believe, and I’m just telling you what I believe, you sold my personal information 21 separate times. I’ve gotten close to 100 f---ing calls, and because I’ve gotten those 100 calls from scumbag collectors that you facilitated, I’m going to make sure that that kind of shit ends now.”Tucker was incredulous: “You think this is my fault?”“You got desperate because you spent two dollars for every dollar you had,” Therrien said.“What are you talking about? Are you trying to micromanage my life? You don’t know jack shit about me.”“I know what happened. You f---ing stole money from people,” Therrien said. “I’m giving you the opportunity to come clean.”“I don’t know who you are, Andrew,” Tucker said. “Who are you?”“A person that you f---ed with too many times.”When Therrien played the tape for me, I was amazed at how fluently he channeled emotion—his own and Tucker’s—to get what he wanted. Incredibly, by the end of the half-hour call, Tucker was offering to help Therrien collect evidence about crimes committed by other people in the payday-loan business. “We need to get this stuff resolved,” Tucker said on the tape, with a sigh. “’Cause this—it’s not healthy for anybody.”The two men started talking and texting a few times a week. “I think he has a mental illness that allows him to think he did nothing wrong,” Therrien told me. (Tucker didn’t respond to most of my emailed questions and kept putting off interview requests. “Lies are not stories,” he wrote in one email. He said that any debt he’d sold was legitimate.)Tucker’s denials made Therrien hate him more, but Therrien masked his feelings to keep the conversation going. The one-year anniversary of his quest was approaching, and he wanted real evidence of wrongdoing—something Tucker couldn’t deny and officials couldn’t ignore.Therrien soon obtained two crucial sets of documents to that end. In March 2016 he flew to California to meet a debt broker, who handed over some contracts Tucker had signed. Separately, Therrien received an email from the manager of a collection agency, to whose conscience he’d spent weeks appealing. The email, whose subject line read “Have faith in the good in heart,” included actual phantom-debt files, with names and Social Security numbers. The metadata yielded a new name: Rob Harsh, Tucker’s IT guy. (The author of the email died of a drug overdose a few months later.)In May 2016, Therrien emailed his discoveries to the FTC. A lawyer replied right away: “Andrew, we need to talk about this.” Therrien also gave his intel to some private lawyers who were going after Tucker in Texas. They contacted Harsh, and in August 2016 he submitted an affidavit to the court. Harsh, who declined to comment for this story, testified that Tucker had asked him to manipulate a database of almost 8 million payday-loan applications, writing in a made-up lender and adding an amount owed of $300 for each person.Therrien had been right all along.Vindication didn’t make Therrien happy, not even when the FTC suit against Rowland’s company took a karmic swerve that drew in Tucker, directing him to return $30 million he’d received in ill-gotten profits from the business. Tucker told the court he was broke.Meanwhile, Rowland was spiraling. He confided in Therrien that he was considering suicide, and one day that summer he called Therrien to say goodbye. “Don’t do anything stupid,” Therrien texted him afterward. “I may be callous with you lately but I still care and don’t want anything bad to happen.” Therrien told me he’d informed the police of Rowland’s plan and that they had intervened. But that October, Rowland shot himself. His death added to Therrien’s outrage at Tucker and other predatory lenders like him who hadn’t faced any real legal consequences.Finally, in December 2016, the FTC sued Tucker for selling phantom debt. According to the regulator, everything had happened pretty much as Therrien imagined: Tucker had invented more than 7.7 million fake debts and sold them to a series of middlemen for $4.2 million. This September, a judge ruled for the agency, ordering Tucker to pay back that money on top of the $30 million he already owed.The FTC has never credited Therrien, and Michael Tankersley, an agency lawyer, declined to discuss their interactions. But Tankersley told me that Harsh and the California broker were two key sources of information establishing Tucker’s wrongdoing.Therrien, as usual, was unsatisfied. He was still getting calls from collectors, for one thing. And he felt that if he’d done a better job investigating, Tucker would be facing criminal charges—not a civil fine he’d never end up paying. Therrien has stayed in touch with the FBI’s Kansas City office. An FBI spokeswoman declines to say whether Tucker is being investigated, but three of his associates told me that agents had contacted them about his debt sales.After the ruling against Tucker, Therrien heard from him for the first time in months, and they started talking again. Amid their conversations, which were recorded, Tucker’s brother, Scott, was convicted on all 14 charges he faced. Without directly asking Therrien to drop his vendetta, Tucker seemed to be pleading for mercy. “I’ve f---ing had enough harm done,” he said. “I’ve lost a brother. Got a brother going to prison. Put it this way, Andrew. I’m tired, buddy. I’m f---ing tired.”“I’m tired too,” Therrien replied, “because I’m still getting harassed by these motherf---ers.”Reference: Millions Are Hounded for Debt They Don’t Owe. One Victim Fought Back, With a VengeanceAlternatively (or additionally), you can follow the United States governments advice regarding telephone scams here:Common Scams and Frauds | USAGovPersonally, I don’t have that sort of time, so I just screen my calls. My ringtone is silent for unknown callers. If a stranger wants to talk to me, they can leave a voicemail message. If it’s worth my time, I’ll call them back. Otherwise, they can just pound sand. Simple. 🙂