Crazy Weather

The weather has been crazy lately. Record-breaking warmth on Christmas day, astounding floods in the midwest of the U.S. and in the U.K., surprise tornadoes, it’s insane. People are taking notice. And it’s not just el Niño — it’s the deadly combination of el Niño and climate change. It even motivated MSNBC to do an actual (albeit brief) report on climate change, featuring Michael Mann.

Please watch. The quotes that struck me the most are “Climate change is no longer playing a subtle role” and “el Niño that has been supercharged by climate change.”

Richard Lindzen: limited understanding?

A recent WUWT post by Richard Lindzen is a rather lame attempt to defend an equally lame opinion piece by Freeman Dyson in the Boston Globe. Evidently, Lindzen felt the need to defend Dyson’s piece because it was rather roundly refuted in a response by 8 members of the faculty of MIT.

Nature’s Thermometer

One of the most common designs for a thermometer works by measuring the volume of a fluid — one which expands when it heats and shrinks when it cools. The classic example of such a “thermometric liquid” is mercury, a liquid metal. Usually the fluid is enclosed in a container (often, a glass tube) so that when it expands it climbs to a greater height. By the height of the fluid, we can deduce the temperature.

Cruz and Smith Subpoena Ice

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX) have issued separate subpoenas for those they believe are withholding crucial information in order to advance President Obama’s global warming agenda. They have threatened criminal prosecution if the targets of their subpoenas fail to appear, or refuse to surrender their private e-mails.

They target of their separate subpoenas: ice.

2015 Recap

Climate Nexus has made a video summarizing some of the extreme weather we got in 2015:

China and the U.S.A.

The two countries which emit the most CO₂ into the atmosphere are China and the U.S. Their governments are taking a very different attitude toward the problem.

November Temperature

NASA has released the November global temperature estimate. It’s hot

Ted Cruz: Just Plain Wrong

When Ted Cruz turned a senate hearing into his own climate denier circus, he didn’t just emphasize lower-troposphere temperature data — he deliberately ignored every other bit of climate data that exists. Way to go, Ted.

Voice of Reason

That wouldn’t be the voice of Ted Cruz. As chair of the senate subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, he held a hearing titled “Data or Dogma? Promoting Open Inquiry in the Debate over the Magnitude of Human Impact on Earth’s Climate.” What’s blatantly obvious is that his only purpose was to deny climate science. The witnesses included denier William Happer, denier Judith Curry, denier John Christy, and denier Mark Steyn.

But one witness provided the voice of reason: Rear Admiral David Titley, USN (ret.). Unlike other witnesses, he showed intelligence, honesty, and class.

The deniers (including Cruz) harped on the so-called “pause” (the one that never happened), the satellite data (ignoring all the other data), and even managed to claim that sea level rise isn’t because of man-made climate change. It’s hard to imagine how they could get any crazier.

I’ll be posting more about this, especially the sea level issue.

A Tale of Two Politicians

Lamar Smith is at it again. He penned an opinion piece for the San Antonio Express News to repeat his claims that climate scientists have “altered historical climate data to get politically correct results.” He just can’t wrap his tiny little mind around the fact that they improved the way data were processed to get scientifically better results, because scientifically better results undermine his political agenda — keep the fossil fuel companies (Lamar Smith’s biggest political contributors) happy.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders has a strong statement on his website which tells the most important truth of the matter: that “the wealthiest industry in the history of our planet has bribed politicians into ignoring science.”

I have one quibble with the statement by Bernie Sanders: some politicians, like Lamar Smith, haven’t been bribed into ignoring science, but into actively denying it while accusing scientists.