Secret Agreement lets homebuilders prevent energy efficiency

A fascinating story in the NY Times tells how the National Association of Home Builders got a special deal which guarantees them — the industry supposed to be regulated — 4 out of 11 seats on two committees responsible for updating building codes. They’ve used that power to block almost all progress in energy efficiency for U.S. homes.

Of course they claim the agreement is “appropriate.” Which makes me wonder, if it’s so appropriate, why LIE about it?

Climate Change Threatens the Corn Belt

While American farmers are still suffering from recent severe flooding, historically our “corn belt” has done a remarkable job increasing food production. The main reason is of course the advances of farming chemistry, genetics, and technology, but throughout the 20th century the U.S. corn belt went farther and faster than other regions of the world (even other regions of the USA).

New research from Partridge et al. might explain why. Climate change has been raising temperatures around the world and across the USA, but while other areas had to contend with the bulk of it, during the growing season our corn belt has heated up much less than most places, while precipitation increased slightly. In other words, we got lucky.

Thank You

First, thanks to Jean-Pierre Dehottay, Koenraad Machiels, Tim Baumann, and James Vogan for kind donations to the blog. As I’ve said recently, it really makes a difference right now.

We still need help (feel free to visit the donation link below!) but we’re already much better off thanks to the kindness and generosity of the folks who read this blog. Thank you!

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Sea Level: Eastern North America

Since Dave Burton was kind enough to remind us how great the danger of sea level rise is, I’m enjoying the recent focus on the topic. I’d like to apply my new alignment technique (including variable station weights) to several regions of eastern North America, to see how they differ and what they have in common in their sea level history.

Sea Level Rise: Regional

I’ve decided to apply some area weighting to my sea level estimate based on my new method.

Aligning Tide Gauge Stations

I’ve spoken before about my new way of aligning tide gauge stations. Maybe it’s time for me to outline some of the details, and share my program (written in R) for doing the computation.

Sea Level Acceleration since the 1960s

Dangendorf et al. have made a new estimate of global sea level since the year 1900, based on data from tide gauges around the world. I’ve compared it (which I’ll call Dang) to the most trusted data set (in my opinion) from Church & White (which I’ll call CW), to the dataset I have criticized from Jevrejeva et al. (which I’ll call Jev), and to my own reconstruction (which I’ll call me) based on my own method of correcting for VLM (Vertical Land Movement). The first thing to note is that my own data doesn’t include proper area weighting, and can only be considered seriously flawed. But it is my own, so we’ll see how the new kid on the block compares to it, as well as to well-known data sets. Here’s the new data from Dang:

Sea Level Acceleration Denial

Dave Burton, you still don’t understand.

You finally commented on this post, showing a graph of San Diego data and saying:

As you can see, there’ve been >112 years of continuous measurements, and still no detectable acceleration.

Not true. I detected acceleration. You don’t believe it. Then you gave us this:

Sea Level Acceleration

Dave Burton has visited, and commented extensively on this post. He takes exception to the sea level data I used, and suggests that sea level has been rising at a steady, unchanging rate “since the late 1920s.” To quote him:

Neil, many locations have seen a little bit of acceleration “since the 1800s” — but not since the late 1920s.

Is that true? I’m skeptical.

Global Temperature Evolution 1950 to 2018

It’s been a while since Foster & Rahmstorf (2011) took global temperature time series and removed our best estimate of the changes due to known fluctuating factors, the el Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), aerosols from volcanic eruptions, and variations in the output of the sun. After removing fluctuations of known origin, what was left over was a very steady rise in global temperature.

I’ve improved (I believe) the method by allowing for more detail in the response to ENSO. I now allow both a “prompt” (not necessarily immediate) and “more delayed” response, as well as a seasonal pattern to the ENSO response. I’ll probably expound on those details at some point, but not now. Now, let’s look at the results.