JoNova

It doesn’t get much better than this. Mazin Sidahmed at The Guardian has posted a handy list of Trumps Cabinet Picks. The times have changed so much that it’s not a case of “spot the skeptic” but a hunt to find any believers in the climate doctrine. Make no mistake, things are very, very bad for the fans of human-caused-weather. Almost every name on this list would be the “top target” of green protests if they had been the one appointee among the standard Obama-Clinton picks. But almost all of them are drawing fire. People who have taken the toxic, unforgivable position of personally investing in oil and gas projects seem neutral now, compared to people who have run lawsuits against the government department they’ve been told to manage. If only The Guardian could find someone who was not in the bottom 10% of the Conservation scorecard!

Climate change denial in the Trump cabinet: where do his nominees stand? Scott Pruitt: Environmental Protection Agency

Pruitt is the anti-christ for the EPA. He has led lawsuits against their unconstitutional grab for power. What’s not to like?

Ryan Zinke: Department of the Interior

He is a congressman, former […]

Coral spawning is visible from the air | Vimeo Biopixel

From the Bolt Report, Professor Peter Ridd points out how little we know about the history of bleaching of corals. Corals have been around for 200 million years, but we only discovered coral bleaching and coral spawning in the 1980s, even though the synchronized slicks are so vast they are visible in satellite shots. When discussing whether the Great Barrier Reef going to die he says “everything that I look at says the opposite”.

Professor Peter Ridd (James Cook Uni)

“Terry Hughes is on record as saying Bleaching is a new phenomena — it never happened before the 1980s. It is an absurdity –we just discovered it to science in the 1980s.

There is another thing the reef does that is equally spectacular — and that’s coral spawning — three days after the full moon in November every year the whole barrier reef, every coral virtually, releases egg bundles that float to the surface and from the air we can see these massive slicks of coral spawn on the surface. It’s incredible. we only discovered that in 1982.

Are we really suggesting that […]

Historic documents warn us that cold times bring death, starvation, disease. Winters were long, the crops failed, trade patterns and prices changed. Rivers froze over in Europe. The detail in this paper is fascinating. The world’s expert climate models (that’ll be NASA GISS, NCAR] don’t know what caused that extreme cold and can’t model it. If something like this were coming in the near future, they couldn’t predict it. Apparently it was due to “natural variation” which is scientific code for “we don’t know”. But the paper discusses the Spörer Minimum (SPM) in depth, and admits they don’t understand the mechanism of solar forcing which may include solar UV, or energetic particle flows. The SPM lasted from 1421 – 1550. They pretty much rule out volcanoes as the cause because the big ones in that era went off in 1453 and 1458.

Figure 2. Individual paleoclimate reconstructions for summer temperature, winter temperature and summer precipitation. Left: dots are specific sites considered by the different authors (listed from 1 to 16; Table 1). Right: decadal-scale (10-year mean) summer temperature, winter temperature and summer precipitation for the 16 climate reconstructions, standardised with reference to the period 1300–1700 (datasets 6, 11 and […]

Emails released by wikileaks show that Roger Pielke was the target of an organized political effort to stop him speaking on climate issues. Remember, Pielke is largely an IPCC type guy — supporting most of their consensus including even carbon trading. Yet straying a tiny bit from the approved line made him a major threat — the IPCC message is a whole package and a flaw in any part of it could unravel the whole kit and caboodle.

Roger Pielke was surprised to find his name in the Podesta emails:

“The multi-year campaign against me by CAP was partially funded by billionaire Tom Steyer, and involved 7 writers at CAP who collectively wrote more than 160 articles about me, trashing my work and my reputation. Over the years, several of those writers moved on to new venues, including The Guardian, Vox and ClimateTruth.org where they continued their campaign focused on creating an evil, cartoon version of me and my research.”

Collectively, they were quite successful. The campaign ultimately led to me being investigated by a member of Congress and pushed out of the field.

That story has been told in the Wall Street Journal today:

My […]