Global Warming Means More Intense Snows Or Something

By William Teach January 23, 2014 – 10:07 am

Hyper-Warmist Bryan Mooney attempts to keep the meme about warming causing more water vapor meaning more snow alive as the US Northeast is buried in lots of the white stuff

Believe It: Global Warming Can Produce More Intense Snows

We all remember “Snowmageddon” in February of 2010. Even as Washington, D.C., saw 32 inches of snowfall for the month of February—more than it has seen in any February since 1899—conservatives decided to use the weather to mock global warming. Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe and his family even built an igloo on Capitol Hill and called it “Al Gore’s New Home.” Har har.

Yet at the same time, scientific voices were pointing out something seemingly counterintuitive, but in fact fairly simple to understand: Even as it raises temperatures on average, global warming may also lead to more intense individual snow events. It’s a lesson to keep in mind as the northeast braces for winter storm Janus—which is expected to deliver as much as a foot of snow in some regions—and we can expect conservatives to once again mock climate change.

To understand the relationship between climate change and intense snowfall, you first need to understand that global warming certainly doesn’t do away with winter or the seasons. So it’ll still be plenty cold enough for snow much of the time. Meanwhile, global warming loads the dice in favor of more intense precipitation through changes in atmospheric moisture content. “Warming things up means the atmosphere can and does hold more moisture,” explains Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “So in winter, when there is still plenty of cold air there’s a risk of bigger snows. With east coast storms, where the moisture comes from the ocean which is now warmer, this also applies.”

Do you know what’s missing? Any proof of anthropogenic causation. Furthermore, we were told that this would not happen, that snow would be a thing of the past. Yesterday’s Weather Channel fact was that January 2014 has been the 4th snowiest for Chicago on record going back to 1885.

Indeed, scientific reports have often noted the snow-climate relationship. An expansive 2006 study of US snowstorms during the entirety of the 20th century, for instance, found that they were more common in wetter and warmer years. “A future with wetter and warmer winters…will bring more snowstorms than in 1901-2000,” the paper predicted. There is also a clear increase in precipitation in the most intense precipitation events, especially in the northeast:

What causes all the snow during cool periods? Like, during glacial ages?

Still, that’s more than enough to refute conservatives who engage in snow trolling.

What about when Warmists engage in weather trolling, where every weather event is the result of “climate change”? Heck, they even troll tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanoes, Blaming them on Mankind’s release of CO2, or, as they like to un-scientifically term it, “carbon”. Perhaps a Warmist could tell us what facts would refute their hypothesis of “climate change”. 20,000 years of these same things happening during the Holocene doesn’t seem to make any impression on Warmists. Nor does 4.5 billion years of history.

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Watchdog Says NSA Phone Program Barely Works And Is Illegal

By William Teach January 23, 2014 – 8:26 am

And recommends shutting it down. Good thing the NY Times buries the story on page A14 of the print edition, wanting to protect Obama and his 100% support of the domestic spying program

(NY Times) An independent federal privacy watchdog has concluded that the National Security Agency’s program to collect bulk phone call records has provided only “minimal” benefits in counterterrorism efforts, is illegal and should be shut down.

The findings are laid out in a 238-page report, scheduled for release by Thursday and obtained by The New York Times, that represent the first major public statement by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which Congress made an independent agency in 2007 and only recently became fully operational. (snip)

The program “lacks a viable legal foundation under Section 215, implicates constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth Amendments, raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties as a policy matter, and has shown only limited value,” the report said. “As a result, the board recommends that the government end the program.”

Does anyone think Team Obama will shut the program down? Remember when the media and Democrats went apoplectic over the Bush admin listening to calls originating overseas between people who were not citizens of the USA, and referred to it as “domestic spying”? Yet most, not all, mind you, but most Dems aren’t showing the same anger over a programs that just scoops up data on most citizens calls and retaining them. And there is so much data that the program really doesn’t work.

(Washington Post) “We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation,” said the report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. “Moreover, we are aware of no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack.”

And for that we’re supposed to let the government collect data on all our phone calls? Perhaps the NSA should focus more on foreigners and people/groups overseas, like they’re supposed to.

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Obama Admin Fears Failure To Fix Healthcare.gov Could Bankrupt Insurers

By William Teach January 23, 2014 – 8:06 am

They’ve already wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars building a barely functional website though a no-bid contract to CGI. Now they have to spend hundreds of millions more

(Fox News) While the administration publicly expresses full confidence in its health care law, privately it fears one part of the system is so flawed it could bankrupt insurance companies and cripple ObamaCare itself.

“Week after week, month after month,” says John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis, “the Obama administration kept telling us everything’s working fine, there’s no problem and then they turn on a dime and fire their contractor.”

To justify a no-bid contract with Accenture after firing CGI as the lead contractor, the administration released documents from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services that offered a rare glimpse of its worst fears, saying the problems with the website puts “the entire health insurance industry at risk” … “potentially leading to their default and disrupting continued services and coverage to consumers.”

Then it went even further, saying if the problems were not fixed by mid-March, “they will result in financial harm to the government.”

What they’re referring to is the “bank-end”, where the information consumers input is transmitted to the health insurance companies. All the information on the consumer and their insurance plan pick, along with whether they are eligible for subsidies and what those subsidies specifically are. Also, payment. Payment’s rather important, wouldn’t you think? Insurers are still receiving bad information, which leads to just guessing about subsidies

For now, though, officials concede they’re relying on estimates from the insurers.

“Here’s who we think we have, and here’s the subsidy we think they’re owed,” explains Jim Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “Please send us a check from the treasury,” he says chuckling. “The honor system again.”

“There’s no way to effectively match policies and people,” says Holtz-Eakin.

That’s a recipe for disaster. Here’s Charles Krauthammer

“Right now the insurers are guessing at the subsidy, so all of this is on the honor system and it can be wildly off,” Krauthammer, a syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor said. “If they undershoot, the insurers are going to go bust. If they overshoot, the government is going to be stuck with a huge bill.”

“You’ve got a train wreck coming,” he said. “I think it’s going to come out slowly, it’s not all going to happen in one day, but I think they’re in deep trouble and the deadline is mid-March. If they don’t have this in place in mid-March, then there’s going to be- all hell’s going to break loose on this.”

What he’s referring to (full video available at the link) is no one really knowing what the real subsidies are. So, the insurers are using estimates. Guesses. Which could cost lots and lots of money to the insurers and/or the government. Larry Kocot, visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, notes that “It’s like [CGI] built the façade of a house with nothing behind it.”

Crossed at Right Wing News.

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Surprise: Montreal Bike-Share Program Goes Belly Up

By William Teach January 22, 2014 – 7:17 pm

Lots of cities are launching these bike-sharing plans. NYC has one. San Francisco just launched one using electric bikes. Many other cities are giving it a whirl or considering it. How’d it work in Montreal?

(Treehugger) Bixi, the Montreal bike-sharing service that debuted in the city in pilot form in the summer of 2008 and filed for bankruptcy yesterday, has definitely had its ups and downs.

When the full Bixi program opened on Montreal’s streets in 2009, it had 3,000 bikes and 300 stations, and was heralded as the coming of full-strength bike share to North America. Bixi (a combination of the words ‘bike’ and ‘taxi’) was popular, too, with 10,000 members and one million trips in the first year. Bixi’s parent company thought its system would become a model internationally.

In its second season, the Montreal bike share was even bigger – more than 5,000 bicycles and 400 stations. But questions about the internal structure of the company behind Bixi surfaced quickly in local press, and Bixi’s debt was feared to affect the city’s bottom line economically.

By the end of 2010 Bixi Montreal had to restructure and get a big loan and line of credit from the city. In 2011 Bixi came back with a few more stations, and advertisements on the bicycles – a feature which many users hated.

There were layoffs in 2011. There were all sorts of software issues. Bixi had to raise prices, then raise them more. They have $42 million in debt. The mayor of Montreal is pledging $1.3 million (US) to making sure that the bike-sharing program is open come spring (do they have spring in Canada? Is that where people stop wearing fur lined hats and switch to lighter weight hats?).

Personally, I like bike-sharing programs, at least in areas that make sense. It wouldn’t work so well here in Raleigh, except for just the downtown area. Probably not. In heavy urban areas they can reduce traffic, get people around quicker, and reduce real air pollution, like smog. Like mass transit (which I support if done correctly), bike-sharing is great in certain areas. However, most of these bike-sharing programs are being done with “climate change” in mind. It’s more about advocacy rather than being a wise business practice. Government is wasting lots of taxpayer money for these limited use programs. Loans that will never be repaid, or repaid at a fraction of the loan value. And then the companies need even more taxpayer money, or the government steps in to kinda or fully run the programs.

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Obama Targets Sexual Assault On Campus, Tells Base To Stop It

By William Teach January 22, 2014 – 4:12 pm

After watching Obama these past 5 years, color me skeptical that this is anything other than some sort of self-serving political move

(The Hill) President Obama will create a new task force to examine how to better prevent sexual assault on college campuses, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.

The president is giving the panel three months to gather specific recommendations for schools to better prevent and respond to an epidemic of campus sexual assaults, according to the wire service. Obama is also asking the task force to provide recommendations on how the federal government can track and promote how well individual schools are responding to the issue, and punish universities that fail to confront the issue.

Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Eric Holder, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, Education Secretary Arnie Duncan and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius will join President Obama and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, chair of the Council on Women and Girls, in the Oval Office to announce the initiative on Wednesday.

A couple points: first, college students tend to vote much for Democrats than Republicans. These are the people who pushed hard to get Obama elected the first time, and sure helped the 2nd time. So why is Obama’s base so involved with sexual assault? Perhaps this is part of the “if it feels good, do it” culture pushed by Obama and the Dems, along with a society of loose morals. Sexual assault has always been around, and, sadly, will always be around. Why has it grown during Obama’s presidency?

2nd, Obama rarely does anything without an ulterior motive. Might one of those be to give the federal government even more direct control over state and private colleges? If you think that’s all conspiracy-like, you haven’t been paying attention the last 5 years.

Then there’s this, from Jammie Wearing Fools

Left unsaid: All the folks listed above have failed over the course of five years to do anything about this so-called epidemic. Meanwhile, they never mention the epidemic of abortion.  Hundreds of thousands will fight the cold weather to march against that epidemic today, but apparently that isn’t newsworthy.

Good point. So, why now? Is this another case of Obama attempting to appear as if he’s Doing Something, especially with the midterms coming this year?  Reducing sexual assault is a worthy goal. I just do not trust Obama’s motives.

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If All You See…

By William Teach January 22, 2014 – 1:00 pm

…is warmth created snow, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is The Camp Of The Saints, with a post on the number 56,662,169.

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2013 Was Really Warm, Meaning Doom

By William Teach January 22, 2014 – 11:02 am

How warm was 2013? Well, Warmist Bryan Walsh wants you to know that despite all that snow and cold and stuff, we’re like doomed

(Time) But don’t worry—on a global climatic scale, the heat is still on. That’s the takeaway from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) annual analysis of global climate data, which was released Tuesday. The red-hot numbers:

  • 2013 ties with 2003 as the fourth-warmest year globally since records began in 1880.
  • The annual global combined land and ocean surface temperatures was 58.12 degrees Fahrenheit (14.52 degrees Celsius), 1.12 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average (the warmest year on record is 2010, which was 1.19 degrees Fahrenheit (0.66 Celsius) above the average.
  • 2013 was the 37th consecutive year that the annual global temperature was above the average, which means that if you were born any year after 1976, you’ve never experienced a year when the global climate was average, let along cooler.
  • Including 2013, 9 of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred in the 21st century, and just one year in the 20th century—1998—was warmer than 2013.

The NOAA report, coming out in the middle of a major snowstorm and during a U.S. winter that’s been marked by the polar vortex, is a reminder that climate isn’t about the day-to-day changes in the weather (Note: NASA came out with its own report on 2013, using a different calculating method than NOAA, and found 2013 to be slightly cooler, but still the seventh-warmest year on record). It’s about the very long-term, as Gavin Schmidt, the deputy director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, said on a conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon:

There you go: day to day changes (you know, like a 17 year pause, 4 out of the past 5 winters being brutal, and this one looks like it might follow that pattern) are meaningless. Except when they back up the Warmist’s memes, then they have meaning.

Anyhow, you know what is missing from the entire article? Proof that the warming is anthropogenic.

And 2014, despite the snowy and chilly start in the U.S., could be even hotter. Scientists now say that an El Nino seems likely to develop later this year, which is likely to push temperatures up in 2014 and 2015, since El Nino years tend to be warmer. So enjoy the snow while you can—it will likely be a faint memory by time Americans are sweating in July.

El Nino is a natural pattern, so, this would mean that if 2014 ends up being a warm one, then it is natural.

Notice that Bryan hedges his bet about 2013 being the 4th warmest by briefly mentioning that NASA has it as the 4th globally. The Hockey Schtick notes

Surprisingly, official government temperature records disagree on how much global warming there was in 2013 in comparison other years that are statistically-insignificant-meaningless-hundredths-of-a-degree different.

One thing is for sure, the globe has fortunately recovered from the Little Ice Age, which coincidentally ended in ~1850 at the start of the instrumental global temperature record, and which shows after UHI-artificial-warming and up-tampered data the temperature rise could have been as much as a whopping 0.7C since 1850. Not only that, the world’s oceans have warmed 0.09C over the past 55 years alone!

So, um, which was it? How can we trust the data when the conclusions are different? How can the models possibly be correct (the vast majority aren’t, BTW) when the data is all over the place?

Again, none of the hyperventilating about tiny changes in temperature prove anthropogenic causation.

Read: 2013 Was Really Warm, Meaning Doom »

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Prosperity Is Driving Climate Change, Per UN Report

By William Teach January 22, 2014 – 8:38 am

Being a rich country is considered bad, as is living a modern lifestyle

(Daily Caller) Growing global economies through expanded trade between rich and poor countries is driving global warming, according to a draft report from the United Nation’s climate bureaucracy. The international agency said that rich countries are “outsourcing” carbon dioxide emissions to poor countries through increasing international trade.

The draft report, obtained by the U.K.’s Guardian, argues that these “outsourced” emissions come “in the form of electronic devices such as smartphones, cheap clothes and other goods manufactured in China and other rising economies but consumed in the U.S. and Europe.”

Nothing is better for lifting people out of poverty than cheap, abundant energy. A warmer climate is much better for health and living conditions than a cool one. But, the Warmists at the UN, who spend lots of time taking fossil fueled flights around the world while living it up on the taxpayer funded credit card, eating fancy meals, dressing in expensive clothes, driving nice cars, staying at nice hotels, tell us that prosperity is Bad.

The U.N. draft report warned that “emissions of carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases are warming the planet grew twice as fast in the first decade of the 21st century as they did during the previous three decades,” reports The Guardian.

Strange, because there has been no statistically significant warming since 1998, and no warming at all this century. In fact, some show a tiny (what would also be considered, in honesty, statistically insignificant) decrease in the global temperature.

“If we are just looking at our national inventory to understand the emissions trends, it is just not telling the full picture of our impacts,” Cynthia Cummis, a climate policy expert at the World Resources Institute, told The Guardian. “We need to understand the full life cycle of all the goods and services that we are purchasing and selling.”

“The consumers that are importing those goods have some responsibility for those goods that are happening outside of our boundaries,” Cummis added.

There you go, Warmists: stop buying anything not made locally. Give up your smartphone, electronics, clothes, and anything else made in China and other companies.

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Target Joins Growing Number Of Companies Dropping Health Insurance For Part-Timers

By William Teach January 22, 2014 – 8:19 am

More victims of Obama’s signature legislation, aided and abetted by most Democrats

(Bloomberg) Target Corp. (TGT) said it will end health insurance for part-time employees, joining Trader Joe’s Co., Home Depot Inc. and other retailers that have scaled back benefits in response to changes from Obamacare.

About 10 percent of Target’s part-time employees, defined as those working fewer than 30 hours a week, use the company’s health plans now, according to an announcement posted on the Minneapolis-based company’s website. Target said it would pay $500 to part-timers losing coverage and a consulting firm will help workers sign up for new Obamacare plans.

$500 is what, no more than two months of premiums on the Obamacare Exchanges, at best? Anyhow, why would Target and other companies do this?

The U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the largest regulatory overhaul of health care since the 1960s, creating a system of penalties and rewards to encourage people to obtain medical insurance. The law known as Obamacare doesn’t require most companies to cover part-time workers, and offering them health plans may disqualify those people from subsidies in new government-run insurance exchanges that opened in October.

Part-time employees have low enrollment rates for insurance via their company because those plans tend to be rather expensive. So, not that many people will be affected. That said, Obamacare encourages, heck, it incents, companies to drop health insurance offerings for part-timers, that way the part-timers will be eligible for taxpayer funded subsidies. In fact, the companies can be on the receiving end of a massive fine/tax if any employee obtains insurance through the Obamacare exchanges, and the ones most likely to do that would be part-timers.

It also incents companies to move employees to part-time. So, not only will we hear about more and more companies dropping their health insurance offerings overall during 2014, along with companies seeing their plans cancelled and replacing them with plans that are more expensive, particularly for the deductibles, we will see companies moving more employees to part-time hours as 2015 and the (illegally delayed) employer mandate. Welcome to the Obama/Democrat economy. It’s no wonder they want to raise the minimum wage: people will be working fewer hours thanks to their own policies.

Crossed at Right Wing News.

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LA Times: We Only Have 15 Years Left Before Climate Doom

By William Teach January 21, 2014 – 3:06 pm

And Everyone Else needs to stop the foot-dragging, per their editorial board

Stop the foot-dragging on climate change

The world has very little time — perhaps 15 years — to make serious inroads on climate change, according to a leaked report from a United Nations panel. Current efforts, even among the most committed nations, fall short, and at the current rate of carbon emissions, the problem might grow too large to overcome with existing technology.

Yet the recalcitrance and myth-making about global warming continue — and become more prevalent — in the United States. Last week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell moved to employ a little-known law to try to halt a key portion of the Obama administration’s climate plan. And at a Senate committee hearing on climate change, Republican senators delivered their usual speeches denying that a problem exists. There was recently cold weather in the Northeast, they argued. And New Orleans hasn’t seen particularly bad hurricanes during the last few years. If anything is to be done about climate change, several of them hinted or said outright, it must be accomplished without taking away jobs or driving up electricity bills.

Here’s a start: the LA Times could stop killing trees to publish its paper. They could stop using fossil fuels to disperse their paper. They could stop using air conditioning, heating, and make sure no fridges at the office have ice makers. All those on the editorial board could pledge to give up their own use of fossil fuels. Those are just a few measures to show that they really believe that “climate change” is a real issue, rather than a way of pushing far, far left political dogma.

It would be misleading to suggest that there will be no sacrifice involved in reducing carbon emissions.

Where’s the sacrifice from the LA Times and its editorial board? Heck, from any Warmists?

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