This Solar Roadways project started showing up in my Facebook news feed, and seems to be getting a lot of popular support.

Except, I’m guessing, from actual engineers.

The idea that we can convert our roadway surfaces to electrical generation solar collectors has numerous practical problems. In fact, I don’t see how anyone with an engineering background could have seriously entertained the idea.

Here are a few of the problems which first came to my mind. (Joel Anderson at Equities.com, who calls the Solar Roadways idea “really silly”, has a few more of his own).

1. You can’t point the roadway to track the sun, to improve energy generation efficiency (which is only about 15% for photovoltaics, anyway, which makes PV generation expensive on a large scale).

2. Why embed solar panels in such a harsh environment where they are constantly being run over and flexed by millions of tons of vehicles? There are many more practical locations to use (such as roofs, that face southward).

3. How do you keep the solar collectors clean (as millions of tires scrub over them, and engines drip oil on them) so that sunlight can get collected by the embedded PV surfaces?

4. Who is going to actually PAY for such an obscenely expensive enterprise (other than government, which means you, the taxpayer)?

Furthermore, the above photo really has me suspicious. The photo supposedly shows the “active” portion of a solar parking lot melting snow. Say WHAT?….here’s a little lesson in thermodynamics. A dark surface heated by the sun converts essentially all of the absorbed sunlight into heat energy…which is what is needed to melt snow. If you instead siphon off some of the absorbed solar energy in the form of electricity, there is actually LESS heat energy to melt snow!

So, unless someone can correct me, something here smells fishy. And I’m being polite.

The Solar Roadways project is run by a couple who have been soliciting donations at the Indiegogo.com crowd funding website. Last I looked, it was approaching $1.4 Million(!) Not bad for a mom-and-pop operation.

Obviously, I work in the wrong field.

See my follow-up post: Why are solar freakin’ roadways so freakin’ popular?

It has been documented that global warming has been accompanied by a general greening of land areas in recent decades, especially those which are semi-arid. While some areas of greening might be attributable to increased rainfall, carbon dioxide fertilization and longer growing seasons are also involved.

The satellite studies have been based upon visible sensor data that measures greenness. Here’s the result of one recent study, which tried to just isolate the greening from CO2 fertilization (click image for full res version):

But we can also use passive microwave imager data, the best calibrated version of which is available since mid-1987 from the SSM/I and SSMIS series of instruments flying on the DMSP satellites. This gives us 26 years of microwave imager data to examine.

The simplest microwave vegetation index is just a difference between the vertically polarized and horizontally polarized channel brightness temperatures at 37 GHz. This polarization difference [V-H] can be thought of as primarily a measure of surface roughness. In heavily vegetated areas, such as Amazonia and the Congo Basin, the difference approaches zero, while sandy deserts and ice sheets are moderately polarized, as seen in the 26 year average of all Augusts (peak vegetation month in the Northern Hemisphere, click image for full-res version):

We have zeroed out the ocean areas because the image gets too messy to interpret, although I will say it showed signatures consistent with the decrease in Arctic sea ice, and increase in Antarctic sea ice.

If we compute the land gridpoint trends across all 26 Augusts, the image looks like this (note the color scale does not match the published greenness trend image above, click image for full-res version):

Note the strong signature of more vegetation in the Sahel and Kalahari Desert regions of Africa, similar to the Donohue et al. study. Significant increases are also suggested in India, Australia, and over the extreme northern reaches of North America and Asia. I have no explanation for the apparent increased roughness signature of the Greenland ice sheet (I’m pretty sure it’s not yet grassland, ha-ha).

There are also many, spotty areas of apparent decreases in vegetation cover (red). I have no idea what these correspond to, so I’m asking readers if they have knowledge of any of these areas (clicking on the above images will bring up the full-size versions). The red areas might also be regions of greater soil surface wetness…there is no way to know with this simple 2-channel approach.

I would be careful about interpreting coastal areas….small geolocation errors in the satellite data combined with the huge [V-H] polarization differences between land and ocean, can cause spurious signals there.

Also, at this microwave frequency (37 GHz) a forest canopy isn’t going to look much different from dense grass. Think of the 37 GHz [V-H] measurement as an indication of how much soil surface (or highly polarized rivers) is visible through breaks in the vegetation….it’s not really a measure of total biomass, unless the vegetation is quite sparse. So, deforestation in Amazonia isn’t necessarily going to show up if forest is replaced by crops, weeds, and shrubs. The nominal resolution of the microwave imagery above is 25 km, at best.

Again, the above microwave imagery is only for August. This was a LOT of full-resolution satellite data that Danny Braswell downloaded from NCDC, and it was not a trivial effort to do the calculations. We just thought that the public might be able to give us some idea if any of these signatures merit further investigation.

The meme that 97% of climate scientists believe global warming is, well, apparently whatever you want them to believe, is getting really annoying. John Kerry is so clueless about this issue it’s downright embarrassing. Does he really think we can do something that will measurably affect global temperatures without killing millions of poor people in the process? Really?

Or maybe that’s the ultimate goal?

As a published climate scientist myself, I would wager that 97% of climate scientists can’t agree on anything.

Except maybe it’s warmer now than 100 years ago (so what? I’ll agree to that).

Or, that humans are at least partly responsible for some of that warming (so what? I’ll agree to that, too).

But I think a more significant statistic — one that doesn’t rely on opinions, but on facts — is that 100% of climate scientists don’t know how much of the warming in the last 50-100 years is natural versus human-caused.

They dance around this issue with weasel words and qualitative language. Because they don’t know. They can say “most” warming is human caused…but how do they know that? They don’t.

You see, we have no idea how much natural climate variations figure into the climate change equation.

For example, this proxy reconstruction of past temperatures suggests climate change is the rule, not the exception:

And this is the stumbling block that will be in everyone’s way until we understand and quantify the causes of natural climate change.

A majority of climate scientists (60%, 80%, or even 97%) might “believe” this or that, but until they figure out just how much of climate change is naturally-induced, we will never know how much is due to humans. All that statistic measures is how inbred the climate research community has become.

And since there is no fingerprint of human- versus natural-caused warming, we might never know the answer to this central question. We might have to just sit back and watch where global temperature go from now on.

And if the climate models are ever going to be proved correct, dramatic warming is going to have to get started pretty darn soon.

Lennart Bengtsson being bullied by colleagues is only the latest example of bad behavior by climate scientists who have made a deal with the devil. They have exchanged their scientific souls for research grants, prestige, and easy access to scientific journals to publish their papers.

I predict history will not treat them kindly, and the reputation of all climate scientists will be tarnished in the process. As it is, the public who pays our salaries are already laughing at us.

Some of us (Christy, Lindzen, myself and others) have put up with many years of unfair treatment by a handful of activist gate-keeping colleagues who stopped our papers from being published or proposals from being funded, sometimes for the weakest of reasons.

Sometimes for entirely made-up reasons.

What makes the Bengtsson case somewhat unusual is his high profile. A Director at ECMWF. Then Max Planck Institute. He was at ECMWF when that organization became the top weather forecasting center in the world. He knows the importance of models providing good forecasts, with demonstrable skill — exactly what the climate models do not yet provide.

That climate models do NOT provide good forecasts with demonstrable skill should concern everyone. But as Bengtsson has found out, a scientist advertises this fact at their peril.

Bengtsson has always been a little skeptical, as all good scientists should be. After all, most published science ends up being wrong anyway.

But once he became more outspoken about his skepticism, well…that’s just unacceptable for someone of his stature. That his treatment should lead him to worry about his health and his safety tells us a lot about just how politicized global warming research has become.

This bad behavior by the climate science community is nothing new. It’s been going on for at least 20 years.

I have talked to established climate scientists who are afraid to say anything about their skepticism. In hushed tones, they admit they have to skew the wording of papers and proposals to not appear to be one of those “denier” types.

At least in the U.S., politicians are the ones who started this mess — Eisenhower predicted “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite” — and they have the power to put an end to it.

They started it by purposely funding research that had the ultimate goal of increasing the power and influence of government over the private sector by accomplishing favored regulatory goals. Agency heads who are political appointees installed managers under them who would be team players. I’ve told the story of meeting with V.P. Gore’s environmental science adviser in the early 1990s who confided that, now that they had successfully regulated the manufacture of CFCs, carbon dioxide was next. The IPCC was being formed to make that happen, by enlisting scientists who would be guided by politicians and government representatives.

This is no conspiracy theory. This was mostly done out in the open, for all to see.

Politicians can fix this. Probably not by just calling hearings and witnesses, through, which will admittedly raise public awareness of the problem. But by telling the funding agencies that some percentage (say, 20%) of their climate research funding must go toward studying the 800 lb gorilla in the room: Natural sources of climate change.

As I have always said, if you fund scientists to find evidence of something, they will be happy to find it for you. For over 20 years we have been funding them to find evidence of the human influence on climate. And they dutifully found it everywhere, hiding under every rock, glacier, ocean, and in every cloud, hurricane, tornado, raindrop, and snowflake.

So, just tell scientists 20% of their funds will be targeted for studying natural sources of climate change. They will find those, too.

It’s not like they will have to look very hard. The 17 year hiatus in warming, which no one predicted, and which the climate models can’t even explain, tells us that Mother Nature is also involved in climate change.

If nature can cause enough global cooling to cancel out anthropogenic warming, it can also cause global warming. It must, because natural changes are cyclical.

I think we might be seeing the death throes of alarmist climate science. They know they are on the ropes, and are pulling out all the stops in a last ditch effort to shore up their crumbling storyline.

Since the public doesn’t really care anymore, they have to shout even louder. Exaggerate even more.

The latest example is the highly speculative theory that, after only 40 years of watching an Antarctic glacier, we have a few scientists extrapolating out to 200 to 1,000 years a “collapse” of a portion of the ice sheet. The media presents it as something that sounds imminent and unavoidable. Governor Brown then says it will inundate LAX airport, even though at 125 ft elevation, the greater threat to LAX is probably sliding into the ocean from a mega-earthquake, or an invasion by extraterrestrials.

Unfortunately, now every tornado and El Nino in the coming months will be pointed to as proof positive they were “right” all along….as if those events didn’t happen before we started driving SUVs. The news media, filled with frustrated creative writers who are trying to change the world, will be only too happy to hype a screenplay-worthy storyline around the latest science claim by some obscure activist scientist.

So, be prepared. The climate disruption hypocalypse is coming. True, it’s man-made…but it only exists in our imaginations and on the movie screen.

Honestly….these are supposed to be the smartest people in the room?

Ben Adler at Grist has an article entitled “Why there is no liberal equivalent to climate change denial“. He builds upon arguments from Paul Krugman that conservatives have a way of denying facts that liberals don’t when it comes to supporting their ideological beliefs.

It’s a clever argument, and I’m sure it will convince many weak minds. I have to wonder whether Adler and Krugman are also convinced of what they write.

What they have done is basically redefined the term “fact” to be anything that Liberals believe is an established fact.

I’m going to set aside their examples of creation-vs-evolution, or the optimum marginal tax rate, or whether conservatives only want smaller government but liberals want improved social welfare. Instead, I’ll just get to Adler’s central claim that there is no liberal equivalent to “climate change denial”.

Of course there are liberal equivalents. For example, here are seven that immediately come to mind:

1) natural climate change denial

2) denial that coal and petroleum work better than unicorn farts as fuels,

3) denial that a small amount of warming is better than killing millions of poor people by restricting access to inexpensive energy,

4) denial that the human-induced component of climate change is anything but catastrophic and an emergency,

5) denial that an increasing number of scientists are becoming skeptics,

6) denial that IPCC scientists were caught red-handed trying to silence the opposition and “hide the decline”,

7) denial of the observations, which show much less warming than any of the climate models can explain over the last 30+ years.

I’m sure I could think of more, but I don’t like to waste any more time than necessary answering such silly claims.

For supposedly being able to understand nuances, these guys can’t admit that most conservatives really do believe that humans have some influence on climate. We just don’t think the scientific and economic evidence supports spreading more misery around the globe than liberal policies have already created.

With 31% ice coverage today (May 9, 2014), Lake Superior now has more ice than after the epic cold winter of 1978-79, which had everyone in a tizzy over the coming Ice Age. Here’s a plot of how the various winters played out between 1973 and 2002, and where Superior ice cover stands today…it shows that by today’s date in most years, the ice was long gone:

Good ice records only began in 1973 because that was the first year we had high-resolution satellite imagery, from the first Landsat satellite. It will be very interesting to see if there is still some ice left in early June.

In the 1970s, cold winters were a sign of a cold climate. Of course, now we know that cold winters are a sign of a hot climate. Scientists can be so silly at times.

Oh, I almost forgot! In only 6 weeks, the days start getting shorter again! 😉

Following the release of the latest U.S. National Climate Assessment report, a new climate forecast visualization widget has just gone live today.

The National Climate Change Viewer (NCCV) allows you to visualize how climate models forecast temperature and precipitation to change over the next 50 years or so. You can examine either individual model’s projections, or the average of all of the models’ projections.

I just started playing with it, and the first thing that really that caught my eye was the dramatic decrease in total snowfall: a 50% decrease over the next 50 years, pretty much independent of calendar month. Here’s the graphic (click for larger versions of images):

Note the largest decreases are in the mountainous areas of the west (where they get a lot of snow anyway), as well as over the Great Lakes and Northeast. It would be helpful if they also provided an option to plot the percentage change…a decrease of 10 inches of seasonal snowfall is a bigger deal in Iowa than it is in the mountains.

The forecast change in temperature just shows an almost uniformly red map (work on the color scales, guys) with the models forecasting generally 4 to 8 deg. F of warming for most of the U.S., in both daily maximum and minimum temperatures. Here’s the max temperature change graphic:

I’ve previously posted about the huge disconnect that is shaping up between the USHCN temperatures observed over the Midwest during the growing season and the climate model projections…eek!….

Setting aside the likely exaggerated forecast trends, the visualization tool, from the USGS and Oregon State University, is pretty cool, and is a useful public outreach tool for the science-savvy public. I’m sure they will improve it over time. Check it out.

I keep getting dragged into e-mail threads dealing with the claim that climate models (General Circulation Models, or GCMs) don’t even model a spherical Earth….that they apply to a flat Earth where the sun shines 24 hours a day.

I really don’t know where this idea ever came from. It might be because of the Kiehl-Trenberth diagram which illustrates the global-average and time-averaged major energy flows in the climate system, which is often presented over a flat cartoon representation of the Earth’s surface:

But the 3D computer models of the climate system most assuredly address a spherical, rotating earth, with one side illuminated by the sun.

For example, here’s a YouTube video of one of the GFDL models outgoing infrared radiation, and you can see (1) the land warm and cool during the day/night cycle, as well as (2) rotating weather systems (caused by the Earth’s rotation), and (3) the mid-latitude westerlies which develop in response to the temperature gradients resulting from the curved Earth receiving less sunlight at high latitudes. These are all the result of modeling the system on a spherical, rotating Earth.

Or, if you prefer a map projection that shows the spherical Earth, here’s a different GFDL model showing the ocean surface salinity evolving over time (the model also contains atmospheric circulation systems, which are partly driving the surface currents you see here, but you really can’t effectively visualize more than one or two variables at a time):

(see the very impressive full-res version here).

So, PLEASE, folks…there is plenty to criticize about the climate models. But let’s stick to the stuff that is true, rather than stuff made-up and repeated by people who apparently mistake a cartoon labeled with averages for a full-blown, 3D coupled ocean-atmosphere climate model containing a half-million lines of computer code.

Now, I really loathe having to defend climate models, because I believe they are not yet useful for making climate predictions. But let’s give credit where credit’s due.

The simplest way I’ve found to express climate model shortcomings is this:
Today’s climate models can be tuned to reasonably represent the *average* climate system. But they are, so far, largely useless for what we *really* want to know, that is, how will the climate system change over time?

There will be many comments from others, I’m sure, but these are my initial thoughts on the 12 major findings from the latest National Climate Assessment, which proports to tell us how the global climate change anticipated by the IPCC on a global basis will impact us here at home.

The report findings are in bold and italics. My comments follow each finding.

1. Global climate is changing and this is apparent across the United States in a wide range of observations. The global warming of the past 50 years is primarily due to human activities, predominantly the burning of fossil fuels. Many independent lines of evidence confirm that human activities are affecting climate in unprecedented ways. U.S. average temperature has increased by 1.3°F to 1.9°F since record keeping began in 1895; most of this increase has occurred since about 1970. The most recent decade was the warmest on record. Because human-induced warming is superimposed on a naturally varying climate, rising temperatures are not evenly distributed across the country or over time.

Yes, it has likely warmed, but by an amount which is unknown due to increasing warm biases in thermometer siting, which cannot be removed through “homogenization” adjustments. But there is no way to know whether “The global warming of the past 50 years is primarily due to human activities…”, because there is no fingerprint of human-caused versus naturally-caused climate change. To claim the changes are “unprecedented” cannot be demonstrated with reliable data, and are contradicted by some published paleoclimate data which suggests most centuries experience substantial warming or cooling.

2. Some extreme weather and climate events have increased in recent decades, and new and stronger evidence confirms that some of these increases are related to human activities. Changes in extreme weather events are the primary way that most people experience climate change. Human-induced climate change has already increased the number and strength of some of these extreme events. Over the last 50 years, much of the United States has seen an increase in prolonged periods of excessively high temperatures, more heavy downpours, and in some regions, more severe droughts.

There is little or no evidence of increases in severe weather events, except possibly in heavy rainfall events, which would be consistent with modest warming. The statement panders to the publics’ focus on the latest severe weather, and limited memory of even worse events of the past.

3. Human-induced climate change is projected to continue, and it will accelerate significantly if global emissions of heat-trapping gases continue to increase. Heat-trapping gases already in the atmosphere have committed us to a hotter future with more climate-related impacts over the next few decades. The magnitude of climate change beyond the next few decades depends primarily on the amount of heat-trapping gases that human activities emit globally, now and in the future.

This is a predictive statement based upon climate models which have not even been able to hindcast past global temperatures, let alone forecast changes with any level of accuracy.

4. Impacts related to climate change are already evident in many sectors and are expected to become increasingly disruptive across the nation throughout this century and beyond. Climate change is already affecting societies and the natural world. Climate change interacts with other environmental and societal factors in ways that can either moderate or intensify these impacts. The types and magnitudes of impacts vary across the nation and through time. Children, the elderly, the sick, and the poor are especially vulnerable. There is mounting evidence that harm to the nation will increase substantially in the future unless global emissions of heat-trapping gases are greatly reduced.

To the extent climate has changed regionally, there is no way to know how much has been due to human activities. In fact, it might well be human-induced changes have reduced the negative impact of natural changes – there is simply no way to know. You see, those scientists who study the natural world cannot bring themselves to consider the possibility than some human impacts are actually positive. Even if the human-caused impacts are a net negative, they are far outweighed by the benefits to society (especially the poor) of access to abundant, affordable energy. Besides, for the next few decades, there is nothing substantial we can do about the problem, unless killing off a large portion of humanity, and making the rest miserable, is on the table.

5. Climate change threatens human health and well-being in many ways, including through more extreme weather events and wildfire, decreased air quality, and diseases transmitted by insects, food, and water. Climate change is increasing the risks of heat stress, respiratory stress from poor air quality, and the spread of waterborne diseases. Extreme weather events often lead to fatalities and a variety of health impacts on vulnerable populations, including impacts on mental health, such as anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. Large-scale changes in the environment due to climate change and extreme weather events are increasing the risk of the emergence or reemergence of health threats that are currently uncommon in the United States, such as dengue fever.

Most of this is just simply made up, and ignores the positive benefits of access to affordable energy which far outweigh the negatives. If there has been an increase in anxiety and PTSD, it isn’t from severe weather events…it’s from the relentless fear mongering by politicians and the news media.

6. Infrastructure is being damaged by sea level rise, heavy downpours, and extreme heat; damages are projected to increase with continued climate change. Sea level rise, storm surge, and heavy downpours, in combination with the pattern of continued development in coastal areas, are increasing damage to U.S. infrastructure including roads, buildings, and industrial facilities, and are also increasing risks to ports and coastal military installations. Flooding along rivers, lakes, and in cities following heavy downpours, prolonged rains, and rapid melting of snowpack is exceeding the limits of flood protection infrastructure designed for historical conditions. Extreme heat is damaging transportation infrastructure such as roads, rail lines, and airport runways.

Sea level rise (which was occurring before we started emitting carbon dioxide in substantial amounts) is a very slow process, which would have to be accommodated for anyway. And the weaker global warming turns out to be, the slower sea level rise will be. Infrastructure damage occurs anyway, and is often due to weather events which exceed the design limits. You don’t engineer roads and buildings and seawalls and levees to handle any possible scenario…it would be too expensive. A large part of our flooding problems are due to the replacement of natural ground with paved surfaces, which enhances runoff into rivers. This has nothing to do with climate change.

7. Water quality and water supply reliability are jeopardized by climate change in a variety of ways that affect ecosystems and livelihoods. Surface and groundwater supplies in some regions are already stressed by increasing demand for water as well as declining runoff and groundwater recharge. In some regions, particularly the southern part of the country and the Caribbean and Pacific Islands, climate change is increasing the likelihood of water shortages and competition for water among its many uses. Water quality is diminishing in many areas, particularly due to increasing sediment and contaminant concentrations after heavy downpours.

This is largely a non sequitur. The problems described exist even without human-caused climate change…to the extent that substantial human influences exist.

8. Climate disruptions to agriculture have been increasing and are projected to become more severe over this century. Some areas are already experiencing climate-related disruptions, particularly due to extreme weather events. While some U.S. regions and some types of agricultural production will be relatively resilient to climate change over the next 25 years or so, others will increasingly suffer from stresses due to extreme heat, drought, disease, and heavy downpours. From mid-century on, climate change is projected to have more negative impacts on crops and livestock across the country – a trend that could diminish the security of our food supply.

I work with the people involved in tracking and long-term prediction of agricultural yields, both domestically and internationally. They see no sign of climate change impacts on agricultural yields. There are always natural fluctuations, but if there is any negative human-induced impact, it is swamped by the increasing yields due to improved agricultural practices, seed varieties, and very likely CO2 fertilization.

9. Climate change poses particular threats to Indigenous Peoples’ health, well-being, and ways of life. Chronic stresses such as extreme poverty are being exacerbated by climate change impacts such as reduced access to traditional foods, decreased water quality, and increasing exposure to health and safety hazards. In parts of Alaska, Louisiana, the Pacific Islands, and other coastal locations, climate change impacts (through erosion and inundation) are so severe that some communities are already relocating from historical homelands to which their traditions and cultural identities are tied. Particularly in Alaska, the rapid pace of temperature rise, ice and snow melt, and permafrost thaw are significantly affecting critical infrastructure and traditional livelihoods.

O..M..G. So let’s help poor people by increasing the cost of everything by making the energy on which everything depends even more expensive? The people who write this drivel are so clueless they should not be allowed to influence the decision making process.

10. Ecosystems and the benefits they provide to society are being affected by climate change. The capacity of ecosystems to buffer the impacts of extreme events like fires, floods, and severe storms is being overwhelmed. Climate change impacts on biodiversity are already being observed in alteration of the timing of critical biological events such as spring bud burst and substantial range shifts of many species. In the longer term, there is an increased risk of species extinction. These changes have social, cultural, and economic effects. Events such as droughts, floods, wildfires, and pest outbreaks associated with climate change (for example, bark beetles in the West) are already disrupting ecosystems. These changes limit the capacity of ecosystems, such as forests, barrier beaches, and wetlands, to continue to play important roles in reducing the impacts of these extreme events on infrastructure, human communities, and other valued resources.

Modest warming and more CO2 available to the biosphere is already having positive impacts, such as the recent greening of the planet. Trying to turn the most obvious positive outcomes into negatives leads to logical contortions which would be funny if they weren’t so serious. Nature changes anyway, folks, as evidenced by glaciers in Europe and North America receding and uncovering ancient tree stumps. Ecosystems are being “overwhelmed”? I don’t think so. Ecosystems are not static.

11. Ocean waters are becoming warmer and more acidic, broadly affecting ocean circulation, chemistry, ecosystems, and marine life. More acidic waters inhibit the formation of shells, skeletons, and coral reefs. Warmer waters harm coral reefs and alter the distribution, abundance, and productivity of many marine species. The rising temperature and changing chemistry of ocean water combine with other stresses, such as overfishing and coastal and marine pollution, to alter marine-based food production and harm fishing communities.

There is increasing evidence that ocean acidification has been greatly overblown. I’m not an expert, but from what I’ve read lately, more realistic lab experiments with adding CO2 to sea water shows that the natural buffering capacity of sea water limits pH changes, and the increasing CO2 is actually good for life in the ocean….just as it is on land (because CO2 is also necessary for the start of the food chain in the ocean). I think the jury is still out on this issue…but, of course, we can’t expect government reports, which are written to facilitate desired policy changes, to provide balance on such things.

12. Planning for adaptation (to address and prepare for impacts) and mitigation (to reduce future climate change, for example by cutting emissions) is becoming more widespread, but current implementation efforts are insufficient to avoid increasingly negative social, environmental, and economic consequences. Actions to reduce emissions, increase carbon uptake, adapt to a changing climate, and increase resilience to impacts that are unavoidable can improve public health, economic development, ecosystem protection, and quality of life.

Translation: We need more government regulation and taxation.

THE BOTTOM LINE:

Follow the money, folks. This glitzy, 840-page report took a lot of your tax dollars to generate, and involved only those “experts” who are willing to play the game. It is difficult to answer in its entirety because government has billions of dollars to invest in this, while most of us who try to bring some sanity to the issue must do it in our spare time, because we aren’t paid to do it. It is nowhere near balanced regarding science, costs-versus-benefits, or implied policy outcomes. Like the previous two National Assessment reports, it takes global climate models which cannot even hindcast what has happened before, which over-forecast global average warming, which are known to have essentially zero skill for regional (e.g. U.S.) predictions, and uses them anyway to instill fear into the masses, so that we might be led to safety by politicians.

Caveat emptor.

(Oh, and if you are tempted to say, “What about all the Big Oil money involved in our need for energy?” Well, that money was willingly given to Big Oil by all of us for a useful product that makes our lives better. Government money is taken from you (I’m not anti-taxation, just pointing out a distinction) that they then use to perpetuate the perceived need for more government control. If “Big Oil” could make a profit by becoming “Big Solar”, or “Big Wind”, they would.)

The Version 5.6 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for April, 2014 is +0.19 deg. C, up slightly from March (click for full size version):

The global, hemispheric, and tropical LT anomalies from the 30-year (1981-2010) average for the last 16 months are:

YR MON GLOBAL NH SH TROPICS
2013 1 +0.497 +0.517 +0.478 +0.386
2013 2 +0.203 +0.372 +0.033 +0.195
2013 3 +0.200 +0.333 +0.067 +0.243
2013 4 +0.114 +0.128 +0.101 +0.165
2013 5 +0.082 +0.180 -0.015 +0.112
2013 6 +0.295 +0.335 +0.255 +0.220
2013 7 +0.173 +0.134 +0.211 +0.074
2013 8 +0.158 +0.111 +0.206 +0.009
2013 9 +0.365 +0.339 +0.390 +0.190
2013 10 +0.290 +0.331 +0.249 +0.031
2013 11 +0.193 +0.160 +0.226 +0.020
2013 12 +0.266 +0.272 +0.260 +0.057
2014 1 +0.291 +0.387 +0.194 -0.029
2014 2 +0.170 +0.320 +0.020 -0.103
2014 3 +0.170 +0.337 +0.002 -0.001
2014 4 +0.190 +0.359 +0.020 +0.092

The global image for April should be available in the next day or so here.

Popular monthly data files (these might take a few days to update):

uahncdc_lt_5.6.txt (Lower Troposphere)
uahncdc_mt_5.6.txt (Mid-Troposphere)
uahncdc_ls_5.6.txt (Lower Stratosphere)