When the eco-idiots started going on about Arctic temperatures a few weeks ago, I thought one possible response was “we’d expect melting in an El Nino year”. However since El Nino is an equatorial phenomenon and Arctic melting isn’t … I was intrigued to find out whether there was a connection.
Well below is my highly scientific check:

Note Arctic temperatures from here and Enso from here. And for the sharp eyed amongst you, you will no doubt spot that I turned the El Nino/ENSO graph upside down because there are clearly some places where El Nino corresponds with cooler Arctic temperatures (like 1940) and La Nina with warmer (e.g. both sides of 1940). Also you’ll see a preponderance of La Ninas recently – and higher Arctic temperatures.
I think it’s reasonable to say that it is likely there is some kind of inverse relatinship but it is not strong and there’s also a low probablity that the apparent relationship is just chance (I tried dropping the graph down with various big offsets and with a bit of effort I could usually start to see possible correlations – this suggests apparent matches are relatively easy especially as I also allow inversion).
 

NotaLotOfPeopleKnowThat has an interesting graph which they post from NoTricksZone:

In a new paper (Stein et al., 2017), scientists find that Arctic sea ice retreat and advance is modulated by variations in solar activity.
In addition, the sea ice cover during the last century has only slightly retreated from the extent reached during coldest centuries of the Little Ice Age (1600s to 1800s AD), which had the highest sea ice cover of the last 10,000 years and flirted with excursions into year-round sea ice.
The Medieval Warm Period sea ice record (~900 to 1200 AD) had the lowest coverage since the Roman era ~2,000 years ago.

I know everyone is going to focus on the little blip (or not) at the end which either does or does not show Arctic ice is currently melting, but what I find interesting is that the amount of sea ice appears to have been increasing for the last 2000 years.
The irony of course, is why on earth would anyone want to continue the trend shown in the last 2000 years and head into an ice-age. Indeed, if it weren’t for the lies from eco-activists and if most people sat down rationally to think about it, we’d all be trying to work out a plan to stop us going into another ice age.
The same is also true with levels of CO2. During the ice-ages, CO2 levels fall to a dangerously low levels below which it is doubtful many plant species could survive. This means there is a plausible scenario that live on earth as we know it may cease during a future ice-age when (without human intervention) CO2 levels could plumet below the level at which most plants … and therefore most animals … could survive.
If I were even mildly tempted into religious beliefs … I could quite easily believe there was some god being who deliberately evolved humans to save the earth from an icy doom by releasing all that locked up CO2.

I’m posting this because it took some time to align all the various layers, because it may be interesting to see, not because it seems to show anything in particular.

A few of things of note:

1. Source: http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/climate/
2. Dec 2015 is missing (so composite of Nov/Jan used as placeholder)
3. Whilst this sequence is dominated by a “super” El Nino year, it’s not at all clear to me (apart from the El Nino months) that I’m seeing a huge amount of red. The regional variability is still much greater than any supposed global trend – which means any global trend may be the result of a chance occurance of similar long-term regional variability.
4. There’s a clear pattern of Equatorial heat. It starts around June15 and then grows west of the Americas until it spreads out all over the equator from Dec15 to Jun16
5. The other thing is that it appears heat patterns move eastward around the latitude of the British Isles and westward at the equator (although a finer division of time would be necessary).
6. The colder than average areas (in what is otherwise a warmer period due to El Nino) seem to dominate in the “eastward moving” zones at about 50/60 North and south. But there’s also a few hotter than average areas in these zones.

If you ever wondered why NASA should have employed Hansen, who was such an eco-activist that I understand he was arrested six times, this incredibly revealing document, from NASA’s “Societal Impact of Spaceflight” (2007) explains why. In part NASA used the environment to justify massive funding for itself, in part as NASA itself says:

NASA realized that it needed to research environmental-atmospheric impacts of the shuttle to defend itself, if necessary, against possible opposition more positively, Fletcher sought to align his agency with environmental values. In 1973, he told congress that NASA should be considered “an environmental agency.” he declared: “everything we do …helps in some practical way to improve the environment of our planet and helps us understand the forces that affect it. Perhaps that is our essential task, to study and understand the earth and its environment.”

That’s right! It was no accident that NASA brought in eco-activists. Indeed, it appears to have been part of a deliberate policy to align itself with the environmental movement and to use environmentalism to create alarm thereby justifying its own budgets to the politicians and public.

That is why NASA climte could fabricate the data apparently with impunity – the policy of egging the data to fit an environmentalist agenda was sanctioned at the highest level within NASA

NASA and the Environment: Science in a Political context

W. Henry Lambright

The advent of the space age has paralleled the rise of the environmental movement. NASA was born in 1958 and Rachael Carson wrote silent spring in 1962; that book is generally seen as marking the onset of modern environmentalism. NASA has intersected with the environmental movement—a set of values and interest groups concerned about the need to protect our natural setting for the current and future generations—in many ways over the years. How did NASA do so? How did it evolve an environmental mission? What did it do with that mission? What were the consequences for society—and NASA—of its environmental role? To answer these questions, this paper will discuss two of the most important ways NASA and the environmental movement related.

First, NASA has had direct impacts through the images of earth taken by Apollo astronauts as well as by satellites in earth orbit. Those satellite images and theories about earth as a system evolved into an organized NASA program, initially called mission to planet earth (MTPE), later the earth sciences program. Second, there was an indirect relation through NASA’s mission from earth. comparative planetology came into existence as a new field; learning about other planets stimulated better understanding of earth.

There are many other issues in the NASA–environment relation, such as space debris and the contamination of other planets, but these two themes—earth monitoring and comparative planetology—are especially salient in NASA’s history, present, and likely future. The first theme focused on the use of space-based remote sensing and became the dominant emphasis in NASA’s environmental history.

There evolved a set of satellites that can be seen as environmental satellites. They are the centerpiece of NASA’s mission to earth. That mission has had an uncertain, somewhat uneasy relationship with other parts of NASA and other agencies. Some people think it is NASA’s most societally relevant mission whereas others think it is extraneous to NASA and belongs somewhere else—the national oceanic and atmospheric administration (NOAA) is the usual candidate. Virtually every observer has found it a controversial mission, one in need of high-level policy attention and improvement for the sake of NASA, the nation, and the world.

The second theme, comparative planetology, has indirectly influenced the main debate—a reminder of the fact that earth is an island home in the vast sea of space and is the only planet (so far) supporting life. NASA’s long association with the environmental and earth sciences has been fruitful but it has also been contested and even tortuous. The history of NASA and its environmental mission is one of science in a political context.

Beginnings in the Apollo Years

Continue reading →

Today I read on Tallblokes blog:

“Why are “giant fountains of lava” suddenly pouring out of some of the most dangerous volcanoes on the entire planet, and why are so many long dormant volcanoes suddenly roaring back to life? ” sott.net/article/344087…

I don’t know the truth of this claim, however if you add it to my own article:

Massive Volcanic eruptions with clouds of sulphur gas caused runaway heating that ended ice-age claims Independent Scientist.  (PR Link, Science link)

And if you then add some NASA “magic”:
A scurriless tabloid journalist could make quite an interesting story along the lines of global warming causing volcanoes. Fortunately, I’ve found a secret technique to stop the press printing these kinds of stories**.
**(you know the way the press won’t touch a story from a sceptic with a barge pole!!)

The great thing I’ve discovered with shredding old files is that because they get bulked up in the shredder, it looks like you’ve done a lot more work than you have.
The highlight was shredding the whole Scottish executive (a huge organisational chart poster) which went through with a satisfying squeel.
With seven bin bags full, I’m really starting to appreciate the benefits such as leg room to push my chair back, a lathe that no longer acts as a filing cabinet draw, and £35 which had somehow dropped to the bottom of the real filing cabinet (although it looks so old I’m not sure it’s all still legal tender).

Over the years I have enjoyed the freedom to comment & speculate on what I thought was going on in the area of climate.
However, recently I’ve written a string of articles, but have at the last minute decided that such articles would be of no use to the Republicans in the US, but instead could assist the Greenblob.
So, if you notice an ominous silence from me, … it’s because I’m trying desperately to keep a diplomatic silence.

For a while I’ve been convinced there is a strong correlation between the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and “global temperature”. AMO is shown below, I was going to post a graph of global temperature, but the problem these days is finding any graph that any longer represents global temperature (most are just the fraudulent lies of data adjusters  – let’s hope that soon changes!!).

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-amo

• 1860-1880 maximum
• 1890-1905 – cooling
• 1910-1920 – minimum
• 1930 – warming
• 1940-1960 -maximum
• 1967 – peak cooling
• 1973 minimum
• 1990-2000 warming
• 2000-??? – maximum

This gives rise to the following:

• max-max ~80yrs
• cool-cool ~70yrs
• min-min ~60yrs
• warm-warm ~ 65yr

We also have the start of another maximum at 2000, but as yet no end.  There are other similar starts at 1860 & 1940. This gives another estimate of 70 years. Including this with the above we obtain an average of:   69yrs with a typical range of +/- 10yrs.
Maximum
If this patterns continues,  give the best estimate of the last maximum was 1950 – (80-70)/2 =  1945, the best estimate of the next maximum is 1945+70 = 2015 (range 2005-2025).  This is a little later than would be expected with an earliest start of the maximum at 2000.
Cooling
Best estimate of maximum cooling is 1967 + 69yrs =  2036 (range 2026-2046)
Worst/best Scenario global temperature
The best estimate is that the AMO maximum will end at latest around 2025.

There is currently a “gap” in politics in Scotland which is for a party with Scotland’s best interests at heart which is not obsessive about independence nor anti business as all on the left now are.
I’ve been looking for a suitable party for years, and unfortunately, the choice either appears to be a mainstream party run from England or a party whose policies seem to have been written by some academic “political scientist”.
So, today I thought I’d try to produce a simple pragmatic party manifesto:

1. The party will be known as the Caledonian** Party
2. We are committed to a democracy that works both in the sense of the most pragmatic means to allow the people’s voice to decide our future, but also in the economic sense of a balance between the rights of individuals and the need to earn our way in the world.
3. We are a Scottish party, not by nationalist inclination, but as a party working for the best interests of the people of Scotland whether they decide to be part of a wider Union or not.
4. We are for public provision and support for good quality education so as to provide the next generation the necessary skills to enhance and grow our economic, social and political skills for the interests of all of us. We aim to modernise further education and will invest to enable Scotland to become a world leader in the provision of internet based supply of further education. In addition we aim to open up research & other funding to target older retired or otherwise economically inactive individuals, with the aim of better utilising this vast untapped reserve of talent.
5. We believe we all have a responsibility to do what we can to keep ourselves fit & healthy, but we also believe medical care for the sick is a hallmark of a civilised society. Thus we  support the public delivery of high quality medical treatment which should remain free to those with serious medical needs.
6. We support private enterprise. As such we will aim for a long-term change to rebalance the Scottish economy, working to increase the size and profitability of the tax-giving private sector and reducing the burden of unnecessary red tape.
7. We aim to have evidence based public policy and in order to support this, we will invest in the necessary research within Scotland to cover all relevant policy areas such as  economic development, environment, climate, education, social & health policy.
8. We are committed to human rights not as a luxury given to a few who have the means to enforce their rights in law, but as a general principle that all of us should be free from excessive or unnecessary government control of our lives.
9. We support our armed services and will support the provision of the necessary arms and personnel for a modern functional army.
10. We will work to improve the transport, energy and communication infrastructure of Scotland with the aim of providing equitable and affordable use across Scotland wherever practical.

Finally … it is time Scotland had an ambition.The US has chosen to go to Mars. Whilst Scotland is much smaller, that does not mean we shouldn’t have ambition. So we too should set ourselves a goal. Whilst that need not be a mission in space, there are nonetheless other important goals, that are achievable and within our means and which would unite our scientists and society. Such a goal, would define us not just for a few years or even a generation, but for many generations to come ideally making us a world leader.
**The name is not important.