When Climate Alarmists Show Their Math

A big announcement in the climate alarmist community today. BIG news.. Rocket scientists doing government work and government workers doing science have crunched the numbers, methodically and with super computers. The scientific method can only produce hard science.  Hard science like the kind that proclaimed the coming ice age in the 1970's and the hard science in the 1990's  proclaming that global warming was  melting the poles, killing polar bears and flooding the world.  Global warming is now called climate change and that is something that the climate has always done, change.  Finally, a label that works backed by the facts on the ground.

Surely I am just another flat earther skeptic?



Exhibit 1 Headline:

NOAA: Earth had its 4th-warmest year on record in 2013

'The Earth had its fourth-warmest year on record in 2013, equaling the level set in 2003, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Tuesday.

The average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.12 degrees above the 20th-century average and marks the 37th consecutive year (since 1976) that the annual temperature was above the long-term average.

All of the top 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1998. The warmest year on record was 2010, NOAA reported.

Global temperature records go back to 1880.'

NOAA, The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration can't be wrong. Can they?


Exhibit 2 Headline:

NASA says 2013 was seventh-hottest year. And it won't stop there 

The space agency announced Tuesday the results of a study by its Goddard Institute for Space Studies showing 2013 in a tie with 2006 and 2009 as the seventh-warmest year since 1880. 2005 and 2010 are the warmest on record.

 
There you have it, The proof cannot be disputed that 2013 was the 4th and 7th hottest year. But there is more:

A global warming expedition to Antarctica at the end of December 2013 provides us more crucial data....



Ask a climate scientist at NASA



Climate alarmism is rocket surgery.

More Oil Spilled from Trains in 2013 than in Previous 4 Decades, Federal Data Shows

WASHINGTON — More crude oil was spilled in U.S. rail incidents last year than was spilled in the nearly four decades since the federal government began collecting data on such spills, an analysis of the data shows.

Including major derailments in Alabama and North Dakota, more than 1.15 million gallons of crude oil was spilled from rail cars in 2013, according to data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. 

 
By comparison, from 1975 to 2012, U.S. railroads spilled a combined 800,000 gallons of crude oil. The spike underscores new concerns about the safety of such shipments as rail has become the preferred mode for oil producers amid a North American energy boom.
 
The federal data does not include incidents in Canada where oil spilled from trains. Canadian authorities estimate that more than 1.5 million gallons of crude oil spilled in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, on July 6, when a runaway train derailed and exploded, killing 47 people. The cargo originated in North Dakota.

Nearly 750,000 gallons of crude oil spilled from a train on Nov. 8 near Aliceville, Ala. The train also originated in North Dakota and caught fire after it derailed in a swampy area. No one was injured or killed.
 
The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration doesn’t yet have spill data from a Dec. 30 derailment near Casselton, N.D. But the National Transportation Safety Board, which is the lead investigator in that incident, estimates that more than 400,000 gallons of crude oil were spilled there. Though no one was injured or killed, the intense fire forced most of Casselton’s 2,400 residents to evacuate in subzero temperatures.
 
The Association of American Railroads, an industry group, estimates that railroads shipped 400,000 carloads of crude oil last year. That’s more than 11.5 billion gallons, with one tank car holding roughly 28,800 gallons.

 
Last year’s total spills of 1.15 million gallons means that 99.99 percent of shipments arrived without incident, close to the safety record the industry and its regulators claim about hazardous materials shipments by rail.

But until just a few years ago, railroads weren’t carrying crude oil in 80- to 100-car trains. In eight of the years between 1975 and 2009, railroads reported no spills of crude oil. In five of those years, they reported spills of one gallon or less.

In 2010, railroads reported spilling about 5,000 gallons of crude oil, according to federal data. They spilled fewer than 4,000 gallons each year in 2011 and 2012. But excluding the Alabama and North Dakota derailments, more than 11,000 gallons of crude oil spilled from trains last year. 

Last week, the principal Washington regulators of crude oil shipments by rail met with railroad and oil industry representatives to discuss making changes to how crude is shipped by rail, from tank car design to operating speed to appropriate routing. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx called the meeting productive and said the group would take a comprehensive approach to improving the safety of crude-oil trains.

Foxx said the changes would be announced within the next 30 days

More At McClatchyDC

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/01/20/215143/more-oil-spilled-from-trains-in.html#storylink=cpy

New Analysis of Rocket Used in Syria Chemical Attack Undercuts U.S. Claims

BERLIN — A series of revelations about the rocket believed to have delivered poison sarin gas to a Damascus suburb last summer are challenging American intelligence assumptions about that attack and suggest that the case U.S. officials initially made for retaliatory military action was flawed.

A team of security and arms experts, meeting this week in Washington to discuss the matter, has concluded that the range of the rocket that delivered sarin in the largest attack that night was too short for the device to have been fired from the Syrian government positions where the Obama administration insists they originated.

Separately, international weapons experts are puzzling over why the rocket in question – an improvised 330mm to 350mm rocket equipped with a large receptacle on its nose to hold chemicals – reportedly did not appear in the Syrian government’s declaration of its arsenal to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and apparently was not uncovered by OPCW inspectors who believe they’ve destroyed Syria’s ability to deliver a chemical attack.

Neither development proves decisively that Syrian government forces did not fire the chemicals that killed hundreds of Syrians in the early morning hours of Aug. 21. U.S. officials continue to insist that the case for Syrian government responsibility for the attack in East Ghouta is stronger than any suggestion of rebel involvement, while experts say it is possible Syria left the rockets out of its chemical weapons declaration simply to make certain it could not be tied to the attack.

Obama "Cherry-Picked" Intelligence on Syrian Chemical Attack to Justify U.S. Strike  Video

“That failure to declare can mean different things,” said Ralf Trapp, an original member of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and a former secretary of the group’s scientific advisory board. “It can mean the Syrian government doesn’t have them, or that they are hiding them.”

In Washington, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said its assertion of Syrian government responsibility remains unchanged.

“The body of information used to make the assessment regarding the August 21 attack included intelligence pertaining to the regime’s preparations for this attack and its means of delivery, multiple streams of intelligence about the attack itself and its effect, our post-attack observations, and the differences between the capabilities of the regime and the opposition. That assessment made clear that the opposition had not used chemical weapons in Syria,” it said Wednesday in an email.

But the authors of a report released Wednesday said that their study of the rocket’s design, its likely payload and its possible trajectories show that it would have been impossible for the rocket to have been fired from inside areas controlled by the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

In the report, titled “Possible Implications of Faulty U.S. Technical Intelligence,” Richard Lloyd, a former United Nations weapons inspector, and Theodore Postol, a professor of science, technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argue that the question about the rocket’s range indicates a major weakness in the case for military action initially pressed by Obama administration officials.

The administration eventually withdrew its request for congressional authorization for a military strike after Syria agreed to submit to the Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans the weapons. Polls showed overwhelming public opposition to a military strike, however, and it was doubtful Congress would have authorized an attack.

Lloyd and Postol’s report is the most recent installment in a months-long debate among rocket and weapons experts, much of it carried out in detailed papers posted on the Internet, about the nature of the munitions used in the Aug. 21 attack on rebel-controlled suburbs of Damascus.

The report’s authors admit that they deal only with one area of the attacks, the eastern suburb of Zamalka, where the largest quantity of sarin was released that night. They acknowledge that smaller rockets likely used in areas southwest of the capital could have come from government-controlled territory.

Relying on mathematical projections about the likely force of the rocket and noting that its design – some have described it as a trash can on a stick – would have made it awkward in flight, Lloyd and Postol conclude that the rocket likely had a maximum range of 2 kilometers, or just more than 1.2 miles. That range, the report explains in detail, means the rockets could not have come from land controlled by the Syrian government.

To emphasize their point, the authors used a map produced by the White House that showed which areas were under government and rebel control on Aug. 21 and where the chemical weapons attack occurred. Drawing circles around Zamalka to show the range from which the rocket could have come, the authors conclude that all of the likely launching points were in rebel-held areas or areas that were in dispute. The area securely in government hands was miles from the possible launch zones.

In an interview, Postol said that a basic analysis of the weapon – some also have described as a looking like a push pop, a fat cylinder filled with sarin atop a thin stick that holds the engine – would have shown that it wasn’t capable of flying the 6 miles from the center of the Syrian government-controlled part of Damascus to the point of impact in the suburbs, or even the 3.6 miles from the edges of government-controlled ground.

He questioned whether U.S. intelligence officials had actually analyzed the improbability of a rocket with such a non-aerodynamic design traveling so far before Secretary of State John Kerry declared on Sept. 3 that “we are certain that none of the opposition has the weapons or capacity to effect a strike of this scale – particularly from the heart of regime territory.”

“I honestly have no idea what happened,” Postol said. “My view when I started this process was that it couldn’t be anything but the Syrian government behind the attack. But now I’m not sure of anything. The administration narrative was not even close to reality. Our intelligence cannot possibly be correct.”

Lloyd, who has spent the past half-year studying the weapons and capabilities in the Syrian conflict, disputed the assumption that the rebels are less capable of making rockets than the Syrian military.

“The Syrian rebels most definitely have the ability to make these weapons,” he said. “I think they might have more ability than the Syrian government.”
Both said they were not making a case that the rebels were behind the attack, just that a case for military action was made without even a basic understanding of what might have happened.

For instance, they said that Kerry’s insistence that U.S. satellite images had shown the impact points of the chemical weapons was unlikely to be true. The charges that detonate chemical weapons are generally so small, they said, that their detonations would not be visible in a satellite image.

The report also raised questions whether the Obama administration misused intelligence information in a way similar to the administration of President George W. Bush in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Then, U.S. officials insisted that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had an active program to develop weapons of mass destruction. Subsequent inspections turned up no such program or weapons.

“What, exactly, are we spending all this money on intelligence for?” Postol asked.
As for the failure of the Syrians to list the rocket in its chemical weapons inventory, experts are undecided on what it means and leery about discussing it in public.
A spokeswoman for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in Damascus declined to comment on what was listed in the declaration. It would violate the Chemical Weapons Convention for anyone who has read the declaration – it’s distributed to all nations that have joined the treaty – to reveal its contents.

Knowledgeable experts said discussion of the apparent omission has been muted because no one wants to say anything that would disrupt what appears to have been the successful dismantling of Syria’s chemical weapons program.

Some say they are worried that the failure to declare one delivery system may also mean that other items went undeclared.

“The most likely explanation for some of the delivery systems not showing up on the chemical declaration is that Assad doesn’t want to incriminate himself or his regime,” said Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association.

Jonathan S. Landay in Damascus, Syria, and Hannah Allam and Anita Kumar in Washington contributed to this report.

Mexican Tax Officials Seize Hundreds of Foreign Owned Boats in $70 Permit Dispute

MEXICO CITY (AP) — When heavily armed marines and government tax agents stormed eight marinas on Mexico's Pacific and Caribbean coasts, boaters thought they were witnessing a major drug takedown.

The mostly American and Canadian retirees found out that the target was actually them — couples spending their golden years sailing warm-weather ports in modest 40-foot boats.

After inspecting more than 1,600 vessels in late November, the Mexican government's Treasury Department announced it had initiated seizure orders against 338 boats it accused of lacking a $70 permit. The office says it has four months to decide whether to release the boards or sell them at auction.
Many owners say they actually have the permit but were never asked to present it. Others say minor numerical errors in paperwork were used as grounds for seizure.

Some say they were away at the time and have never been officially notified at all, learning of the seizure only from local marina operators.
It is all part of a new effort by President Enrique Pena Nieto's administration to increase government revenues in a country with one of the worst tax-collection rates among the world's large economies. The push has drawn howls of protest from Mexicans upset about new sales taxes and levies on home sales. But few of the new measures were as unexpected or toughly enforced as what foreign pleasure boat owners call a heavy-handed crackdown over a minor permit, and they say it threatens a tourism sector Mexico has long sought to promote.

"They brought all these marines, with machine guns and stuff, and they kind of descended on the marina and everybody's going, 'Wow, there's a big narco thing going down here,'" said Richard Spindler, whose catamaran Profligate was impounded near Puerto Vallarta. "These are just retired people, 50-, 60-year-old retired people, mellow people. It was way over the top."

The document in question, known as a Temporary Import Permit, can be obtained from a Mexican government website and proves holders own their boats and promise not to leave them in Mexico or sell them here.

Many boat owners say they simply weren't around when authorities came by and slapped liens on the boats barring them from leaving Mexico. They say officials have not told them how they could remedy the situation.

One boater said marina operators warned that anyone who tried to leave would be hunted down. The owner, who expressed fear that speaking out by name could bring reprisals, said officials had given no written notice of seizure on their boat, and they had learned of it second hand from marina workers.

Hundreds of boats did present their papers on time and weren't impounded. Elizabeth Shanahan, who lives on her boat at a marina in the Pacific coast resort of Nueva Vallarta, said she had no trouble when authorities came through, and that fellow boaters who didn't initially have their papers in order were given 10 days to comply.

"It is the responsibility of the property owner, be it a boat or whatever, to know the laws of the country in which they are traveling and visiting," she said.

The Treasury Department and its tax agency refused to specify the size, value or nationality of boats that were impounded and did not respond to numerous requests for details or reaction to the boat owners' complaints.
Because authorities put no notices or chains on targeted boats, some foreigners in affected marinas are uncertain if their boats are on the impound list and fear their vessels might be seized if they tried to sail away even if they had paid the $70 tax.

"This is killing nautical tourism in a worse way than drug trafficking, because it's the government itself that is taking the yachts," said Enrique Fernandez, a member of Mexico's Association of Marinas.

A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, Mark C. Johnson, said in an email that U.S. officials are holding discussions on the issue with the Mexican government. Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development said it knows of three Canadians whose boats were seized.
Spindler, who has been sailing to Mexico for 36 years and publishes the sailing magazine Latitude 38, estimated that about 45 of the 53 boats at the marina where his boat was seized are owned by Americans or Canadians.

"Mexico wants and greatly supports nautical tourism," he said, but warned that the heavy-handed approach could put the sailing sector at risk.
"I'm getting all these letters from people now going: 'Well, that's it. I was going to go to Mexico, I was a little scared before, but now I'm not going to do it for sure,'" he said.

Paradoxically, Mexico may be punishing some of its biggest boosters — visitors who return each year and keep marinas and boatyards in work.
"This is the killer, these people are the greatest ambassadors for Mexico you have ever heard," Spindler said. "It's given Mexico a really black eye."

Chinese Icebreaker Involved in Antarctic Rescue Faces More Troubles

The media coverage for this event has been questionable at best. The 'mainstream media' spin for this story about global warming scientists getting stuck in the SUMMER Antarctic ice is as interesting as the story itself.

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — An Australian icebreaker carrying 52 passengers who were retrieved from an icebound ship in the Antarctic was told to halt its journey home on Friday after concerns that a Chinese vessel involved in the dramatic rescue may also become stuck in the heavy sea ice.

The icebreaker Aurora Australis had been slowly cracking through thick ice toward open water after a Chinese helicopter on Thursday plucked the passengers from their stranded Russian research ship and carried them to the Aurora.

But on Friday afternoon, the crew of a Chinese icebreaker that had provided the helicopter said they were worried about their own ship's ability to move through the ice. The Aurora — which was carrying the passengers to the Australian island state of Tasmania — was told to stay in the area in case the Chinese icebreaker Snow Dragon needs help, according to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority's Rescue Coordination Centre, which oversaw the rescue.

The Snow Dragon, which is at the edge of the ice pack surrounding the Russian vessel, will attempt to push through the ice to open water early Saturday, when tidal conditions are most favorable. The Aurora is waiting around 11 kilometers (7 miles) north of the Snow Dragon, said Lisa Martin, spokeswoman for the marine authority.

Authorities have not said what the next step would be if the Snow Dragon became stuck, but it is possible that the Aurora will utilize its icebreaking capabilities to assist the Chinese vessel.

The maritime authority said the decision to place the Aurora on standby was a precaution and noted there was no danger to anyone on board the Snow Dragon. But it was yet another wrinkle in the highly complex rescue operation of those on board the Russian ship MV Akademik Shokalskiy, which got stuck in the ice on Christmas Eve.
A spot of clear weather on Thursday finally allowed the multinational rescue operation after blinding snow, strong winds and thick sea ice forced rescuers to turn back time and again.

The twin-rotor helicopter, which is based on the Snow Dragon, took seven hours to carry the scientists and tourists in groups of 12 from the Russian ship to the Aurora. Earlier, the passengers had linked arms and stomped out a landing site in the snow next to the Russian ship for the helicopter.

Helicopter pilot Jia Shuliang told China's official Xinhua News Agency that he had no way of knowing whether the ice could withstand the helicopter's weight.
The rescue came in the never-ending daylight of summer after days of failed attempts to reach the vessel.

"I think everyone is relieved and excited to be going on to the Australian icebreaker and then home," expedition leader Chris Turney told The Associated Press by satellite phone from the Antarctic.

Sydney resident Joanne Sim, a paying passenger, wept as she boarded the Australian icebreaker. She said the passengers had spent their time watching movies and playing games.

"It really has been an emotional rollercoaster," she told a reporter from The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper who is aboard the ship.

The 22 crew members of the Akademik Shokalskiy stayed with the icebound vessel, which is not in any danger and has enough supplies on board to last for weeks. They will wait until the ice surrounding the ship breaks up, which could take several weeks, ASMA Emergency Response Division manager John Young said.

"Only now am I sort of feeling a bit emotional about leaving the Shokalskiy," Alok Jha, a journalist from The Guardian who is traveling with the Akademik Shokalskiy, said in a video shot before he boarded the helicopter. "The poor old thing is stuck still."

The cost of the rescue would be carried by the owners of the ships and their insurers, in accordance with international conventions on sea rescues, Young said.
Any official inquiry into how the ship got stuck would have to be conducted by Russia, he said.

The Akademik Shokalskiy, which left New Zealand on Nov. 28, got stuck after a blizzard pushed the sea ice around the ship, freezing it in place about 2,700 kilometers (1,700 miles) south of Hobart, Tasmania. The scientific team on board the Russian vessel had been recreating Australian explorer Douglas Mawson's 1911 to 1913 voyage to Antarctica.
___
Associated Press writers Kristen Gelineau in Sydney, Adam Schreck in Dubai, and Gillian Wong and researcher Zhao Liang in Beijing contributed to this report.