
"If we have not passed it already, we are on the threshold of global observations becoming incompatible with the consensus theory of climate change...
...But it does not mean global warming is a delusion."
David Whitehouse

The five-year mean global temperature has been flat for the last decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slow down in the growth rate of net climate forcing.Admittedly I have not been keeping up with the global warming news nearly as closely as I used to, I pretty much have just been keeping up with the headlines and "big" stories.
James Hansen
"Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth's surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar,"It is sure nice that the fear mongers have quit denying the truth, but I have a rather simple question which I have not seen asked since this new "revelation" has taken hold of the climate community. It is simply this:
1) Sandy should not be “blamed” on climate change. Climate change does not cause storms and did not cause Superstorm Sandy. Storms form when certain weather ingredients come together. The historic record shows violent storms, some even more severe than Sandy, have struck the Northeast repeatedly..I might be going out on a limb here, but if temperatures have been flat for the past 10-15 years, not only can Superstorm Sandy not be blamed on climate change, there was no climate change to be blamed!
2) While climate change did not cause Sandy, it may have been a performance enhancer like a steroid, injecting it with somewhat more energy and power.
3) Sea level rise from manmade climate change increased the water level along the Northeast coast 6 to 8 inches and, as a result, somewhat worsened the coastal flooding from Sandy.
Effects of Global WarmingWell when you attribute everything to something that is not actually happening, then I guess you can find signs everywhere, can't you? They go on an alarmist tangent about all that is happening to our world while temperatures have been "flat" for over a decade.
Signs Are Everywhere
The planet is warming, from North Pole to South Pole, and everywhere in between. Globally, the mercury is already up more than 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius), and even more in sensitive polar regions. And the effects of rising temperatures aren’t waiting for some far-flung future. They’re happening right now. Signs are appearing all over, and some of them are surprising. The heat is not only melting glaciers and sea ice, it’s also shifting precipitation patterns and setting animals on the move.They tell us that some of these things are happening now, among the examples I found interesting was this
Spruce bark beetles have boomed in Alaska thanks to 20 years of warm summers. The insects have chewed up 4 million acres of spruce trees.Spruce bark beetles may have boomed in Alaska, but it has nothing to do with global warming, Alaska has been cooling over the past 15 years. But you wouldn't expect the National Geographic to have their facts correct now would you? not when the narrative is so much more dramatic.
The evidence is clear. Rising global temperatures have been accompanied by changes in weather and climate. Many places have seen changes in rainfall, resulting in more floods, droughts, or intense rain, as well as more frequent and severe heat waves. The planet's oceans and glaciers have also experienced some big changes - oceans are warming and becoming more acidic, ice caps are melting, and sea levels are rising. As these and other changes become more pronounced in the coming decades, they will likely present challenges to our society and our environment.The evidence is clear?


The Amazon rainforest is less vulnerable to die off because of global warming than widely believed because the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide also acts as an airborne fertilizer, a study showed on Wednesday.
The boost to growth from CO2, the main gas from burning fossil fuels blamed for causing climate change, was likely to exceed damaging effects of rising temperatures this century such as drought, it said.The fact that CO2 is a "plant fertilizer" seems to be a new realization to the wizards of smart who have been keeping the world on edge these past couple of decades as they cash their tax payer funded checks. After years of demonetization of CO2. Reuters felt compelled to reluctantly and briefly explain that yes carbon dioxide actually does play a very significant and beneficial role in nature, as anyone over thirty years old remembers from grade school science knows, though who knows what is taught today.
Plants soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use it as an ingredient to grow leaves, branches and roots.This grade school biology has finally made its way into the calculations of climate scientist and they have now issued a reprieve for the world's largest rain forest. Not only that but we are being informed, again reluctantly, that CO2 far from being a negative to the Amazon is actually a net positive.
It estimated that the damaging effects of warming would cause the release of 53 billion tons of carbon stored in lands throughout the tropics, much of it in the Amazon, for every single degree Celsius (1.8F) of temperature rise.As if increased heat would not also be beneficial to plant growth....in a jungle environment. Oh well we will take what we can get from the scientific community, they have such a hard time admitting what to most people is common sense.
The benefits of CO2 fertilization exceeded those losses in most scenarios, which ranged up to a 319 billion ton net gain of stored carbon over the 21st century. About 500 to 1,000 billion ton of carbon are stored in land in the tropics.
"I am no longer so worried about a catastrophic die-back due to CO2-induced climate change," Professor Peter Cox of the University of Exeter in England told Reuters of the study he led in the journal Nature. "In that sense it's good news."Gee thanks Prof, we were really worried about it, especially after you and your peers put out stories like this just four short years ago.
"Amazon could shrink by 85% due to climate change, scientists say"
Global warming will wreck attempts to save the Amazon rainforest, according to a devastating new study which predicts that one-third of its trees will be killed by even modest temperature rises.I guess these scientist did not take grade school science and did not know about the whole "plant fertilizer" properties of the demon gas carbon dioxide. They were all to worried about CO2 induced warming killing off the Amazon and made sure that as the Reuters article pointed out that the "die off because of global warming ...[is] widely believed."
Chris Jones, who led the research, told the conference: "A temperature rise of anything over 1C commits you to some future loss of Amazon forest. Even the commonly quoted 2C target already commits us to 20-40% loss. On any kind of pragmatic timescale, I think we should see loss of the Amazon forest as irreversible."You got that? One of the hottest most humid environments on Earth was going to be "irreversibly lost" due to global warming. Even 1C rise in temperature was predicted to reek havoc on our South American jungles.
Peter Cox, professor of climate system dynamics at the University of Exeter, said the effects would be felt around the world. "Ecologically it would be a catastrophe and it would be taking a huge chance with our own climate. The tropics are drivers of the world's weather systems and killing the Amazon is likely to change them forever. We don't know exactly what would happen but we could expect more extreme weather." Massive Amazon loss would also amplify global warming "significantly" he said.So the reason people believe that global warming is going to destroy the Amazon and create a global "ecological catastrophe" is because that is precisely what Peter Cox was telling the world four years ago.
"Destroying the Amazon would also turn what is a significant carbon sink into a significant source."
The scientists said the study was a step forward because it used models comparing forest growth with variations in the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.So all that they did different in this study was factor in forest growth as a result of increased CO2, which leads one to believe that they did not previously factor this into their models.