As I write, Hurricane Irma has reached Category 5, with maximum sustained winds of 175 mph. The National Hurricane Center calls it “the strongest hurricane in the Atlantic basin outside of the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico in the NHC records” (emphasis added). The NHC says Irma “will bring life-threatening wind, storm surge, and rainfall hazards to portions of the northeastern Leeward Islands beginning later today"; the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico beginning tomorrow, reaching the … [Read more...]
Why Houston Flooding Isn’t a Sign of Climate Change
[Editor’s note: Please continue to pray for the millions of people in Texas and elsewhere suffering seriously from the tremendous flooding brought by Hurricane Harvey. At the same time, don’t be led astray by claims that it’s caused by human-induced global warming. Cornwall Alliance Senior Fellow Dr. Roy W. Spencer, a NASA and University of Alabama climate scientist, explains why it isn’t in this article] In the context of climate change, is what we are seeing in Houston a new level of … [Read more...]
Blame Global Warming for Hurricane Harvey?
In the hallowed tradition of Rahm Emanuel's "You never let a serious crisis go to waste," ThinkProgress followed Emanuel's advice when it wrote, "As of 10 a.m. ET on Thursday, Trump had posted seven tweets from his personal @realDonaldTrump account. ... Not a single tweet mentioned the potentially devastating storm or warned Gulf residents to prepare for the incoming wind, rain, and possible flooding." A frequent visitor to Cornwall Alliance's Facebook page who excoriates us at every … [Read more...]
A Global Warming Red Team Warning: Do NOT Strive for Consensus with the Blue Team
Now that the idea of a global warming Red Team approach to help determine what our energy policy should be is gaining traction, it is important that we understand what that means to some of us who have been advocating it for over 10 years — and also what it doesn’t mean. The Red Team approach has been used for many years in private industry, DoD, and the intelligence community to examine very costly decisions and programs in a purposely adversarial way…to ask, what if we are wrong about a … [Read more...]
We Owe it to the Poor to Exit the Paris Climate Treaty
The scientific godfather of modern global warming alarmism, James Hansen, has called the Paris Climate Agreement “a fraud really, a fake ... It’s just worthless words.” What Dr. Hansen is referring to is that the agreement is so weak, that it amounts to all pain for no climate gain. So why shouldn’t the U.S. remain in the Agreement, and help make it stronger? Because the more effective it is, the more painful it will be. Right now, the Agreement is just feel-good rhetoric, giving the … [Read more...]
Human-induced Global Warming—A Little, or a Lot?
Cornwall Alliance Senior Fellow Roy W. Spencer's monthly graph of global lower atmosphere temperature anomaly for March 2017 shows we're still cooling from the super-El Nino that so warmed 2016. Track your eye straight left from the farthest-right point and you'll see that there's little change from the anomalies of roughly 2001--2006, and of course we had significant downs and ups in between. John Christy in his February 2017 Global Temperature Report (go to … [Read more...]
Did the Pause End, or Did El Niño Interrupt It?
While reading Cornwall Alliance Senior Fellow Dr. Roy W. Spencer's "UAH Global Temperature Update for January, 2017: +0.30 deg. C," I happened to notice that the anomaly for the globe as a whole for January 2017 was identical to that of January 2015, at 0.3˚C. Then I eyeballed the anomalies for the intervening months in the table Roy provided and noticed quickly how prominently the effect of the super-El Niño that ran from late 2015 through most of 2016 was. In light of widespread questions … [Read more...]
Hurricane Matthew—A Grateful Retrospect
Two days ago, anticipating what government and media forecasters predicted could be a Category 3 or 4 hurricane's visit to my home in south Florida, just north of Miami and seventeen miles from the coast, I wrote a brief blog piece about my preparations. Immediately afterward, I left the keyboard and started the long, hot, laborious, and sometimes dangerous job of installing hurricane shutters. That took the remaining five or six daylight hours, during which I, with help from a young man who … [Read more...]
Whom to Trust? NASA GISS, NASA, or Cornwall Alliance?
After citing a couple of Cornwall Alliance's articles in discussion, an educator friend got this response from one of his former students: The problem with referencing the Cornwall Alliance to discredit statistics from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies is that one (the Cornwall Alliance) is a political advocacy organization with no scientific relevance while the other (NASA) has the weight of objective fact and science behind it. To me there is virtually no legitimate way one can … [Read more...]
Earth to Climatistas: I’m Not Cooperating!
The climate alarmists claim that global warming will lead to more frequent and more severe hurricanes. Nature doesn't seem to be cooperating. As University of Alabama climatologist and Cornwall Alliance Senior Fellow Dr. Roy W. Spencer points out: In less than two months (October 6, 2016) it will be 4,000 days since the last time a major hurricane made landfall in the U.S., which was Wilma on October 24, 2005. Wilma was a record-setter, being the strongest Atlantic hurricane on record, … [Read more...]
