Climate: LNG in B.C. vs Alberta tarsands

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http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/warmest-year-low-gas-prices-a-bad-combo-for-climate-1.2895335
Warmest year, low gas prices a bad combo for climate
We should be thinking long-term when it comes to climate, Bob McDonald writes
By Bob McDonald, CBC News Posted: Jan 09, 2015 12:18 PM ET Last Updated: Jan 09, 2015 12:18 PM ET

Gas prices have been falling for several weeks, with prices at the pumps hitting levels not seen in years. (CBC)

Photo of Bob McDonald
Bob McDonald
Bob McDonald is the host of CBC Radio's award-winning weekly science program, Quirks & Quarks. He is also a science commentator for CBC News Network and CBC TV's The National. He has received eight honorary degrees and is an Officer of the Order of Canada.


Two independent reports, out of Japan http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/gwp/temp/ann_wld.html and England http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30683339, have shown that 2014 was the warmest year on record, with average global temperatures continuing a steady rise that began in the 1800s when we started burning fossil fuels. Meanwhile, lower gas prices have boosted sales of trucks and SUVs - the vehicles that get the worst gas mileage - showing that the message is not getting through to consumers.

Still another report out of England http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable/sustainable-news/nature_fossil_fuels put an actual number on how much of a reduction in fossil fuel consumption it would take to curtail climate warming. It says most of the world's oil and gas, including all of Canada’s oil sands, should remain in the ground if we are to avoid a 2-degree increase in the warming of the Earth’s climate - a tipping point where it will continue to warm unabated.

But with sales of more large vehicles increasing the demand for that oil, the trend toward a warmer world is not going to reverse soon.

Gas prices have been falling for several weeks.

Our current situation in Canada, where our economy absolutely depends on fossil fuels, puts us in the awkward position where we are sitting on a huge resource that can provide great wealth for the country, but using it damages the environment (CBC)

​It’s like loading a boat with gold.

Imagine you have a large cache of gold that could make you rich, but you have to transport it in a boat that is too small. Since gold is very heavy, as you load it the weight makes the boat sit lower in the water. Soon, you reach the capacity of the boat, but there is still gold left on the shore. And you don’t have a bigger boat.

The safer choice is to think long-term, leave the rest of the gold behind and come back for it later. But if you are greedy, thinking only about the riches to be had immediately, you could keep loading beyond the boat’s capacity to sail safely and say, “What’s the problem, it’s still floating!”

So when do you stop loading gold? Eventually, you'll come to a point where you have to trade off getting richer against sinking the boat.

So here we are, sitting on a huge motherload of black gold in Canada. Its value has kept our economy afloat through the last recession, with the prospect of sustaining it in the short-term future. No one in the fuel business or government wants to leave it in the ground. It’s too valuable, despite its burden on the climate.

But our spaceship Earth has global temperature graphs that are rising like the water creeping up the side of the hull. Where’s the turning point?

It all comes back to getting rich now without much regard for the long term consequences. We could turn to other riches, but at the moment, we don’t see alternatives because we’re blinded by the lustre of the gold.

It's time to think green instead of gold.
 
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NOAA: 2014 Was Only The 34th Warmest On Record For U.S.

earth cloudsWhile climate scientists warn that 2014 could be the warmest year on record globally, last year was only the 34th warmest on record in the U.S., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

NOAA says the 2014 average contiguous U.S. temperature was 52.6 degrees Fahrenheit, about 0.5 degrees above the 20th Century average. The climate agency said very “warm conditions dominated the West, with four states having their warmest year on record, while the Midwest and Mississippi Valley were cool” and that the “temperature exceeded the 20th Century average for the 18th consecutive year.”

There were also fewer weather/climate disasters that cost more than $1 billion in 2014 than the previous year, according to NOAA. In 2013 there were nine weather/climate disasters that killed 113 people, while 2014 only saw eight such events and 53 people killed.

Probably the most startling figure is that California had relatively average precipitation despite its severe drought. Though NOAA climatologists warned that there were “tremendous impacts to agriculture” from water shortages, along with other ecological impacts from record heat.

The contiguous U.S. as a whole saw above average rain last year.

“The drought is a silent disaster, but the impacts are quite profound,” Adam Smith, a NOAA climatologist, told reporters on a conference call.

Reporters also pressed NOAA climatologists about the severe cold weather currently hitting most of the U.S. and how much longer Americans could expect to freeze. The main question: is this caused by global warming?

“It’s hard to make the connection of this singular pattern to longer term climate change,” said Jake Crouch, a NOAA climatologist. “If we look at global temperatures, it’s really just eastern America that’s experiencing these cold temperatures during 2014.”

The U.S. deep freeze comes as the Japan Meteorological Agency announced that 2014 was the warmest year on record by 0.05 degrees Celsius. Environmentalists have heralded this as proof the Earth is still warming, despite satellite data showing there has been no global warming for 18 years and three months.

NOAA said it will release its own analysis of 2014 global temperatures next week, just days before President Obama is set to give his State of the Union Address. Obama’s speech is expected to talk about global warming and his administration’s efforts to curb global temperature rises.
 
Climate Alarmists Warm It Up | National Review Online

The year 2014 had scarcely expired before being declared the warmest year on record. First off was the Japan Meteorological Agency. The year 2014 surpassed 1998 to set a new record by all of five one hundredths of one degree Centigrade, according to the agency’s preliminary numbers. Then Britain’s Met Office announced that 2014 was the warmest year in the 355 years of the Central England Temperature series.

Each year, global-warming adherents anticipate an El Niño (a strong warming phase in the Pacific) as the physical manifestation of global warming’s Second Coming to herald the end of the barren years of flat-lining global temperatures. The Center for American Progress’s Joe Romm called the 2014 record doubly impressive. As Romm noted, “We’re still waiting for the start of El Niño” but got a temperature record nonetheless.

After years of climate-change prognosticators’ pointing to extreme weather events — Arctic (but not Antarctic) sea-ice extent and, as they claim, excess heat disappearing into the ocean — as evidence of global warming, it is scientifically healthy that attention is focusing back on trends in global surface and atmospheric temperature, as the theory is that global warming should drive climate change. Indeed, the Met Office press release belies alarmist notions of “climate disruption,” “climate breakdown,” and the other terms trotted out from the shop-soiled lexicon of alarmism.

Despite seeing a record-breaking year overall, Britain had no major heat waves, and no new monthly records were set in 2014. Instead, each month was consistently warm, only one having below-average temperatures, and the year seeing the lowest number of frosts since 1961. Similarly with rainfall: Although 2014 was one of the 20 wettest years since 1766, no individual region had its wettest year on record. After a stormy January and February in Britain, the rest of the year was “relatively quiet,” as the Met Office describes it.
This isn’t part of the narrative being spun by Naomi Oreskes, Harvard professor of the history of science. Previewing the hottest-year-on-record announcements, Oreskes wrote in the New York Times last week that we were underreacting to the reality of dangerous climate change “now unfolding before our eyes.” The burden of proof should be lowered, Oreskes argued, but her excursion into statistical methodology to buttress this contention was widely panned (here, here, and here).

Most jaw-dropping was Oreskes’s claim that climate change is happening “faster than scientists predicted.” This is flat-out untrue. A 2013 commentary co-authored by Francis Zwiers, an elected member of the IPCC Bureau and former IPCC lead coordinating author, found that recent observed global warming was significantly less than the surface trend simulated by climate models. In the 15 years to 2012, the observed trend of 0.05 degrees Centigrade per decade — not significantly different from zero, according to the authors — was more than four times smaller than the averaged simulated trend of 20 climate models used by the IPCC. Since the turn of the century, the 15-year running trend in observed temperature has fallen back to the 1900–2012 trend, an increase of around seven tenths of one degree Centigrade per century. For Oreskes’s claim to be valid, scientists would have had to be expecting global cooling.

In science, models are used to produce predictions that can be tested against nature and thereby advance scientific knowledge. On this basis, the clear inference of the disagreement between climate-model simulations and observations over the past two decades is that scientists’ current understanding of the climate system is faulty. Climate science is not normal science: It has become the leading branch of global therapeutics. Climate-model outputs are used as a tool to win the political battle for policies believed necessary to save a dying planet.

Arguing for a relaxation of confidence levels (misdescribed by Oreskes the polemicist as burden of proof) to justify such policies, Oreskes the historian misattributes the widely used 95 percent confidence level to R. A. Fisher, the British statistician. Biologist Richard Dawkins once described Fisher, possessed of a towering intellect, as the father of modern statistics and, for his work in genetics, Darwin’s greatest 20th-century successor. Rather than the 95 percent confidence level, to Fisher belongs the credit of formulating the null-hypothesis test: For there to be a relationship between two variables, it must first be demonstrated that the null hypothesis — that the two variables are independent of each other — is false. As Fisher put it, every experiment may be said to exist only in order to give the facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis.

The null hypothesis is widely used across the physical and social sciences, but not by the IPCC. In the approximately 1,500 pages of the IPCC fifth assessment report (2013) on the physical basis of climate change, it merited three paragraphs. Whether global temperatures rise by up to 4.8 degrees Centigrade by the end of century, as the IPCC believes, or, in line with 1900–2012 trends, rise by 0.7 degrees Centigrade by the century’s end, there will continue to be years that set new temperature records. However, this would tell us next to nothing about whether such events portend catastrophe or are essentially harmless.

There is a non-temperature trend that should worry alarmists. Since March 2001, Gallup’s environment poll has surveyed voters annually on the seriousness of global warming. In the first years of the century, the percentage who said global warming was exaggerated was generally in the low 30s (2004 saw a spike to 38 percent). The percentage then rose in the run-up to the December 2009 Copenhagen climate conference and peaked three months later at 48 percent. Since then, the percentage has slipped back to the low 40s — the skeptics, as they might be called, gaining ten points on the prior decade.

With the intensifying drumbeat of alarm and exaggeration anticipating this year’s Paris climate conference in December, climate-change alarmists face a conundrum: The more they act true to form, the more voters become skeptical and, in the United States, the greater the political incentives for Republicans to block climate-change policies. As yet, the alarmists don’t seem to have gotten the message.
 
Nice to see some leadership here in Canada, for a change.
I say ... give these folks a chance and lets here what they have to say..
http://ecofiscal.ca/
[RBNPHv0R-aw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBNPHv0R-aw

High-powered commission aims to align economic and environmental aspirations to help support Canada’s continuing prosperity



  • Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission will strive for fiscal policy reforms needed to support a thriving economy underpinned by clean air, land and water.
  • First report highlights success of ecofiscal policies already implemented in Canada and globally.

Toronto, November 4, 2014 – A group of Canada’s leading economists, backed by an advisory board that includes high-profile leaders from business, the environment and across the political spectrum, today unveiled a bold new initiative to address the country’s economic and environmental challenges.
“Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission is a unique effort to move the conversation on reforming fiscal policy that impacts the environment beyond the academic into the realm of practical policy application particularly for provinces and municipalities,” says its chair, Chris Ragan, an associate professor of economics at McGill University in Montreal and former Special Advisor to the Governor of the Bank of Canada.
“We see this as one of the most important policy opportunities of this generation – a modern fiscal system designed to help us achieve the two things we need most: economic and environmental health,” says Ragan.
In its first report released today, the Commission highlights how fiscal policy reform in Canada and globally has benefitted both the economy and the environment in jurisdictions where it has been implemented. The report also presents an overview of the issues the Commission will be exploring as it moves forward. (See separate executive summary.)
The Commission comprises 12 prominent economists from across Canada’s regions and 14 advisors including former political leaders including Preston Manning, Jean Charest, Mike Harcourt, and Bob Rae as well as community leaders such as Sheila Watt-Cloutier and leaders from business including Steve Williams, President and CEO, Suncor Energy, Dominic Barton, Global Managing Director, McKinsey & Co, and Jack Mintz, one of Canada’s leading business tax experts. The advisors will help inform the Commission’s work with insights from their broad and diverse perspectives. They will also help create space for pragmatic, trans-partisan consideration of its recommendations across the country.
“We are bringing a new, trans-partisan perspective to the critical challenge of aligning our economic and environmental goals,” adds Ragan.
Over the next five years the Commission will publish and promote discussion of research and recommendations grounded in Canada’s unique and regionally diverse economic and policy context. It will focus on issues most relevant to Canadian provinces and cities including those affecting fresh water, air quality, environmental disasters, greenhouse gas emissions, transportation and road congestion.
“Our first report shows that smart fiscal policies can be used to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, pollution and waste, while stimulating innovation and growth. We are calling these ecofiscal policies a new word to facilitate a new conversation about solutions guided by both economic and environmental objectives,” says Ragan
“There is growing global awareness that our economies and the environment are inextricably linked; this basic premise defines the new “business as usual” of the 21st century,” Ragan explains. “Good environmental policy is good economic policy. That’s what Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission is setting out to achieve.”
“The Commission aims to serve policy-makers particularly at provincial and municipal levels, which have jurisdiction over many of the issues the group is examining. The commissioners will analyze and recommend options to reduce growth-impeding taxes, promote innovation and improve Canada’s global competitiveness in a way that should be acceptable to all Canadians”, he says.
The Commission is funded by a number of private Canadian family foundations and will receive some funding from Canadian corporations.

Link to the first report
http://ecofiscal.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Ecofiscal-Report-November-2014.pdf
former Leader of the Official Opposition
​
<figure class="thumbnail" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 10px auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.42857143; border: none; border-radius: 50%; -webkit-transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out; transition: all 0.2s ease-in-out; -webkit-box-shadow: none; box-shadow: none; position: static; width: 125px; height: 125px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></figure>Steve Williams

​
 
The loss of climate significance

The NOAA National Climatic Data Center has released the complete 2014 dataset of state, regional, and national climate data. This allows us to look for which regions have statistically significant trends in annual temperatures over the past three decades – the period over which climate alarmists tell us that climate change impacts should be evident.

The results are not promising for the alarmists.

The contiguous United States as a whole has absolutely no sign of a significant trend in its annual temperature since 1985. Only two of nine climate regions – the Northeast and Southwest – have significant trends over this time.

Out of the 48 contiguous states, we are now down to just 11 with significant trends in annual temperatures – Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Texas, and Vermont.

During the past two decades (i.e., since 1995), the non-parametric correlation in the contiguous U.S. annual temperature has turned negative – toward cooling, not warming. Since 1998, there is very nearly (p=0.06) a statistically significant cooling trend in the temperature of the contiguous United States.

Looks like there could be some interesting times ahead for the alarmists if Senator James Inhofe does what he indicated in a recent interview witht the Daily Caller once he becomes chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, "which has the largest jurisdiction of any Senate committee":

Inhofe also noted his committee would hold hearings on the science behind global warming, countering claims made by Democrats that 'the science is settled' when it comes to global temperature rises.

'We're going to have a committee hearing on the science,' Inhofe told The DCNF [The Daily Caller News Foundation]. 'People are going to hear the other side of the story.'

As the recent trends in U.S. temperatures show, there certainly is another side to the alarmist story that needs to be told to this Senate committee.
 
Spiegel Dumps Cold Water On “Record Warm Year” Significance … Sees Science Fraught With Widespread Uncertainty

Browse: Home / 2015 / January / 08 / Spiegel Dumps Cold Water On “Record Warm Year” Significance … Sees Science Fraught With Widespread Uncertainty
Now that a couple of surface temperature data sets are showing 2014 was a “record warm year,” people are wondering if it means the warming pause is over, and if so, how much climate sensitivity to CO2 there really is.

Online Spiegel science journalist Axel Bojanowski (a geologist) has an analysis of 2014’s “record warm year” and asks if it means global warming has resumed after “a pause since the end of the 1990s”. He describes how climate scientists have been dumbfounded by the “unexpected warming pause”. A number of scientists blame the oceans for absorbing the heat out of the atmosphere. Japan’s meteorological services report that global surface temperature has risen 0.7°C in one hundred years, he writes.

On the significance of the warm year, the Spiegel science journalist quotes the German Climate Consortium: “The following years will allow us to judge the extent global warming at the surface of the earth has resumed.” And even the most alarmist organizations are conceding the global warming pause is real. For example the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) indirectly admits to Spiegel that the global temperature has paused, but reminds us that the 14 warmest years on record occurred over the past 15 years.

On the future of warming, Bojanowski describes a science fraught with uncertainty when it comes to future projections:

The UN IPCC continues to predict a hefty global warming should carbon dioxide emissions not be drastically reduced. But there are major uncertainties in the calculations and for this reason short-term fluctuations will remain unexplainable.”

Readers should note at this point that this too also has to apply for “short-term” warm fluctuations, such as the one from 1980-1998. That one too must have been in large part due to natural factors.

Bojanowski sums up his analysis by pointing out there is also uncertainty not only at the earth’s surface, but in the troposphere as well, writing that “satellite meaurements are astonishing” researchers:

Moreover satellite measurements for upper air levels, which have been taken since the mid 1990s, show hardly any warming. Because of this, scientists are debating if the sensitivity of air temperature with respect to greenhouse gases is possibly less than assumed.”

Bojanowski also points to conflicting scientific literature and papers when it comes to the stability of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. He adds, “The uncertainties show that the decisive questions about the future cannot be answered using short-term fluctuations.” And:

A warm record here, a warming pause there – the concerns and questions surrounding climate change remain the same.”
 
Can Nobel Prize Winners Be Complete Morons?
Posted on January 9, 2015 by stevengoddard
Several Nobel Prize winners have stated that they believe CO2 is the control knob for Earth’s temperature.

This is an amazing theory, given that the historical record shows that the Earth makes sharp swings in temperature, while CO2 continues to trend in the opposite direction.


110,000 years ago CO2 (red) was rapidly dropping while temperature (blue) was sharply rising. This went on for thousands of years. Only a complete flaming moron could believe that CO2 is the control knob. Temperature changes first, and then CO2 follows much later. Ice cores show that temperature is the control knob for CO2, not the other way around.



So the answer is – yes, Nobel Prize winners can be complete morons.
 

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people ask if you “believe in” global warming, answer yes — and no.

Glenn K. Beaton: Fear, Loathing And Global Warming

Here’s what a global warming “denier” said recently in the Wall Street Journal:

“The idea that ‘climate science is settled’ runs through today’s popular and policy discussions. Unfortunately, that claim is misguided. It has not only distorted our public and policy debates on issues related to energy, greenhouse-gas emissions and the environment. But it also has inhibited the scientific and policy discussions that we need to have about our climate future.”

Except he isn’t a “denier.” He’s President Obama’s former undersecretary for science, Steve Koonin. He’s also a former professor of theoretical physics and a provost at Cal Tech, and holds a Ph.D. from MIT. His piece is titled “Climate Science is Not Settled,” published Sept. 19 on the Wall Street Journal’s website.

Koonin explained that global warming exists, or doesn’t, depending entirely on the time period you’re referencing. Dinosaurs thrived on an Earth that was much hotter than it is now. (In fact, there were no polar ice caps at all for the great majority of Earth’s history.) Mammoths romped on a colder Earth. Romans ruled one a little warmer. Columbus sailed in one a little cooler. President Bill Clinton held office in one that was slightly warmer than it is now.

So next time people ask if you “believe in” global warming, answer yes — and no.

Notwithstanding all those natural climate variations, serious scientists such as Koonin do say this:

Part of the slight warming over the past few hundred years was probably human-caused. We don’t know how much.

It’s not factual that 97 percent of scientists believe that global warming is a crisis. What those 97 percent actually believe is the first point — that some part of that slight warming over the past few hundred years was human-caused.

Scientists are roughly split on whether it’s a crisis. Some think it’s a good thing because it may save us from the next ice age.

The recent warming peaked about 18 years ago. The computer models didn’t predict that. We still don’t know why it happened. We don’t know if the warming will resume or reverse and, if it does resume or reverse, we don’t know at what rate or whether it will stop or start again.

Extreme weather events are no more frequent now than in the past. In fact, there are fewer hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods and wildfires. We don’t know why.

If global warming resumes, it will produce winners and losers. It is hard to predict which will be which. [...]

So what should we do?

First, take the issue seriously. We should continue to test, probe, measure, analyze, model and debate.

Let’s use but not waste the resources of this unique planet and let’s look for ones that are renewable. Whether you’re from the political side that calls this “environmentalism” or the side that calls it “conservation,” we can agree that conserving our resources is a good thing.

Here’s what not to do:

Don’t fear-monger by contending that a particular heat spell or a snowstorm proves or disproves global warming. Scientists don’t rely on a single data point.

Don’t loath those who disagree with you. Children censor, shout and name-call; scientists consider, analyze and, only then, rebut. And friends and other persons in a civil society simply respectfully disagree. Persons with one set of views are not “deniers” and persons with another are not afflicted with “hysteria.”

In any event, censorship, shouting and name-calling are counter-persuasive. They say, “I’m not smart enough to rebut you, so I’ll instead silence you.”

Don’t take scientific advice from politicians and celebrities, and don’t take a position because it’s fashionable or because that’s the position dictated by your liberal or conservative tribe. Think for yourself.

Finally, unless you’ve stopped traveling by planes, trains and automobiles — and ski lifts — don’t get too sanctimonious. We’re all in this together.
 
<iframe width="854" height="510" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/sOqjYo3dE8A" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Tar Sands: Canada's First Nation Communities Are Paying the Price
 
<iframe width="854" height="510" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/AAxG1rFPC_8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Canada oil sands: The future of energy in the Americas?
 
[h=2]Richard Muller: I Was Wrong on Global Warming[/h]Physicist Richard Muller became a hero to the climate denial community a few years ago, after saying some pretty harsh things about climate science, and scientists. He started the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project to double check estimates of global warming and, in his mind, answer the criticisms of existing temperature reconstructions. Not surprisingly to the mainstream community, he came up with the same answer as all other groups over the last 40 years. The planet is warming, and the only plausible explanation is increased greenhouse gases.

[Sme8WQ4Wb5w]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sme8WQ4Wb5w#t=25
 
05 JAN 2015: REPORT

For California Salmon, Drought
And Warm Water Mean Trouble

With record drought and warming waters due to climate change, scientists are concerned that the future for Chinook salmon — a critical part of the state’s fishing industry — is in jeopardy in California.

by alastair bland

Gushing downpours finally arrived in California last month, when December rains brought some relief to a landscape parched after three years of severe drought.

But the rain came too late for thousands of Chinook salmon that spawned this summer and fall in the northern Central Valley. The Sacramento River, running lower than usual under the scorching sun, warmed into the low 60s — a temperature range that can be lethal to fertilized
chinook-salmon-250.png
Pacific Northwest National Lab​
Chinook, the largest species of Pacific salmon, need cool waters to reproduce.

Chinook eggs. Millions were destroyed, and almost an entire year-class of both fall-run Chinook, the core of the state’s salmon fishing industry, and winter-run Chinook, an endangered species whose eggs incubate in the summer, was lost.

The disaster comes on the heels of a similar event the previous autumn. It is also reminiscent of ongoing troubles on northern California’s Klamath River, where diversion of water for agriculture has at times left thousands of adult Chinook — the largest species of Pacific salmon — struggling to survive in water too shallow and warm to spawn in.

Now, scientists — who are observing increasing human demand for water, genetic decline of hatchery-reared salmon, and climate change models predicting intensified droughts — are concerned that the Chinook salmon will be unable to tolerate future river conditions and will all but vanish from California’s landscape.

Robert Lackey, a professor of fisheries at Oregon State University, Corvallis, says that as the climate continues to warm, “salmon at the southern edge of their range will be the first to go.”

Read the rest here
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/for_california_salmon_drought_and_warm_water_mean_trouble/2834/
 
OldBlackDog said:
NOAA: 2014 Was Only The 34th Warmest On Record For U.S.

earth cloudsWhile climate scientists warn that 2014 could be the warmest year on record globally, last year was only the 34th warmest on record in the U.S., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

NOAA says the 2014 average contiguous U.S. temperature was 52.6 degrees Fahrenheit, about 0.5 degrees above the 20th Century average. The climate agency said very “warm conditions dominated the West, with four states having their warmest year on record, while the Midwest and Mississippi Valley were cool” and that the “temperature exceeded the 20th Century average for the 18th consecutive year.”

There were also fewer weather/climate disasters that cost more than $1 billion in 2014 than the previous year, according to NOAA. In 2013 there were nine weather/climate disasters that killed 113 people, while 2014 only saw eight such events and 53 people killed.

Probably the most startling figure is that California had relatively average precipitation despite its severe drought. Though NOAA climatologists warned that there were “tremendous impacts to agriculture” from water shortages, along with other ecological impacts from record heat.

The contiguous U.S. as a whole saw above average rain last year.

“The drought is a silent disaster, but the impacts are quite profound,” Adam Smith, a NOAA climatologist, told reporters on a conference call.

Reporters also pressed NOAA climatologists about the severe cold weather currently hitting most of the U.S. and how much longer Americans could expect to freeze. The main question: is this caused by global warming?

“It’s hard to make the connection of this singular pattern to longer term climate change,” said Jake Crouch, a NOAA climatologist. “If we look at global temperatures, it’s really just eastern America that’s experiencing these cold temperatures during 2014.”

The U.S. deep freeze comes as the Japan Meteorological Agency announced that 2014 was the warmest year on record by 0.05 degrees Celsius. Environmentalists have heralded this as proof the Earth is still warming, despite satellite data showing there has been no global warming for 18 years and three months.

NOAA said it will release its own analysis of 2014 global temperatures next week, just days before President Obama is set to give his State of the Union Address. Obama’s speech is expected to talk about global warming and his administration’s efforts to curb global temperature rises.
Click to expand...

Wow ... I guess your team see your self as one of these types
320px-Statue_of_Sherlock_Holmes_in_Edinburgh.jpg


But the rest of the world see you more like this.....
Maxwell-Smart.jpg


How is the "paws" working out for you?
 
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