From the James Hansen said the oceans would boil and the Tabloid Climatology™ department...

As a long-suffering member of the television news media, some-days, I just want to find the reporter and slap him upside the head and tell him to do some basic science research before making wild claims on national TV. This is one of those days. The graphic below says it all.

From the Business and Media Institute comes this howler from CBS News about the latest IPCC report.

"[CBS] Evening News" took a different tack, airing a story about oyster farming and complaints that climate change is ruining a man's business. But in Ben Tracy's story, which mentioned the IPCC's latest report, he said that oceans have absorbed much of the heat caused by CO2 and that ocean temperatures have risen only slightly. Then he made a claim that Principal Research Scientist Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama in Huntsville called "totally misleading and irresponsible."

Here's what the reporter said, after telling us most of the heat went into the oceans:

"Had all that heat gone into the atmosphere, air temperatures could have risen by more than 200 degrees [showed 212 degrees onscreen]," Tracy warned.

"Interesting there was a snowstorm on May 22nd and then Sept 29th," says reader Ralph Fato. "Four months between snowstorms."
"I wonder what the melt gap was?" asks Ralph. "I believe there was still snow there in June which makes it only 3 months being snow free? Something you expect from 10,000 feet up, not 5400′."

See larger image

Some claim it was the coldest Oct 1st ever recorded.

Predeal, Azuga and logs show that this was the coldest October 1st in the last 84 years. Plus yellow code for snow in 5 Counties.

After snowfalls in recent days, dozens of trees were broken under the weight of snow and blocked the lines. With the Brasov to Bucharest train delayed more than 10 hours, all those who had the misfortune to start the trip by rail have cursed the day.

Problems between Brasov and Predeal railway began last night when, under the weight of snow, trees collapsed the power lines. Seven trains remained stuck for hours in stations or on the trail.

In total, 13 trains linking the south of Transylvania froze, to the dismay of travelers .

Five roads also closed by snow.

A Swedish nuclear reactor was restarted on Wednesday following a three-day closure caused by a build-up of jellyfish in a cooling system, according to the operators.

The incident occurred in reactor 3 at Oskarshamn power station on the Baltic Sea coast, which is run by OKG, a subsidiary of the German electricity company EON.

"It was a larger amount than we had ever seen. Every autumn we have to get rid of jellyfish, but not that many," OKG spokeswoman Emmy Davidsson told AFP.

The company announced on Sunday that the reactor -- Sweden's largest with a 1400 MW output and the world's largest boiling water reactor -- was "manually shut down due to a large amount of jellyfish present at the cooling water intake".

The operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant said Tuesday workers had spilled four tonnes of radioactive water, likely contaminating the soil and possibly groundwater.

Workers were pumping rain water that was trapped in a concrete gutter into an empty 12-tonne tank that sat on open soil, said a spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO).

"Work crew started operating the pump around 10:38 am. At 11:50 am, they found water was spilling from the manhole on top of the tank," the spokesman said.

TEPCO has estimated roughly four tonnes of collected rain water might have escaped. The extent of contamination was unclear, the spokesman added, although it was not thought to be highly polluted.

"The water itself was rain water. But it was from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and could contain radioactive materials," he said, adding: "The water seeped into the ground".

TEPCO has long struggled to control waste water at the plant. The company poured thousands of tonnes of water onto runaway reactors to keep them cool, and continues to douse them.

TEPCO has so far disclosed no clear plan for disposing of the huge amounts of stored polluted water, which is stored at hundreds of tanks at the plant. Some tanks have leaked highly radioactive waste water, which might have washed to sea.

Source: Agence France-Presse

A storm carried heavy rainfall, lethal winds and drastic temperature swings into Uruguay last weekend. In the course of the three days that it lasted, the storm managed to take the lives of more than 30,000 of the country's sheep.

The storm, which was particularly damaging for the country's north and northwest regions, where much of Uruguay's sheep and ewes are raised, was unlike anything most of the country's northern residents had ever experienced. "I have never seen anything like it, and the people who have spent years working in the countryside haven't either - not even their parents or grandparents have told them stories like these," Walter Galliazzi, a farmer in Salto in the country's northwest told local newspaper El País The combination of near-freezing temperatures, some eight inches of daily rainfall and powerful winds was too much for the sheep, many of which had recently been shaven.

Event Time
2013-10-01 03:38:21 UTC
2013-10-01 13:38:21 UTC+10:00 at epicenter

Location
53.166°N 152.742°E depth=565.8km (351.5mi)

Nearby Cities
317km (197mi) NW of Ozernovskiy, Russia
376km (234mi) W of Yelizovo, Russia
380km (236mi) W of Vilyuchinsk, Russia
395km (245mi) W of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Russia
2194km (1363mi) NNE of Tokyo, Japan

Technical Details

The United Nations-sponsored International Panel on Climate Change is about to release its 2013 report, but details already are leaking out. Apparently, there are admissions that the dire global warming predictions from the IPCC 2007 report of rising sea levels, more frequent and severe hurricanes and vanishing sea ice - all caused by human activity - are not happening.

Not allowing facts to get in the way of its agenda, the Obama EPA just released its new power plant regulations, which will effectively end the use of coal in new power plants and force consumers to pay higher electricity rates, predicated on coal's contribution to climate change. But that conclusion is now almost impossible for any honest person to reach.

There is no dispute that CO2 levels are rising in the atmosphere. But science proves that CO2 levels - which make up only 0.04 percent of the atmosphere - are not the cause of warming or of other changes in the climate. Natural cycles driven largely by the sun and complex systems of forcings and feedbacks account for such changes.

But as Dick Armey once said, "Conservatives believe it when they see it; liberals see it when they believe it." Consistent with this axiom, climate change alarmists, who believe that humans are destroying the Earth and its atmosphere, cannot suspend their belief even as the peer-reviewed science to the contrary mounts.

Roughly three of every eight registered voters in the U.S. believes that "global warming is a hoax," according to a national poll released Tuesday by the firm Public Policy Polling (PPP).

The automated telephone poll asked 1,247 American registered voters their beliefs on a wide range of topics broadly categorized as "conspiracy theories" in the firm's press release.

When asked, "Do you believe global warming is a hoax, or not?" 37% of Americans said they do, while 51% said they do not. Twelve percent of those surveyed were not sure.

Dr. Jeff Masters, co-founder and director of meteorology at Weather Underground, isn't hedging his bets:

"So, who is more likely to be correct -- the 97% of all publishing climate scientists, who view the evidence as showing that humans are primarily responsible for global warming? Or the 37% of the public who view global warming as a hoax, who have been subject to a massive PR campaign by the richest industry in human history, to make them believe just that? I'll go with the 97% of climate scientists."

The IPCC released their "approved" Summary for Policymakers for their 5^th Assessment Report early this morning (eastern U.S. time), still in draft form. As far as I can tell, there are two paragraphs that discuss the recent global temperature plateau.

Note: I haven't yet crosschecked between the draft and the approved versions to see if they've made any significant changes, so the following may be old hat.

From page 3:

In addition to robust multi-decadal warming, global mean surface temperature exhibits substantial decadal and interannual variability (see Figure SPM.1). Due to natural variability, trends based on short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general reflect long-term climate trends. As one example, the rate of warming over the past 15 years (1998 - 2012; 0.05 [ - 0.05 to +0.15] °C per decade), which begins with a strong El Niño, is smaller than the rate calculated since 1951 (1951 - 2012; 0.12 [0.08 to 0.14] °C per decade).

And from page 12:

The observed reduction in surface warming trend over the period 1998 - 2012 as compared to the period 1951 - 2012, is due in roughly equal measure to a reduced trend in radiative forcing and a cooling contribution from internal variability, which includes a possible redistribution of heat within the ocean (medium confidence). The reduced trend in radiative forcing is primarily due to volcanic eruptions and the timing of the downward phase of the 11-year solar cycle. However, there is low confidence in quantifying the role of changes in radiative forcing in causing the reduced warming trend. There is medium confidence that internal decadal variability causes to a substantial degree the difference between observations and the simulations; the latter are not expected to reproduce the timing of internal variability. There may also be a contribution from forcing inadequacies and, in some models, an overestimate of the response to increasing greenhouse gas and other anthropogenic forcing (dominated by the effects of aerosols). {9.4, Box 9.2, 10.3, Box 10.2, 11.3}

Regarding the cause of the warming, still living in fantasy world, they write:

Greenhouse gases contributed a global mean surface warming likely to be in the range of 0.5°C to 1.3°C over the period 1951−2010, with the contributions from other anthropogenic forcings, including the cooling effect of aerosols, likely to be in the range of −0.6°C to 0.1°C. The contribution from natural forcings is likely to be in the range of −0.1°C to 0.1°C, and from internal variability is likely to be in the range of −0.1°C to 0.1°C. Together these assessed contributions are consistent with the observed warming of approximately 0.6°C to 0.7°C over this period. {10.3}

They're still misleading the public. Everyone knows (well, many of us know) their models can't simulate the natural processes that cause surface temperatures to warm over multidecadal timeframes, yet they insist on continuing this myth.