Approximately 200,000 people have died due to global terrorism in the last 10 years.

During the same time, many millions of people (mostly women and children) have died due to policies promoted by Greenpeace and other “green” organizations (e.g. anti-DDT, anti-golden rice, anti-fossil fuel).

I’ve said it before…I don’t really care where our energy comes from…as long as it is abundant and affordable. Until someone comes up with an alternative energy source with those two characteristics, humanity is stuck with fossil fuels as our primary energy source.

It’s not like the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior runs on solar energy.

Since poverty is the leading cause of premature death in the world, and fossil fuels have enabled the world to prosper and live longer, more comfortable lives, being against fossil fuels is, in my opinion, either misguided or evil.

It appears that Greenpeace is pulling out all the stops to minimize the impact that we skeptics have on the global warming debate. In addition to the COP21 meeting in Paris wrapping up this week, today’s Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness hearing chaired by Ted Cruz appears to also be an event Greenpeace is trying to thwart.

Here’s what’s been happening. Last month I was contacted by what now appears to be a front-group (or fictitious group?) for Greenpeace called “Hamilton Ellis”, supposedly headquartered in Beirut. Supposedly on behalf of Mideast oil interests, they contacted a number of skeptics with offers to pay for reports on climate change.

Here’s the email I received:

Dear Dr Spencer,

I am a partner in a business advisory firm based in Beirut, working across sectors but primarily focusing on energy and defence.

One of our clients is an E&P company that is concerned about the impacts of the UN climate talks later this month. I am writing to you now because we are looking to commission a briefing to be released early next year, following the talks, which highlights the crucial role that oil and gas have to play in developing economies, such as our client’s MENA region.

Given your influential work in this area and your position at the University of Alabama we believe a very short paper authored or endorsed by yourself could work strongly in our client’s favour. Does this sound like a project you would be interested in discussing further?

Kind regards,

Jonathan
—
Jonathan Ellis

Hamilton Ellis Associates
Tel: +961 1 956 412
Fax: +961 1 956 355

hamiltonellis.com

If you try their website, you get a blank page. A Google search turns up no previous consulting work.

It turns out what they were really trying to do was to find out what kind of fossil fuel funding skeptics have been receiving. I am told that more on this revelation (which was not my discovery) will be forthcoming at ClimateDepot.com. (UPDATE: I’ve published the information, in an article by Dr. Patrick Moore, here.)

Of course, the popular meme has been that we skeptics are paid large sums by Big Oil and Big Coal.

I wish.

Over the years, I’ve charged to give talks out-of-state, taking vacation time away from my research day job (which is 100% federal and state funded) to avoid any charges of “double-dipping”. A few of those talks have been for fossil fuel-related organizations, a few have been for environmental organizations, but most have not.

My affiliations with the Marshall Institute and Cornwall Alliance have been on a volunteer basis. I’ve also been paid a modest amount to write a couple of reports over the years, as well as to help in a recent legal case. The total compensation I’ve received is very small compared to my day job, and it’s even very small compared to the ad revenue I receive from our little weather website, Weatherstreet.com.

Many years ago I was paid to write articles for a website called TCSDaily.com, which turned out to be fossil-fuel funded. I didn’t know that at the time, but I don’t think it would have mattered. After all, like most of us in the modern world, I’ve given far more money to fossil fuel interests than I’ve ever received from them. 😉

I’m still waiting for that Big Check from Big Oil. After all, I’ve been carrying their water for years. In my case, my support of fossil fuels (and the prosperity and longevity they have enabled humanity to achieve) goes back decades. It’s a no-brainer. If there is another energy technology as cheap and reliable and large-scale, I’m all for it.

But there isn’t. So I’m not.

And I really don’t care if every CEO of every coal and petroleum company eventually sides against me. (Why should they take a public relations hit, when they know that – at the end of the day –people still need their energy?)

You see, as a scientist I won’t accept the premise…the premise that more CO2 in the atmosphere is “carbon pollution”, and that it is necessarily a bad thing.

After all, more CO2 is causing global greening, and increased crop productivity, with only mild warming (which isn’t necessarily mostly due to increasing CO2) and no demonstrable increase in severe weather.

But, since Greenpeace seems to think that doing any work for a fossil fuel interest is bad, let’s talk about what is “evil” for a moment.

Besides promoting global warming policies that will cause energy poverty (and if there’s one thing that kills people reliably, it’s poverty), Greenpeace has been promoting anti-human policies for decades. Their opposition to golden rice alone is enough to call them out as bigger enemies of humanity than ISIS…at least so far. We really don’t see the harm they do splashed over the TV screen because it’s the poor in third world countries that suffer the most from the policies they promote.

In 2014, terrorism killed over 32,000 people. But golden rice could save as many as 1,000,000 poor children’s lives each year, by supplying necessary vitamin A….yet, Greenpeace has been actively campaigning against poor countries growing golden rice.

Although they now deny it, they were also opposed to DDT, which is relatively safe and saves millions of lives.

It’s not just religious organizations calling them out. Atheists have been outraged, too: The Evil that Greenpeace Does.

Of course, Dr. Patrick Moore famously left the organization he helped found and lead when it became clear that they were valuing nature above human life. Patrick also has called them evil.

And this is besides their opposition to the primary fuels that power the global economy and allow people to live long lives free from the misery that poverty brings.

So, does Greenpeace have any moral authority on matters related to the wellbeing of humans? There seems to be a serious shortage of it in green circles these days.

For example, George Soros, after years of driving down the value of coal companies by promoting “green energy” policies, turned around and recently bought over 1 million shares of Peabody Coal at dirt-cheap prices. So, where is his moral authority on environmental matters?

And I’m also reminded of Al Gore selling Current TV to Al Jazeera (funded by Mideast oil interests) last year, netting him $100 million.

Apparently, hypocrisy runs deep in the Green Blob.

If Greenpeace believes that there are too many poor people in the world using up the natural resources they want for themselves to power their ships and commute 250 miles by jet to work, then they are on the right track with the policies they support.

They just shouldn’t expect to keep the moral high ground in the process.

Way back in June, John Christy and I called 2015 as being the warmest year on record…in the surface thermometer data. Given the strong El Nino in progress, on top of the official thermometer data warming trend, this seemed pretty obvious.

Of course, everyone has their opinions regarding how good the thermometer temperature trends are, with periodic adjustments that almost always make the present warmer or the past colder.

But I’m not going there today…

Instead, I’m going to talk about our only truly global dataset: the satellite data. With the November 2015 data now in, it’s pretty clear that in our UAH analysis 2015 will only be the 3rd warmest year since the satellite record began in 1979. Based upon my calculations, this will be true no matter what happens in December (barring Armageddon).

Here are the yearly rankings, for which I assumed the December 2015 anomaly will be +0.40 C (click for full-size):

The years are displayed with the warmest on the left, and the coldest on the right. The color coding and arrows have to do with El Nino years, discussed below.

Will 2016 be a Record?

What is interesting is to consider the possibility that 2016 will indeed be a record warm year, even in the UAH (and probably RSS) satellite data. This is because the second year of El Nino year couplets is almost always the warmest, and 2015 is only the first year.

In the plot above I have color-coded the four previous major El Nino year pairs: 1982-83, 1987-88; 1997-98; and 2009-10. In three of those (all except 1987-88), the second year was much warmer than the first year. This means there is a good chance that 2016 will be a record warm year.

But as 1987-88 shows, it’s not guaranteed….

If the current El Nino unexpectedly fizzles in the next few months – OR – if this El Nino transitions unusually rapidly into a strong La Nina (like the 1987-88 event), then 1998 might not be beaten for the warmest year. Mother Nature is full of surprises, and I still believe she is mostly in control.

If I simply average the previous four El Nino events together as an estimate of what will happen next year, then 2016 would be 0.25 C warmer than 2015. This would cause it to edge out 1998 as the record warmest year by 0.02-0.03 deg. C.

But I’m not making any bets.

NOTE: This is the eighth monthly update with our new Version 6.0 dataset. Differences versus the old Version 5.6 dataset are discussed here. Note we are now at “beta4” for Version 6, due to our accidental omission of lower stratospheric data from NOAA-9 post-Feb. 1987.

The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for November, 2015 is +0.33 deg. C, down from the October, 2015 value of +0.43 deg. C (click for full size version):

The global, hemispheric, and tropical LT anomalies from the 30-year (1981-2010) average for the last 11 months are:

YR MO GLOBE NH SH TROPICS
2015 01 +0.28 +0.40 +0.16 +0.13
2015 02 +0.17 +0.30 +0.05 -0.06
2015 03 +0.16 +0.26 +0.07 +0.05
2015 04 +0.08 +0.18 -0.01 +0.09
2015 05 +0.28 +0.36 +0.21 +0.27
2015 06 +0.33 +0.41 +0.25 +0.46
2015 07 +0.18 +0.33 +0.03 +0.47
2015 08 +0.27 +0.25 +0.30 +0.51
2015 09 +0.25 +0.34 +0.17 +0.55
2015 10 +0.43 +0.64 +0.21 +0.53
2015 11 +0.33 +0.43 +0.23 +0.53

The tropics continue warm due to El Nino conditions, but the temperature in recent months seems to have plateaued despite the climatological expectation of increasing temperature as we approach peak El Nino warmth in the next few months. This plateau, of course, could end at any time.

The global image for November, 2015 should be available in the next several days here.

The new Version 6 files (use the ones labeled “beta4”) should be updated soon, and are located here:

Lower Troposphere: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0beta/tlt
Mid-Troposphere: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0beta/tmt
Tropopause: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0beta/ttp
Lower Stratosphere: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0beta/tls

Spoiler alert…the following contains spoilers about what the Paris COP21 climate conference this week will actually accomplish.

Human-caused global warming and climate change is an interesting human malady. No matter whether you consider it a physical or emotional ailment, many of us simply know it to be true.

Many of us have personally experienced it in a heat wave, snow storm, hurricane, etc., which now feel different than they used to when they were mere weather events.

For example, Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) in 2009 declared, “Global warming creates volatility and I feel it when I’m flying. The storms are more volatile.”

This affliction will actually be greatly alleviated this week as those who have been stricken with it take a collective placebo pill in the form of yet another Earth-saving international agreement to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

SPOILER: We already know that the pill has no actual medicine in it. The commitments (or non-commitments) by various countries of the world have already been submitted and analyzed. And the prognosis is this: the agreements will have an unmeasurable effect on global temperatures, no matter what you believe about the human influence on climate.

But there is good news! The world will swallow that pill, and then experience a collective sigh of relief, for we will have done something to Save the Earth!

Those who most believe in human-caused climate change will hopefully receive the most relief of their symptoms. I saw some of these people at previous COP meetings in Montreal and Cancun. I described my first experience in Montreal at the 2005 COP11 as culture shock. People dressed up in all kinds of costumes meant to draw attention to whatever portion of the Earth is supposedly suffering from your SUV. Polar bear costumes are especially popular. Meanwhile, a frigid winter wind was blowing outside, which I was ill-equipped to handle despite being from northern Michigan.

The people participating in COPXX meetings are easily convinced that polar bears are disappearing…even though they haven’t been. They are convinced CO2 is a poison, even though it is necessary for life to exist on Earth—and, given that, is in amazingly short supply.

Later, at the 2009 COP16 in Cancun, I debated Daryl Hannah on TV, who seemed very informed on alternative energy strategies until we were off-camera and she told me we just need to switch to all renewables right away. The fact is that doing such a thing is a physical impossibility, unless you want to relegate humanity to a new Stone Age.

Even though I’m asked, I’ve stopped attending the COPXX meetings because what little remains of my mental health is too precious to me. In addition to my climate research dealing with physics and actual numbers, I must also already deal with a steady stream of interactions with the public and the media involving feelings and beliefs. I am ill-equipped to handle the latter, but it now goes with the territory in a climate scientist’s life.

So, as the United Nations declares yet another a landmark agreement to Save the Earth, just remember…sometimes placebos really do work. The danger, though, is that the politicians of the world will be emboldened to manufacture ever greater quantities of placebos, at ever-increasing costs to humanity.

Up to 20 million midwest U.S. residents are about to get some significant pre-Thanksgiving snowfall.

Portions of five Midwest states are now under winter storm warnings as 6 to 10 inches of snow are expected across Iowa, northern Illinois, and southern Lower Michigan. Portions of Chicago could see a foot of snow.

Here are the expected snowfall totals by mid-day Sunday (GFS model output courtesy of Weatherbell.com):

Total forecast snowfall by midday Sunday, 22 November 2015 (NWS GFS model).

After the snowstorm passes, temperatures could reach the single digits in northern Illinois on Sunday morning.

There I was, minding my own business, just making some sarcastic remarks on Facebook alluding to the hypocrisy of COP21 and those involved.

The next thing I know, people are claiming I want terrorists to attack COP21 (I’m not even going to advertise their craziness with links).

Here’s the entirety of what I wrote on FB:

Why ISIS Should Support COP21 in Paris…

After the horrific terror attacks in Paris last night, there is considerable speculation over the possible cancellation of the COP21 climate talks in Paris in a couple of weeks.

I will remind you that President Obama has stated that the threat of climate change is greater than the threat of terrorism. I will also remind you that many believe that ISIS would not have arisen if not for climate change, specifically, drought in Syria caused by your SUV.

It is only logical that ISIS should be supportive of COP21 in Paris, and that the conference should go on as planned. To enlightened minds, terrorism is clearly just a consequence of climate change. Fix the weather, and terrorism will go away.

If terrorism is such a minor, contained threat (as Obama just stated yesterday), and global warming is really the overriding threat facing humanity, how can we consider cancelling – or even postponing – COP21?

After all, isn’t COP21 our last, final, last chance to Save the Earth?

Just ignore centuries of history which demonstrates that the strict followers of the Koran have a holy mandate to take over the world for Islam, killing anyone who will not submit.

Yes, all of the world’s politicians who have supported a COP21 agreement should still plan on attending. And they should reach out to ISIS to join them in building a better world…a world without droughts.

In fact, in solidarity with the gun-control measures many of those politicians support (and which French law follows), any personal security personnel accompanying them should be unarmed.

Maybe it was that last line that got people all up in arms got people’s panties in a wad.

The multiple points I was making had to to with the silliness of various political positions (including taking guns out of the hands of law abiding citizens…can you imagine what would have happened if that Paris nightclub hostage ordeal was in Texas? No, you can’t, because it wouldn’t have even been tried in Texas).

Funny how the most powerful gun control advocates have no problem with using guns to protect themselves.

Today is the 40th anniversary of the sinking of the Great Lakes freighter Edmund Fitzgerald, on November 10, 1975, which took all 29 of the crew to the bottom of Lake Superior in 530 ft of water.

The Fitzgerald sank during a gale caused by an intense low pressure passing over Lake Superior. As the low moved east of the lake, unusually strong west to northwest winds caused waves that pushed the limits of what these freighters were designed to handle.

There are three theories of why the ship sank, and they all involve wind-driven waves. It is estimated that winds were gusting to close to 90 mph at the time of sinking, and the nearby Arthur M. Anderson reported being hit by rogue waves as high as 35 ft.

I lived on the lower St. Mary’s River which flows out of Lake Superior, and all freighters passed a few hundred yards in front of our house whether they were up-bound into or down-bound from Lake Superior, so I was familiar with both the Fitzgerald and the Anderson.

Those of us who lived in eastern Upper Michigan and who saw the passage of lake freighters nearly every day remember what we were doing when we heard the news that evening. In my case, my wife-to-be and I were driving in the dark during the windstorm. I was preparing to be an atmospheric science student at U. of Michigan and, like all meteorology students, if there was bad weather, I wanted to be in it.

We stopped in at the National Weather Service Office in the Sault, where I worked summers and knew all of the employees. One of them was on the phone yelling at the Fitzgerald‘s operator in Cleveland to “start paying attention to the weather up here!” He then slammed the phone down.

I distinctly remember the weather forecast model prediction for that storm, as I examined the forecast charts in the weather office a day or two before. Unlike the Wikipedia entry characterization, this was not a typical November storm.

The forecast low pressure was unusually intense, and the anticyclonic curvature of the isobars right behind the low suggested there was going to be phenomenal winds just after the low passage.

That’s exactly what happened.

The 711 ft. long ship now sits in two pieces on the lake bottom, symbolically straddling the U.S.-Canadian border. The Fitzgerald remains the largest of many ships that have sunk to the bottom of the Great Lakes. Most experts who have studied the sinking have concluded that the ship broke apart on the surface before it went down.

Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot immortalized the sinking with his Grammy Award-winning Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald a year later (1976).

AP Was There: 40 Years Ago Edmund Fitzgerald Sinks

As the 2015 Atlantic hurricane season nears its end, and as we enter the 11th year without a major hurricane (Cat3+) strike in the U.S., let’s look at how 2015 has shaped up.

Here are the cumulative number of North Atlantic hurricanes by calendar date for 2015, 2014, and 2005:

Those who are old enough to remember might recall that after the devastating 2005 season (remember Katrina?), this was going to be the “new normal” for Atlantic hurricane activity due to global warming. There were 15 hurricanes that year. The next year (2006) the bottom dropped out. The National Hurricane Center expected system after system to strengthen, and it almost never happened.

To update an old saying, “global warming is what you expect; weather is what you get.” This year we have had only three hurricanes so far. Tropical Storm Kate just formed this morning near the Bahamas, but it is not expected to reach hurricane strength and should remain offshore of the U.S. mainland.

Has there been any long term trend in Atlantic tropical cyclone activity? If so, it has been slightly downward. Here is Ryan Maue’s plot of the “Power Dissipation Index” since 1950, akin to his tropical “Accumulated Cyclone Energy” (ACE) index for the Atlantic, which monitors the total 3-D wind energy contained in tropical cyclones. It shows that the current lull in activity matches the lull back in the late 1970s and early 1980s:

I believe it was in the 1980s when the Director of the National Hurricane Center, Neil Frank, testified in congress that the lull in hurricane activity in the ’70s and ’80s had made people complacent, and people should expect an upturn in activity.

What was Dr. Frank’s reason for the warning? Global warming expectations? No, it was natural climate variations.

Neil Frank is now one of “us”…scientists who believe the human component of climate change — to the extent it exists — is not dangerous.

Now, it is true that global average tropical cyclone activity has increased again in the last year or so. But it remains to be seen whether this has anything to do with warmer temperatures or a long-term trend, since there are many conditions which must be satisfied for a tropical cyclone to form and intensify…not just ocean temperatures being a fraction of a degree higher.

I suppose this was inevitable, and Exxon Mobil probably expected it as well.

According to the Justin Gillis NYT story, the New York attorney general’s “investigation focuses on whether statements the company made to investors about climate risks as recently as this year were consistent with the company’s own long-running scientific research.”

The thing that astounds me about this is, as far as I know, Exxon Mobil “scientific research” would not have uncovered anything that was not already widely hypothesized (not “known”) by the scientific community, Al Gore, Greenpeace, school teachers, Hollywood actors, your 8 yr old son, et al.

How one compares a tobacco company cover-up of evidence that smoking kills millions of people, to human-caused climate change, which cannot be demonstrated to have occurred let alone cause even one death (or even inconvience) is beyond me.

But then, we live in a brave new world, don’t we?

That this was coming can be seen from the popular meme that conflates “climate change” with “human caused climate change”. For example, a few months ago The Guardian had a headline which crowed, “Exxon knew of climate change in 1981“.

What a stupid headline. Of course “climate change” exists. Medieval farmers enjoyed the fruits of it. Vikings in Greenland cursed it.

We knew about climate change long before Al Gore earned his “D” in Natural Science and decided to become an expert on the subject.

Natural climate change has caused (or at least contributed to) millions of deaths over the centuries. But our use of fossil fuels has enabled a level of prosperity which has made us much more resilient to climate change and weather disasters, maybe akin to the prosperity enjoyed in Medieval times when warmer conditions prevailed.

Where are the studies to investigate the possibility that modest warming has actually prevented severe weather? Major tornadoes and hurricanes in the U.S. have certainly seen a downturn in recent years. Maybe Exxon Mobil should be charging extra for this ‘positive externality’?

What about all the prevented cold weather, which still kills many more people than hot weather?

Instead, every bad thing that happens in weather is now blamed on carbon dioxide emissions. Too hot. Too cold. Not enough snow. Too much snow. It’s all our fault.

Medieval witchcraft. Time to burn some CEOs at the stake.

Even though sea level was slowly rising long before CO2 could be blamed, we now blame it on your SUV. In order to even begin to blame it even partially on CO2, the rise should be accelerating, which it (arguably) hasn’t.

Investigating Exxon Mobil for some sort of undisclosed knowledge of “climate change” is like investigating the agricultural industry for undisclosed knowledge that too much food can make people fat…except that there isn’t even any human fingerprint of global warming, like there is a stomach-print of overeating.

Or, maybe a better analogy is an investigation into the Mexican or Italian food industry for their secret knowledge that their spicy food causes peptic ulcers…except that theory was finally debunked, despite a 99% consensus in the medical community.

It’s easy to go after corporate giants, since they have so much money. Too bad people don’t realize the reason these corporations are so rich is they provide us with a standard of living we want more than other things we could have spent that money on. Econ 101.

And natural climate change is Climatology 101.

Or, at least it used to be.

DISCLOSURE: I’ve been known to give Exxon Mobil money in exchange for gasoline. But I usually use Chevron gas, which contans Techron which keeps my intake manifold and valves clean.

Alpine Meadows, CA basecam, 4 November 2015.

A series of Pacific storms mixed with some cold Canadian air is expected to result in up to 12 feet of new snow during the next week to 10 days over portions of the western U.S.

The latest GFS model forecast shows that about a dozen states will be receiving substantial pre-Thanksgiving snows, likely helped out by the current strong El Nino (graphic courtesy of WeatherBell.com, click for full-size):

GFS model forecast total snow accumulation by Sunday, Nov. 15, 2015.

A few states have already opened ski resorts early, with about 10 states now reporting snow on the ground.

While El Nino usually results in less snowfall over the West, this isn’t always the case, and the presence of the warm ocean “Blob” off the west coast is likely making this El Nino more unpredictable in its impacts on U.S. weather.