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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (914931)	1/16/2016 7:19:47 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574848

"I expect you do and are just being dishonest as usual." I expect you are projecting again. The next honest climate piece you post will be the first. In the meantime, expect more adjustments. The transition to automatic weather stations. We’d better study it now. This is a POST post. The Parallel Observations Science Team (POST) is looking across the world for climate records which simultaneously measure temperature, precipitation and other climate variables with a conventional sensor (for example, a thermometer) and modern automatic equipment. You may wonder why we take the painstaking effort of locating and studying these records. The answer is easy: the transition from manual to automated records has an effect on climate series and the analysis we do over them. In the last decades we have seen a major transition of the climate monitoring networks from conventional manual observations to automatic weather stations. It is recommended to compare these instruments before the substitution is effective with side by side measurements, which we call parallel measurements. Climatologists have also set up many longer experimental parallel measurements. They tell us that in most cases both sensors do not measure the same temperature or collect the same amount of precipitation. A different temperature is not only due to the change of the sensor itself, but automatic weather stations also often use a different, much smaller, screen to protect the sensor from the sun and the weather. Often the introduction of automatic weather stations is accompanied by a change in location and siting quality. From studies of single temperature networks that made such a transition we know that it can cause large jumps; the observed temperatures at a station can go up or down by as much as 1°C. Thus potentially this transition can bias temperature trends considerably. We are now trying to build a global dataset with parallel measurements to be able to quantify how much the transition to automatic weather stations influences the global mean temperature estimates used to study global warming.... variable-variability.blogspot.com

To: Brumar89 who wrote (914931)	1/16/2016 7:25:07 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574848

Here's some good news about your old boss and existential threat, Killer Coal. And then there was one. So, one more to go. Arch Coal files for bankruptcy, joining a half-dozen other major American coal companies going bankrupt over the last year. Arch is the second biggest coal producer, after Peabody. And Peabody is now worth 0.4% of what it was valued five years ago. The main, direct business effect is to make it very unlikely that coal corporations will be able to finance much anything, either through bonds or stock issuance. The political impact seems more important - the chart above shows what people think of coal's future. And in political news, Obama has suspended new coal leases on federal lands for a three year review period. If a Democrat replaces Obama then this suspension will be permanent. While the administration claims current leases can sustain production for 20 years, the suspension reduces the flexibility to shift production between different leaseholders. Production level also depends on price, so the suspension eliminates the chance to switch to newer and cheaper coal sources on federal land, especially after the cheapest coal gets mined from existing leases. Obama also has a $10 million program to assist economically-declining coal areas of Appalachia, assuming the Republican Congress passes it. That assumption isn't guaranteed, even though Republicans dominate the area, because the program helps people and not the coal corporations that fund the Republican Party. Hillary Clinton has a much bigger $30 billion proposal specifically targeting assistance to present and retired coal miners. This relates back to the bankruptcies - the companies are using them to void pension obligations and to transfer ownership from stockholders to lenders, and among the stockholders are miner pension funds. Again coal companies and Republican leadership reject the help, arguing instead for trickle-down benefits of increasing coal company revenues and expecting miners to get some of the money. Last, world coal consumption may have peaked in 2013. China and India may both be ramping down their coal imports. I'm not sure I believe their claims that they'll end imports in two years, but it's more evidence that the international market is in decline, which can affect the love affair with coal and climate denialism in places like Australia and the US. Some very good news. rabett.blogspot.com