Global Ocean Cooling Continues

July Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) are now available, and we can see further ocean cooling led by plummeting temps in the  Tropics and Southern Hemisphere, continuing the downward trajectory from the previous 12 months. Note that higher temps in 2015 and 2016 were first of all due to a sharp rise in Tropical SST, beginning in March 2015, peaking in January 2016, and steadily declining back to its beginning level. We have seen lots of claims about the temperature records for 2016 and 2015 proving dangerous man made warming.  At least one senator stated that in a confirmation hearing.  Yet HadSST3 data for the last two years shows how obvious is the ocean’s governing of global average temperatures. –Ron Clutz, Science Matters, 10 August 2017

Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt said his staff will gauge the “accuracy” of a major federal science report that blames human activity for climate change — just days after researchers voiced their fears to The New York Times that the Trump administration would alter or suppress its findings. “Frankly this report ought to be subjected to peer-reviewed, objective-reviewed methodology and evaluation,” Pruitt told a Texas radio show Thursday. “Science should not be politicized. Science is not something that should be just thrown about to try to dictate policy in Washington, D.C.” Scientists called his remarks troubling, especially because the report — part of a broader, congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment — has already undergone “rigorous” peer-review by a 14-person committee at the National Academies. –Emily Holden, Politico, 11 August 2017

Preparations are well underway in the liberal media to make August 18 a milestone in the history of climate policy.  That is the date when a special U.S. government report on the state of climate science by authors from 13 federal agencies, known as the U.S. Global Change Research Program, is due to be released. But if August 18 does become a day to be remembered, it will be as a much-hyped political event, not a scientific one. The substance of the USGCRP report apparently only rehashes, at great length, research that was assessed even more exhaustively in the Fifth Assessment Report or FAR, published in 2013 by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. What is different is that the well-known research findings — well known to experts, anyway — are summarized in the USGCRP document in a way that makes them appear newer, stronger and more alarmist than they really are.  –W. David Montgomery, Fox News, 15 August 2017

A coalition of businesses has called on one of the UK’s most powerful charities to stop fighting plans for a major off-shore wind farm and warned that the livelihoods of hundreds of families are at stake. Twenty-nine companies claim that the continued legal action by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) could further delay or even kill off the £2 billion renewable energy scheme and the 600 jobs involved in it. The RSPB has decided to take the last legal step allowed it by appealing directly to the Supreme Court. It argues that Scottish ministers were wrong to approve the scheme, and if three other offshore developments were also given the go-ahead, they could lead to a “major decline in seabird populations”. —The Times, 16 August 2017

Imagine a sausage factory – the luckiest, most profitable sausage factory in the world. Its machines crank out their sausages, and lorries carry them to supermarkets. So far, so normal. But this particular factory makes as many sausages as the management and staff choose. If they feel like taking the day off, the lorries and shelves stay empty. If they want to go a bit wild, they sometimes make so many sausages that there aren’t enough lorries to take them away. Or they carry on cranking out sausages even if the shelves are already full. And here’s the really amazing thing: even when the lorries can’t cope or there is no demand for sausages, the factory gets paid. Indeed, they get paid more for not sending the sausages to the shops than for sending them. This is such great business that the factory is actually building an extension, so it can threaten to make even more unwanted sausages. Does all that sound completely mad? Of course, it does. But it’s what happens in the British electricity industry – where the blackmailing, money-printing sausage factory is a wind farm in Scotland. –John Constable and Matt Ridley, CapX, 10 August 2017

The Daily Telegraph recently published a claim by Aviva that subsidies to fossil fuels in the United Kingdom amounted to $6.5 billion dollars a year. Examination of the source behind this claim, data from the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), reveals that it consists of $1 billion of tax relief and $5.5 billion of public finance to international aid projects. Neither of these is “subsidies” in any meaningful sense. –John Constable, GWPF Energy Comment, 15 August 2017