Reposting -- This Really Is Huge, September 5, 2014; "Pauses Of 15 Years Zero Out Any So-Called Trends" -- NOAA

Updates

March 2, 2015: decision on where plastics plant to be located will be delayed. 

February 15, 2015: it is now being reported that the fertilizer plant to be built in Jamestown needs more water than Jamestown area can provide. Options are limited:

CHS tried to get permits to use water from aquifers around Jamestown. The State Water Commission, which evaluates the availability of water and issues permits, said many of the water rights for the area already had been allocated. 

Something seems a bit fishy; shouldn't this have been worked out by now?

Original Post

Just last week I made the comment:

If a new project in the Bakken is not followed by "-est" -- the biggest, the largest, -- it hardly makes news.

Then, this morning, Kent wrote:

"$3 billion here, $3 billion there." 

Remember, a single Bakken well costs upwards of $10 million. A 14-well pad, $150 million.
Two hundred wells/month in the Bakken. $2 billion/month just for the wells.

But this is what caught my eye and the eyes of others, today. It was a big enough story to make Yahoo!In-Play:

CHS Inc. to build fertilizer plant at Spiritwood, N.D.; plant to cost ~$3 bln and employ ~160-180 people: Co announced it will proceed with construction of a fertilizer manufacturing plant at Spiritwood, N.D.

• The CHS Board of Directors approved final plans for the ~$3 bln project at its September meeting. Groundbreaking will take place following completion of additional details, with the plant intended to be fully operational in the first half of calendar 2018. When complete, the plant will employ 160-180 people.
• The CHS fertilizer plant will produce more than 2,400 tons of ammonia daily which will be further converted to urea, UAN and Diesel Exhaust Fuel.

2018. I will be only three or four years older. Awesome.

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Whatever Happened To Global Warming?

An op-ed in the WSJ:

On Sept. 23 the United Nations will host a party for world leaders in New York to pledge urgent action against climate change. Yet leaders from China, India and Germany have already announced that they won't attend the summit and others are likely to follow, leaving President Obama looking a bit lonely.

Could it be that they no longer regard it as an urgent threat that some time later in this century the air may get a bit warmer?

In effect, this is all that's left of the global-warming emergency the U.N. declared in its first report on the subject in 1990.

The U.N. no longer claims that there will be dangerous or rapid climate change in the next two decades.

Last September, between the second and final draft of its fifth assessment report, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change quietly downgraded the warming it expected in the 30 years following 1995, to about 0.5 degrees Celsius from 0.7 (or, in Fahrenheit, to about 0.9 degrees, from 1.3).

Even that is likely to be too high.

The climate-research establishment has finally admitted openly what skeptic scientists have been saying for nearly a decade: Global warming has stopped since shortly before this century began. 

Baraq O'Bama is going to be a bit lonely -- but mainstream media is going to use a lot of ink on this conference.

Might as well add this:

Two years before Mr. Whitehouse's article, climate scientists were already admitting in emails among themselves that there had been no warming since the late 1990s.

"The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998," wrote Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia in Britain in 2005.

He went on: "Okay it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn't statistically significant."

If the pause lasted 15 years, they conceded, then it would be so significant that it would invalidate the climate-change models upon which policy was being built.

A report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) written in 2008 made this clear: "The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more." [Read that again.]

Well, the pause has now lasted for 16, 19 or 26 years—depending on whether you choose the surface temperature record or one of two satellite records of the lower atmosphere. That's according to a new statistical calculation by Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guelph in Canada. 

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[The University of Guelph is consistently ranked as a top comprehensive university in Canada by Maclean's magazine, and given top marks for student satisfaction among medium-sized universities in Canada by The Globe and Mail. It has held these rankings with its reputation, innovative research-intensive programs, and lively campus life cited as particular strengths. The University of Guelph has also been ranked 50 among the top 100 universities under 50 years old by Times Higher Educaton. The university has a key focus on life science and has ranked 76-100 in the world by ARWU.]