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Posts tagged ‘warming’

Apr 16

earth

Climate scientists struggle to explain warming slowdown

Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent — Reuters — April 16, 2013

(Reuters) – Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions.

Often focused on century-long trends, most climate models failed to predict that the temperature rise would slow, starting around 2000. Scientists are now intent on figuring out the causes and determining whether the respite will be brief or a more lasting phenomenon.

Getting this right is essential for the short and long-term planning of governments and businesses ranging from energy to construction, from agriculture to insurance. Many scientists say they expect a revival of warming in coming years.

Theories for the pause include that deep oceans have taken up more heat with the result that the surface is cooler than expected, that industrial pollution in Asia or clouds are blocking the sun, or that greenhouse gases trap less heat than previously believed.

The change may be a result of an observed decline in heat-trapping water vapor in the high atmosphere, for unknown reasons. It could be a combination of factors or some as yet unknown natural variations, scientists say.

Weak economic growth and the pause in warming is undermining governments’ willingness to make a rapid billion-dollar shift from fossil fuels. Almost 200 governments have agreed to work out a plan by the end of 2015 to combat global warming.

“The climate system is not quite so simple as people thought,” said Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician and author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” who estimates that moderate warming will be beneficial for crop growth and human health.

Some experts say their trust in climate science has declined because of the many uncertainties. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had to correct a 2007 report that exaggerated the pace of melt of the Himalayan glaciers and wrongly said they could all vanish by 2035.   Continue reading, here…..

Mar 29

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It’s the cold, not global warming, that we should be worried about

Fraser Nelson — The Telegraph — March 28, 2013

No one seems upset that in modern Britain, old people are freezing to death as hidden taxes make fuel more expensive

A few months ago, a group of students in Oslo produced a brilliant spoof video that lampooned the charity pop song genre. It showed a group of young Africans coming together to raise money for those of us freezing in the north. “A lot of people aren’t aware of what’s going on there right now,” says the African equivalent of Bob Geldof. “People don’t ignore starving people, so why should we ignore cold people? Frostbite kills too. Africa: we need to make a difference.” The song – Africa for Norway – has been watched online two million times, making it one of Europe’s most popular political videos.

The aim was to send up the patronising, cliched way in which the West views Africa. Norway can afford to make the joke because there, people don’t tend to die of the cold. In Britain, we still do. Each year, an official estimate is made of the “excess winter mortality” – that is, the number of people dying of cold-related illnesses. Last winter was relatively mild, and still 24,000 perished. The indications are that this winter, which has dragged on so long and with such brutality, will claim 30,000 lives, making it one of the biggest killers in the country. And still, no one seems upset.

Somewhere between the release of the 1984 Band Aid single and Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, political attention shifted away from such problems. The idea of people (especially old people) dying in their homes from conditions with which we are all familiar now seems relatively boring. Much political attention is still focused on global warming, and while schemes to help Britain prepare for the cold are being cut, the overseas aid budget is being vastly expanded. Saving elderly British lives has somehow become the least fashionable cause in politics.

The reaction to the 2003 heatwave was extraordinary. It was blamed for 2,000 deaths, and taken as a warning that Britain was horribly unprepared for the coming era of snowless winters and barbecue summers. The government’s chief scientific officer, Sir David King, later declared that climate change was “more serious even than the threat of terrorism” in terms of the number of lives that could be lost. Such language is never used about the cold, which kills at least 10 times as many people every winter. Before long, every political party had signed up to the green agenda.

Since Sir David’s exhortations, some 250,000 Brits have died from the cold, and 10,000 from the heat. It is horribly clear that we have been focusing on the wrong enemy. Instead of making sure energy was affordable, ministers have been trying to make it more expensive, with carbon price floors and emissions trading schemes. Fuel prices have doubled over seven years, forcing millions to choose between heat and food – and government has found itself a major part of the problem.  Continue reading, here…..

Mar 20

earth warming
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The Great Green Con no. 1: The hard proof that finally shows global warming forecasts that are costing you billions were WRONG all along

David Rose — Daily Mail — March 16, 2013

No, the world ISN’T getting warmer (as you may have noticed). Now we reveal the official data that’s making scientists suddenly change their minds about climate doom. So will eco-funded MPs stop waging a green crusade with your money? Well… what do YOU think?

The Mail on Sunday today presents irrefutable evidence that official predictions of global climate warming have been catastrophically flawed.

The graph on this page blows apart the ‘scientific basis’ for Britain reshaping its entire economy and spending billions in taxes and subsidies in order to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. These moves have already added £100 a year to household energy bills.

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Steadily climbing orange and red bands on the graph show the computer predictions of world temperatures used by the official United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The estimates – given with 75 per cent and 95 per cent certainty – suggest only a five per cent chance of the real temperature falling outside both bands.

But when the latest official global temperature figures from the Met Office are placed over the predictions, they show how wrong the estimates have been, to the point of falling out of the ‘95 per cent’ band completely.

The graph shows in incontrovertible detail how the speed of global warming has been massively overestimated. Yet those forecasts have had a ruinous impact on the bills we pay, from heating to car fuel to huge sums paid by councils to reduce carbon emissions.

The eco-debate was, in effect, hijacked by false data. The forecasts have also forced jobs abroad as manufacturers relocate to places with no emissions targets.

A version of the graph appears in a leaked draft of the IPCC’s landmark Fifth Assessment Report due out later this year. It comes as leading climate scientists begin to admit that their worst fears about global warming will not be realised.   Continue reading, here….

 

Mar 1

earth warming

Peer-Reviewed Survey Finds Majority Of Scientists Skeptical Of Global Warming Crisis

James M. Taylor — Somewhat Reasonable — February 18, 2013

Don’t look now, but maybe a scientific consensus exists concerning global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies.

By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.

The survey results show geoscientists (also known as earth scientists) and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists. Two recent surveys of meteorologists (summarized here and here) revealed similar skepticism of alarmist global warming claims.

According to the newly published survey of geoscientists and engineers, merely 36 percent of respondents fit the “Comply with Kyoto” model. The scientists in this group “express the strong belief that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature, and humans are the main or central cause.”

The authors of the survey report, however, note that the overwhelming majority of scientists fall within four other models, each of which is skeptical of alarmist global warming claims.

The survey finds that 24 percent of the scientist respondents fit the “Nature Is Overwhelming” model. “In their diagnostic framing, they believe that changes to the climate are natural, normal cycles of the Earth.” Moreover, “they strongly disagree that climate change poses any significant public risk and see no impact on their personal lives.”

(To continue reading, click here)

Jan 2

un
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United Nations Global Warming Propaganda Exposed

Andrew Puhanic — The Globalist Report — December 2012

A new study published by the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change has concluded that the impact of Global Warming on Earths natural resources is much less than predicted and is in fact responsible for improving plant growth and development.

The study argues that the United Nations has lied to the public about claims that current temperature levels and changing precipitation patterns are beginning to stress Earth’s natural and agro-ecosystems by reducing plant growth and development.

The study also argues that the United Nations has misled the public with its claims that the world needs to drastically reduce the ongoing  rise in the air’s CO2 content because crops will fail, food shortages will become commonplace, and many species of plants (and the animals that depend on them for food) will be driven to extinction.

(To continue reading about the studies findings, click here)

 

Jan 2

Screencap, Live cam at North Pole, May 28, 2012

Forget global warming – Alaska headed for an ice age

Ice Age Now — January 1, 2013

“Defiant as ever, the state that gave rise to Sarah Palin is bucking the mainstream yet again,” says this article in the Alaska Dispatch.

The thought that Alaska may be headed into an ice age “may not be news to Alaskans coping with another round of 50-below during the coldest winter in two decades,” the article continues. Nor would it be news to the “mariners locked out of the Bering Sea this spring by record ice growth.”

“In the first decade since 2000, the 49th state cooled 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

That’s a “large value for a decade,” say scientists G. Wendler, L. Chen and B. Moore of the Alaska Climate Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

According to Wendler et al, the cooling is widespread — holding true for 19 of the 20 National Weather Service stations sprinkled from one corner of Alaska to the other.

In a report published this year in The Open Atmospheric Science Journal (link below), “the cooling is most significant in Western Alaska, where King Salmon on the Alaska Peninsula saw temperatures drop most sharply, a significant 4.5 degrees for the decade.”

(To continue reading, click here)

Dec 30

earth warming

Europe, wind, warming … We’re slowly waking up to reality

Christopher Booker — The Telegraph — December 29, 2012

 

There could be few more apt epitaphs for the year now ending than a recollection of the headlines in April that greeted a stark warning from the Environment Agency. Fuelled by the predictions of the climate-change-obsessed Met Office (and the the official policy, since 2007, of the similarly fixated EU) that we will have “hotter, drier summers” for decades to come, the agency foretold that the drought conditions of the early spring were likely to last “until Christmas and perhaps beyond”. The prophecy was swiftly followed by the wettest late spring, the wettest summer, the wettest autumn and the wettest Christmas we have ever known – eight months of near-continuous rain and floods amounting to England’s wettest year since records began.

For many of the major stories which have long been followed by this column, 2012 has been the year when long-dominant belief systems and fondly held illusions have been conspicuously falling apart, portending a time of agonising reappraisal when familiar certainties give way to greater realism and painful rethinking.

On Tuesday, for instance, much coverage will be given to the 40th anniversary of the day in 1973 when Britain finally junked “1,000 years of history” – in the famous words of Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell – and threw in her lot with the attempt to create an all-powerful super-government over the nations of Europe. (Gaitskell had shrewdly predicted, in his speech back in 1962, what the Common Market, as it was then known, was intended eventually to become.)

(To continue reading, click here)

Dec 7

earth warming
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Is the Global Warming scare the greatest delusion in history?

The scare over man-made global warming is not only the scientific scandal of our generation, but a suicidal flight from reality.

Christopher Booker — The Telegraph — November 2011

To grasp the almost suicidal state of unreality our Government has been driven into by the obsession with global warming, it is necessary to put together the two sides to an overall picture – each vividly highlighted by events of recent days.

On one hand there is the utterly lamentable state of the science which underpins it all, illuminated yet again by “Climategate 2.0”, the latest release of emails between the leading scientists who for years have been at the heart of the warming scare (which I return to below). On the other hand, we see the damage done by the political consequences of this scare, which will directly impinge, in various ways, on all our lives.

It is hard to know where to begin, after a week which opened with The Sunday Telegraph’s exclusive on a blast of realism from Prince Philip over the folly of our Government’s infatuation with useless windmills. Then came an excoriatory report from the House of Lords on how we have so run down our nuclear expertise that it is doubtful whether we can hope to run a new generation of nuclear power stations. Next, there was a report from a leading Swiss bank finding that the EU’s “emissions trading scheme” has wasted $287 billion (£186billion) over six years – paid by all of us, to achieve nothing in terms of reducing “carbon emissions”. There was also a front page story in another newspaper, warning that (as readers of this column have long been aware) within nine years we could all be paying nearly £300 a year to subsidise solar panels and those same useless windmills.

Let’s start, however, with a form of insanity which has so far made few headlines – a Government policy which, in the next few years, will inflate the cost of a new home in Britain by as much as 66 per cent.

(To continue reading, click here)

Nov 15

earth warming
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Global Warming and Climate Change are back on the topic menu. And of course, governments are looking at it as an excuse for a Carbon Tax.

Benjamin Gaul — The Guardian — November 18, 2012

Why are we still even having this conversation? Oh yeah; billions of dollars in grants and taxes, taken from an unsuspecting public and given tax-free to the Wizards of Smart who keep the lie going, annually. Silly question. Let me rephrase that.

How can governments around the world continue to harp about a problem which only exists in Computer Models, in the face of all the Real World data which completely refutes said Computer Modeling?

OK, so nobody told you there was credible, verifiable data out there which debunks the whole myth of Global Warming / Climate Change. And if it’s ever brought up, it’s only to be laughed at as some wild conspiracy theorist nut-job making unsubstantiated claims. Or that the 31,487 scientists who signed the Global Warming Petition must ALL be in pay of Big Oil, they are scientists of the wrong fields or they don’t actually exist. None of them. But all the people who tell you that, fail to mention that research is big business, which is most often driven by ideology.

The scientists who know how to write the grants, get the money.

A 2005 study in the science journal Nature, surveyed 3247 US researchers who were all publicly funded by the National Institutes of Health, which is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. HHS is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and health-related research, and consists of 27 separate institutes and centers. Out of the 3247 scientists questioned, 503 admitted to altering design, methodology or results of their studies, because of pressure from their funding source. And those were just the scientists willing to be honest.

The trick for getting the Grant money seems to lay in what your study purports to discover. Lets say you wanted to study the dietary habits of the Red Tailed Squirrel of the Sierra Nevada mountains. You could title your grant proposal thus: “A study of the dietary habits of the Red Tailed Squirrel of the Sierra Nevada mountains.” Which makes perfect sence.

But you’re competing against another scientist whose title is “A study of the effects of Global Warming and Climate Change on the dietary habits of the Red Tailed…” You get the point. Both surveys will gather the exact same data, but only one of them forwards the current political mindset. Guess which study will get funded.

(To continue reading, click here)

May 1

It just keeps getting worse and worse for the climate change crowd

Richard Stalker — WebProNews — May 1, 2012

The environmental scientists are still not on board when it comes to global warming. Even after climategate showed that global warming was a huge conspiracy. Now their beloved wind farms are shown to have an enviornmental impact on the areas around them.

In a study released by the journal ‘Nature Climate Change,’ published a study that found that the wind farms in west Texas are actually changing the temperature around the turbines by 0.72 °C per decade.

“Wind power is going to be a part of the solution to the climate change, air pollution and energy security problem,” said Liming Zhou, at the University of Albany in New York. “But understanding the impacts of windfarms is critical for developing management strategies to ensure the long-term sustainability of wind power.”

Continued … here

May 1

Sky Falls for Wind Energy

Daniel J. Graeber — April 30, 2012

A study featured in the journal Nature suggests that the latest victim of the green-versus-clean debate is the wind turbine. Researchers looking at wind farms in Texas found that overnight temperatures could increase over time compared with areas that don’t have wind farms.

This prompted a flurry of media massaging over the global warming link to wind farms, but there were a few “ifs” in the study that might quiet the alarm bells.

The study, published in the journal Nature, found that while wind energy was among the fastest growing renewable energy sectors in the world, there were some drawbacks. The study found that warming attributed to wind farms occurred at a rate of about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. The scientists involved with the study said the warming trend, if large enough, could have “noticeable impacts” on the climate.

Sound the alarms!

“Wind farms can cause climate change,” reads the headline from The Daily Telegraph.

“Wind farms are warming the earth,” writes Fox News.

More sensibly, however, was the caveat in The Christian Science Monitor that included the all-important word “could” and “local” in its headline, “How wind farms could cause local (but not global) warming.”   The scientists found that gently rotating wind turbines work much like the ceiling fan in your living room. Commercial-scale wind farms create a “gentle turbulence” that mixes rising hot air with sinking cooler air, meaning frost might not appear on the ground below a wind farm despite freezing temperatures.

(continued……here)

Apr 9

1939 — Riddle of the retreating glaciers

From an Australian newspaper

Friday, January 13, 1939

RIDDLE OF THE GLACIERS — Ice Retreating, Geologists Still Puzzled

One of the riddles which is puzzling geologists all over the world is the continuous retreat of the ice glaciers.  Does this phenomenon indicate that the sun is getting hotter, as some astronomers believe or is it dependent up comparatively unimportant changes in the earth’s atmosphere?

Considerations such as these were discussed by Professor R. Speight, formerly professor of geology at Canterbury College, Christchurch, New Zealand and now curator of the Canterbury Museum, in his presidential address to the geology section of the Science Congress today.  His subject was “Some Aspects of Glaciation in New Zealand.”

The steady retreat of the glaciers in New Zealand, he said, had been observed during the last 70 years.  Photographs taken in 1896 and 1933 showed that several glaciershad retreated distances varying from 100 yards to half a mile in 40 years.

WORLD WIDE PHENOMENON

The phenomenon, however, was world-wide.  Equally impressive records were obtainable from Switzerland, Scandinavia, Iceland and the United States.  Attempts had been made to reconcile these observations with the Bruckner cycle of climate change every 36 years, Professor Speight said, but so many discrepancies occurred that in his opinion, precise synchronization with that period could not be accepted.

In Alaska, glaciers had been retreating from 100 to 200 years, the average rate of recession being about 50 feet a year.  The Antarctic ice-sheet also showed signs of recent retreat.

“In fact” said Professor Speight, ‘no case is recorded of a region of the world in which there are present signs of an advance.  This is quite apart from the general retreat since the Pleistocene age and may be merely a pausing phase.  It’s precise significance can only be determined by continued observation.”

Government of Australia Archives

Mar 10

Monckton’s Schenectady showdown

There’s no shortage of esteemed, knowledgable individuals who provide the backup support for our fight.  Thanks to Watt’sUpWithThat? for showcasing this lecture at Union College. — Donna Quixote

THE NEWS that Lord Monckton was to give his “Climate of Freedom” lecture at Union College in Schenectady, New York, had thrown the university’s environmentalists into a turmoil. The campus environmentalists set up a Facebook page announcing a counter-meeting of their own immediately following Monckton’s lecture. There is no debate about global warming, they announced. There is a consensus. The science is settled. Their meeting would be addressed by professors and PhDs, the “true” scientists, no less. Sparks, it seemed, were gonna fly.

Traveling with Lord Monckton on the East Coast leg of his current whistle-stop tour of the US and Canada, I was looking forward to documenting the Schenectady showdown. I have had the pleasure of listening to His Lordship at previous campus events. He is at his best when confronted by a hostile audience. The angrier and more indignant they are, the more he seems to like it.

The afternoon of the event, Lord Monckton appeared on the CFACT leaders’ hour-long weekly show on the Union College radio station. As a result, that evening 200 people packed a campus lecture theater to hear Lord Monckton speak.

As they filed in, Lord Monckton was chatting contentedly to a quaveringly bossy woman with messy blonde hair who was head of the college environmental faction. Her group had set up a table at the door of the auditorium, covered in slogans scribbled on messy bits of recycled burger boxes held together with duct tape (Re-Use Cardboard Now And Save The Planet). “There’s a CONSENSUS!” she shrieked.

“That, Madame, is intellectual baby-talk,” replied Lord Monckton. Had she not heard of Aristotle’s codification of the commonest logical fallacies in human discourse, including that which the medieval schoolmen would later describe as the argumentum ad populum, the headcount fallacy?  From her reddening face and baffled expression, it was possible to deduce that she had not. Nor had she heard of the argumentum ad verecundiam, the fallacy of appealing to the reputation of those in authority.

Lord Monkton Schools Watermelons

Watts Up With That? website

Mar 8

The Grand View: 4 Billion Years Of Climate Change

Submitted by Doug L. Hoffman – 08/27/2009 — The Resilient Earth

Two of the terms bandied about by global warming alarmists are “unprecedented” and “irreversible.” It is troubling that scientists, who should know better, persist in  using these terms even though the history of our planet clearly shows that neither term is accurate. Proof of this inaccuracy is obvious if we look back over the history of Earth, taking the “Grand View” of historical climate change.

According to Meg Urry, the head of the physics department at Yale University: “Scientists observe nature, then develop theories that describe their observations. Science is driven by nature itself, and nature gives us no choice. It is what it is.” While some of the dates presented here may change and scientists continue to argue some of the fine points, here is what science thinks it knows about life, the Universe and everything.

Around 13.7 billion years ago the Universe came into existence. Not long afterward the Milky Way galaxy was formed. Stars formed, transmuted elements in nuclear fire and ended their lives in supernovae explosions. This cycle was repeated many times for many different stars.

Then, 4.6 billion years ago our Sun was born out of the ashes of older dead stars. Along with the Sun a large brood of planets was also formed, including the one we call Earth. A million years after the birth of our sun, the violent explosion of a nearby supernova nearly ended life on Earth before it began. Over the next four and a half billion years, forces of nature shaped our planet and the life it harbored.

Buffeted by supernovae, barely surviving the traumatic birth of the Moon, bombarded by asteroids, the resilient Earth endured. And despite planet-freezing ice ages, devastating mass extinctions and ever changing climate life not only survived, it thrived.  Even though meteors continued to rain down on the young planet there is evidence that as long as 4.2 billion years ago liquid water, the prerequisite for life as we know it, was present. The evidence also indicates that life has been present on our planet for close to 4 billion years, though for most of that time it was relatively simple single celled life. At the start, Earth’s atmosphere was a toxic mix of methane, carbon dioxide and ammonia—oxygen was nearly absent in the atmosphere of early Earth. To humans and most of the world’s familiar flora and fauna, this atmosphere would have been toxic.

Asteroid impacts, tremendous volcanic eruptions, and shifting tectonic plates resulted in drastic changes in climate and the emergence of new life forms. Somewhere along the way the simple microorganisms, which were ancient Earth’s only inhabitants, developed photosynthesis that created a net gain of oxygen first in the ocean and later in the atmosphere. Then, 2.3 billion years ago, the world’s first ecological disaster occurred when free oxygen established a permanent presence in the atmosphere. Known as the Great Oxidation or the Oxygen Catastrophe, almost every living thing on Earth died as a result of this massive bacteria-induced climate change.

Read full article here

Observations

  • Earth’s temperature is always changing.
  • Over time there have been periods when it has been colder than it is today.
  • Life has persisted during periods both hot and cold.
  • There is no one “right” temperature.
  • Carbon dioxide has always been present in Earth’s atmosphere.
  • Over time there have been periods when CO2has increased and decreased naturally.
  • Life has persisted during periods with high CO2 and low CO2.
  • CO2levels will change with or without human contributions.
  • Over time there have been a number of ice ages—Life has endured multiple ice ages.

What the future holds climate scientists are unable to portend with all their computer models and IPCC consensus reports. The Earth and its climate are constantly changing—there is no one correct climate or temperature for our planet. Those who say CO2 is the most important factor in climate change, that human GHG emissions will cause runaway global warming, have no historical basis for such claims.

As Earth’s climate history has shown, nothing predicted by the global warming alarmists would be unprecedented—Earth’s climate has been colder than today’s and much, much warmer. CO2 levels have also been many times higher than they currently are, even during ice ages. Ice ages come and go, caused by mechanisms mankind is powerless to control. And after every ice age the world warms and the glaciers disappear only to return millions of years later. No change in climate is irreversible. Given 4 billion years of Earth history and 542 million years of complex life, blaming mankind for 9,000 years of global warming seems rather silly.

Mar 6

Global annualized temperature

“full of [snip] up to their eyebrows”

by   — March 4, 2012

Guest Post by Dr. Robert Brown,
Physics Dept. Duke University [elevated from comments]

Dr. Brown mentions “global temperature” several times. I’d like to know what he thinks of this.

Dr. Brown thinks that this is a very nice piece of work, and is precisely the reason that he said that anybody who claims to know the annualized average temperature of the Earth, or the Ocean, to 0.05 K is, as the saying goes, full of [snip] up to their eyebrows.

What I think one can define is an average “Global Temperature” — noting well the quotes — by following some fixed and consistent rule that goes from a set of data to a result. For example, the scheme that is used to go from satellite data to the UAH lower troposphere temperature. This scheme almost certainly does not return “the average Global Temperature of the Earth” in degrees absolute as something that reliably represents the coarse-grain averaged temperature of (say) the lowest 5 kilometers of the air column, especially not the air column as its height varies over an irregular terrain that is itself sometimes higher than 5 kilometers. It does, however, return something that is likely to be close to what this average would be if one could sample and compute it, and one at least hopes that the two would co-vary monotonically most of the time.

 

Full article

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