XDA

A pretty good writer Timothy Egan, whom I had never heard of before this, gives a tutorial on how not to be persuasive in his prissy little bitch of a article in the NYT here.

Let's start with the basics. CO2, the beneficial trace gas, does very little of the actual 'greenhouse' warming of our atmosphere. H2O does almost all of it. Furthermore, the curve of how increased atmospheric CO2 warms the atmosphere is asymptotic, that is, it flattens out quickly, so that the first doubling of CO2,  from 140 to 280 ppmv, increases temperature about two degrees but after that doubling again of CO2, from 280 to 560 ppmv, has ever diminishing returns and from 370 to 740 ppmv, the increase is just over one degree. Since we won't get to 740 ppmv until deep into the 22nd Century, that's not very scary. To get to an alarming increase in global temperature, the true believers have to rely on an amplification theory--the little bit of more heat from CO2 causes more water to evaporate and that increased water vapor increases the temperature even more. Without water vapor amplification, there is no alarming rise in temperature possible, and the alarming part of the global warming climate change meme goes away. Check it out here and here.



So the burning of fossil fuel necessarily results in more water in the atmosphere, according to the alarmist. Which makes Mr. Egan's title a little ironic--Days of Dessication. Shouldn't it be ever wetter in the atmosphere? He's talking about the current drought in California. He talks about our 'fevered' planet like a good little alarmist, but then he stumbles into this truthful statement.

The drought itself may not be a result of climate change...

That's true, there were droughts in California that lasted over a century in the past 1500 years, back when there was no fossil fuel burning. It seems very unlikely that this two year drought is anything outside the normal ebb and flow of the clouds above California. Unfortunately, then Egan adds this nonsense to his true statement:

...but it is made worse by all the meteorological complications.

What?

Oh, by the way, here are the long term Palmer drought indices for the middle of this month. Most of the United States is in good shape as far as drought is concerned. So much for the Permanent Southwestern Drought. My state is going like gangbusters hydrologically speaking

I think the short term drought was made worse because central Californians can no longer store sufficient water to survive a common drought because they have to keep it flowing to the sea to save the three inch bait fish, the delta smelt. Millions of acre feet of water have not been stored because of ecological concerns seriously out of balance. People first, smelts second, I always say. Not the other way around. I'll skip the smelt it, deltaed it non-comedy. Mr. Egan avoids talking about the real delta smelt issue beyond mere assertion that the smelt is absolutely key to a health California ecology. Yeah, right, about as vital as the Shoshone pupfish.

Egan seems to prefers to go ad hominem, a lot, rather than respond to the 'denier' arguments with rational counter arguments. This preference makes him come across as a smug asshole. Examples:

No surprise, some of the worst deniers of the obvious come from places where it pays to look the other way. Let me introduce Representative Devin Nunes, Republican from Fresno. Like most elected members of his party, Nunes apparently skipped out of science class.

I can't find out what Mr. Egan studied at U. Wash, while I was down the coast at Stanford, four decades ago. He certainly does not mention his vast and superior scientific studies anywhere on his little used website (We share an admiration for the sci fi writer Vernor Vinge, but that's about all we share, it seems). Perhaps he is a scientific genius who is modest. However, modest humans, secure in themselves, don't often go out of their way to insult others. I put his belligerence down to a hidden realization that he actually has little in the way of real scientific knowledge and has to put down people who don't share his faith in the invisible Sky God Seeohtu in order to make himself feel better about his own suppressed inadequacies. It's a valid theory, at least. Here's more snark.

But Nunes prefers the myth, firmly planting himself with the fact-denial majority of Republican lawmakers.

 And more:

As for stupid, the fish yields its time to the congressman from California.

He then reveals his utter lack of historical knowledge (even though he wrote a well reviewed book on the Dust Bowl) in calling the current two years of dessication a "drought for the age." I have to think the actual, centuries-long mega-droughts of the medieval period might have been bigger deals while this little one is of no real consequence or would be of no consequence if others of Mr. Egan's ilk hadn't demanded that all that water, which would be very useful to the central valley just about now, be flushed out to the ocean rather than pumped into storage for just this sort of normal California weather, for the sole benefit of small fry.

Every time there is a weather event that harms people, the alarmist true believers all start chanting: Seeohtu, global warming, climate change, the end is near, the planet is fevered and the like; but these events are absolutely normal--not more deadly, destructive, powerful, or frequent than in the past. The real issue here is the government interference in the sound hydrological plans, ruined by the delta smelt ruling. Egan is having none of that. Pity.

And his name calling is so off-putting that I had to respond in kind.

UPDATE: A single swallow does not make a Summer but here is the first of several storms lined up to bring water to California. Headline: Big storm brings heavy rain, snow to dry California.

Certainly not the end of the drought but perhaps the beginning of the end of the drought of the ages.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax, smug asshole; California Drought, Timothy Egan

Steven Goddard catches extremist Warmie True Believer James Hansen, et al. changing the historical record regarding temperatures, again. Goddard then explains why the changes are hooie.

I seem to remember a book where there were government employees whose job it was to change all the records to reflect the current political meme. Anyone remember the title of that?

The HadCRU record is suspect because its raw data has been lost or purged so that it can never be checked for accuracy.

The GISS has demonstrably been corrupted by scientists changing the distant past for no other reason than to make the record support their cause.

No one should rely on these temperature records. GOGO.

Labels: Changing the Numbers, Global Warming Hoax

As you can see, the natural warming is completely different from the man-made warming. And this is the Phil Jones data set, which should not be used due to the fact, inter alia, that Jones has "lost" the original data and no one can check to see if it's accurate. And it's generally higher than the recent satellite data.

(h/t Steven Goddard)

Labels: Global Warming Hoax

The Warmies' seven stages of grief -- 'Stage 1: They aren't real emails. Stage 2: They are real emails but they aren't in context. Stage 3: They are in context, but that's how scientists work. Stage 4: OK this isn't really science, but you guys stole the emails! Stage 5: This is old stuff. Stage 6: This is nothing. Stage 7: Look everyone! Winter storm! See, we have proof of our theories now.'

Start here, if your interested in learning the truth about the anthropogenic global warming hoax.

I've got to say that the release of their E-Mail seems to have set back the cause a bit.

(h/t Climate Depo)

Labels: Global Warming Hoax

Today in an unsigned opinion piece the NYT calls the Republican Presidential candidates "in denial" for being sceptical of alarmist Warmie true believers' claims of a CO2 Armageddon just around the corner.

The single out Gov. Rick Perry for the major rebuke, saying:

Never mind that nearly all the world’s scientists regard global warming as a serious threat to the planet, with human activities like the burning of fossil fuels a major cause. Never mind that multiple investigations have found no evidence of scientific manipulation.

Then they praise non-entity candidate Gov. Jon Huntsman for swallowing one of the greatest scientific hoaxes ever perpetrated.

The investigations referenced were largely shams (You can't pull Mike's Nature trick to hide the decline and then claim to be an honest scientist) and the scientific consensus is not nearly as solid as the NYT supposes. But consensus is all it touts as a reason to call sceptics "in denial." Behold:

With one exception — make that one-and-one-half — the rest of the Republican presidential field also rejects the scientific consensus.

Consensus in science is worth exactly nothing. It was the consensus of the world's scientists that the Earth was the center of the universe around which all the planets, the sun, stars and moon all revolved. In my lifetime, I have watched the scientific consensus change so that floating continents went from dead wrong to dead right in about a decade. The recent CERN experiments have started a similar process regarding cosmic rays and clouds.

Your theory or explanation is either right or wrong--that a million people, even those with some knowledge, believe it does not change a wrong thing into a right thing. Indeed, the very essence of the scientific approach to the universe is scepticism. Show me why what you say is right; don't just repeat 'most scientists believe this' and fail completely to provide any proof. The Warmie true believers won't debate. They say "It is known." and revert to ad hominem attacks. To me at least that is not at all convincing.

As the sham of alarming anthropogenic global warming becomes ever more apparent, the NYT seems the one entity involved in its article to be actually in denial.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax

Here is coverage in the Washington Post of the just released National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration' 2010 Report on the Climate. You can download the report here.

The two graphs shown at the beginning of the story in the Post are average temperatures of the world according to three suspect data sets (the more reliable satellite data, from UAH and RSS, are not mentioned--they're showing lower average temperatures) and loss of Greenland glacier ice (a precipitous drop) -- more on that later. But here's just a plain lie, the Post says the report says:

Sea level continued to rise across the world’s oceans on average.

No, just the opposite--all the satellite systems including the new system of diving, recording and transmitting buoys (Jason 2) say that 2010 saw a decline in sea levels. The European satellite system is showing sea level at its lowest level since the satellite started taking measurement.

The University of Colorado chart shows the same thing, a clear downward trend in 2010 getting even lower into 2011. It wouldn't upload, sorry.

Does NOAA think we can't access these measurements?

OK now about the Greenland glaciers. If the ice on land is melting, where is it going? I had always assumed into the sea, but if so, then why, if there really is a whole lot of glacier melting, is the sea level going down rather than way up?

HMMM.

Didn't President Obama proclaim that his selection as candidate would be the moment when the rise of the oceans would begin to slow? He did say that three years ago. I'm a little creeped out just now.

(h/t real science)

Labels: Global Warming Hoax, NOAA Misinformation

h/t Big Lizards

Labels: Global Warming Hoax

Here is an accurate graph of the four major global temperature services from about this time last year. The satellite services (RSS and UAH) show a definite cooling over the past decade, as does HadCRUT. GISS, which is run by Warmie true believers, and based on unreliable ground thermometers they manipulate, merely shows a flat decade without any warming at all. One would think that this cooling, would cause real scientists to wonder about their AGW theory. It did, just a little, and the Warmie true believers said that the heat from anthropogenic CO2 was in the sea, in some sort of pipeline.

Well, we have placed 3,000 buoys in the sea, the Argo system, which has been supplying data from the oceans, including water temperature from the surface to a mile deep, since 2003. Although spokesman Josh Willis first let it slip, on NPR of all places, that the data showed a slight cooling, he later took it back, and blamed the measurers. But then another scientist took a look and indeed the oceans have been cooling at the same time the surface air (low troposphere) has also cooled. OK, Warmies, I give up, where has the atmospheric warming from the ever increasing CO2 gone?

They will say 'cooling is evidence of warming too', they will say 'we never said it would always get hotter', they will blame the interpreters of the data and go ad hominem ad nauseum, they will adjust the data until it says what they want it to say, but they will not admit, yet, that the walls of their fantasy/hoax house are crashing down around their ears.

With the La Nina firmly entrenched and the sun super quiet, there will almost certainly be decades of additional cooling. Serious cooling. That's because CO2 after 300 ppm has almost no effect on atmospheric warming, maybe a single degree in 150 years or so, and then another degree in a thousand years of CO2 increase. But don't count on the hoaxers to admit it until there is, as with the last decade's phantom/lost heat, no where left to hide.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax, Ocean Warming

Last year, some Warmies got in sea kayaks to float/paddle to the North Pole, or as close as they could get. Although it was Summer, it was freakin' cold and they kept getting frozen in. They quit after a short time when it was clear that, despite other Warmie predictions, not all the sea ice had melted and there was just no open water for their intended travels. They barely got to 80 degrees.

This year, three Warmie Brits, Pen Hadow, Ann Daniels and Martin Hartley, set out (in Winter!) to trek to the North Pole schlepping along a portable radar unit to measure the thickness of the sea ice. They thought that it would take 90 days. When they first got to the Arctic they were ecstatic. "Welcome to the High Arctic at 75 degrees North. We love it." (Emphasis added).

Then they were dropped of in the middle of nowhere. It was a hard slog through day 6 but they made some distance (about 1% of the way) but since then things have gone poorly. The ice has drifted south, so as hard and far as they travel (not that far compared to earlier explorers), they were, on day 12, not even to the day 6 point of greatest advance, and now that it's day 18, they are further from the Pole than they were on day 12. Now the real bitching and moaning starts in.

It was my birthday on Tuesday.
What a way to spend it - 500 miles from the North Pole, floating on a raft of sea ice that is breaking up to the north of us, a polar bear plodding around close by and running out of food.
The resupply plane is now several days late. I know they've tried three times and the weather has stopped them, so we are now down to half rations.
[...]

But the ambient temperature inside (sic) the tent is -40C, the inside of the tent is like an ice cavern.
I've got frostbite in my toes, my sleeping bag is full of ice and the supposedly hot food ends up like a roofing tile in seconds!
The best way to keep warm is to stay in your sleeping bag - but when that's full of camera cables as well as ice it makes for pretty uncomfortable sleeping.

I really don't wish them ill. I hope they give up and are rescued soon, but there seems to be a slight bit of disconnect between the Warmie beliefs and the cold hard facts of the Arctic climate.

The Warmies come off as fatuous clowns.

UPDATE: There was an earlier attempt to walk to the North Pole that was nipped in the bud two years ago. A friend called the current attempt brave. I still call these people showboaters, at best. I say end the suffering of the Catlin 3 now, bring them home.

UPDATE 2: Although Ms. Daniels is quoting a Robert Service poem about suicide and Mr. Hartley has called the expedition extremely cold and hard, they have been resupplied and are pushing on. Even if we go by the first 6 days' rate of advance, it looks like over a year until they reach the Pole. They say by May. Well, maybe. I have to note that these guys probably know what they're doing. Hadow walked alone in 2003 from Canada to the Pole without resupply That's impressive. He did the same at the South Pole, which is even more impressive as it's even colder there. Daniels has made the trips as part of teams to both Poles. Hartley has been around the Poles 19 times. I feel better about their chances now. These are not naive tyros; but the fact that, less than three weeks into it, they are semi-despairing, and sounding like Scott's ill fated team in 1912, shows just how difficult it is for men and women to live between 80 and 90 degrees latitude. It looks like they just had a run of bad luck with the weather and the fact that it was really, really cold, like negative forty Celsius. Who would have imagined that it would be so cold in late Winter in the Arctic?

UPDATE 3: They tell you how far they've gone, and how long they've been on the ice and they even have a daily average of distance traveled. Right now it's 1.42 km/day with 929 km to go to the Pole. I reckon they're going to have to pick up the pace a bit because at that rate they'll be nearing the pole early-January, 2011, just 19 months behind schedule. Well, if anyone can pick up the pace, it will be these guys, all in their 40s.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax, The Real Climate Strikes Back

Here is what Al Gore said/wrote in the Warmie propaganda movie (and book) An Inconvenient Truth:

...less than a month before Hurricane Katrina hit the United States, a major study from MIT supported the scientific consensus that global warming is making hurricanes more powerful and more destructive...

(Emphasis added).

And here is the truth:

Tropical cyclone (TC) activity worldwide has completely and utterly collapsed during the past 2 to 3 years with TC energy levels sinking to levels not seen since the late 1970s.

Like temperature itself, the Cyclone Energy level and thereafter the number of cyclones and hurricanes goes up and then it goes down. CO2 has nothing more to do with it than it has to do with global mean temperature, that is, after CO2 gets to 280 ppm in the atmosphere. Put another way, Al Gore is full of it regarding the climate on Earth.

Labels: AL Gore's Misrepresentations, Global Warming Hoax

We had the friends mainly, informal, celebratory wedding party last night. We didn't drink as much as I thought we would, which is good, I guess. My new brother in law and hunting partner and I had an argument about anthropogenic global warming. I was trying to show him that at 280 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere almost all the heat was 'trapped' but we never got that far because he thought that the CO2 in the atmosphere was .23%. I knew that was an order of magnitude high so I bet $100 and we looked it up on Wikipedia. The results:

Nitrogen--78.08%
Oxygen---20.95%

That adds up to just over 99% which means that all the other gasses, and all of the greenhouse gasses (not including water vapor) are less than 1%, far less it seems because the next gas, a noble gas not greenhouse at all is:

Argon--.93%

which means the top three are 99.96% of the atmosphere. That means only .04 of the dry gas atmosphere of this planet are all the trace gasses, including all the greenhouse ones. Here's the next:

CO2--.038%.

That brings the total of the top four to 99.998%. Of course, of the tiny bit of CO2 diffuse in the atmosphere, only a tiny portion is man made. So there's a lot supposedly happening from just .0019% of the atmosphere. Actually, it's doing nothing at all, at least nothing measurable.

By the way, at the Huffington Post, of all places, there is this good overview of the truth about the Global Warming Hoax. My favorite part by Mr. Ambler:

Mr. Gore states, ad nauseum, that carbon dioxide rules climate in frightening and unpredictable, and new, ways. When he shows the hockey stick graph of temperature and plots it against reconstructed C02 levels in An Inconvenient Truth, he says that the two clearly have an obvious correlation. "Their relationship is actually very complicated," he says, "but there is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others, and it is this: When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer." The word "complicated" here is among the most significant Mr. Gore has uttered on the subject of climate and is, at best, a deliberate act of obfuscation. Why? Because it turns out that there is an 800-year lag between temperature and carbon dioxide, unlike the sense conveyed by Mr. Gore's graph. You are probably wondering by now -- and if you are not, you should be -- which rises first, carbon dioxide or temperature. The answer? Temperature. In every case, the ice-core data shows that temperature rises precede rises in carbon dioxide by, on average, 800 years. In fact, the relationship is not "complicated." When the ocean-atmosphere system warms, the oceans discharge vast quantities of carbon dioxide in a process known as de-gassing. For this reason, warm and cold years show up on the Mauna Loa C02 measurements even in the short term. For instance, the post-Pinatubo-eruption year of 1993 shows the lowest C02 increase since measurements have been kept. When did the highest C02 increase take place? During the super El Niño year of 1998.

So maybe the relationship between temperature and CO2 is not that complicated at all.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax

I studied Old Norse in grad school (ever a fan of dead languages I) and wrote a paper in 1977 which showed that the period of greatest vigor, first heroic and then literary, in Iceland a millennium ago coincided with what was then called the Little Optimum, now called the Medieval Warm Period. To reach that conclusion I had to read a lot of climatological studies. Thus, when some of the Warmies published data which completely erased the Little Optimum from history (the most egregious of which Warmie propaganda was the thoroughly discredited Mann hockey stick graph), I knew something was wrong. I have become ever more convinced, though silently, that certain scientists, for political reasons, have abandoned real science and are shilling for the hoax, anthropogenic global warming. I didn't want to believe it, and in an unaccustomed period of humility, I thought, who am I to accuse them of bad acts or bad science? I'm just an English major (with an MA in Old English) and a lawyer. But I feel I can't keep quiet any more and since someone else with greater scientific credentials is saying the same thing, I am silent no more.

It is not just a coincidence that the temperature measurements which can be manipulated are showing consistently warmer temperatures than the two satellite measurers which cannot be easily manipulated.

Not only are the Warmies backing the wrong horse, they are cooking the books to support the horse (if that's not too mixed a metaphor for you).

Shame on them. Our reaction should go beyond mere disbelief, past even ignoring them--we should hold them in active disdain. More to follow, including names.

Here are the bits of the Tulane Professor's letter I just read which I found so compelling:

It is obvious that anthropogenic global warming is not science at all, because a scientific theory makes non-obvious predictions which are then compared with observations that the average person can check for himself. As we both know from our own observations, AGW theory has spectacularly failed to do this. The theory has predicted steadily increasing global temperatures, and this has been refuted by experience. NOW the global warmers claim that the Earth will enter a cooling period. In other words, whether the ice caps melt, or expand --- whatever happens --- the AGW theorists claim it confirms their theory. A perfect example of a pseudo-science like astrology.

I emphasized [above] that the average person has to be able to check the observations. I emphasize this because I no longer trust "scientists" to report observations correctly. I think the data is adjusted to confirm, as far as possible, AGW. We've seen many recent cases where the data was cooked in climate studies. In one case, Hanson and company claimed that October 2008 was the warmest October on record. Watts looked at the data, and discovered that Hanson and company had used September's temperatures for Russia rather than October's. I'm not surprised to learn that September is hotter than October in the Northern hemisphere.

[...]

Another shocking thing about the AGW theory is that it is generating a loss of true scientific knowledge. The great astronomer William Herschel, the discoverer of the planet Uranus, observed in the early 1800's that warm weather was correlated with sunspot number. Herschel noticed that warmer weather meant better crops, and thus fewer sunspots meant higher grain prices. The AGW people are trying to do a disappearing act on these observations. Some are trying to deny the existence of the Maunder Minimum.

[...]

AGW supporters are also bringing back the Inquisition, where the power of the state is used to silence one's scientific opponents. The case of Bjorn Lomborg is illustrative. Lomborg is a tenured professor of mathematics in Denmark. Shortly after his book, "The Skeptical Environmentalist," was published by Cambridge University Press, Lomborg was charged and convicted (later reversed) of scientific fraud for being critical of the "consensus" view on AGW and other environmental questions. Had the conviction been upheld, Lomborg would have been fired. Stillman Drake, the world's leading Galileo scholar, demonstrates in his book "Galileo: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford University Press, 2001) that it was not theologians, but rather his fellow physicists (then called "natural philosophers"), who manipulated the Inquisition into trying and convicting Galileo. The "out-of-the-mainsteam" Galileo had the gall to prove the consensus view, the Aristotlean theory, wrong by devising simple experiments that anyone could do. Galileo's fellow scientists first tried to refute him by argument from authority. They failed. Then these "scientists" tried calling Galileo names, but this made no impression on the average person, who could see with his own eyes that Galileo was right. Finally, Galileo's fellow "scientists" called in the Inquisition to silence him.

I find it very disturbing that part of the Danish Inquisition's case against Lomborg was written by John Holdren, Obama's new science advisor. Holdren has recently written that people like Lomborg are "dangerous." I think it is people like Holdren who are dangerous, because they are willing to use state power to silence their scientific opponents.

(h/t William Katz'a blog Urgent Agenda via John Hinderaker at Power Line)

Labels: Global Warming Hoax

Labels: Global Warming Hoax

There is one thing shared by all the climate models and projections, relied on by the IPCC, Al Gore and all the rabid Warmies for their dire (and demonstrably false) predictions--that the worst of the warming will be in the troposphere about 10 kilometers up over the tropics. Here is the computer generated heat signature. This pattern is not only common to the predictions; it is key to the predictions.

There's only one thing wrong. It ain't there. The scientists have looked for it with satellites; they have run up weather balloons with transmitting thermometers. There is no such signature, or pattern, there to be detected.

Here's the real heat signature:

So there is something totally wrong with the models, projections and predictions. Namely, that there is no appreciable global warming caused by human generated greenhouse gasses, not in the past, not now, not in the future. As we Deniers dared to predict months ago, anthropogenic Global Warming Climate Change is a huge and ultimately perfidious hoax. Within a year, the sad fact of the hoax will be common knowledge and Al Gore will be ridiculed constantly by the likes of Conan O'Brien and Jon Stewart.

Anyone care to bet against me?

Labels: Global Warming Hoax, Missing Signature

Even the most basic of astronomical knowledge includes the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, a several hundred year old hurricane. Well, now it's the Great Salmon Spot and there are more of them. What could be the cause? Robert Britt says it's global warming, sorry, climate change. Tough to blame the heating there on anthropogenic greenhouse gasses. Let's review--Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and even Pluto are warming. What could be the cause of that? Mystery for the ages, that one.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax

You have nothing to lose but our ill deserved anxiety. Here is a one two punch against the scam of the new century, anthropogenic global warming. The work of the scientists mentioned in the links does not represent yet a death knell to the climate change crisis, but huge cracks are visibly growing in what Peter Gabriel calls the Grand Façade.

Here is the first article's money quote:

...You may have heard that the IPCC models cannot predict clouds and rain with any accuracy. Their models assume water vapour goes up to the troposphere and hangs around to cook us all in a greenhouse future.

However, there is a mechanism at work that "washes out" the water vapour and returns it to the oceans along with the extra CO2 and thus turns the added water vapour into a NEGATIVE feedback mechanism.

The newly discovered mechanism is a combination of clouds and rain (Spencer's mechanism adds to the mechanism earlier identified by Professor Richard Lindzen called the Iris effect).

The IPCC models assumed water vapour formed clouds at high altitudes that lead to further warming. The Aqua satellite observations and Spencer's analysis show water vapour actually forms clouds at low altitudes that lead to cooling.

Furthermore, Spencer shows the extra rain that falls from these clouds cools the underlying oceans, providing a second negative feedback to negate the CO2 warming.

The second is in pdf form and I can't do anything but link to it. Thanks, Doug. I really like the pie chart of green house gasses and how tiny is our collective contribution.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax

There are plenty of reasons to read this article from Australia, not only for the admission from the IPCC that the Earth has been cooling this past decade, but also for the news, little reported, of the data from a 2002 satellite called Aqua, which shows that the clouds do not react as the climate modelers predict. But there's more.

Money quotes:

"Is the Earth still warming?"

"No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."

"Is this a matter of any controversy?"

"Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued ... This is not what you'd expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you'd expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up ... So (it's) very unexpected, not something that's being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it's very significant."

Just what I was thinking.

...What this great data from the NASA Aqua satellite ... (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they're actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you're getting a negative rather than a positive feedback."

"The climate is actually, in one way anyway, more robust than was assumed in the climate models?"

"That's right ... These findings actually aren't being disputed by the meteorological community. They're having trouble digesting the findings, they're acknowledging the findings, they're acknowledging that the data from NASA's Aqua satellite is not how the models predict, and I think they're about to recognise that the models really do need to be overhauled and that when they are overhauled they will probably show greatly reduced future warming projected as a consequence of carbon dioxide."

And then there is this coup de grace prediction.

A great many founts of authority, from the Royal Society to the UN, most heads of government along with countless captains of industry, learned professors, commentators and journalists will be profoundly embarrassed. Let us hope it is a prolonged and chastening experience.

With catastrophe off the agenda, for most people the fog of millennial gloom will lift, at least until attention turns to the prospect of the next ice age. Among the better educated, the sceptical cast of mind that is the basis of empiricism will once again be back in fashion. The delusion that by recycling and catching public transport we can help save the planet will quickly come to be seen for the childish nonsense it was all along.

Childish nonsense indeed.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax

There appear to be two mutually exclusive schools of thought about global warming climate change. The Warmies believe we are in an unprecedented meteorological period where man made gases, primarily CO2 from burning fossil fuels, are forcing up the mean global temperature in a way never seen before (because we've not been burning so much fossil fuel before). The Skeptics know that the mean global temperature goes up and goes down in both regular and irregular patterns and there's nothing new or alarming about what's been happening over the past 150 years.

Despite the Stalinist attempts to silence or even to criminalize dissent in this matter, any prediction about the future carries some risk of being wrong (the sun, for example, won't appear to rise tomorrow morning if it explodes today) and given the reality of the Vostok ice cores, it seems incumbent on the Warmies to have the mean global temperature act in accordance with the theory. If it doesn't follow the theory or the computer predictions, then it's probable that the theory and predictions are wrong.

The Mauna Loa Observatory has recorded a steady state rise in atmospheric CO2 over the past half century. And indeed the consensus is that it has risen from 270 ppm in the mid 1800s to nearly 380 ppm today. That is a significant rise. If the Warmies are right, then the temperature has to have risen, and it has to keep rising as the CO2 rises; otherwise, the spell is broken and CO2, as we Skeptics believe, has no direct correlation to mean global temperature (except a World warmed by other things produces later more CO2, mainly from the Ocean).

So, are all the observations congruent with the theory and predictions. Well, in a word, no.

NPR correspondent Richard Harris has an article which should cause a lot of concern in the Warmie community entitled The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat.

The theory is that the sea will warm a lot if there is global warming. It's not warming. Now what do they do?

My favorite bit:

...80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.
"There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant ..."
(Emphasis added).

No, nothing significant here. Move along. The theory is that there will be warming and nothing but warming (although sometimes at slower rates than at other times) and now there's not warming but cooling. As Josh Willis at NASA's JPL puts it:

"Global warming doesn't mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may
be that we are in a period of less rapid warming."

Silly me, I thought global warming meant exactly that every year (in response to ever year of rising CO2) will be warmer than the last. And Josh, it's not "less rapid warming" you're seeing; it's actual cooling and real serious cooling (in the air) in the last 14 months.

Here is how NPR author puts the possibilities for solving the mystery:

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

Or it could mean that the very theory of global warming caused primarily by anthropogenic CO2 is complete bunk. Richard Harris apparently can't even imagine that possibility. We Skeptics can, and indeed it seems the most likely possibility to us based on the scientific literature we have read (and sometimes understood).

Labels: Global Warming Hoax

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit often says that he will believe global warming is a crisis when those pushing the theory begin to act like it is a crisis. I'm not sure that would do it for me. If the best scientific minds can't get the short term predictions right, like the weather tomorrow, or even next year, why in the world would we believe they know what the weather will be like in a 100 years. The real truth is that they don't. They have no freakin' idea and it is the worst form of hubris for them to think they can accurately predict the future weather over such a temporal distance.

Here is their prediction last October for what this finally ending Winter of 2007-2008 would be like. The NOAA said it would be warm, (December through February is likely to be another milder-than-average winter for much of the country) but it's actually been the coldest winter in decades.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."

Not the stuff for building confidence in their ability to predict.

(h/t Boortz via Mark Dunn) Boortz has a lot bad to say today about the Colorado public school system too.

UPDATE: Prince Charles says it is madness to doubt that the Earth is warming primarily due to man made CO2. Oh, OK. If an intellectual powerhouse like the passed-over Prince says I'm being stupid, then that's good enough for me. I'm sorry for going 'crazy' on you. That really cold temperature you feel right now in most of the Northern Hemisphere is probably just the product of your delusional skepticism. It's clearly getting warmer and just as clearly we powerful humans are the blame. Carry on.

UPDATE 2: Just in case you didn't know I was being sarcastic above, I was. I have checked the Cryosphere Today website. The sea ice in the North is not melting, despite the misinformation from the Prince. Half of the 14 distinct areas have more ice than normal, three are just at normal and four are down--Greenland Sea, Hudson Bay, Sea of Okhotsk, and Barants Sea. In the South, the sea ice is no longer melting and is nearly 100,000 square Km above normal. There is, therefore, in the whole world, more sea ice than normal. We'll see what happens in the North this Summer. I'll go out on a limb and say it will not melt below 75,000 square Km below normal. Any Warmies care to make a gentleman's wager? Tone?




UPDATE 3: Here is a graph of sea level rise for the past 9 thousand years. Wow, it's really been shooting up over the past 2,000, hasn't it? (More sarcasm). Despite the no longer a boy Prince's pronouncement about recent startling sea level rises (about 6 inches in 130 years), the real rise in sea levels was happening 8 thousand years ago, well before any man made CO2, other than a few camp fires and of course the out breath of a few hundred thousand cave men. This view of course gives no credence to the alternative reality 'histories' of Atlantis and Mu. I wonder if Prince Charles has a position on those myths as well?

Labels: Global Warming Hoax

Labels: Global Warming Hoax