Why Are Carbon Hysterics Going Cuckoo Trying to Explain A Cold and Snowy Winter as Another Sign of Climate Catastrophe?

Willis Eschenbach WUWT
It looks as if the January 2011 global temperature anomaly may be a full degree Fahrenheit below "average." And the brutal winter snow assaults against North America and Europe are probably not over yet. It was winter in the Northern Hemisphere the last time I checked, so why are carbon hysterics going out of their minds trying to explain cold and snow as a sign of catastrophic global warming?!!?

Willis Eschenbach takes a look at some of the mathematical prestidigitation upon which the global enterprise of climate catastrophism rests, and begins to suspect that the catastrophists are stuck in a dark, airless compartment of their own construction. In other words, the mathematically modeled construction of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) finds itself "locked in." It has no choice but to continue to argue -- more and more frantically as believed necessary -- that the construct is the only possible valid way to view the climate.

Certainly many of the superstars of climate catastrophe are finding themselves being discredited by ClimateGate and any number of other ongoing discoveries of dishonest, dishonourable, and unscientific shenannigans that have been perpetrated by the IPCC's first team players -- in the attempt to keep the bandwagon of CAGW orthodoxy from crashing and burning entirely.

Fortunately, there is light at the end of the highly politicised IPCC tunnel of obfuscation. Alternative means of publication are springing up for honest climate researchers, far out of the reach of the carbon hysteric overlords and overseers. Even President Doombama Obama of the USA neglected to mention climate change or promote carbon trading in his most recent State of the Union address to the nation.

The future will demand the best and most honest efforts from science, technology, economics, and politics, which the human species can produce. This is no time to get stuck in a blind box and go cuckoo.

More 29Jan11: Did government agencies lie about 2010 being the "warmest year ever?"

As the Sun Weakens, the Earth Cools

You may be aware that the sun is in a deep solar minimum, with an ultra-low sunspot count. Besides sunspot number, the sun is behaving strangely in other ways.

"Lately, coronal mass ejections (CMEs) have become very slow, so slow that they have to be dragged away from the sun by the solar wind," says researcher Angelos Vourlidas of the Naval Research Lab. Here is an example from April 11th:

Each second in the SOHO animation corresponds to an hour or more of real time. "The speed of the CME was only 240 km/s," says Vourlidas. "The solar wind speed is about 300 km/s, so the CME is actually being dragged."

Vourlidas has examined thousands of CMEs recorded by SOHO over the past 13 years, and he's rarely seen such plodding explosions. In active times, CMEs can blast away from the sun faster than 1000 km/s. Even during the solar minimum of 1996, CMEs often revved up to 500 or 600 km/s. "Almost all the CMEs we've seen since the end of April 2008, however, are very slow, less than 300 km/s."

Is this just another way of saying "the sun is very quiet?" Or do slow-motion CMEs represent a new and interesting phenomena? The jury is still out. One thing is clear: solar minimum is more interesting than we thought. _spaceweather_via_FreshBilge

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the climate is getting distinctly colder. March 2009 was the coldest March this millenium, and April is on track to be even colder compared to other Aprils.

The sun is in a deep slumber. Arctic sea ice is growing ever thicker since 2007, and Antarctic sea ice extent is growing alarmingly. More reputable scientists are disputing the IPCC's myopic anti-scientific fascism.

More up to the minute news about the dismantling of the faux crisis of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) here and here.

Planet Earth Adjusts Over Time to Recycle CO2 -- Planetary Rainforests Grow and Gobble Greenhouse Gases at Record Rates

It makes sense that atmospheric CO2 concentrations would rise as more CO2 is added to the air -- even the relatively small proportions of CO2 coming from humans. But the planet's rainforests are growing -- pushing back against human encroachment. And they are getting hungry, Hungry, HUNGRY! for CO2. Higher CO2 concentrations are spurring the growth of new jungles across the tropics. And these jungles are crying out "FEEED MMEEEEE!!!"

Africa's tropical forests have stored huge amounts of carbon over the last four decades and become a critical sponge for greenhouse gases, according to a study published Thursday.

Long-term measurements taken across the continent's tropical belt showed that African forests absorb as much carbon dioxide as those in the Amazon.

Tropical forests only account for seven-to-ten percent of the Earth's land area. But they hold up to half of the carbon locked inside the planet's terrestrial vegetation, giving them an outsized role in regulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

...Two dozen international researchers led by Simon Lewis of the University of Leeds in northern England pulled together data from 79 monitoring plots scattered across 10 countries in western and central Africa.

Sifting through the data, the scientists found that the region's rain forests had pumped progressively more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as trees underwent photosynthesis and grew.

The average increase was almost identical to those for Amazonia, a net plus of 630 kilos per hectare each year between 1967 and 2007, reported the study, published in the British science journal Nature.

The question, then, is why these tropical forests are continuing to draw down ever more CO2....

"Perhaps the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is effectively fertilizing tropical tree growth," speculated Muller-Landau.

"With adequate protection, these forests are likey to remain large carbon stores in the longer term," they wrote. _TerraDaily

Of course extra CO2 fertilises tropical tree growth. A scientist should understand these things, since they have been studied ad nauseum over several decades.

With rapid urbanisation occurring even in the primitive societies of the tropics, more and more previously farmed areas will revert to forest -- even in the face of biofuels-motivated cultivation of palm plantations. The longer oil prices remain low, the more progress that researchers in microbial biofuels will make in devising alternative methods of making biofuels from biomass -- for example using algae that are fertilised by CO2 from coal plants.

For a far better understanding of CO2 than anything you will get from the mainstream media or from the climate zombies, check out CO2 Science. For the best understanding of the effect of CO2 on oceans, go to Sea Friends' special treatment of the topic.

We are living through a disastrous convergence of the climate zombies and the Obama zombies. The news and entertainment media is rife with the rot-brained buggers, as are social science faculties of universities. Remember, if they come for you, you absolutely must aim for the head! ;-)

You Know You May be Demented if You Believe in Climate Catastrophe and Ocean Acidification

Admit it: any conscientious person who really believed in human-caused climate catastrophe would have shot himself in the head long ago. They could easily lighten the planet's burden and save many hundreds of tons of CO2 by the simple act of rapid intra-cranial lead infusion.

So, if you really want to save the planet, stop wasting time and energy by writing pointless articles based on flimsy evidence. Charity starts at home, but saving the environment starts in the governments of India, China and the USA. There are also a number of other ways to make a difference

1. Breath[e] less. An average person's respiration generates some 900g of carbon dioxide a day, so by breathing less, or avoiding getting steamed up over global warming issues you could make a real difference immediate.
2. Shoot yourself. My thanks to Jonathan Porrit for pointing out that doing something about population could help stop climate change, even if he can’t do the demographic maths too well. Of course the quickest way to make a difference would be to shoot yourself. Ending your life 40 years ahead of schedule would save over 400 tons of carbon dioxide, and this could be easily increased by bumping off a few other people too.
_Cientifica

You really have to be more than a bit deranged or demented to believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming and ocean acidification in the first place. It's really tough to dig yourself out of a deep mental hole when you've been so thoroughly academically lobotomised and psychologically neotenised. Simply putting yourselves out of your own misery might be best.

Science is not about belief, or even about factual, declarative knowledge. Science is about questioning, doubting, testing -- building structures of testable hypotheses for the sheer pleasure of tearing them down again using ever more elegant logical hypotheses and means for testing them.

We are learning that there is no scientific basis for forecasting climate. We are learning that even James Hansen's supervisors at NASA see Hansen as dishonest and an embarrassment to NASA. We are learning that northern glaciers in Alaska, Norway, and Greenland are growing once again, and that arctic sea ice is already beginning to recover from its recent low in summer 2007. We have learned that ocean acidification from CO2 is an absurdity. We can easily see that alarmist temperature predictions from Hansen and the IPCC are diverging from actual temperature trends.

In the huge, dimly lit camp of the Obama-zombies, we see large numbers of true believers in human caused eco-devastation. The zombies constantly dwell on warming catastrophe and ocean acidification. It is easy to for them believe such things -- particularly when the rest of the milling mob believes them too. Not so easy to think for one's self, particularly when all the forces of one's upbringing, education, media and political culture...are telling you to let others do your thinking.

The science is not settled, and the debate is not over. Only the demented and the deranged hold to the static view of science promoted by Gore and Hansen. Future reality holds some harsh surprises for the zombie horde.

Not Just Your Imagination, It Really Is Getting Cold

Image from Watts Up With That

Data from the NCDC shows a downward trend in North American temperatures over the past ten years. Also see here for another decadal decline in temperatures. Reasons for this apparent decline vary from sunspot cycles to ocean oscillations to volcanic eruptions and outright denial. According to a study published in the January 8 issue of Nature, part of the reason for the recent global cooling may be too small to see without a microscope.Diatoms are microscopic oceanic plankton which every year remove billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. The history of plankton is being re-written by scientists at this very moment, and it is quite likely that the repercussions of new plankton research will be quite significant.

The evolutionary history of diatoms -- abundant oceanic plankton that remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year -- needs to be rewritten, according to a new Cornell study. The findings suggest that after a sudden rise in species numbers, diatoms abruptly declined about 33 million years ago -- trends that coincided with severe global cooling.

..."Why diatom diversity peaked for 4 to 5 million years and then dropped is a big mystery," Rabosky said. "But it corresponds with a period when the global climate swung from hothouse to icehouse. It's tempting to speculate that these tiny plankton, by taking carbon dioxide out of the air, might have helped trigger the most severe global cooling event in the past 100 million years." _CornellChronicle

The new, re-written evolutionary history of diatoms may indeed shine an important light on our present climate. But perhaps the lesson to be taken from the study is that diatoms thrive in warmer water. As climate and the oceans grow colder, diatoms are unable to thrive as well and reproduce as quickly. Correlation does not equal causation.

Diatoms are very important in the overall carbon cycle, as are a number of other carbon-fixing oceanic species. Apocalyptic predictions of future ocean acidification fail to properly take into account the oceans' enormous capacity for removing and fixing atmospheric carbon in permanent or semi-permanent form. Such basic errors in reasoning, when combined with an irrational faith in simplistic climate models, lays the foundation for an incredibly unscientific quasi-religious faith in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming -- CAGW. The religious orthodoxy of manmade warming catastrophe is in the process of destroying the economic infrastructure of Autralia and the EU, and under the narcissist-elect Obama threatens to destroy the economic infrastructure of the US.

Climate science itself has become co-opted by political influences, such as the United Nations, the European Union, various leftist political fronts for environmental causes, and deranged activists such as Al Gore. Science has very little to do with media commentary on the climate. But science is still lurking in the background, and threatens a severe backlash against the political co-opters of climatology.

So before you buy into the climate fantasies of Gore, Hansen, and Obama, consider educating yourself in the evolutionary history of the humble diatom. Particularly for Obama voters, such self-education could prevent them from making themselves "twice the fool."

Obama's Brave New Energyless World

Oct. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Barack Obama will classify carbon dioxide as a dangerous pollutant that can be regulated should he win the presidential election on Nov. 4, opening the way for new rules on greenhouse gas emissions. _Bloomberg_via_Wattsupwiththat

Obama in his wisdom is preparing to put the finishing touches to the demise of the US (and thus the world) economy. The implications of this incredibly foolish proposal go to the heart of Obama's judgment and personal competence.

In my opinion, this is lunacy - Obama’s thinking is completely off the rails now. He cites a new energy plan in August, then cripples it from the start with this sort of thinking. _WattsUpWithThat

Lunacy is proposing to give every citizen $50,000 a year just for existing. Lunacy is being willing to sit down with enemies of your country without preconditions. Lunacy is destroying the educational system of Chicago and planning to do the same to the entire US. But this????!! This goes far beyond lunacy into the criminally insane category.

Already, much needed power plants are being cancelled due to misplaced concerns over CO2 emissions. Under Obama's grand regime, plans for new uses of coal, oil sands, heavy oils, shale oil, and other carbon producing energy methods would be placed in suspension indefinitely, as existing plants are shut down, and the already dangerous energy and electrical generation reserves will be reduced below critical levels.

Want to know a secret that only you and a few other people will know? The current worldwide market fiasco and credit crunch happened not just because of Carter and Clinton's misguided forays into "home mortgages for all" using the CRA and Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac. The crash is not just because the federal government pushed banks into dangerous loans, and provided incentives for the wild trading in credit default swaps in national and international markets. It was not just that ACORN, Maxine Waters, Barney Franks, Chris Dodd, and the other usual suspects prevented Bush and McCain from reforming Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the growing mortgage dysfunction. Not even a growing dread among investors over a possible Obama presidency fully explains the sinking financials.

The tipping of the edifice occurred when the headlong flight into commodities (including oil) by hedge funds, pension funds, long-only funds of investment banks, etc. ran into a brick wall. The funds, banks, and investment houses were already up to their necks in unsound derivatives. But when the commodity markets took a dive--which anyone with a brain knew they would--the camel's back was broken. Now you know. A delusional belief in "Peak Oil" was one of the fibres in the straw that broke the financial camel's back.

Now, Obama wishes to use another popular delusion--climate catastrophe or CAGW--to finish the job. Is he that stupid? Does he believe the American people are stupid enough not to connect the dots? Or are both questions to be answered in the affirmative?

Sunspots Vanish, Earth Cools, CAGW Dying

Image Source

Although total solar irradiance (TSI) may vary by only 0.1% over time, the effect this small variance has on the climate of Earth is profound. By charting trends in solar activity, and factoring in ocean oscillations such as the AMO, PDO etc, one can explain most of the cyclic variations in Earth's climate without considering variations in atmospheric CO2. Since H2O is the predominant greenhouse gas in the Earth climate system, it is likely that a better understanding of the water cycle will fill in large gaps remaining in the understanding of ordinary changes in Earth climate. Catastrophic changes--like glaciations--will likely need longer time scale explanations that can easily reach outside of our solar system.

Image Source

The Earth's temperature has not warmed over the past 10 years, even 20 years by some estimates. The recent month of May was quite cool, globally speaking. There are no sunspots yet again today. We have had nothing but "sun specks" recently, and the long overdue Solar Cycle 24 has yet to come out to play with the planets.

Some scientists are even predicting that sunspots will disappear altogether by the year 2015. It is unlikely that the sunspots themselves are causing warming or cooling, but the current paucity of sunspots reveals an unusual, unpredicted prolongation of solar cycle 23--and a delay to the start of solar cycle 24. Historically, longer solar cycles correlate with cooler temperatures, and lower numbers of sunspots correlate with lower temperatures. Please do not confuse "correlation" with "causation." Such confusion has made monkeys out of Al Gore and James Hansen, along with Ramachandra Pachauri.

CAGW is dying for lack of substantiation. It is being propped up by Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, other corrupt politicians, the news and entertainment media, and a few outspoken "climate celebrities" whose futures hinge upon keeping the public believing in catastropohic warming.

It is a matter of time. The current neurosyphilitic US Congress is gambling the economic future of the US on the CAGW hypothesis. If the hypothesis fails--which so far it is doing spectacularly--the futures of the climate crusading congressmen and celebrities will fail equally spectacularly. They simply must keep the charade going as long as they can, for their own sake.

H/T Tom Nelson

Wikipedia: Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? Part 2

When we go to an encyclopedia for information, we should be able to expect the best available information--free of petty bias and corruption. Unfortunately, the closer one looks at Wikipedia, the more petty bias and corruption of information one tends to find.

[William]Connolley is not only a big shot on Wikipedia, he's a big shot at Wikipedia -- an a dministrator with unusual editorial clout. Using that clout, this 40-something scientist of minor relevance gets to tear down scientists of great accomplishment. Because Wikipedia has become the single biggest reference source in the world, and global warming is one of the most sought-after subjects, the ability to control information on Wikipedia by taking down authoritative scientists is no trifling matter.

...Wikipedia is full of rules that editors are supposed to follow, as well as a code of civility. Those rules and codes don't apply to Connolley, or to those he favours.

"Peiser's crap shouldn't be in here," Connolley wrote several weeks ago, in berating a Wikipedian colleague during an "edit war," as they're called. In such a war, rival sides change the content of a Wikipedia page from one competing version to another, often with bewildering speed. (Two people, landing on the same page seconds apart, might obtain entirely different information.) In the Peiser case, a Wikipedian stopped a prolonged war by freezing a continually changing page, to prevent more alterations until the dispute was settled. As occurs on such occasions, readers are alerted that Wikipedians are warring over the page, and that Wikipedia was not endorsing the version of the page that had been frozen. To Connolley's chagrin, however, the version that was frozen cast doubt on claims of a consensus on climate change. Although this was done within Wikipedia rules, Connolley intervened to revert the page and ensure Wikipedia readers saw only what he wanted them to see.

Peiser is Benny Peiser, a distinguished U.K. scientist who had convincingly refuted a study by Naomi Oreskes that claimed to have found no scientific papers at odds with the conventional wisdom on climate change. The Oreskes study -- cited by Al Gore in his film, An Inconvenient Truth-- is an article of faith to many global warming doomsayers and guarded from criticism by Connolley et al. Peiser and other critics of Oreskes's study, meanwhile, get demeaned.

Connolley and his cohorts don't just edit pages of scientists actively involved in the global warming debate. Scientists who work in unrelated fields, but who have findings that indirectly bolster a critique of climate change orthodoxy, will also get smeared. So will non-scientists and organizations that he disagrees with. Any reference, anywhere among Wikipedia's 2.5-million English-language pages, that casts doubt on the consequences of climate change will be bent to Connolley's bidding. __Source

As we are rapidly learning by following climate research, the hypothesis so favoured by Connolley--catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW)--is rapidly becoming discredited by the data. Yet Connolley and his witless acolytes such as Kim Dabelstein Petersen, continue to enforce the party line on Wikipedia. Who is watching the watchers?

At Wikipedia, the petty warlords of corrupted information reign. While some will claim that Wikipedia has procedures that would prevent such info-tyranny, they make those claims out of ignorance of what goes on behind-the-scenes.

H/T IceCap

Is Earth's Climate Related to Solar Cycles?

There seems to be a relationship, certainly. Just looking at the graph above appears to suggest at least a superficial relationship.

It is clear that the late 20th Century warming spell matched the duration of the two shortest, fastest solar cycles in the historical record ( 21 and 22) At the same time thare was a matching sequence of strong El Nino events. These points should not be lightly dismissed. The cooling fears of the 60's and early 70's coincided with weak cycle 20 and the cessation of warming occurred during cycle 23 which has been weaker than the two cycles before it.

On balance the evidence shows that solar is more likely the cause than CO2 but the issue can soon be resolved by observing the global temperature changes that occur as a result of the extended cycle 23 and the probable weak cycle 24.

If we now get a period of natural cooling it might well last several decades.There has been a gradual background and wholly natural warming trend since the end of the Little Ice Age. Of course it is all a matter of trends over time periods. You can 'prove' any trend you require by choosing the right time scale. What matters is the scale of human influences either towards cooling or towards warming as against the underlying trend behind natural variability. It really is an unknown quantity. Even the scale and trend behind natural variability is subject to an unknown number of overlapping cycles from multiple causes many of which are unknown, unquantified or both. _Source__via_GreenWatch

We are overdue to enter Solar Cycle 24. Solar Cycle 24 is a solar cycle that was supposed to have been one of the strongest cycles in the past 400 years, according to NASA solar prognosticators. We have an opportunity to determine whether the correlation between the length of the solar cycle, and Earth's estimated average temperature, will hold during the next two solar cycles: cycle 24 and cycle 25--a cycle predicted to be exceptionally long and weak.

There is a lot more to solar variation than just sunspot number. The possible mechanisms by which solar variation can affect the climate of Earth are much more numerous than the gnomes of NASA Goddard are willing to admit. The cosmic ray hypothesis of Svensmark is only one of many potential means by which the Solar dynamo can impact Earth's naturally chaotic climate.

Sir Karl Popper attempted to head off an ongoing takeover of science by ideological interests, but in the field of climatology, many of Popper's lessons have gone unlearned.

Popper, then, repudiates induction, and rejects the view that it is the characteristic method of scientific investigation and inference, and substitutes falsifiability in its place. It is easy, he argues, to obtain evidence in favour of virtually any theory, and he consequently holds that such ‘corroboration’, as he terms it, should count scientifically only if it is the positive result of a genuinely ‘risky’ prediction, which might conceivably have been false. For Popper, a theory is scientific only if it is refutable by a conceivable event. Every genuine test of a scientific theory, then, is logically an attempt to refute or to falsify it, and one genuine counter-instance falsifies the whole theory. In a critical sense, Popper's theory of demarcation is based upon his perception of the logical asymmetry which holds between verification and falsification: it is logically impossible to conclusively verify a universal proposition by reference to experience (as Hume saw clearly), but a single counter-instance conclusively falsifies the corresponding universal law. In a word, an exception, far from ‘proving’ a rule, conclusively refutes it. __SEP

Climatology--as interpreted by the bureaucrats at the UN's IPCC, and by politician Al Gore--has become an unfalsifiable ideology, rather than a science. It has become a secular religion, like Marxism or other leftist ideology of "social justice". It has become an instrument of social justice, rather than a branch of science. Sadly, Gavin Schmidt of NASA Goddard has acknowledged the unfalsifiability of CAGW, catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.

Climatology is not the only former branch of science to be attempting the "ideological breakaway." But it is certainly the best financed and most politically connected.

A lot is at stake, as the violent inner workings of our local star go about their cyclical activities. We should assume an attitude of humble observation, curious and open to what we may find.

Climate Science in Disarray: Fraying at the Seems

Image Source

Recent revelations that the oceans are no longer warming, and satellite readings showing that Earth land temperatures have stabilised over the past ten years, have caused much concern among believers of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW). Skeptics of the catastrophic climate interpretation have begun to grow bolder in looking at alternative climate forcings besides CO2. The catastrophic branch was in need of rescue from malignant moderates. Imagine their relief, when Lancaster scientists Sloan and Wolfendale announced that they had proven that there is no sun-climate link! The celebration in orthodox circles was jubilant, and much publicized. But then, scientists began pointing out that what Sloan and Wolfendale claim to have proved, was not proven at all.

Image Source

The basic theory as promoted by Svensmark is illustrated in the image above. Galactic cosmic rays interact with the atmosphere to promote formation of low level clouds--which reflect sunlight away from earth before it can heat the oceans and land. An active solar wind will deflect many of the galactic cosmic rays so that they cannot instigate Terran cloud formation. The lack of low level clouds allows more sunlight to heat the land and seas, thus heating the Earth more. Sloan and Wolfendale (PDF) claimed to have refuted Svensmark's hypothesis, and the news media believed them. Unfortunately, the Lancaster scientists looked at the wrong type of cosmic ray, so they seem to have missed the mark.

Sloan and Wolfendale raised three critiques which supposedly discredit the CRF/climate link. A careful check, however, reveals that the arguments are inconsistent with the real expectations from the link. Two arguments are based on the expectation for effects which are much larger than should actually be present. In the third argument, they expect to see no phase lag, where one should actually be present. When carefully considering the link, Sloan and Wolfendale did not raise any argument which bares any implications to the validity or invalidity of the link.

One last point. Although many in the climate community try to do their best to disregard the evidence, there is a large solar-climate link, whether on the 11-year solar cycle (e.g., global temperature variations of 0.1°C), or on longer time scales. Currently, the cosmic-ray climate link is the only known mechanism which can explain the large size of the link, not to mention that independent CRF variations were shown to have climatic effects as well. __Source__via__Lubos

In addition, the new Solar Cycle 24 is still reluctant to come out to play. The longer cycle 24 takes to commence in full, the lower its eventual activity is expected to be. We are already expecting cycle 25 to be of extremely low activity. If the low activity begins earlier, with cycle 24, we may see global cooling of earlier onset, greater extent, and longer duration than anyone expected.

To top it off, some very public figures in climate science are beginning to defect from the up-till-now well managed "consensus herd." Kerry Emanuel, hurricane modeler and researcher, has expressed public doubts about the GCM's ability to predict severe weather activity.

The models are telling us something quite different from what nature seems to be telling us. There are various interpretations possible, e.g. a) The big increase in hurricane power over the past 30 years or so may not have much to do with global warming, or b) The models are simply not faithfully reproducing what nature is doing. Hard to know which to believe yet. __Source

More on Emanuel here

And here

More on the great unraveling here

H/T Tom Nelson


At this time the alarmist CAGW movement is the politically correct interpretation of climate science. That means that research that follows the PC line are more likely to be funded, and more likely to be published and cited by mainstream media.

As long as the research is politically correct, it is passed through the checkpoints almost automatically, with little scrutiny.

Only when the research begins to question the politically popular viewpoints does it come under the microscope, and every small blemish is magnified in an attempt to disqualify the challenging viewpoint.

Under the government of the USSR, all challengers to Lysenkoist biology were put in their place by the powers of the state. As the EU and other inter-governmental agencies gain more power, and approach the authoritarianism of the old USSR, perhaps we will see similar punishments meted out to skeptics of CAGW? It is quite likely to happen, unless a new renaissance of enlightenment thinking descends upon the university and society at large. But don't hold your breath.

Cane Ethanol from Brazil: Current Pricing

Sugar cane is a much better crop for ethanol production than maize (corn). Brazilian producers can price ethanol currently at $1.64 a gallon, wholesale. US ethanol wholesales for $2.55 a gallon, which is probably less than the actual costs of producing ethanol from maize. It is time for the US government to get rid of corn ethanol mandates, and open the market for international business without the protectionist tariffs.

“I think we are going to see record ethanol production this year in Brazil, while the U.S. ethanol producers are struggling to make a profit,” said Antonio Augusto Duva, a soft commodities manager at BNP Paribas bank in Sao Paulo. “The (Brazilian) industry’s hope, and this might be wishful thinking on their part, is that lower prices here and high gas prices there could result in big ethanol exports to the U.S.,” he said.

Another reason is that high corn prices — hovering near $6 per bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade — means U.S. corn ethanol producers are facing very tight profit margins, if they have any profit margin to speak of. Corn prices shot up last week when the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported an 8% expected drop in U.S. corn plantings to 86 million acres this season. “At these prices, a lot of ethanol producers are on the edge. You get bad weather this summer and the crop looks bad, and suddenly prices go to $7.

That would be impossible for U.S. ethanol companies,” said Joseph Petrowski, chief executive of Gulf Oil in Boston. Nevertheless, the U.S. has mandated ethanol use. So ethanol isn’t just going to vanish if corn prices stay at these levels and ethanol companies [will] start to go bankrupt as did Kansas-based Ethanex Energy Inc. (EHTE) on March 25. ___QiBioenergy

The US government has no idea how to deal with current energy problems. The Democratic Party dominated US Congress is particularly slow and obtuse. Congressional policies are driving up the cost of conventional energy to intolerable levels, while making it almost impossible for the market to bring in much needed alternatives. What we are seeing is political peak oil, and political global warming from all the hot air emanating from the US Capitol Building.

For a more enlightened look at bio-energy alternatives than anything you will find typically on the news media, check out NPR's Science Friday tomorrow:

NPR’s Science Friday will air an update on biofuels research tomorrow (April 11), with calls accepted from 2-4 EDT. In this week’s segment, George Huber, of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, reports on green gasoline, highlighted earlier this week in Biofuels Digest. Also, Miriam Sticklen of Michigan State University will highlight work on enzymes from cattle used for cellulosic ethanol and Percival Zhang of Virginia Tech will relate developments in producing hydrogen gas from biomass. __BiofuelsDigest

For a fascinating summary-style look at some of the problems the IPCC and the "climate consensus" are facing, check out this interesting article from a New Zealand website. H/T Energy Blog

The issues of CAGW, Peak Oil, and BioEnergy are inextricably inter-tied, in a perverse way. Many close observers and critics of the many inconsistencies and inadequacies of CAGW orthodoxy, feel strangely compelled to attack BioEnergy. Many supporters of BioEnergy seem to think that biofuels will help stave off CAGW, although that is surely whimsical thinking at its worst. Many believers in catastrophic Peak Oil resent BioEnergy as a "party crasher" that threatens to spoil all the fun of watching civilisation crashing all about. Many members of the cloned-consensus of CAGW also believe in catastrophic Peak Oil, although there are deep contradictions involved in the path to catastrophe of the two apocalypses.

Quasi-religious thinking lies at the heart of most people's beliefs about energy, economics, society, politics, and life in general. Even atheists unwittingly tread the same quasi-religious thought pathways and processes that the most devout believers walk. But don't tell them. They might burn you at the stake.

Climate Basics: Earth's Heat Content

Intelligent people understand that they can trust neither politicians, nor the media. What some of them have not yet learned, is that they cannot blindly trust anyone, regardless of academic or scientific credentials.

Consider the science behind climate change. A scientific theory must contain falsifiable hypotheses. The key to understanding and testing current orthodox theories of anthropogenic global warming, is to identify the falsifiable hypotheses and to attempt to falsify them.

"Global Warming" requires an ongoing accumulation of heat. This heat accumulation should be reflected in temperature measurements -- allowing for normal climate and weather cycles. The best measurement of Earth's heat content is ocean temperature measurements, rather than the ground surface station measurements that currently feed data into GCMs.

The simplest form of "fact-checking" of IPCC GCM climate projections, is to see if Earth's heat content is growing.

...global warming requires a more-or-less monotonic increase in the accumulation of heat (in Joules) within the climate system. The use of a global average surface temperature, regardless if it is increasing or decreasing is an inadequate and inaccurate metric of global warming as the heat is not only a function of temperature but also mass over which the heat change occurs! This is why the ocean is the dominate reservoir of heat content change.

With respect to the change in upper ocean heat content, as reported on a Climate Science weblog on February 15 2008, the paper

Willis, J. K., D. P. Chambers and R. Steven Nerem, 2008: Assessing the Globally Averaged Sea Level Budget on Seasonal and Interannual Time Scales. Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans (in press),

reports on no upper (700m) ocean warming since 2004.

Thus while we cannot state that the recent widely distributed cold waves or overall cooling of the troposphere are evidence of the end of global warming over decadal and longer time scales, we can state that global warming has not occurred in the last 4 years. This is a major issue for both climate science and for policymakers, as only those who blindly (or deliberately) ignore the scientific evidence can still accept the 2007 IPCC conclusions as settled science.___ClimateScience

The question is, how long will the heat content of Earth's climate system be allowed to diverge from orthodox climate models, before the climate orthodoxy begins to modify its approach to GCM's and climate projection?

The current climate orthodoxy is based upon a set of assumptions--incorporated into its models--that must eventually be pared down enough to a form which can be falsified. We are not at that point as of yet. Currently, the orthodoxy has taken care to obscure and complicate its theories so as to present a front to the world which is indistinguishable from an unfalsifiable belief system, a religion.

But if catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) orthodoxy is to be taught in university science departments, rather than in cloistered seminaries and monasteries, curious students, post-grads, and junior professors will attempt to formulate the issues in terms of science--falsifiable hypotheses. As these un-initiated supplicants produce a body of work based upon pre-orthodox mindsets, it should be possible to tease out a set of hypotheses which are falsifiable.

More time. More data. Cleaner theories. More honest science. The orthodoxy can consider itself under siege.

Greenhouse Global Warming? Informed Skepticism Wisest Course

It has almost become something of a joke when some "global warming" conference has to be cancelled because of a snowstorm or bitterly cold weather.

But stampedes and hysteria are no joke -- and creating stampedes and hysteria has become a major activity of those hyping a global warming "crisis."

They mobilize like-minded people from a variety of occupations, call them all "scientists" and then claim that "all" the experts agree on a global warming crisis.

Their biggest argument is that there is no argument.

A whole cottage industry has sprung up among people who get grants, government agencies who get appropriations, politicians who get publicity and the perpetually indignant who get something new to be indignant about. It gives teachers something to talk about in school instead of teaching.

Those who bother to check the facts often find that not all those who are called scientists are really scientists and not all of those who are scientists are specialists in climate. But who bothers to check facts these days?__Source

There are a number of reasons, besides the graphic divergence pictured above, to suspect that the High Orthodoxy of Climate Change has taken in large numbers of opportunists and the gullible. For instance, cyclic ocean oscillations can have a huge impact on multi-decadal climate trends, but GCMs cannot accurately capture them.

... remarkably high SOI averages as seen recently and now in February also took place in the past during periods of global cooling as late in the 19th century and in the 50’s and the 70’s as the PDO experimented a negative phase. This strong La Niña event and the behavior of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation may hint the beginning of a new negative phase of the PDO, but is too early to tell and it could be another false indicator as seen in 1999 and 2000. The same could be said about global cooling. The recent trend of global temperature (read Anthony Watts's excellent tracking) can be a brief lapse in the curve of global warming or may indicate the beginning of a long term cooling trend. I entirely agree with WOOD-TV Craig James’ opinion (read more) that this can be "just a noise in the upward trend or is it the start of a downward trend in temperatures". The famous and very competent meteorologist from Grand Rapids tells "it is a little too early to be proclaiming that global warming has ended" and it sounds reasonable to me, but at the same time it is very nice to see that natural forcing and not manmade global warming is driving our planet temperature.___Source__via_NCMediaWatch

Unlike the true believers who flock to the Climate High Orthodoxy, intelligent people reserve the right to be skeptical and to keep an open mind as the data accumulates.

In fact, it is starting to look as if the Climate Orthodoxy's massive media deluge is beginning to backfire.

“Mass media efforts to raise American public concern about climate change - such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and the ‘scientific consensus’ media drumbeat - ironically may be having just the opposite effect, according to a new study appearing in the scientific journal Risk Analysis.”___Source

People are naturally curious, and skeptical. When certain ideas are pounded into their heads so unrelentingly, the more intelligent ones begin to wonder about the reasons for the militant attacks on their senses. Arguments for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) are wearing thin, as they are repeated ad nauseum without satisfactory evidential support. Such growing discontent among the brighter and more skeptical members of the public makes them more likely to consider alternative explanations for climate phenomena.

Despite much evidence relating climatic changes on Earth to solar variability, a physical mechanism responsible for this is still poorly known. A possible link connecting solar activity and climate variations is related to cosmic rays and the physical-chemical changes they produce in the atmosphere. Here we review experimental evidence and theoretical grounds for this rela tion. The cosmic ray – climate link seems to be a plausible climate driver which effectively operates on different time scales, but its exact mechanism and relative importance still remain open questions.____Source

The High Orthodoxy of Climate has the advantage of the media, political, and academic high ground. The Orthodoxy can maintain multi-billion dollar media barrages for the indefinite future. With that kind of public relations and big media firepower, you would think that the skeptics would be "drowned out" and "obliterated" by now. But that would be ignorning the "new media," the internet. The High Orthodoxy may be fighting this century's war with the last century's weapons.

Certainly with intelligent and informed climate discussion as one finds here, here, here, and here, it is unlikely that the Orthodoxy will be able to shut down debate in the foreseeable future.

H/T Tom Nelson

The Energy Promised Land?

Daniel Yergin from Cambridge Energy Research Associates recently spoke to the US National Governors Association meeting. His message to the governors was seen as optimistic on the future of energy, a welcome relief from the usual cant of negativism. Yergin suggested that clean energies such as nuclear and hydroelectric would provide most of the alternatives to fossil fuels in the future.

Yergin explained how CERA’s analysis in Crossing the Divide uses a scenarios framework to assess the prospects among the various clean energy technologies and help define key risks and opportunities as companies seek to place their technology bets. The analysis addresses new and conventional energy technologies that can provide energy with a minimal carbon footprint and facilitate greater energy security. These technologies include biofuels, renewable power technologies, carbon capture and storage, nuclear and hydropower.___CERA

As can be seen by Al Fin's recent postings on biomass, biofuels, and CHP, we here at Al Fin are particularly optimistic about the energy future--assuming the basic political and economic climate remains intact. Climate change is more of a religion than a science, but it is a particularly dominant religion in the area of government and foundation financing, and science publication. It is an unfalsifiable religion, however, and realists treat it as such when allowed to speak honestly.

Yergin is an energy realist, like Leonardo Maugeri. Energy realists understand that oil, gas, coal, and unconventional petroleum deposits are still plentiful. New technologies will make them even more accessible and economical than at present.

But even realists like Yergin have to saturate their communications with the cloying suffocation of "climate change" rhetoric. Even years after the discrediting of Naomi Oreskes, such caution is required in order to remain within the mainstream of government and quasi-governmental money flow. As James Watson, Larry Summers and many other scientists, engineers, and other technical people have learned, some things cannot be talked about honestly in public.

H/T Energy Blog

Climate Orthodoxy Is Given Little Respect by Anyone Acquainted with Actual Science

Pity the poor infant science of climatology. Fresh from winning the Nobel Peace(!) Prize, the high priests of climatology return from Oslo to find that back at home, most knowledgeable people do not consider them "real scientists." Why not?

The scientists who interest me in this field are those who can draw on the experience of a lot of people who have come before them. And uniformly in these areas I find scepticism. People who write mathematical models of complex systems for a living tend to find the climate models very unconvincing. Geologists find the arguments very unconvincing. Engineers find the arguments unconvincing. And astrophysicists find the arguments unconvincing.

Why? Well the answers are clear....The climate models seem to be largely driven by over-fitting to a small sample set and positive feedback. The small sample set - at most 30 years of accurate data - might be enough to try and predict one or two years, but 50 year predictions? Ignoring the biggest effect on global warming - water vapour - is surely going to cause problems.

Positive feedback in engineering invariably results in unstable systems - so we have to ask why do most if not all of the climate models rely on it to get doomsday predictions? For the Earth to have survived as long as it has with a stable climate, through major events like ice-ages or volcanic eruptions, there is little doubt that a degree of negative climate feedback is essential.

Geologists will quite happily explain how major climate changes in the Earth are a result of geological changes. Remember that more carbon is trapped in limestone than in either plant life or fossil fuels (or both put together for that matter). Ice ages and volcanic eruptions are all things that will unarguably change the climate. Yet, with the notable exception of the extinction of the dinosaurs, it seems life has happily trundled along through it all. We're the living proof.

Of course, it's also interesting to see changes over shorter time periods. If you go to see the Roman ruins at Ephesus in Turkey, the guide will point out that the harbour is miles from where the nearest sea is today. Sea levels go up and down for many reasons - carbon dioxide not being one of them. Somehow, we survive.___Source

Rather than sitting still, being quiet, and letting the infant high priests of climatology destroy the global economy, many scientists have gotten disgusted enough by the quasi-religious pompous pseudoscientific pretense, to say "enough!"

• There are no calculations to determinate an average surface temperature of a planet:

• a) with or without atmosphere,

• b) with or without rotation,

• c) with or without infrared light absorbing gases.

• The frequently mentioned difference of 33 C for the fictitious greenhouse effect of the atmosphere is therefore a meaningless number.

• Any radiation balance for the average radiant flux is completely irrelevant for the determination of the ground level air temperatures and thus for the average value as well.

• Average temperature values cannot be identifed with the fourth root of average values of the absolute temperature’s fourth power.

• Radiation and heat flows do not determine the temperature distributions and their average values.

• Re-emission is not reflection and can in no way heat up the ground-level air against the actual heat flow without mechanical work.

• The temperature rises in the climate model computations are made plausible by a perpetuum mobile of the second kind [perpetual motion machine]. This is possible by setting the thermal conductivity in the atmospheric models to zero, an unphysical assumption. It would be no longer a perpetuum mobile of the second kind, if the average fictitious radiation balance, which has no physical justification anyway, was given up.

• After Schack 1972 water vapor is responsible for most of the absorption of the infrared radiation in the Earth’s atmosphere. The wavelength of the part of radiation, which is absorbed by carbon dioxide is only a small part of the full infrared spectrum and does not change considerably by raising its partial pressure. Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects : : : 93

• Infrared absorption does not imply “backwarming”. Rather it may lead to a drop of the temperature of the illuminated surface.

• In radiation transport models with the assumption of local thermal equilibrium, it is assumed that the absorbed radiation is transformed into the thermal movement of all gas molecules. There is no increased selective re-emission of infrared radiation at the low temperatures of the Earth’s atmosphere.___Much More at Source

H/T Icecap and Green Watch

The problem with calling climate modelers "scientists", is that actual scientists generate testable, falsifiable hypotheses within their specific areas of study. Actual scientists operate under the discipline of the scientific method. GCMs (general circulation models)--the omnipotent toys of climate modelers--are not falsifiable. They are not even good enough to be wrong!

Yet, Senators Obama, Clinton, and McCain all claim to believe in the proclamations of the orthodox IPCC, to arbitrarily place onerous controls, damaging regulations, and crippling restrictions on the US economy--to placate the "gods" of global warming. Talk about human sacrifice! The EU government is even worse, but then, no one expects any better from an unrepresentative, unaccountable mega-bureaucracy like the EU.

The dullards who remain, fixed in their unmovable belief in CAGW, are the real losers here. At least the members of the orthodoxy are getting tenure, publications, a certain amount of "acclaim", and--a Nobel Peace(!) Prize. The dullard true believers will get nothing whatsoever out of this deal--except drained pocketbooks, loss of jobs, and in the end--incredible disillusionment when the whole cathedral-of-cards comes crashing to ground. C'est la vie.

Still Waiting for Greenhouse

The plot above is of satellite temperature readings of the lower atmosphere from UAH (red) and RSS (blue). UAH is University of Alabama Huntsville, and RSS is Remote Sensing Systems, two trusted climate satellite groups that have recently reconciled data measurement differences.

....both the RSS and the UAH temperature records show that January 2008 was below the long term (1979-1998) average for the month. This is the first time since January 2000 (exactly 8 years ago) that both records were colder than normal. Figure 3 shows both records from January 2001 through January 2008 and illustrates that over this time period—more than 7 years, during which time global emissions of carbon dioxide have increased by probably 15-20% (the actual data are only available through 2004, but the emissions growth from 2001 to 2004 was over 11% and we doubt things have slowed down any, see here for data )—there has been absolutely no warming whatsoever in the lower atmosphere.

World Climate Report

Also check out Roger Pielke's take on deep ocean heating, and Richard Lindzen's Case Against Climate Alarmism (H/T Tom Nelson)

This is only short term weather noise, of course. We will need to keep watching to see if the apparent "disconnect" between atmospheric CO2 and temperature trends continues. Of course this is not the first de-coupling of CO2 and temperature. Nor will it be the last.

Only the highly gullible have made up their minds that a catastrophic anthropogenic global warming disaster from greenhouse gases is just over the next hill. It is the smart ones who are skeptical--the ones who actually believe in science.

Is Climatology Pseudoscience?

Not exactly a pseudoscience. Climate statistician William Briggs, specializing in forecast evaluation, explains why climatology deserves our respect, until--until it doesn't.

The short answer, I will disappoint many of you by saying, is no. Like I wrote before, climatologists are generally nice people genuinely struggling with understanding the immense complexities of the oceanic-atmospheric (and space!) system. It might be that many of them are misleading themselves by custom tailoring models to show them what they expect (or desire?) to see, but this has not reached a level where it is done with intent. Most mistakes that are made are honest ones. And it is also true that much has been learned while examining climate models. Still, while scientists are in general noble creatures, there does exists the possibility of them sliding into the abyss.

So suppose, if you are able, that significant man-made climate change is false; further, that it cannot happen, and that all changes to the climate system are due to external forcings, such as those caused by changes in solar output. Just suppose all this is true for the sake of argument.

Now put yourself in the place of a climatologist, one of the many hundreds, in fact, who was involved with the IPCC and so shared in that great validator, the Nobel Peace Prize*. You have spent a career devoted to showing that mankind, through various forms of naughtiness, has significantly influenced the climate, and has caused temperatures to grow out of control. Your team, at a major university, has built and contributed to various global climate models. Graduate students have worked on these models. Team members have traveled the world and lectured on their results. Many, many papers were written about their output, and so forth.

But something has gone wrong. The actual temperature, predicted to go up and up, has not cooperated and has instead stayed the same and even has gone down. What do to? Let’s take a “What would a scientist do” quiz and find out.

Your model has predicted that temperatures will go up because CO2 has, but unfortunately temperatures have gone down. Do you:

1. Abandon the model and seek a new career
2. Discover where the model went wrong; publish results admitting why and how you were wrong
3. Sit and wait: after all, the temperature is bound to increase sooner or later, hence validating your model
4. Believe that the model cannot be wrong, else so many people wouldn’t believe it, and so posit some new source that is “holding back” warming, and only if that new source weren’t there, your model would be perfect.

____William M. Briggs, Statistician

And that is where the scientist co-authors of the IPCC reports find themselves currently. The scientific approach would be to choose number 2. But statistician Briggs goes on to explain the actual choices being made by different climatologists--mostly 3 and 4.

Of course, the ongoing divergence of temperatures from IPCC and NASA models does not disprove a long-term warming trend. All it does is to call into question the current models being used by the IPCC. So what does a real scientist do, when his models--his hypotheses--fail to prove true?
H/T Green Watch
Image tip Icecap

Extensive Snow and Ice: North, and South

Snow cover for the current Northern Hemisphere winter is 2% above normal, and the highest for the past 5 years.

With a major snowstorm in China and snow covering much of Asia and parts of the middle east and a decent snowpack in North America (recently NASA reported 60% of the lower 48 states and all of Canada was snowcovered), our Northern Hemispheric snowcover is now 2% above normal and the highest level in at least 5 years. A rather amazing 25% of the northern Hemispheric is snow and ice covered....December sea ice extent in the Southern Hemisphere was a remarkable 15% above normal and the highest of the entire record as was the case in the late winter (it is now mid-summer and the sea ice is diminishing but is still well above normal).____IceCap

Also linked by Tom NelsonPredictions for further snow this winter:

A briefly bitter cold start to January gave way to a record second week warm spell. Frigid air returned in week 3 concentrated in the central states. It has moderated this weekend in the central and will by early week with some rains in the east but another shot of cold will be felt this week mainly across the north....We are entering a phase of the MJO that favors a series of storms for the west and central states that will bring very heavy snows to many areas there (focused mainly on the Midwest in areas like Des Moines, IA, Chicago IL and Madison, WI).

You will see stories in the news about these snow events through the next few weeks. These storms will ride up through the northeast but those storm track usually mean rain for the east with the exception maybe in some events for the higher elevations up north and west (northern New York and northern Vermont). With time (in a few weeks) the storm track will shift east and assuming there are bullets left in storm gun, the east would get its shot at more snows, in time for ski areas to recover for the important President’s Day week.-----IceCap

Of course, this is only weather. Weather does not become climate until a trend persists for 25 years or more. Weather is driven by the sun, and ocean oscillations. The solar cycles and the cycles of ocean oscillations combine to create longer term climate.

For over a decade, opportunists in politics, the media, certain industries--even in science--have been trying to frame every short term weather event in terms of "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming" (CAGW). A lot of weather events that did not fit the orthodox dogma were either ignored or minimised. But it is now time for everyone to start the clock ticking on the GCM projections of Hansen etc.

Unfalsifiable theories are not science. Up to this point, all we have from Gore, Hansen, etc. is unfalsifiable assertions. Given the public respect and adoration these men have been given (thanks to an uncritical and largely ignorant-of-science media), they should show the courage to lay out a timetable of climate phenomena that would falsify their CAGW theories.

Waiting for Apocalypse

The demise of two recent frontrunners in the race to apocalypse--peak oil and global warming--appears to place doomseekers in a curious position. Waiting for an apocalypse that may not appear in their lifetime. Imagine the disappointment! Peak oil has always been a long shot, but why has the global warming doomsday been cancelled?

The High Court in London recently ordered the British Government to correct nine of the 36 serious errors in Al Gore’s climate movie before innocent pupils were exposed to it. It was Gore who, in 1994, announced that Mars was covered in canals full of water. This notion had been disproved before his birth. It was Gore who recently spent $4 million of the profits from his sci-fi comedy horror movie on a luxury condo just feet from the supposedly rising ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco. No surprise that he and the mad scientists with whom he has close financial and political links are under investigation for racketeering -- peddling a false prospectus to investors in his “green” investment corporation by distorting climate science even after the UK judge’s ruling.

It is not so well known that the UN’s [IPCC] climate reports are also error-packed and misleading.

.....global temperatures were warmer than today in the medieval warm period. It overlooks the dozens of peer-reviewed papers that establish this fact, and continues to rely on the bogus and now-discredited “hockey-stick” graph by which its previous assessment in 2001 had tried to rewrite history.

It was also warmer than today in Roman times, and in the Minoan warm period or Holocene climate optimum, when temperatures were warmer than today for 2000 years in the Bronze Age, firing the emergence of great civilizations worldwide. In each of the four previous interglacial periods, temperatures were 10F warmer than today’s. For most of the past half billion years, temperatures were nearly always 12.5F warmer than the present. So the warming that has now stopped (there has been no statistically significant warming since 1998) was well within the natural variability of the climate.

....The UN’s computer models predict that in the tropics the rate of increase in temperature five miles above the surface will be three times the rate of increase down here. But 50 years of atmospheric measurement, first by balloon-borne radiosondes and then by satellites, show that the air above the tropics is not merely failing to warm at three times the surface rate: for 25 years it has been cooling. The absence of the tropical mid-troposphere “hot-spot” indicates that the computer models -- expensive guesswork -- on which the UN’s rickety case is founded are, in a fundamental way, misunderstanding the way the atmosphere behaves (Douglass & Knox, 2004; Douglass et al., 2007).

On top of the “radiative forcings” from greenhouse gases, the UN says the mere fact of temperature change will cause more change still, through what it calls “feedbacks.” The UN has hiked the feedback multiplier by more than 52 percent since its 1995 report, without quite saying why. Shaviv (2006) and Schwartz (2007) calculate that the sum total of all feedbacks is either nil or very small; Wentz et al. (2007) report that the UN has missed out two-thirds of the cooling effect of evaporation in its assessment of the water-vapor feedback; Spencer (2007) finds that the cloud albedo feedback, which the UN says is strongly positive, is in fact negative; Ahlbeck (2004, 2005) says the CO2 feedback has been enormously exaggerated.....Schulte (2008: in press) reviewed 539 papers on “global climate change” in the scientific journals. Only one paper mentioned that “global warming” might be catastrophic, and even that paper offered not a shred of evidence for the supposed apocalypse.

Hawaii Reporter via Icecap and Tom Nelson

To top it off, solar cycles are lengthening--which is generally a sign of a cooler climate to come. Is the coming apocalypse to be an ice age???

"By the mid-21st century the planet will face another Little Ice Age, similar to the Maunder Minimum, because the amount of solar radiation hitting the Earth has been constantly decreasing since the 1990s and will reach its minimum approximately in 2041," he said.

The Maunder Minimum occurred between 1645 and 1715, when only about 50 spots appeared on the Sun, as opposed to the typical 40,000-50,000 spots.

It coincided with the middle and coldest part of the so called Little Ice Age, during which Europe and North America were subjected to bitterly cold winters.

Dalton Minimum ReturnsSolar activity is beginning to resemble pre-Maunder activity. We are only now recovering from Maunder, so if you like winter year round, you should be pleased.

We Are All Nobel Laureates Now--Dumbing Down the Nobel Prize

Steven Running is a University of Montana Forestry professor, who was one of the many authors of a recent IPCC climate report. Running's association with the IPCC as a "co-author" of this report made Running a "co-recipient" of Al Gore's 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Interesting, perhaps, but what is truly fascinating is what Professor Running is doing with his miniscule chunk of the prize--he is leveraging his "distinguished Nobel status" into a local public speaking guruship. Behold, the distinguished Nobelist, coming to our hometown--just imagine!

But some Montanans are apparently better informed than the typical easily impressed Missoulan. Some Montanans actually expect a scientist to have EARNED his Nobel prize.

...when some residents complained that his presentation here would be one-sided because no opposing view would be offered, the superintendent of Choteau School District No. 1, Kevin St. John, canceled it....Mr. St. John said that numerous residents had complained to school board members and that they in turn had suggested that the program be called off. NYT

The forestry professor models his talk rather pretentiously, after Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's "Five Stages of Grief" to dying. Except in the professor's talk, it is the "Five Stages of Grief" to climate change. Clever? Not so much. In fact, Running's public lecture is apparently a miniaturized version of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" slideshow.

Last spring, University of Montana ecologist and forestry professor Steve Running presented an abbreviated version of his increasingly popular lecture, “The Inconvenient Truth for Montana,” to a room full of environmental journalists.

Near the end of his keynote, Running outlined what he called his “Five Stages of Climate Grief.” Running’s adaptation of Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ groundbreaking “Five Stages of Grief” starts with stage one: denial that global warming exists.

Missoula Independent

Reading the NY Times account would lead the typical member of the public to assume that the Montanans who demanded a balancing viewpoint to Running's "catastrophic climate change cant" are typical flat earthers, science deniers. But in truth, it requires far more scientific sophistication to understand how the lock-step climate change industry is slanting the data, than it does to go along with the flock--the flock that swallows the mainstream media sensationalism and catastrophism.

It is a shame that the public concept of "Nobel laureate" has to be dumbed down by quasi-impostors such as Running. It is a huge shame that the NYTimes and most of the rest of the mainstream media abets in that process.
"