by Andrew Bolt, Melbourne Herald Sun [here]
THE vultures are circling over Burma’s dead. Hey, isn’t that fat one Al Gore?
Sure is. And - flap, flap, plop - there he lands, the first to go picking over carcasses for scraps to feed his great global warming scare campaign.
What the world should be learning from this terrible loss of at least 60,000 people in the cyclone that hit Burma last week is that tyrannies kill more surely than any freak of weather.
But Al Gore, who won a Nobel “Peace” Prize for terrifying people with his error-riddled An Inconvenient Truth, wants you to blame instead his pet bogeyman. Tremble, sinners, before the wrath of a hot planet!
In an interview on America’s NPR on Tuesday, Gore claimed Cyclone Nargis was actually part of a pattern.
“Last year a catastrophic storm . . . hit Bangladesh. The year before, the strongest cyclone in more than 50 years hit China, and we’re seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming.”
This cyclone that hit Burma is a “consequence” of global warming? Gore should die of shame to peddle such self-serving deceptions.
Fact: The world has not warmed in a decade, says the Hadley Centre and two of the three other institutions that measure its temperature.
Fact: Any link between hurricanes and warming is highly disputed by scientists, with “evidence both for and against”, says the American Meteorological Society.
Fact: The data is “insufficiently reliable to detect trends on the frequency of extreme cyclones”, says a recent paper in Science by world authority Chris Landsea.
Fact: The cyclone that hit Burma was just a category three storm - not a category five - and less deadly than worse cyclones that struck Bangladesh in 1970 and 1991. What’s more, Gore concedes the record breaker was 50 years ago, before the world got this gassy.
So there’s no recent warming, no agreed link with cyclones, no trend of worse cyclones, and nothing unusually strong about the one that hit Burma.
Yet there goes Gore - caw, caw, caw - flogging the warming scare that has made him so fantastically rich. The great Profit of Doom. …
Let us not be sidetracked. These are people killed not by Gore’s global warming, or even by Friday’s Cyclone Nargis - but by a filthy band of rapacious dictators who have left their people beggared and blinded, at the mercy of even the wind and waves. … [more]
May 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
NASA Earth Observatory [here]
A cool-water anomaly known as La Nina occupied the tropical Pacific Ocean throughout 2007 and early 2008. In April 2008, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that while the La Nina was weakening, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation-a larger-scale, slower-cycling ocean pattern-had shifted to its cool phase.
This image shows the sea surface temperature anomaly in the Pacific Ocean from April 14–21, 2008. The anomaly compares the recent temperatures measured by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite with an average of data collected by the NOAA Pathfinder satellites from 1985–1997. Places where the Pacific was cooler than normal are blue, places where temperatures were average are white, and places where the ocean was warmer than normal are red.
The cool water anomaly in the center of the image shows the lingering effect of the year-old La Nina. However, the much broader area of cooler-than-average water off the coast of North America from Alaska (top center) to the equator is a classic feature of the cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The cool waters wrap in a horseshoe shape around a core of warmer-than-average water. (In the warm phase, the pattern is reversed).
Unlike El Nino and La Nina, which may occur every 3 to 7 years and last from 6 to 18 months, the PDO can remain in the same phase for 20 to 30 years. The shift in the PDO can have significant implications for global climate, affecting Pacific and Atlantic hurricane activity, droughts and flooding around the Pacific basin, the productivity of marine ecosystems, and global land temperature patterns. “This multi-year Pacific Decadal Oscillation ‘cool? trend can intensify La Nina or diminish El Nino impacts around the Pacific basin,” said Bill Patzert, an oceanographer and climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “The persistence of this large-scale pattern [in 2008] tells us there is much more than an isolated La Nina occurring in the Pacific Ocean.”
Icecap Note [here]: We have been noting this shift in the Pacific as has Bill for a while. As he says it favors more of these cool La Ninas, more tornadoes, hurricanes, winter snow, spring flooding and summer heat waves and drought - and importantly a cooling of the global temperatures, which will be augmented if cycle 24 proves to be quiet and when the AMO cycles back into its cool mode.
April 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
by Sherwood, Keith, and Craig Idso
CO2 Science, Volume 11, Number 17 [here]
In the introduction to their illuminating paper, the authors say they previously studied “a long span of Chinese history and found that the number of war outbreaks and population collapses in China is significantly correlated with Northern Hemisphere temperature variations and that all of the periods of nationwide unrest, population collapse, and drastic change occurred in the cold phases of this period.” In their current study, they write that they “extend the earlier study to the global and continental levels between AD 1400 and AD 1900.” This they do by using high-resolution paleoclimate data to explore “at a macroscale” the effects of climate change on the outbreak of war and population decline in the pre-industrial era as discerned by analyses of historical socioeconomic and demographic data.
In describing their findings, the five scientists say their newest analyses, like their earlier ones, show that “cooling impeded agricultural production, which brought about a series of serious social problems, including price inflation, then successively war outbreak, famine, and population decline.” And they suggest, as they put it, that “worldwide and synchronistic war-peace, population, and price cycles in recent centuries have been driven mainly by long-term climate change,” wherein warm periods were supportive of good times and cooling led to bad times, some of which (in our opinion) could arguably be described as a descent into hell. … [more]
April 29, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
By ERIC BERGER, Houston Chronicle
By pioneering the science of seasonal hurricane forecasting and teaching 70 graduate students who now populate the National Hurricane Center and other research outposts, William Gray turned a city far from the stormy seas into a hurricane research mecca.
But now the institution in Fort Collins, Colo., where he has worked for nearly half a century, has told Gray it may end its support of his seasonal forecasting.
As he enters his 25th year of predicting hurricane season activity, Colorado State University officials say handling media inquiries related to Gray’s forecasting requires too much time and detracts from efforts to promote other professors’ work.
But Gray, a highly visible and sometimes acerbic skeptic of climate change, says that’s a “flimsy excuse” for the real motivation — a desire to push him aside because of his global warming criticism.
Among other comments, Gray has said global warming scientists are “brainwashing our children.”
Now an emeritus professor, Gray declined to comment on the university’s possible termination of promotional support. … [more]
April 28, 2008 | 3 Comments | Topic: Latest Climate News
All six episodes of major flooding events of the Sushui River occurred during cool periods, not warm ones.
from World Climate Report, April 24, 2008 [here]
In nearly every presentation on global warming, we hear that floods and droughts will be more severe as the temperature rises. Believe it or not, and who would not believe it given thousands of websites on the issue, there are many scientists who believe the opposite. We have covered these topics in many previous essays, and a recent article in Quaternary Science Reviews reinforces our skeptical viewpoint. …
The research was conducted by Chun Chang Huang and five associates from China’s Shaanxi Normal University. Their goal was to reconstruct major flooding events of the Sushui River (Figure 1) during the Holocene period (the Holocene began approximately 12,000 years ago when the last great glacial period ended).
… Basically, they found a geomorphic sequence that beautifully preserves datable information about major floods over the past 12,000 years. They write “Thus, these loess–soil sequences provide unique information for investigation of Holocene climatic change, flood hydrology, geomorphic and pedogenic changes, and human impact in semiarid zones. This stratigraphic data can provide valuable hydrologic information to those working in engineering hydrology, flood hazard prevention and mitigation, geomorphology, Quaternary sciences and global change.”
The authors… conducted a surprisingly complex set of analyses, and they found six periods over the past 12,000 years when large floods were frequent. Huang et al. state “During the Holocene, there are six episodes of overbank flooding recorded over the alluvial plain. The first occurred at 11,500–11,000 a BP, i.e. the onset of the Holocene. The second took place at 9500–8500 a BP, immediately before the mid-Holocene Climatic Optimum. After an extended geomorphic stability and soil formation, the third overbank flooding episode came at about 3620–3520 a BP, i.e. the late stage of the mid-Holocene Climatic Optimum, and the floodwater inundated and devastated a Bronze-age town of the Xia Culture built on the alluvial plain, and therefore the town was abandoned for a period of ca 100 years. During the late Holocene, the alluvial plain experienced three episodes of overbank flooding at 2420–2170, 1860–1700 and 680–100 a BP, respectively.”
OK – so what, right? As it turns out, all six episodes occurred during cool periods, not warm ones.
April 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor, The Star Online [here]
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Mountain pine beetles that are destroying forests along much of the Rocky Mountain range are doing so much damage that they may affect climate change, Canadian researchers reported on Wednesday.
The damage is nearly equivalent to the polluting effects of forest fires, they report in the journal Nature.
“In the worst year, the impacts resulting from the beetle outbreak in British Columbia were equivalent to 75 percent of the average annual direct forest fire emissions from all of Canada during 1959-1999,” Werner Kurz of the Canadian Forest Service in Victoria, British Columbia and colleagues wrote.
Usually, a forest is a carbon “sink,” soaking up carbon dioxide that would otherwise affect the atmosphere and help hold in heat.
The beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae, changed that. Dead trees release carbon as they rot, and of course fail to use carbon dioxide as they would if alive.
Read more
April 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News, Latest Forest News
by Phil Chapman, The Australian, April 23, 2008 [here]
THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.
What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.
Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.
All four agencies that track Earth’s temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.
There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.
It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.
This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.
It didn’t happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.
Read more
April 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
by Michael Rollins, The Oregonian, Friday April 18, 2008, 1:08 PM [here]
The big question on everybody’s mind as they watch their natural gas bills go up and shiver at assorted baseball games and soccer matches this Saturday and Sunday? How cold is it anyway?
Pretty darn cold, at least in terms of the record book.
The record low high temperature for April 19 is 47 degrees, set in 1961. The forecast for Saturday calls for a high of 48. The record low for that date is 31, set in 1982. Tonight’s forecast calls for an overnight low of 36 and 33 Saturday night.
The record low high April 20 temperature is 42 set in 1963. The forecast for Sunday calls for a high of 49. The record low for April 20 is 33 degrees, set in 1975.
Before we break away, the record high for Saturday was 80 in 1956 and for Sunday, 84 in 1956. Hmmm. Sounds like a nice April back then.
Admin note: It is currently snowing here at W.I.S.E. World Headquarters in the Willamette Valley. Daffodils, irises, and cherry, peach, pear, and apple blossoms appear to be withering due to repeated drenches of snow, sleet, hail, and freezing rain. The blooms were already two weeks later than average. The global cooling so much desired by knee jerk liberal boneheads and urban yokels swimming in dumbfounding gullibility is here. Hip hip hooray.
April 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
by The Oregonian and The Associated Press, Saturday April 19, 2008, 7:21 AM
Light snow fell overnight at higher Portland-area elevations and forecasters say the region should brace for low temperatures and possibly more snow through the weekend.
The Portland area is expected to approach record cold for the date, with a high of 48 anticipated today, one degree short of the record low high temperature for this day. [more]
April 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
Listing posted on Solar Science blog [here]
Another week of excitement as the second solar cycle 24 spot appeared…and then disappeared just as rapidly.
I can’t help feeling that with an unprecedented amount of high technology monitoring the Sun with ever higher resolution, the criteria by which a sunspot is defined has become radically weakened to such an extent that it all becomes meaningless.
On Climate Audit commenters noted that the criteria for naming hurricanes had become so weakened that practically any frontal wave in the Eastern Atlantic that persisted for more than a few hours got a name (the so-called “Tiny Tims” of the hurricane season).
So it appears to be with sunspots and Solar Cycle 24. … [more]
April 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
By Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post
Listing posted on ICECAP [here]
Kim Dabelstein Petersen. She (or he?) is an editor at Wikipedia. What does she edit? Reams and reams of global warming pages. I started checking them. In every instance I checked, she defended those warning of catastrophe and deprecated those who believe the science is not settled. I investigated further. Others had tried to correct her interpretations and had the same experience as I—no sooner did they make their corrections than she pounced, preventing Wikipedia readers from reading anyone’s views but her own. When they protested plaintively, she wore them down and snuffed them out.
By patrolling Wikipedia pages and ensuring that her spin reigns supreme over all climate change pages, she has made of Wikipedia a propaganda vehicle for global warming alarmists. But unlike government propaganda, its source is not self-evident. We don’t suspend belief when we read Wikipedia, as we do when we read literature from an organization with an agenda, because Wikipedia benefits from the Internet’s cachet of making information free and democratic. This Big Brother enforces its views with a mouse.
While I’ve been writing this column, the Naomi Oreskes page has changed 10 times. Since I first tried to correct the distortions on the page, it has changed 28 times. If you have read a climate change article on Wikipedia—or on any controversial subject that may have its own Kim Dabelstein Petersen—beware. Wikipedia is in the hands of the zealots.
April 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
Listing posted on Tom Nelson Blogspot [here]
Only a lonely quartet of governors showed up (and even Arnold Schwarzenegger was late):
Joining Rell and Schwarzenegger in signing the declaration on the stage in Woolsey Hall were Govs. Jon Corzine of New Jersey and Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas.
Note that all 50 governors were invited, and careful weasel wording earlier this week suggested that as many as 10 governors would participate.
This event was supposed to convince us that U.S. state governors care deeply about global warming; to any thinking person, this event indicates just the opposite.
April 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
Listing posted on Tom Nelson Blogspot [here]
ABC and the Washington Post polled Americans about the most important issue to them in the upcoming elections. The economy ranked #1 with 41%, Iraq #2 with 18%, Health Care #3 with 7%, Terrorism/National Security #4 with 5%, Immigration and Ethics followed with 4%, Education and Morals with 2%, Environment and Global Warming continue to receive a 0%.
April 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
By PATRICK MICHAELS, Wall Street Journal, April 18, 2008
President George W. Bush has just announced his goal to stabilize greenhouse-gas emissions by 2025. To get there, he proposes new fuel-economy standards for autos, and lower emissions from power plants built in the next 10 to 15 years.
Pending legislation in the Senate from Joe Lieberman and John Warner would cut emissions even further – by 66% by 2050. No one has a clue how to do this. Because there is no substitute technology to achieve these massive reductions, we’ll just have to get by with less energy.
Compared to a year ago, gasoline consumption has dropped only 0.5% at current prices. So imagine how expensive it would be to reduce overall emissions by 66%.
The earth’s paltry warming trend, 0.31 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the mid-1970s, isn’t enough to scare people into poverty. And even that 0.31 degree figure is suspect.
For years, records from surface thermometers showed a global warming trend beginning in the late 1970s. But temperatures sensed by satellites and weather balloons displayed no concurrent warming. …
Then it was discovered that our orbiting satellites have a few faults. The sensors don’t last very long and are continually being supplanted by replacement orbiters. The instruments are calibrated against each other, so if one is off, so is the whole record. Frank Wentz, a consulting atmospheric scientist from California, discovered that the satellites also drift a bit in their orbits, which induces additional bias in their readings. The net result? A warming trend appears where before there was none. …
There have been six major revisions in the warming figures in recent years, all in the same direction. So it’s like flipping a coin six times and getting tails each time. The chance of that occurring is 0.016, or less than one in 50. That doesn’t mean that these revisions are all hooey, but the probability that they would all go in one direction on the merits is pretty darned small.
The removal of weather-balloon data because poor nations don’t do a good job of minding their weather instruments deserves more investigation… For example, weather stations are supposed to be a standard white color. If they darken from lack of maintenance, temperatures read higher than they actually are. After adjusting for such effects, as much as half of the warming in the U.N.’s land-based record vanishes. Because about 70% of earth’s surface is water, this could mean a reduction of as much as 15% in the global warming trend.
Another interesting thing happens to the U.N.’s data when it’s adjusted for the non-climatic factors. The frequency of very warm months is lowered, to the point at which it matches the satellite data, which show fewer very hot months. That’s a pretty good sign that there are fundamental problems with the surface temperature history. …
But every climatologist must know that Greenland’s last decade was no warmer than several decades in the early and mid-20th century. In fact, the period from 1970-1995 was the coldest one since the late 19th century, meaning that Greenland’s ice anomalously expanded right about the time climate change scientists decided to look at it. …
This prompts the ultimate question: Why is the news on global warming always bad? Perhaps because there’s little incentive to look at things the other way. If you do, you’re liable to be pilloried by your colleagues. If global warming isn’t such a threat, who needs all that funding? Who needs the army of policy wonks crawling around the world with bold plans to stop climate change? … [more]
April 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News
By Bob Zybach, Opinion, Eugene Register Guard
For Oregonians with a strong interest in doing something about global warming and climate change, the logical starting point is our forests. That is where most of the carbon is, and where the most immediate and profound actions can take place to affect statewide carbon dioxide emissions.
Here are five practices that can be implemented within a few months or years. These practices would achieve dramatic results in Oregon’s efforts to address this issue: 1) Prevent forest fires by rapid response and 2) by mechanical thinning to reduce ladder fuels, 3) by salvaging dead trees, 4) by planting new trees and 5) by creating log banks. … [more]
April 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News, Latest Forest News
