The wonders of carbon

Beyond all this alarmism about global warming or ocean acidification, we need to see that on a deeper level it is a debate about carbon, and when we dig into that level of the debate we will finally see that behind the demonization of carbon and CO2, it is all about an attack on humanity itself.

Global warming alarmism is not a science, but a religio/political movement. This paper will show why it is a dangerous totalitarian ideology and a more serious threat to human freedom than Communism or Nazism. It is also like a bad joke, because carbon just happens to be the most wonderful of all the elements in the periodic table because of its ability to make so many organic compounds that are fundamental to the formation of life.

Read The Vindication of Carbon by Robert D. Brinsmead.

Monckton: Temperature Change and CO2 Change – A Scientific Briefing

Christopher Moncton's latest report comes to us via the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI).

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE) -- The Earth has shown an under-reported cooling trend for eight straight years, raising serious questions about the accuracy of the UN’s climate projections, since not one of the computer models on which it relies had predicted so long and steep a cooling, says a new review paper -- Temperature Change and CO2 Change – A Scientific Briefing --from the Science and Public Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank.

The paper posits that “The chief reason for scepticism at the official position on “global warming” is the overwhelming weight of evidence that the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, prodigiously exaggerates both the supposed causes and the imagined consequences of anthropogenic “global warming”; that too many of the exaggerations can be demonstrated to have been deliberate; and that the IPCC and other official sources have continued to rely even upon those exaggerations that have been definitively demonstrated in the literature to have been deliberate.


“In short,” writes Monckton, “science is being artfully manipulated to the point of what are in essence political and not scientific conclusions – a conclusion that is congenial to powerful factions whose ambition is not to identify scientific truth but rather to advance the special vested interests with which they identify themselves.

The paper demonstrates that if CO2 concentration continues to rise more slowly than the IPCC had predicted, and if climate sensitivity to CO2 concentration is in any event well below the IPCC’s projected range, the likelihood of any “global warming” >2 °C/century to 2100 is vanishingly small.

Monckton also demonstrates that official sources have:
• relied upon questionable and occasionally downright dishonest methods to inflate the observed rate of temperature increase
• created the false impression that the rate of increase is itself rising when an identical argument can be used to demonstrate that it is falling
• diminished earlier and warmer temperatures in this century
• abolished the mediaeval warm period
• diverted attention away from the fact that throughout almost all of the Holocene, and throughout all four previous interglacial periods, surface temperatures were considerably warmer than they are today.

Says SPPI president, Robert Ferguson, “When the climate science is wrong, the policies are wrong, and then both people and the environment are harmed. It is past time that the media and elected officials stop treating “man-made global warming” as a religion and started asking some serious and pointed questions. This paper lays the ground work for that.”

Emphasis added by moi.

NI Enviro minister calls alarmist views "hysterical psuedo-religion"

When was the last time you heard an elected Minister say anything like this?

"Reasoned debate must replace the scaremongering of the green climate alarmists."

Those words were said by Northern Ireland's Environment Minister Sammy Wilson.

The Environment Minister Sammy Wilson has angered green campaigners by describing their view on climate change as a "hysterical psuedo-religion".

(...)

Mr Wilson said he refused to "blindly accept" the need to make significant changes to the economy to stop climate change.

"The tactic used by the "green gang" is to label anyone who dares disagree with their view of climate change as some kind of nutcase who denies scientific fact," he said.

Right on cue, the greens said Wilson was "like a cigarette salesman denying that smoking causes cancer". I like how the lefties always stoop to character assassination when they encounter a skeptic, but never, ever ever offer to debate the science.

Global Warming as Mass Neurosis

via Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal:

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it's time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in.

What, discredited? Thousands of scientists insist otherwise, none more noisily than NASA's Jim Hansen, who first banged the gong with his June 23, 1988, congressional testimony (delivered with all the modesty of "99% confidence").

But mother nature has opinions of her own. NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world's oceans show there has been slight cooling in the past five years, never mind that "80% to 90% of global warming involves heating up ocean waters," according to a report by NPR's Richard Harris.

The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere's coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.

This last item is, of course, a forecast, not an empirical observation. But it raises a useful question: If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming, what isn't evidence of global warming? What we have here is a nonfalsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God. This doesn't mean God doesn't exist, or that global warming isn't happening. It does mean it isn't science.

Blue Planet in Green Shackles

Vaclav Klaus has a new book and has challenged Al Gore to debate the science of global warming.

Washington - Czech President Vaclav Klaus said Tuesday he is ready to debate Al Gore about global warming, as he presented the English version of his latest book that argues environmentalism poses a threat to basic human freedoms. "I many times tried to talk to have a public exchange of views with him, and he's not too much willing to make such a conversation," Klaus said. "So I'm ready to do it."

[...]

Klaus, an economist, said he opposed the "climate alarmism" perpetuated by environmentalism trying to impose their ideals, comparing it to the decades of communist rule he experienced growing up in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia.

Don't hold your breath waiting for the Goracle to enter the debate. He won't - because he would surely lose and he knows it.

It's been said that the global warming alarmists resemble a pseudo-religion with all the trappings: a struggle for salvation (of the planet), a doomsday scenario, a belief system based on faith (not science) and a high priest in the form of the Goracle Himself.

Klaus has made this analogy to communism before and he knows of what he speaks, having grown up under totalitarian rule. Communism failed both ideologically and as a form of government. Says Klaus:

"In the past, it was in the name of the Marxists or of the proletariat - this time, in the name of the planet,"

Despite the best efforts of the lefties, socialism hasn't succeeded in western democracies. But environmentalism has become the new rallying cry for those who would like to impose state control on every aspect of our lives.

Klaus' new book is Blue Planet in Green Shackles - What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom? Here are some notes from his presentation in Washington:

To make my position and my message clear, I should probably revoke my personal experience. My today’s thinking is substantially influenced by the fact that I spent most of my life under the communist regime which ignored and brutally violated human freedom and wanted to command not only the people but also the nature. To command “wind and rain” is one of the famous slogans I remember since my childhood. This experience taught me that freedom and rational dealing with the environment are indivisible. It formed my relatively very sharp views on the fragility and vulnerability of free society and gave me a special sensitivity to all kinds of factors which may endanger it.

I do not, however, live in the past and do not see the future threats to free society coming from the old and old-fashioned communist ideology. The name of the new danger will undoubtedly be different, but its substance will be very similar. There will be the same attractive, to a great extent pathetic and at first sight quasi-noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of something above him, (of something greater than his poor self), supplemented by enormous self-confidence on the side of those who stand behind it. Like their predecessors, they will be certain that they have the right to sacrifice man and his freedom to make their idea reality. In the past it was in the name of the masses (or of the Proletariat), this time in the name of the Planet. Structurally, it is very similar.

That's worth reading.

I can't find a link where the book can be purchased yet. Let me know in the comments if you know it.

Update: here's a link to Klaus' book from Barnes & Noble.

Monckton: The cost and futility of trading hot air

Here's a bit from the Foreword – A Political Context of a new paper by Lord Christopher Monckton, The Cost and Futility of Trading Hot Air:

European and American statists, including activist NGOs like the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), assert that the moderate climate warming that is occurring today is a man-made catastrophe, and have embraced the dystopian fantasy that coercive policies for the elimination of fossil fuel production and usage can prevent or turn back the current warming cycle. They have, thus, made the “global warming planetary emergency” into the central plank of their ongoing campaigns for more centralized government.

[...]

For decades environmental activists have insisted that capitalism is not a “sustainable” (sufficient to “save the planet”) economic system. We now hear brazen declarations that democracy is no longer a “sustainable” political process. Al Gore lends a popular, philosophical/theological underpinning to collectivist impulses by casting the root of all environmental evils – real and imagined – in the scientific and industrial/technological revolutions. Put differently, for Gore and the EDF, the planetary environment, not human life, appears the supreme standard of value. Therefore, everything, most importantly Science and Economics, must be pried away from the benefit of man and pressed into total service of the State.

Given just a decade or two of such “sustainable” policies, bolstered by Gore’s religion, the world will be well on its way to a new Dark Ages, and the human misery it breeds.

The American people who owe their long, comfortable and healthy lives to the accomplishments of modern industry, technology, medicine and affordable fossil energy ought to be outraged by activists’ claims and policies.

Monckton says that carbon ‘cap-and-trade’ is an immoral non-solution to a non-problem. And he's exactly right. But of course, a ‘cap-and-trade’ system is exactly what Stéphane Dion, the current leader of the Liberal Party, would like to impose upon Canadians should he ever become Prime Minister.

Read the The cost and futility of trading hot air (pdf)

The Goracle preaches to the faithful in Montreal

The Church of Global Warming yesterday enlightened about 250 "enviro-disciples" to "go forth and spread the bad news about climate change".

On the second day of his weekend visit to Montreal, climate-change prophet Al Gore said: Let there be enthusiasm; and there was enthusiasm.

And Gore saw the enthusiasm in the eyes of the 250 Quebec and Canadian climate-change disciples he had come to train and he said: Let there also be enlightenment; and there was enlightenment.

The enlightenment took the form of intensive training sessions that Gore held yesterday at the downtown Hyatt Regency Hotel in Complexe Desjardins for 250 Quebec and other Canadian disciples of his crusade against global warming.

Do we need any more proof that global warming alarmism has become a pseudo-religion? If you should be lucky enough to encounter any of these self-described "secular missionaries" of the Church of Global Warming, you might find it interesting to see how they react when presented with some straight-up facts.

Somehow, I suspect they won't be interested.

Vaclav Klaus

The Epicycles of Global Warming

How are the "True Believers" of anthropogenic global warming coping with the reality of this coldest of cold winters and an observed annual drop in temperature of 0.6 Degrees? Well, it seems that they're hopping on their "epicycles" and peddling them as hard and as furious as they can.

Courtesy of American Thinker.

Today we see a spate of new computer models showing up in science journals, each one attempting to rescue some piece of the ecological goose that laid the golden egg. These are often not called "models." With utter dishonesty, they are labeled "new studies of the climate." But they are not empirical studies at all. They are little math models with new epicycles, but still based on the same gross oversimplifications. To reassure the True Believers, they always end with the same punch line: Yes, Virginia, there really is a global warming faerie, and all the doom-sayers are right.

More...

God to Gore

From Mens News Daily. Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.

Since the Renaissance, considerable human energy and ingenuity in the Western world has been applied to improving and increasing food production and the results of manual labor. Aiding the resulting elevation of living standards was the rise of mathematics and the physical sciences. People came increasingly to understand the workings of the physical world and the God-given laws of science governing nature.

In the 19th century, however, scientific progress became infused with nonsensical political theory, the atheistic and materialistic socialism of the French Revolution. From this came the idea of progress toward conquest of nature. It was not sufficient merely to understand the processes of nature. Man had to become godlike and to control the forces of nature.

As C. S. Lewis warned us in The Abolition of Man,

At the moment, then, of Man's victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual man, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely 'natural' – to their irrational impulses. Nature untrammelled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of man.

Our current-day obsession with the hypothesis of global warming as a man-made phenomenon, rather than a normal cycle of God's nature, is one result.

Its impetus is to transfer all individual freedom to a single, universal control board whose chairman presumably would be Al Gore. The Kyoto Protocol, don't forget, was a product of the UN and collectivist bodies like the EU.

Individuals are no longer to be free to make decisions about how to heat their homes, what automobiles to drive, even what foods to eat. Liberal-progressive-socialist councils will tell us what we are required to want and how we are required to conduct our daily lives.

Gore, the man who would be God, is unsatisfied with continuing an open scientific investigation of natural phenomena. He has, once and for all time, selected his hypothesis and strives mightily to achieve the earthly power to impose its sanctions upon us all.

The article also contains a number of useful links to recent news relating to the fact that "much counter-evidence to the man-made global warming hypothesis has come to light."

Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age

Temperature Monitors Report Widespread Global Cooling

Measuring the Phoenix Urban Heat Island

Global warming skeptics buoyed by record cold

UA prof challenges one of central beliefs about global warming

Ocean circulation in a warming climate

Chilling Effect

Global Warming: Experts' Opinions versus Scientific Forecasts

Kilimanjaro's ice set to linger

The Sun Also Sets

Read the sunspots

The real costs of climate change

Bono's praise for "Father Al"

News item: Bono confesses sins to "father" Al Gore.

It has been said here many times that the current global warming hysteria is nothing more than a pseudo religion. Well Bono's rant adds credence to that theory.

Here's a transcript on the topic from Rush Limbaugh's radio show from yesterday, January 25th, 2008 [emphasis added].

RUSH: What have I always told you people? Well, I know, a lot. The global warming hoax is nothing more than a religion. If you look at global warming -- Michael Crichton made this point in a brilliant speech about it -- if you look at global warming, it has all the elements of every major religion on the planet. It has the creation of the divine; it has original sin; it has the Garden of Eden; it has penance; it has everything. The most important element that it has is faith, because the people who believe in it can't prove it. So, it is nothing more than a religion for people who have not a whole lot of foundation in their lives. They want their lives to have meaning, so they're running around and doing these inconsequential things. They're "mattering," which everybody wants to do. There have been many incidents of evidence that I am right about this, but perhaps the best one happened yesterday in Davos, Switzerland. The famous rock star Bono of U2 was at the World Economic Forum. This is a portion of his discussion of Algore.

BONO: It's not even a professorial thing, as has been cited. He's more as a rabbinical. Or like an Irish priest, you confess your sins. "Father Al, I am not just a noise polluter, I am a noise-polluting, diesel-sucking, methane-emitting, gulfstream-flying rock star." "And what are you going to do about it son? Are you going to kick the habit?" "I'm trying Father Al, but to be honest with you, oil has been very good for me. It's been very good for me. It's been very good to me. Those convoys of articulated lorries, petrochemical products, hair gel."

RUSH: Now, he's making light of it, but that's the point, Father Al, Algore, the high priest of the global warming religion.

Al Gore is more than the high priest of the global warming religion, he's the Goracle!

Related: John McCain has been an active promoter of the global warming hysteria.

The hot air cult

Cal Thomas comments at the Washington Times on a theme that's been observed here in the past: that global warming alarmists are in fact followers of a pseudo-religion:

You don't have to be religious to qualify as a fundamentalist. You can be Al Gore, the messiah figure for the global warming cult, whose followers truly believe their gospel of imminent extermination in a Noah-like flood, if we don't immediately change our carbon-polluting ways.

One of the traits of a cult is its refusal to consider any evidence that might disprove the faith. So it is doubtful the global warming cultists will be moved by 400 scientists, many of whom, says The Washington Times, "are current or former members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Gore for publicizing a climate crisis." In a report by Republican staff of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, these scientists cast doubt on a "scientific consensus" that human-caused global warming endangers the planet.

Like most cultists, the true believers struck back, not by debating science, but by charging that a small number of the scientists mentioned in the report have taken money from the oil industry.

And Exxon has dismissed the claim as just so much hot air. But we should take a look at the dollars for some startling information:

The pro-global warming cultists enjoy a huge money advantage. Paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter, who has testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, noted in an EPW report how much money has been spent researching and promoting climate fears and so-called solutions: "In one of the more expensive ironies of history, the expenditure of more than $50 billion on research into global warming since 1990 has failed to demonstrate any human-caused climate trend, let alone a dangerous one," he wrote on June 18, 2007. The $19 million spent on research that debunks the global warming faith pales in comparison.

Mr. Thomas doesn't pull any punches when it comes to the Goracle and his followers:

Mr. Gore and his disciples will still be living in their big houses, driving gas-guzzling cars and flying in private jets that leave carbon footprints as large as Bigfoot's, while most of us will be forced to drive tiny automobiles and live in huts resembling the Third World. But hypocrisy is just one of many traits displayed by secular fundamentalists like Mr. Gore.

Before adopting any faith, the agendas of the people attempting to impose it, along with the beliefs held by them and their disciples, should be considered. Al Gore and company are big government liberals who think government is the answer to all our problems, including those they create. As Ronald Reagan often said, in too many cases government is the problem.

That last paragraph sums it up rather nicely.

h/t: the Strong Conservative

Bryson: Don't make me throw up

via the Madison, Wisconsin Capital Times:

Reid Bryson, known as the father of scientific climatology, considers global warming a bunch of hooey.

The UW-Madison professor emeritus, who stands against the scientific consensus on this issue, is referred to as a global warming skeptic. But he is not skeptical that global warming exists, he is just doubtful that humans are the cause of it.

There is no question the earth has been warming. It is coming out of the "Little Ice Age," he said in an interview this week.

"However, there is no credible evidence that it is due to mankind and carbon dioxide. We've been coming out of a Little Ice Age for 300 years. We have not been making very much carbon dioxide for 300 years. It's been warming up for a long time," Bryson said.

[...]

Just because almost all of the scientific community believes in man-made global warming proves absolutely nothing, Bryson said. "Consensus doesn't prove anything, in science or anywhere else, except in democracy, maybe."

Bryson, 87, was the founding chairman of the department of meteorology at UW-Madison and of the Institute for Environmental Studies, now known as the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. He retired in 1985, but has gone into the office almost every day since. He does it without pay.

[...]

So, if global warming isn't such a burning issue, why are thousands of scientists so concerned about it?

"Why are so many thousands not concerned about it?" Bryson shot back.

"There is a lot of money to be made in this," he added. "If you want to be an eminent scientist you have to have a lot of grad students and a lot of grants. You can't get grants unless you say, 'Oh global warming, yes, yes, carbon dioxide.'"

Speaking out against global warming is like being a heretic, Bryson noted.

[...]

"There is very little truth to what is being said and an awful lot of religion. It's almost a religion. Where you have to believe in anthropogenic (or man-made) global warming or else you are nuts."

While Bryson doesn't think that global warming is man-made, he said there is some evidence of an effect from mankind, but not an effect of carbon dioxide.

For example, in Wisconsin in the last 100 years the biggest heating has been around Madison, Milwaukee and in the Southeast, where the cities are. There was a slight change in the Green Bay area, he said. The rest of the state shows no warming at all.

"The growth of cities makes it hotter, but that was true back in the 1930s, too," Bryson said. "Big cities were hotter than the surrounding countryside because you concentrate the traffic and you concentrate the home heating. And you modify the surface, you pave a lot of it."

Bryson didn't see Al Gore's movie about global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth."

"Don't make me throw up," he said. "It is not science. It is not true."

Global Warming Jihad

Article by Butler Shaffer at LewRockwell.com:

In my college days, I was introduced to a book, written in 1841 by Charles Mackay. Titled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, it remains a worthwhile chronicle – at least through the mid-nineteenth century – of some of the consequences of mankind’s periodic collapses into mass-mindedness. If Mackay was around today, he would be able to devote a chapter to the emergence of the latest secular religion: environmentalism.

It is a common mistake for people to assume that religious faith and fervor are qualities to be found only within institutionally-structured churches with formal doctrines and rituals. They are to be found, in varying degrees, within all belief systems, be they secular or theistic in nature. The polar opposite philosophies of Marxism and Ayn Rand’s Objectivism – both of which openly condemned traditional religion – are, themselves, grounded in a faith in various central propositions. True-believers of these doctrines who voiced doubt as to any of the underlying premises, have been subjected to purges as enthusiastically conducted as medieval trials for heresy.

I am a strong defender of the processes of scientific inquiry. And yet, I am aware that most scientists cling to a faith in conclusions that have been widely accepted within their respective communities, and angrily react against any heresies – however well-documented and reasoned – that arise from skeptical minds.

Click to read the rest of Global Warming Jihad.

A History of CO2 Shenanigans

Via John Ray at Greenie Watch comes an extensive quote from a very interesting paper, A History of CO2 Shenanigans. It's a bit dated (1997) but still applicable in it's discussion of the development of Global Warming dogma:

IPCC's "Greenhouse Effect Global Warming" dogma rests on invalid presumptions and a rejectable non-realistic carbon cycle modelling which simply refutes reality, like the existence of carbonated beer or soda "pop" as we know it.

(...)

In order to construct a "CO₂ Greenhouse Effect Doom" dogma, it will be necessary to
justify that (1) pre-industrial atmospheric CO₂ was lower than today, (2) atmospheric CO₂ has steadily risen from its pre-industrial level to today's level, (3) Man's burning of fossil fuel is causing an increase in atmospheric CO₂ level, (4) hence atmospheric CO₂ must have a long residence time (lifetime), and (5) atmospheric temperatures are increasing due to Man's burning of fossil fuel.

Global warming has evolved into a pseudo-religion, as discussed elsewhere in this blog, but as this article explains, it was no accident. Well worth a look.

Here's a link to the original paper, Carbon cycle modelling and the residence time of natural and anthropogenic atmospheric CO2: on the construction of the "Greenhouse Effect Global Warming" dogma by Tom V. Segalstad

The new morality of Global Warming Alarmists

In this article at The American Thinker, Tim Thorstenson asks "Why Did Global Warming Become a Moral Matter?"

As a scientist, I find the current strategy of the global warming crusade to be fascinating. Particularly because I am a scientist, I also find it insulting. Everyone should find it very disturbing.

I am referring to the fact that the global warming issue is now regarded as a "moral" matter by its advocates. None other than The High Priest of Global Warming (Al Gore) has decreed it as such.

Thorstenson explains why the global warming alarmists want desperately to make this a moral matter and not a scientific one.

Michael Crichton on Environmentalism as a Religion

Michael Crichton speaks to students in this video recorded in 2005.

Krauthammer: Limosine Liberals

More on the modern day indulgences spotlighted at this year's "first-ever green" Academy Awards:

It turns out that the Academy neutralized the evening's "carbon footprint" by buying carbon credits. That means it sent money to a "carbon broker," who promised, after taking his cut, to reduce carbon emissions somewhere on the planet equivalent to what the stars spewed into the atmosphere while flying in on their private planes.

In other words, the rich reduce their carbon output by not one ounce. But drawing on the hundreds of millions of net worth in the Kodak Theatre, they pull out lunch money to buy ecological indulgences. The last time the selling of pardons was prevalent--in a predecessor religion to environmentalism called Christianity--Martin Luther lost his temper and launched the Reformation.

Brilliant analysis, as always, by Charles Krauthammer who describes offsets as "a way for the rich to export the real costs and sacrifices of pollution control to the poorer segments of humanity in the Third World" in this Time article, Limousine Liberal Hypocrisy:

GreenSeat, a Dutch carbon-trading outfit, buys offsets from a foundation that plants trees in Uganda's Mount Elgon National Park to soak up the carbon emissions of its rich Western patrons. Small problem: expanding the park encroaches on land traditionally used by local farmers. As a result, reports the New York Times, "villagers living along the boundary of the park have been beaten and shot at, and their livestock has been confiscated by armed park rangers." All this so that swimming pools can be heated and Maseratis driven with a clear conscience in the fattest parts of the world.

h/t: Les Enfants Terrible

Dr. Sallie Baliunas on Extreme Weather and Superstition in the Middle Ages

Global Warming Expedition cancelled due to severe cold

A couple of explorers who had planned an expedition to the North Pole to highlight the effects of global warming to school groups had to abandon their mission when they encountered severe cold and frostbite!

The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment.

"Ann said losing toes and going forward at all costs was never part of the journey," said Ann Atwood, who helped organize the expedition.

Then there was the cold - quite a bit colder, Atwood said, then Bancroft and Arnesen had expected. One night they measured the temperature inside their tent at 58 degrees below zero, and outside temperatures were exceeding 100 below zero at times, Atwood said.

"My first reaction when they called to say there were calling it off was that they just sounded really, really cold," Atwood said.

The explorers had planned to call in regular updates to school groups by satellite phone, and had planned online posts with photographic evidence of global warming.

Ha! Well, better luck next time. Maybe the school kids will figure this one out. Oops, it seems like the severe cold was caused by... you guessed it - global warming!

They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with global warming," Atwood said. "But one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability."

True believers. Their faith in the global warming gods is unshakable, even at -100 degrees.

h/t: Noel Sheppard