The Weather Isn't Getting Weirder

I often hear from otherwise normal, rational, intelligent people how the weather is getting more and more extreme. And that this is proof that we humans have somehow messed up the climate with our carbon emissions. I argue that it isn't so, that the floods, hurricanes, hot spells and even the record cold and snowfalls are not signs of extreme weather brought about by anthropogenic global warming, er climate change. After all, most of the "records" we have been experiencing recently impact only the last 40 or 50 years, a relatively short time span in the historical record and the global climate change business.

That's why it was encouraging to see this study:

The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project is the latest attempt to find out, using super-computers to generate a dataset of global atmospheric circulation from 1871 to the present.

As it happens, the project's initial findings, published last month, show no evidence of an intensifying weather trend. "In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years," atmospheric scientist Gilbert Compo, one of the researchers on the project, tells me from his office at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871."

It is all too easy for climate alarmists to point to recent extremes of weather and cry "we must do something before it's too late". We need to keep in mind that while the weather around the globe can and has been experiencing extremes, this doesn't signify anything out of the historical norm.

Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception?

The Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) has released a new study by Joe D’Aleo and Anthony Watts, Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception?

click image to download the report

From SPPI (with emphasis added):

Authors veteran meteorologists Joe D’Aleo and Anthony Watts analyzed temperature records from all around the world for a major SPPI paper, Surface Temperature Records – Policy-driven Deception? The startling conclusion that we cannot tell whether there was any significant “global warming” at all in the 20th century is based on numerous astonishing examples of manipulation and exaggeration of the true level and rate of “global warming”.

That is to say, leading meteorological institutions in the USA and around the world have so systematically tampered with instrumental temperature data that it cannot be safely said that there has been any significant net “global warming” in the 20th century.

From their Summary for Policymakers (catchy title there guys):

click image to enlarge

Robert Ferguson, President of SPPI, said: “The entire case for alarm about ‘global warming’ is of course predicated on the assumption that ‘global warming’ has actually occurred. D’Aleo and Watts sampling of horrifying examples of deliberate tampering with the temperature data from all parts of the world raises very serious questions not just about how much ‘global warming’ occurred in the last century but also about whether there was any significant warming at all.

“The serious question now arises: do these transparent data manipulations by self-interested government agents add to cascading revelations of worldwide scientific and financial fraud?

h/t to JoNova and of course Anthony Watts.

The start of a mini ice age?

Interesting post by David Rose in the Daily Mail:

The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in summer by 2013.
According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.

Note to all the warmists: it's time to re-think that global warming thing.

Update: this video via Captain Ed illustrates the costs of a cooler climate far outweigh those of a hotter one.

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Ocean Acidification: the next frontier

With the credibility of global warming and climate change falling faster than our recent temperatures, alarmists are scrambling to find new reasons to convince us to limit CO2.

The Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) – a DC think tank – has produced a science-based critique of a recent film produced by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The SPPI paper is entitled Acid Test: The Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification – A New Propaganda Film by the National Resources Defense Council Fails the Acid Test of Real World Data.

In late 2009, NRDC released a short 21-minute film entitled Acid Test: The Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification. Featuring Sigourney Weaver as its narrator, the film highlights the views of a handful of scientists, a commercial fisherman, and two employees of the NRDC, as they discuss what they claim is a megadisaster-in-the-making for Earth's marine life.

The villain of the story is industrial man, who has "altered the course of nature" by releasing large quantities of carbon dioxide or CO2 into the air via the burning of the coal, gas and oil that has historically fueled the engines of modern society. Once emitted into the atmosphere, a portion of that CO2 dissolves into the surface of the world’s oceans, where subsequent chemical reactions, according to the NRCD, are lowering the pH status of their waters. This phenomenon, they theorize, is reducing marine calcification rates; and if left unchecked, they claim it will become so corrosive that it "will cause sea shells to dissolve" and drive coral reefs to extinction "within 20 to 30 years."

“Typically, the NRDC chose to present an extreme one-sided, propagandized view of ocean acidification in their film,” says SPPI president, Robert Ferguson. “The part of the story that they clearly don't want the public and policy makers to know was just released in our newest review of the peer-reviewed scientific literature,” added Ferguson.

h/t: wooeb news

Waxman-Markey bill includes a cap on job losses

Via Investors.com

Democrats failed to create jobs with their unnecessary, pork-laden stimulus bill. Now they want to kill even more of them with an equally unnecessary global warming bill.

The party that cares so much about jobs for "working families" sure has a funny way of saving them.

Amid pre-summer frosts and hailstorms, the White House this week released a sky-is-falling report on global warming that outdoes even Al Gore in predicting doomsday scenarios.

"Heat waves will become more frequent and intense," the report warns, unleashing an apocalypse of "major insect outbreaks" and herbicide-resistant, garden-choking ... "weeds" (horrors!).

"Heat waves" in the Midwest and "extreme heat" in the Northeast will lead to "increases in heat-related deaths."

Really? Tell that to berry farmers in Michigan, whose crops have been delayed by a cold snap for the second spring in a row.

Or New Englanders, who have seen temperatures drop four degrees below normal.

It's all a set-up for a painful government fix. The public duly alarmed, the White House embraces a House bill to control industrial carbon emissions through a punishing cap-and-trade scheme.

The Democrats' energy bill would have the effect of de-industrializing America and cost millions of jobs — something its authors, Democratic Reps. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey, indirectly acknowledge. Buried in the fine print of their jobs-killing bill is a provision to provide relief against massive dislocations.

"The Democrats' bill has an unemployment provision that provides 70% of your job benefit for at least three years — in addition to any other unemployment benefits — if you lose your job because of that bill," Rep. Joe Barton, D-Texas, said. "They, at least tacitly, recognize that their bill is going to cost millions and millions of jobs."

In other words, the cap on emissions requires a cap on job losses.

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.

AGW Alarmists "out in the cold"

So sayeth Andrew Bolt in Australia's Herald Sun:

IT'S snowing in April. Ice is spreading in Antarctica. The Great Barrier Reef is as healthy as ever.

And that's just the news of the past week. Truly, it never rains but it pours - and all over our global warming alarmists.

Time's up for this absurd scaremongering. The fears are being contradicted by the facts, and more so by the week.

Doubt it? Then here's a test.

Name just three clear signs the planet is warming as the alarmists claim it should. Just three. Chances are your "proofs" are in fact on my list of 10 Top Myths about global warming.

And if your "proofs" indeed turn out to be false, don't get angry with me.

Just ask yourself: Why do you still believe that man is heating the planet to hell? What evidence do you have?

So let's see if facts matter more to you than faith, and observations more than predictions.

Be sure to check out Andrew's list of top 10 myths about global warming.

h/t: Watts Up With That?

Foster: An Inconvenient Film

Peter Foster via the National Post:

Al Gore is about to feature in a new movie, but he’s not going to like it very much. Titled Not Evil Just Wrong: The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria, the film presents a devastating account of the shaky foundations and hefty price of Mr. Gore’s brand of self-interested and hypocritical alarmism.

Created by the Irish film making duo of Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney — who made another excellent documentary about the “dark side of environmentalism” called Mine Your Own Business — Not Evil provides the perfect rebuttal to Mr. Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

Despite being chock-a-block with inaccuracies and misrepresentations, Mr. Gore’s movie has frightened schoolchildren all over the world, driven the public policy debate, and garnered both an Academy Award and a Nobel Peace Prize for its star.

Not Evil — which is due to be released later this year — will appear at a crucial time. The world’s crisis-beset nations are due to meet in Copenhagen in November to concoct a new policy straitjacket to succeed the meddlesome but utterly failed Kyoto Accord. If global warming's U.N.-based ringmasters have their way, this will lead to a slashing of industrial production in developed countries and to a huge extension of boondoggle redistributionist schemes to fund “green” technologies in developing countries.

Higher taxes, closed factories. Otherwise known as the "green" economy.
More about Not Evil Just Wrong here.



Update: Thanks to Magnus in the comments, here is another video with Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney being interviewed by Sean Hannity on Fox News.

Obama to save the planet

with Geoengineering:

WASHINGTON – The president's new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth's air.

John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort.

"It's got to be looked at," he said. "We don't have the luxury of taking any approach off the table."

Holdren outlined several "tipping points" involving global warming that could be fast approaching. Once such milestones are reached, such as complete loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, it increases chances of "really intolerable consequences," he said.

Twice in a half-hour interview, Holdren compared global warming to being "in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog."

You can't make this stuff up. The lunatics are now officially in charge of the asylum - (no disrespect to lunatics intended).

Goldenberg: AGW = Al Gore Warming

NOAA Meteorologist Claims 'Gross, Blatant Censorship' for Speaking Out Against Climate Change Alarmism

Stanley Goldenberg of NOAA's Hurricane Research Division tells ICCC audience global warming has no measurable impact on hurricane activity.

By Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute
3/9/2009 8:06:09 PM

You often hear scientists who promote the theory of man-made global warming allege they are victims of censorship. But when it is the other way around – that scientists who dispute that claim are victims of the same thing, you never hear a peep.

That’s what Stanley Goldenberg, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) Hurricane Research Division, told an audience at the The Heartland Institute’s 2009 International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC) in New York on March 9. Voices that counter global warming alarmism are often subject to censorship, he said.

“The debate, as you also know, is masked by media censorship, bias and distortion,” Goldenberg said. “I’m interviewed quite bit on many, many levels and thankfully most of our interviews are benign. They’re trying to get out to the public.”



Goldenberg explained that as a skeptic of the anthropogenic global warming theory, he had firsthand experience, and he challenged the media to give a positive spin to the ICCC event.

“[I]’ve seen gross, gross blatant censorship,” Goldenberg said. “If you’re here from the media I’d be glad to argue with you from firsthand experience. I challenge anybody from a mainstream media source to take or print a positive report on this conference. They won’t get it past the editor. If they do, miracles do happen.”

Goldenberg is known for his research on how hurricane activity variability can be influenced on anything from intraseasonal to multi-decadal time scales. He disputes the theory hurricanes are significantly impacted by global warming. And he claimed his colleagues at other hurricane research institutions dispute it as well.

“Not a single, to my knowledge – not a single scientist at the National Hurricane Center, the Hurricane Research Division, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center – I’m trying to find out about the Central Pacific Hurricane Center – believe that hurricanes – numbers, activity – that there’s any measurable impact from any so-called global warming.”

Goldenberg explained there were differences between the terms anthropogenic global warming (AGW), referred to as “Al Gore warming” and global warming or climate change when used. He also alluded to the media’s willingness to use natural catastrophe to propagate this alarmism.

“Just because climate change has happened doesn’t mean AGW,” Goldenberg said. “Just because weather disasters happen doesn’t mean AGW. And an inconvenient truth that most of the media are speaking of, CAGW – that’s very important. They’re not just talking about AGW, but catastrophic [anthropogenic global warming]. If we just have a little bit of warming from manmade causes, nobody really cares, but they’re talking about it’s going to be catastrophic.”

A recent Business & Media Institute analysis discovered global warming alarmists often link weather phenomena like tornadoes, hurricanes, ice melt, droughts and wildfires with global warming and the media embrace the stories. However, when wintry weather hits places that aren’t accustomed to it – like recent snows in Las Vegas and New Orleans – the news coverage isn’t as quick to point their finger at the possibility of global cooling.

More links to news stories about the ICCC.

Carter: Facts Debunk Global Warming Alarmism

Bob Carter is an adjunct professor of geology at James Cook University. He writes:

THE National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that October in the US was marked by 63 record snowfalls and 115 lowest-ever temperatures.

Over the past few years, similar signs of colder than usual weather have been recorded all over the world, causing many people to question the still fashionable, but now long outdated, global warming alarmism. Yet individual weather events or spells, whether warmings or coolings, tell us nothing necessarily about true climate change.

Nonetheless, by coincidence, growing recognition of a threat of climatic cooling is correct, because since the turn of the 21st century all real world, long-term climate indicators have turned downwards. Global atmospheric temperature reached a peak in 1998, has not warmed since 1995 and, has been cooling since 2002. Some people, still under the thrall of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change's disproved projections of warming, seem surprised by this cooling trend, even to the point of denying it. But why?

Can you say computer models?

2008: the year man-made global warming was disproved

Via Christopher Booker in the Telegraph:

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare.

(...)

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed...

(...)

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

Alarmism

Alarmism has long been a favourite method of the global warming climate change crowd. It has been used with great success to get the public to take notice of their message of human induced planetary warming. It's a lesson that has not been lost on others.

A whopping 582,000 direct and indirect jobs would be lost in Canada over the next five years if the ailing Big Three US auto makers shut down their Ontario operations, said a study Tuesday.

The above report prepared for the Ontario Manufacturing Council has been at the top of the news today. But it's just another example of alarmism being used in an attempt to motivate government to act in a way it might not otherwise. In this case, the goal is to motivate government to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to "bail out" a failing segment of the automotive industry.

One does not need to be an economist to question the conclusions of this report. Let me explain.

First, we need to ask if it is even remotely likely that the "Big Three" automakers would completely shut down and lay off all of their employees? Of course not. And if you think that's a real possibility, I have some swampland in Florida that might interest you.

No, what the "Big Three" are facing is bankruptcy not total shut down. Bankruptcy is not the end of the world in business. In fact, some might argue that it's a new beginning. Bankruptcy is a process designed to assist failing companies by giving them protection from creditors while they re-organize and restructure their business, reduce their financial losses and hopefully emerge as a company that is leaner, meaner, competitive and profitable. A complete shutdown of operations is not the intent nor even a reasonable expectation of bankruptcy.

Second, with regard to a "bail out" we need to ask the questions, "would it do any good?" and "how much is enough?". The answer to the former is "no". A bailout that does not also include a restructuring will never be large enough. So the answer to the latter is there is no amount sufficient to keeping an inefficient company afloat. They'll be back for more and more and more. And then some more.

I am left wondering at the foolishness of all these proposed bailouts. It is not the government's role to provide for all of our needs. It is not the government's role to rescue every failing business. Have we become so hooked on the nanny state that we believe the government can solve all our problems?

Government cannot solve these problems and that is why it should not waste billions of our dollars investing in losing businesses. Yes, the economy is a mess. Yes, this is going to be painful. Very, very painful. But we will get through this quicker if uncompetitive businesses like the "Big Three" are made to accept their fates and get on with what they must do.

But bailout mania seems to have taken hold across the land. The only difference between the outgoing (Republican) President and the incoming (Democrat) President appears to be which has the plan to dish out the most cash the fastest.

It's all good money after bad. What infuriates me is that it's our money they're rushing to flush down the toilet. Which leads to one last question. Who will bail out the government when it fails?

Whether the goal is to control the climate (an obvious impossibility) or to control the economy (equally impossible) the alarmists' solution is always the same: massive government intervention in our free economy. But after all of our industries have been regulated and nationalized, there won't be any free economy to worry about.

And that's alarming.