“Santiago, Chilean capital, had its coldest winter since the Little Ice Age. The last time it was so cold there was in 1885 (see Padahuel plot from NASA GISS).”
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By the way, much of Australia, too had a cold winter, with a record cold June.
Another factor that could change the record is heat from cities. This is called the urban heat bias, and as with solar effects, scientists tended to think the effect, while real, was relatively minor. That is why the IPCC allowed only six hundredths of a degree for urban heating.
We are currently witnessing an international awakening of scientists who are speaking out in opposition to former Vice President Al Gore, the United Nations, the Hollywood elitists and the media-driven "consensus" on man-made global warming.See the speech for supporting links.
We have witnessed Antarctic ice GROW to record levels since satellite monitoring began in the 1970's. We have witnessed NASA temperature data errors that have made 1934 -- not 1998 -- the hottest year on record in the U.S. We have seen global averages temperatures flat line since 1998 and the Southern Hemisphere cool in recent years.
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Hollywood activist Leonardo DiCaprio decided to toss objective scientific truth out the window in his new scarefest "The 11th Hour." DiCaprio refused to interview any scientists who disagreed with his dire vision of the future of the Earth.
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Children are now the number one target of the global warming fear campaign. DiCaprio announced his goal was to recruit young eco-activists to the cause.
"We need to get kids young," DiCaprio said in a September 20 interview with USA Weekend.
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Apparently, David and other activists are getting frustrated by the widespread skepticism on climate as reflected in both the U.S. and the UK according to the latest polls.
It appears the alarmists are failing to convince adults to believe their increasingly shrill and scientifically unfounded rhetoric, so they have decided kids are an easier sell.
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A Canadian high school student named McKenzie was shown Gore's climate horror film in four different classes.
"I really don't understand why they keep showing it," McKenzie said on May 19, 2007.
In June, a fourth grade class from Portland Maine's East End Community School issued a dire climate report: "Global warming is a huge pending global disaster" read the elementary school kids' report according to an article in the Portland Press Herald on June 14, 2007. Remember, these are fourth graders issuing a dire global warming report.
And this agenda of indoctrination and fear aimed at children is having an impact.
Nine year old Alyssa Luz-Ricca was quoted in the Washington Post on April 16, 2007 as saying:
"I worry about [global warming] because I don't want to die."
The same article explained: "Psychologists say they're seeing an increasing number of young patients preoccupied by a climactic Armageddon."
I was told by the parent of an elementary school kid last spring who said her daughter was forced to watch "An Inconvenient Truth" once a month at school and had nightmares about drowning in the film's predicted scary sea level rise.
The Hollywood global-warming documentary "Arctic Tale" ends with a child actor telling kids: "If your mom and dad buy a hybrid car, you'll make it easier for polar bears to get around."
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I am convinced that future climate historians will look back at 2007 as the year the global warming fears began crumbling. The situation we are in now is very similar to where we were in the late 1970's when coming ice age fears began to dismantle.
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Meteorologist Joseph D'Aleo, the first Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological Society's (AMS) Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting, explained in August how miniscule mankind's CO2 emissions are in relation to the Earth's atmosphere.
"If the atmosphere was a 100 story building, our annual anthropogenic CO2 contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor," D'Aleo wrote.
Laurie Fenwood, Ivory-bill recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, says she's interested in the idea of setting up more advanced camera traps, but the agency does not plan to invest in the equipment this year. "We wouldn't rule it out," she says.Since we're told that our very existence may hang in the balance, I trust that they'll find one or more helicopters that don't run on fossil fuel.
For now, the plan this winter is to rely on small groups of experienced birders and aerial searches by helicopter. If Congress approves the $1.2 million in requested funds for this year's search, helicopters will fly over parts of Arkansas and North Carolina, and possibly Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and Texas in hopes of spotting an Ivory-bill.
"We don't have the 8x10 glossy photo that everyone wants, but we've accumulated enough evidence that we cannot ignore," Fenwood says.
Yes, it really is amazing. I think this is going to go down as one of the larger scientific scandals of the decade. It has a lot of similarities, I feel, to the Piltdown Man hoax, in terms of group dynamics--a lot of people believing what they wanted to believe. (I don't think the initial sightings in Arkansas by Sparling, etc. were deliberate hoaxes--I feel they were mistakes.)
Climate change was identified as one of the most pressing problems but the condition of fresh water supplies, agricultural land and biodiversity were considered to be of equal concern.Just a couple of weeks ago, we saw this:
Former Vice President Al Gore and a United Nations panel on climate change were named cowinners of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their work against global warming.I'm wondering if someone at the UN has enough sense to notice things like that pesky southern hemisphere's refusal to warm.
Gore, who shares the award with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said at a news conference that global warming “truly is a planetary emergency,” and that he would donate his portion of the Nobel prize money - about $750,000 - to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit environmental group. Gore is chairman of its board.
“That amount is very small compared to the enormous challenge that lies ahead,” Gore said in brief remarks at the news conference in Palo Alto, Calif., where he is presenting his now-famous slide show on global warming. "It is the most dangerous challenge we have ever faced."
The envelope of uncertainty in climate projections has not narrowed appreciably over the past 30 years, despite tremendous increases in computing power, in observations, and in the number of scientists studying the problem (1). This suggests that efforts to reduce uncertainty in climate projections have been impeded either by fundamental gaps in our understanding of the climate system or by some feature (which itself might be well understood) of the system's underlying nature.Just for review, what were scientists predicting about three decades ago, when their ability to predict future climate was not "appreciably" worse than it is now?
They found no need to worry about the carbon dioxide fuel-burning puts in the atmosphere.2. In 1975, after some more short-term global cooling, that infamous Newsweek "Cooling World" article appeared.
There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.The timing of this 1975 cooling panic is particularly humorous, since it occurred immediately before a sudden, dramatic warming that occurred in a one-year period around 1976:
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic.
...Brian Hartman and Gerd Wendler of the Alaska-taxpayer-funded Alaska Climate Research Center have written extensively on this subject. They are particularly interested in something called “The Great Pacific Climate Shift,” a sudden and dramatic warming that occurred in a one-year period around 1976.
Here’s what they have written:
When analyzing the total time period from 1951-2001, warming is observed, however the 25-year trend analyses before 1976 (1951-1975) and thereafter (1977-2001) both display cooling.
That’s right. The mean Alaskan temperature has been declining for the last quarter-century. All of the warming is determined by a mysterious, single-year “burp” in Pacific Ocean temperature.
Is that due to human activity? Search the scientific literature for a computer model of human influence on climate that says all our impact occurred at once, in a single year. You won’t find one reference.
Canada signed on to Kyoto and now the country's greenhouse gas emissions are 33% above the Kyoto commitment.Note another perspective in this excerpt from the first comment here:
I wrote more than 5 years ago that 'Kyoto isn't a real solution, but then it doesn't matter, because global warming isn't a real problem'.
...The much trumped ‘scientific consensus’ on global warming is bogus. There are thousand of scientists who disagree with Gore’s greenhouse gas scenario. But their voices have been largely ignored and/or their motives often denigrated. Many warming skeptics receiving federal grant support have been reluctant to express their views due to worries over the continuation of their research grants and criticisms from their warming colleagues who seek uniformity of view. Their friends may criticize them as being anti-environmental. Many younger warming skeptics concerned about their future careers refuse to confront the issue...
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These GCM models should not be relied upon to give global temperature information 50 to 100 years in the future where model verification in the lifetime of the model builders is not possible. These GCM modelers do not dare make public short-period global temperature forecasts for next season, next year, or a few years hence. This is because they know they do not have short range forecast skill. They would lose credibility if they issued forecasts that could actually be verified. These climate modelers live largely in a ‘virtual world’ of their own making where reality and model skill is determined largely by the modelers themselves. The climate models are so complicated that it takes teams of specialists to construct all of the various model components. No one person well understands any model’s complete numerical package. No independent outside person would ever know enough to realistically evaluate the model’s outputs. They are just giant black boxes telling us that humans are warming the globe at a dangerous rate. The fact that nearly all the GCMs give similar results (global warming of 2-5oC for a doubling of CO2 near the end of the 21st century) should not increase our confidence in these models. They all have similar flaws. For many modelers it appears that grant support and media coverage are more important than model reality.
It is impossible to make skillful initial value numerical predictions beyond a few weeks. Although numerical weather prediction has shown steady and impressive improvements since its inception in 1955, these forecast improvements have been primarily made through the advancements in the measurement (i.e. satellite) of the wind and pressure fields and the advection/extrapolation of these fields forward in time 10-15 days. But for skillful numerical prediction beyond 10-15 day periods it is necessary to be able to forecast changes in the globe’s complicated energy and moisture fields. This entails forecasting processes such as future amounts of condensation heating, evaporation cooling, cloud-cloud-free radiation, air-sea moisture-temperature flux, etc, etc. It is impossible to write computer code for all these complicated energy-moisture processes, and then integrate all of these coded processes forward in time hundreds of thousands of time steps and obtaining anything close to meaningful results. Realistic climate modeling by numerical processes is not possible now and likely never will be. Yet this is the area to which hundreds-of-millions of research dollars is currently being expended. Most of this numerical model funding could be more profitably spent in unique observational programs that would teach us more about the atmosphere. Many promising observational programs do not go forward for lack of funding.
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Although initially generated by honest questions of how human-induced greenhouse gases might affect global climate, this topic has long ago taken on a life of its own that has been extended and grossly exaggerated by a large cadre of supporters wishing to profit from the exploitation of the public’s lack of knowledge on this subject. This includes our federal and foreign governments, the media, environmentalists and scientists who are willing to bend their objectivity to obtain government grants for research on this topic.
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We are also brainwashing our children on the warming topic. We have no better example than Al Gore’s alarmists and inaccurate movie which is being shown in our schools and being hawked by warming activists with little or no meteorological-climate background. How much will this affect our children’s trust in science in the coming decades when these warming scares are proven false?
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It is not easy to be a climate skeptic. Global warming contrarians have trouble obtaining federal grants, some have been isolated and denigrated by their colleagues, and some have been smeared as tools of the fossil-fuel industry, as if those global warming advocates receiving large federal grant support were not tools of the federal government. I have, nevertheless, been a bit surprised and disappointed that more of my meteorological colleagues have not publicly spoken out against the exaggerated global warming scenarios.
I believe that in the next few years the globe is going to enter a modest cooling period similar to what was experienced in the 30-years between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s. I am convinced that in 15-20 years we will look back on this period of global warming hysteria as we now look back on other popular and trendy scientific ideas that have not stood the test of time.
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The author is a Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University where he has worked since 1961. He holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago in Geophysical Science. He has issued Atlantic basin seasonal hurricane forecasts since 1984.
There is talk about of an extended solar minimum occurring, or perhaps a recurrence of a Dalton or Maunder type minimum. There are signs that the sun’s activity is slowing. The solar wind has been decreasing in speed, and this is yet another indicator of a slowing in the suns magnetic dynamo.Nobody really knows what the sun is going to do, but don't discount the possibility of significant global cooling in upcoming decades.
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One thing is certain, based on past climate history and solar history, if in fact the suns magnetic activity slows, or collapses and we enter a prolonged period of little or no sunspot activity, we’ll see a global cooling trend. There are a number of theories about and a couple of dozen predictions about solar cycle 24 which has yet to start.
It was five years before the turn of the century and major media were warning of disastrous climate change. Page six of The New York Times was headlined with the serious concerns of “geologists.” Only the president at the time wasn’t Bill Clinton; it was Grover Cleveland. And the Times wasn’t warning about global warming – it was telling readers the looming dangers of a new ice age.Check out Newsweek's infamous "The Cooling World" article from April 1975.
The year was 1895, and it was just one of four different time periods in the last 100 years when major print media predicted an impending climate crisis. Each prediction carried its own elements of doom, saying Canada could be “wiped out” or lower crop yields would mean “billions will die.”
Just as the weather has changed over time, so has the reporting – blowing hot or cold with short-term changes in temperature.
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In all, the print news media have warned of four separate climate changes in slightly more than 100 years – global cooling, warming, cooling again, and, perhaps not so finally, warming.
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve...
Presumably this is approximately the same ratio of the environmentalists and conservationists population as the ratio of physicists and climatologists that argue that there is insufficient evidence to suggest an anthropomorphic component to global warming.Your statement suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientific debate on global warming.
The debate is all about the magnitude of that anthropogenic component.Many skeptics think the magnitude of the anthropogenic component is relatively small (say, on the order of .5 degrees Centigrade in the 21st century in a "business as usual" scenario).
...The latest work comes from a team of scientists with China’s Shanghai Typhoon Institute and is published in the Chinese journal Acta Oceanologica Sinica (you may notice a few misspelled words and odd phrases in some quotes from the article). The work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Special Climate Project of China’s Meteorological Administration.
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They conclude “it seems that the long-term trend change of tropical cyclone frequency within the next half century would be less than about 5% decrease,” ultimately finding “It is indicated that in response to the global climate change the general circulation of atmosphere would become unfavorable for the formation of tropical cyclone.”
Another factor that could change the record is heat from cities. This is called the urban heat bias, and as with solar effects, scientists tended to think the effect, while real, was relatively minor. That is why the IPCC allowed only six hundredths of a degree for urban heating. But cities are hot: the correction is likely to be much greater. We now understand that many cities are 7 or 8 degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside.
Some studies have suggested that the proper adjustment to the record needs to be four or five times greater than the IPCC allowance.
Now what does this mean to our record? Well remember, the total warming in the 20th century is six tenths of a degree.
If some of this is from land use and urban heating (and one studies suggests it is .35 C for the century), and some is solar heating (.25 C for century), then the amount attributable to carbon dioxide becomes less. And let me repeat: nobody knows how much is attributable to carbon dioxide right now.
But if carbon dioxide is not the major factor, it may not make a lot of sense to try and limit it. There are many reasons to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and I support such a reduction. But global warming may not be a good or a primary reason.
So this is very important stuff. The uncertainties are great.
We all wish that Ivory-billed Woodpeckers still lived, but unrealistic hopes of the species' survival are not helpful. We need to accept the tragic loss of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and move beyond it, in order to understand the consequences of our actions then and now. Only that will give us the clarity and the commitment needed to take on the biggest environmental challenges of the present.Update 1: In a post entitled "Ivory-Billed Exclamation Point", a blogger says:
David Sibley is an expert, and his recent post is perhaps the best and most complete summation I have read to date.Update 2: In linking to Sibley's post, the author of Bootstrap Analysis writes:
Yeah, what David Sibley says.
Times a million. Read it, twice, carefully. Hope somebody pays attention...
This IPCC report, like all others, is held in such high regard largely because it has been peer-reviewed. That is, it has been read, discussed, modified and approved by an international body of experts. These scientists have laid their reputations on the line. But this report is not what it appears to be--it is not the version that was approved by the contributing scientists listed on the title page. In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.
A comparison between the report approved by the contributing scientists and the published version reveals that key changes were made after the scientists had met and accepted what they thought was the final peer-reviewed version. The scientists were assuming that the IPCC would obey the IPCC Rules--a body of regulations that is supposed to govern the panel's actions. Nothing in the IPCC Rules permits anyone to change a scientific report after it has been accepted by the panel of scientific contributors and the full IPCC.
The participating scientists accepted "The Science of Climate Change" in Madrid last November; the full IPCC accepted it the following month in Rome. But more than 15 sections in Chapter 8 of the report--the key chapter setting out the scientific evidence for and against a human influence over climate--were changed or deleted after the scientists charged with examining this question had accepted the supposedly final text.
Few of these changes were merely cosmetic; nearly all worked to remove hints of the skepticism with which many scientists regard claims that human activities are having a major impact on climate in general and on global warming in particular.
The following passages are examples of those included in the approved report but deleted from the supposedly peer-reviewed published version:
* "None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases."
* "No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed to date] to anthropogenic [man-made] causes."
* "Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced."
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The IPCC summary itself, a political document, is economical with the truth: It has problems with selective presentation of facts, not the least of which is that it totally ignores global temperature data gathered by weather satellites, which contradict the results of models used to predict a substantial future warming. It seems to me that IPCC officials, having failed to validate the current climate models, are now desperately grasping at straws to buttress their (rather feeble) conclusion that "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate." In this crusade to provide a scientific cover for political action, they are misusing the work of respected scientists who never made extravagant claims about future warming.
Gore says the Arctic has been warming faster than the rest of the planet. It is not. While it is in general true that during periods of warming (whether natural or anthropogenic) the Arctic will warm faster than other regions, Gore does not mention that the Arctic has been cooling over the past 60 years, and is now one degree Celsius cooler than it was in the 1940s. There was a record amount of snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere in 2001. Several vessels were icebound in the Arctic in the spring of 2007, but few newspapers reported this. The newspapers reported that the North-West Passage was free of ice in 2007, and said that this was for the first time since records began: but the records, taken by satellites, had only begun 29 years previously. The North-West Passage had also been open for shipping in 1945, and, in 1903, the great Norwegian explorer Amundsen had passed through it in a sailing ship.
The tables below provide a comparison of model predictions with actual observations and provide a yes-no-undetermined score of whether the models are successful or not.
There is no escaping the fact that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been rising for 150 years – and very uniformly since the 1950s. Yet the temperature has not increased in step with CO2. Not only have there been long periods of little change in temperature, but also the year-to-year oscillations are totally unrelated to CO2 change. What is more, the trend lines of glacial shortening and rise in sea level have shown no marked change since the big increase in the use of fossil fuels since 1950.
How can this be explained unless there are other factors at work overriding the greenhouse effect of CO2? There are, of course, many to be found in the peer-reviewed literature: solar cycles, cosmic rays, cloud control and those little rascals, such as El Niño and La Niña, all of which are played down or even ignored by the global-warming brigade.
Many of the suggested names reflect things that are found predominantly in northeast Arkansas. Several offered the “Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers,” as a nod to the bird, long thought to be extinct, that may have been seen in the swamps outside Brinkley a few years ago.Check out the mascot suggestions here.
We traveled to the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Conference in New York, and talked to energy efficiency guru Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, MacArthur Genius Award winner and science educator Shawn Carlson, and appropriate-technology entrepreneur Shawn Frayne. It's a fascinating discussion of everything from how America can save energy and protect the environment without sacrificing our lifestyle, to ways of helping the third world, to techniques for energizing American students' interest in science and technology.
In the end, there seems to be two kinds of people in the debate. Those that are critical thinkers; skeptical as they may remember global cooling scare or the threat in the 70s that oil would run out by 1987 or 1993, those that are wise enough not to accept Al Gore's "the debate is over" claim, when we actually understand about 10-30% of the issue at best, those that realize the "consensus" is that the globe has been warming for 150+ years (most of it having occurred before 1950 and we started putting out a lot of CO2), those that realize the models are weak or that Solar activity/output is a better/more likely forcing factor with a better correlation to temperature than CO2, those that realize the Mann hockey-stick models flaws (in overweighting bristle-cone pines, and over weighting late rises and undervaluing earlier swings) --- and the other side. Those that believe politicians like Al Gore, or other chicken little's in the media or science that are exploiting the issue for personal gain. I prefer to be skeptical and keep my mind open, to being a sheeple following the latest fad crisis. But heck, to each their own. I realize I probably won't change their minds. As long as they stop trying to pretend that I and people like me don't exist -- or that we're just evil bastards trying to harm the environment -- then I'm fine. But their hate-mongering and mislabeling "my kind" can only foster more hate/anger/backlash. At least Stossel aired the other side, that we exist, and that we aren't all evil uninformed bastards. And for that, the other side is angry. How dare he.
HALF of children between the ages of seven and 11 are anxious about the effects of global warming and often lose sleep over it, according to a new report.
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Pete Williams, of Somerfield, said: "Kids are exposed to the hard facts as much as anybody. While many adults may look the other way, this study should show that global warming is not only hurting the children of the future, it's affecting the welfare of kids now."
One of the world's foremost meteorologists has called the theory that helped Al Gore share the Nobel Peace Prize "ridiculous" and the product of "people who don't understand how the atmosphere works".
Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth.
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"We'll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realise how foolish it was," Dr Gray said.
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