The intractable non-problem of climate change | The SPPI Blog

The Royal Society of Edinburgh, a science pressure-group largely funded by taxpayers, has decided to join the rent-seeking classes worldwide in trying to extract cash from you and me in the name of Saving The Planet from the non-threat posed by “global warming”. The lobby-group has set up an enquiry into the gap between the policies the governing classes would like to inflict upon us and the policies that we, the governed, might be willing to accept. Here is the joint submission from me, my lovely wife, the Carie Estate, and Monckton Enterprises Ltd. The bureaucrats won’t enjoy it, but perhaps our readers will. The Royal Society’s questions are in bold face: our replies are in Roman face.

Climate Resistance » Spiking Copenhagen

Two predictions. First, we are anticipating that “scepticism” or “denial” – call it what you want – will become more organised this year, perhaps it already is. Second, although the climate issue is not going away, it has suffered terrible PR, and there is widespread recognition that the climate change pudding has been over-egged. We anticipate that the environmental debate will begin to refocus around the issue of over-population, rather than climate.

Climate madness from Richard Denniss | Australian Climate Madness

I have never understood why people continually say "it's in Australia's interest" to cut emissions. Cutting emissions isn't in any country's interest if that country values its standards of living, the health of its economy and seeks to alleviate poverty. But it's a price that may have to be paid in order to assuage the demands of radical environmentalists. And then there are the weighty tomes. Denniss is an economist too, so it's not surprising he places so much faith in other economists, but the Stern report was, to quote Lawrence Solomon, "a comic mishmash of bad math, bad faith and worst-case scenarios treated as overwhelming probabilities." Garnaut's was much the same. To base policy on that kind of hyperbole is madness. Add that to the punishing cost of replacing coal with hugely expensive alternatives for electricity generation and you have a recipe for certain economic disaster. And to what end? To reduce global emissions by three fifths of sod-all.

Storm drains winter budgets

After one major storm, the state of Maryland already has plowed through its snow-removal budget for the season, and many counties and cities, including Rockville, have done the same.

Officials say they will be forced to cut back on other services to pay for snow-removal and salt operations for the remainder of fiscal 2010.

CapitalClimate: Florida Freeze Feeds Futures Frenzy Orange Juice Prices Increase on Record Cold

A RECORD COOL MAXIMUM TEMPERATURE OF 50 DEGREES WAS SET AT ORLANDO TODAY. THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 57 SET IN 1980

Bah Humbug! « the Air Vent

Dickens life demonstrates the extraordinary variability of the British winters during that era, when the coldest and warmest winters in the CET records can be juxtaposed. Generally there are few examples of constant cold winters year after year-the LIA was becoming much more sporadic than it had been several centuries earlier, when bitter cold weather appears to have been the norm. To put this era into perspective mature English people might be surprised to learn they lived through a much colder winter than Dickens ever experienced. 1962/3 at -0.33C was the third coldest in the entire CET record compared to Dickens coldest year 1814 at 0.43c, the fourth coldest in the record. (1962/3 was a bit of a one off-Dickens experienced a greater number of relatively cold winters)

Fun with computer models? Don’t bother | The SPPI Blog

You may like to read my paper at SPPI’s website on why models of the climate can’t work. The central problem is that the global climate is mathematically-chaotic, so that even a minuscule perturbation in just one of its parameters at the outset will cause everything to go all over the place a few weeks out. The key paper on this is Lorenz (1963), in the climate paper that founded chaos theory. See also Giorgi (2005). Therefore I don’t think there’s anything much to be gained by computer models of the climate except for forecasting the weather up to a few weeks ahead. After that, all models must fail, as Lorenz proved. The IPCC is quite well aware of this, but simply ignores it because – and here’s the thing – it can only make out a case for climate alarm by using models. You can’t get to the same alarmist result by using real-world data, which all point to a considerable stability in the climate, just as you say. So, except for the very short term, I don’t play with climate models any more.