Wolf Howling: arctic

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Sunday, January 2, 2011

A Question To Ask Every Global Warming Proponent

We are at a critical point in the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) war on prosperity. The EPA is about to engage in economy busting regulation of CO2 on the theory that it is a pollutant. And on that basis, Obama is destroying our energy infrastructure with his war on coal, which accounts for 50% of our nation's electricity generation, and oil, which, with declining domestic productions, now accounts for over half of our trade deficit. This has us on a road to pay disastrous prices for energy in the future, with all that means for our economy and jobs. If our nation is to return to prosperity, we must change the paradigm of the AGW debate.

For the last two decades, the meme of the warmies, repeated ad infinitum, has been that climate science is proven by peer reviewed literature and that the consensus is that the science is beyond dispute. Today, there is a mountain of evidence showing that the meme is a canard. It is time to change the terms of the debate on this issue. It is time to demand, unequivocally, that the warmies tell us exactly what would falsify the theory of AGW. And it is time to demand that the EPA Administrator answer that question under oath before Congress.

We have had fifteen years of stable or slightly falling temperatures (notwithstanding the inane babbling of uber-warmie Jim Hansen and his manipulation of NASA data - including the "raw data"). Much of the world has just experienced one of the most horrendously cold Decembers on record. This comes on the heels of warmies telling us for years (Hansen, the MET, and virtually all other warmies included) that global warming would mean temperatures rising co-extensively with humans pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, causing untold calamities and much milder winters.

Instead, the climate models used by the warmies have catastrophically failed over the past 15 years and we are experiencing record-setting bitter winters. Shamelessly, warmies now tell us that AGW is the cause of this cold weather. AGW is, they alledge, melting sea ice, thus leading to changing weather patterns and increased humidity that is the cause.

It is notable that NASA told us, in 1999, that AGW was causing changing weather patterns over the Arctic, but that the result thereof would be ever milder winters. Regardless, and more importantly, do see Roger Pielke, Sr's specific criticism of this new theory. Pielke, an IPCC scientist, critically notes that the proposed narrative suffers from significant factual errors and actually raises "substantive issues with the robustness and accuracy" of the 2007 IPCC report.

Thus do we need to be forcing the warmies to answer, at every turn, the simple question, what evidence would be necessary to falsify the theory of global warming? What are the "facts" that they identify as forming the crucial underpinnings that AGW? With that answer in hand, then the meme of AGW will cease to be mindless dogma. It will become actual science that cannot withstand scrutiny.

The evidence against AGW is mountainous. The rise in temperatures in the last century are not in any way extreme compared to what we see throughout geologic history. World temperatures are nowhere near a historic high. For but one example, Nature magazine, a pro-AGW publication, is today discussing the study of ice cores showing that temperatures 130,000 years ago were a whopping 9 degrees F. warmer than today.

Geologic history shows no correlation between CO2 and climate. To the contrary, evidence shows CO2 levels lagging temperature spikes by centuries. A very recent study looking at this issue over the past several decades found a direct correlation between humidity and temperature, but no significant correlation between CO2 and temperature.

Our geologic history has shown numerous temperature spikes at least equal to, and in most cases exceeding, the current warming that has been occurring since the end of the Little Ice Age. Just within the past 2,000 years, evidence shows the Roman Warming and the Medieval Warming periods likely exceeded temperatures occurring today (notwithstanding the infamous hockey stick). So how can the warmies possibly show that the modern warming trend is anomalous?

What about ice? The warmies would have us believe that the ice caps are melting and that it is only a matter of time until Manhattanites are taking gondalas to work. Yet on the aggregate, we are losing little if any ice cover, and there is nothing anomalous about the local ice cover that we are losing. The vast majority of the world's ice is in Antarctica - approximately 90%. And the ice there is growing, hitting record highs in 2010. The Arctic has lost ice, but this is not an inexplicable anomaly. Moreover, interestingly, we recently learned that the area of thick ice in the Arctic has actually doubled since 2008. Regardless, there have been numerous periods in recorded history where Arctic sea ice has tended low. So how do the warmies distinguish our modern situation from history?

And when the warmies claim that their work is peer reviewed, understand that the term is meaningless as a measure of reliability (that according to one of the fathers of the modern peer review process). That is all the moreso in the context of climate science, where the entire scientific process has been bastardized - AGW proponents have substituted "peer review" as ipso facto proof of reliability in place of reproducibility of their results. Indeed, an important aspect to changing the paradigm on AGW is to ask whether each and every study and data set relied on by the AGW crowd include all the raw data, meta data, methodology and computational formulas such as would allow the work to be independently verified. Anything not meeting this criteria - and it is a very large chunk of the studies upon which the canard of AGW is built, including the temperature data sets of NASA and others - is worthless as proof of AGW. Indeed, we should be demanding that our government pass legislation holding that anyone operating pursuant to publicly funded grants and who publishes studies in respect thereof without information that would allow for independent verification be thereafter banned from recieving any future public grants. I can assure you that would shake the AGW promoting academia to their core. Certainly we should demand that the EPA not place any reliance on unreproducable studies when making regulatory decisions.

It bears repeating that carbon dioxide is a trace gas, forming only 0.03% of the earth's atmosphere. It is not even the most significant of the green house gases; water vapor is. The vast majority of the 0.03% of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is produced naturally. Indeed, all of the human burning of fossil fuels only contributes 0.0042% to the level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. And that is what is supposed to be driving our climate? Pay no attention to that little glowing ball in the sky.

The few true believers are nuts. The rest who are pushing this are pursuing either money, dictatorial power over our lives, or the destruction of America - or some combination of all three. Our prosperity depends on winning the argument about AGW in the public square, and that with virtually all of the mainstream media arrayed in favor of AGW. Regardless, the argument can and must be won. Step one is to change the paradigm of the argument.

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Saturday, April 24, 2010

Naive Greens - When Faith Runs Up Against Reality

Andrew Bolt, writing at Australia's Herald Sun, has up a superb article on the global warming acolytes, having bought into the dogma that the polar regions are melting away under the intense heat of man made global warming, made expeditions to the poles to raise awareness - only to find that maybe they should have checked with Joe Bastardi instead of the IPCC . . .

TOM Smitheringale wanted to prove the world was warming. Now he's another alarmist with frostbite.

The 40-year-old from Perth planned to be the first Australian to trek unassisted to the North Pole, but announced he'd raise some consciousness along the way.

As he wrote on his website: "Part of the reason Tom's One Man Epic is taking place now is because of the effect that global warming is having on the polar ice caps."

Indeed, he wanted to see the North Pole while it was still there: "Some scientists have even estimated that the polar ice cap will have entirely melted away by 2014!"

Have your say at Andrew's blog

But Antarctica isn't melting away, and Arctic ice has slowly increased since its big low in 1997.

But no one seems to have told Tom, who soon found his extremities freezing. . . .

This is actually now the fourth year running that warming alarmists have had to be rescued from expeditions to prove the Arctic is warmer than it actually is. It's a metaphor.

Last year it was British eco-explorer Pen Hadow and his two-person team who had to be flown out mid-stunt, after battling brutal sub-zero weather conditions that gave the team's photographer frostbite.

The year before, eco-adventurer Lewis Gordon Pugh was similarly thwarted.

He'd planned to kayak 1200km to the North Pole to raise awareness of how global warming had allegedly melted the ice sheet so badly that scientists warned the North Pole that summer could be ice-free.

No such luck. Pugh had to pull out, still 1000km from the finish, when a great barrier of sea ice blocked his route.

The year before gave even more farcical entertainment.

"Explorers and educators" Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen said they were off on what reporters described as "a historic 75-day expedition to the North Pole and beyond to raise awareness of global warming's impact on the fragile Arctic".

It turned out that what was fragile was not the Arctic but the alarmists, who had to call off their big trip not long after it started, when Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold drained their batteries.

Explained a spokesman: "They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with global warming."

Like the globe, really.

The fact is that when Arctic rescuers must save more people from global warming stunts than from global warming itself, it's time to heed again the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

"We have nothing to fear but fear itself." So if alarmists settled down, they might just live longer, and keep their toes.

And the rest of us might not be put to so much needless expense. Like rescues, for instance.

There certainly is a measure of justice to all of this. Now if we could just ship all the greens to the poles for a reality check . . . Indeed, hopefully they might even be able to give us first hand information as to whether the polar bear population is really shrinking - assuming they can run fast enough.

Monday, April 5, 2010

Climategate Update 26: The Return Of Arctic Sea Ice, Der Spiegel On Climategate, & The Whitewashing of Climategate In The UK

Climategate continues it convulsions. Der Spiegel covers it in a long article, explaining why belief in global warming in Germany is plummeting. Yet left-wing politicians continue to pretend that nothing has changed. Various attempts to whitewash this greatest scientific scandal of our time are made, including the ridiculous findings of a House of Commons inquiry. AGW scientists continue to make claims that simply defy logic, yet many AGW scientists are running scared, and it seems to me at least that contrary science is now being truly heard. Moreover, in but the past few days, another major development has occurred in the spirit of Climategate. After years of scaremongering as to how the ice in the arctic was receding and would soon disappear, causing massive changes to our climate, sea ice in the arctic is now all but completely recovered.

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Der Spiegel has a good article, A Superstorm For Global Warming Research, on Climategate and its reverberations. It is too long to condense, but it looks at many aspects of Climategate and its fallout, finding politicization and sloppy work exposed and public confidence in AGW theory waning. But while the majority of the article is quite good, it goes off the rails when it comes to dealing with computer modeling. The Der Spiegel authors assume that, despite it all, AGW is real and the computer models used to predict AGW still valid. But as I have pointed out here, the computer models relied upon by the IPCC are fundamentally and fataly flawed. They assume that the primary driver of temperature is CO2 and they have failed over the past decade as the earth has cooled while CO2 has risen. Dr. Doug Hoffman makes much the same point in a recent post in his blog, The Resilliant Earth. He looks at numerous computer models, concluding:

[M]ore pernicious are the lies generated by climate models, models held up to be oracles of scientific truth—and nothing could be farther from the truth. The models lie because they are built on faulty assumptions, calibrated with inaccurate data and are, by their very nature, incapable of calculating “correct” answers.

Nonetheless, politicians continue to ignore Climategate, acting as if it never occurred, and that AGW theory is reality. Thus do we have Obama now 'pivoting' to his cap and trade legislation ostensibly to combat global warming. And in Britian, an utterly laughable House of Commons inquiry into Climategate found, after one day of hearings, that the issues arising out of Climategate were but smoke and mirrors. And of course, many AGW scientists attempt much the same. For example, Goddard has published a temperature map based on adjusted temperatures that, if it is to believed, has the arctic and antarctic with temperatures rising starkly. Yet, as meteorologist Joe Bistardi points out, that is impossible. Arctic sea ice is growing significantly.

This growth in Arctic sea ice despite the continued growth in human CO2 contribution is of great import as to the validity of AGW theory. Dr. North at EU Referendum has up a must read post on this, A Death Spiral For Warmists:

Jonathan Leake in The Sunday Times picks up on the news that the size of the Arctic ice cap has increased sharply to levels not seen since 2001, putting the ice extent two days ago almost at the average level for 1979-2000.

Given the enthusiasm the media have shown for reporting Armageddon claims about the retreat of the ice, it is significant that his is the only such report in today's batch of newspapers – although The Daily Mail covered it briefly yesterday. Hitherto, the only detailed report had been on Watts up with that?.

But what is especially significant about the Leake report is his interview with Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Colorado. He is said to be "surprised" by the Arctic’s recovery from the great melt of 2007 when summer ice shrank to its smallest recorded extent. "In retrospect," he says, "the reactions to the 2007 melt were overstated. The lesson is that we must be more careful in not reading too much into one event."

In making this declaration, Serreze is getting away extraordinarily lightly. It was he, after all, who was pre-eminent in stoking up the alarm over the Arctic ice melt, providing fuel for the warmists and driving much of the global warming scare as the ice extent became a poster child for the activists. . . .

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

More Green Blasphemy

Retired NASA Scientist Dr. Leonard Weinstein, a 35 year empolyee of NASA's Langley Research Center, and now Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute of Aerospace, penned an article on April 23 reviewing the current state of scientific knowledge and the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). This from his article:

The final question that arises is what prediction has the AGW made that has been demonstrated, and that strongly supports the theory. It appears that there is NO real supporting evidence and much disagreeing evidence for the AGW theory as proposed. That is not to say there is no effect from Human activity. Clearly human pollution (not greenhouse gases) is a problem. There is also almost surely some contribution to the present temperature from the increase in CO2 and CH4, but it seems to be small and not a driver of future climate. Any reasonable scientific analysis must conclude the basic theory wrong.

(H/T Climate Depot)

Read the entire paper. This comes as solar activity has gone incredibly quiet and our earth has cooled over the past seven years - despite all computer models forecasting the opposite. Today we learn that Australia has experienced its coldest day ever recorded. A recent study in the North Pole of previously untested areas found the ice twice the expected thickness. Antarctic sea ice, far from receding, is at its thirty year high and expanding. Montana is in the midst of experiencing record April snowfall. Oh, and Obama is now about to put a huge nail in our economy with cap and trade in order to combat global warming.

Lets give the final word to Dr. William J.R. Alexander, Professor Emeritus of the Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering at the University of Pretoria in South Africa:

The whole climate change issue is about to fall apart. Heads will roll. . . . It is also very important to note that global climate models are unable to produce an output that is verifiable. In other words the output can neither be proved nor disproved. What grounds do those who use these models have to refute observations made by others to the effect that there is no believable evidence of the postulated dramatic adverse changes produced by the models? . . .

Not only do our studies completely negate the claims made by climate change scientists, but we can demonstrate with a high degree of assurance that all the proposed measures to limit greenhouse gas emissions will be an exercise in futility. There is no way whatsoever that the costly mitigation measures will have a meaningful effect on the world’s climate.

Read the entire piece here.