Are We About To See The Death Of The Global Warming Scam?

The article in today's Daily Mail

Forget global warming - it's Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again)

- Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years

So what is the biggest bombshell in this article?

Is it that the MET and the University of East Anglia have confirmed that there has been no global warming for the past 15 years (contrary to NASA numbers from the despicable James Hansen?)

Is it that all of the IPCC computer models - predicated on the theory that the world will warm in direct proportion to increases in atmospheric CO2 - have failed utterly?

Is it that we seem to be heading into a lull in sunspot activity last seen during periods of intense global cooling - (in particular that period known as the little Ice Age that Michael Mann wiped from the historic records with his hockey stick graph?)

Or is it that we are about to see the heretical theory of Henrick Svensmark - that solar activity, not CO2, is the primary determinant of our globe's warming and cooling through cloud formation - finally given a real world trial? Note that the same theory passed its first test at CERN last year.

This from the Daily Mail:

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century. Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food. Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.

We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’ – which is why last week’s solar storm resulted in sightings of the aurora borealis further south than usual. But sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century.

Analysis by experts at NASA and the University of Arizona – derived from magnetic-field measurements 120,000 miles beneath the sun’s surface – suggest that Cycle 25, whose peak is due in 2022, will be a great deal weaker still.

According to a paper issued last week by the Met Office, there is a 92 per cent chance that both Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as, or weaker than, the ‘Dalton minimum’ of 1790 to 1830. In this period, named after the meteorologist John Dalton, average temperatures in parts of Europe fell by 2C. However, it is also possible that the new solar energy slump could be as deep as the ‘Maunder minimum’ (after astronomer Edward Maunder), between 1645 and 1715 in the coldest part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ when, as well as the Thames frost fairs, the canals of Holland froze solid.

Interestingly, the MET is still taking the position that there will be no global cooling because it will all be offset by increasing carbon dioxide. Cue Henrick Svensmark:

‘World temperatures may end up a lot cooler than now for 50 years or more,’ said Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at Denmark’s National Space Institute. ‘It will take a long battle to convince some climate scientists that the sun is important. It may well be that the sun is going to demonstrate this on its own, without the need for their help.’

He pointed out that, in claiming the effect of the solar minimum would be small, the Met Office was relying on the same computer models that are being undermined by the current pause in global-warming.

CO2 levels have continued to rise without interruption and, in 2007, the Met Office claimed that global warming was about to ‘come roaring back’. It said that between 2004 and 2014 there would be an overall increase of 0.3C. In 2009, it predicted that at least three of the years 2009 to 2014 would break the previous temperature record set in 1998.

So far there is no sign of any of this happening. But yesterday a Met Office spokesman insisted its models were still valid.

Talk about your deadenders. The MET is hanging onto their AGW CO2-centric models with the very edges of their bloody fingernails at this point. They won't be able to do it much longer.

‘We’re now well into the second decade of the pause,’ said Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. ‘If we don’t see convincing evidence of global warming by 2015, it will start to become clear whether the models are bunk. And, if they are, the implications for some scientists could be very serious.’

So is tar and feathering serious enough for these world's greatest scam artists, or is something more serious warranted? Perhaps it is for Al Gore, Michael Mann and James Hansen. What do you think, maybe permanent deportation to Siberia where they can live out their lives with a zero carbon footprint?

The real crime with all of this is that, while our governments still push global warming, the reality is that global cooling may soon be upon us - and the effects could be devastating. Unfortunately, our world will not be able to prepare for this eventuality until the AGW gravy train is brought to its final, bitter end.  And given that the global warming scam is not about science, but rather about political power, patronage and money, we will be well into global cooling before that will ever happen.

Update:  Linked by Paul in Houston

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Fiddling While Rome Freezes . . . And Crop Production Falls (Updated)

And in the same year, after Candlemas, came the strong winter, with frost and with snow, and with all kinds of bad weather; so that there was no man then alive who could remember so severe a winter as this was, both through loss of men and through loss of cattle; yea, fowls and fishes through much cold and hunger perished.

Anglo Saxon Chronicle, entry for the year 1046

[A]ll the accepted measures of global temperatures show that their trend has been downwards since 2002, declining at a rate that averages to about 0.25 degree per decade. Yet such a fall was predicted by none of those 25 computer models on which the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the rest of the Great and the Good rely for their theory of runaway global warming. Their computers are programmed to assume that as CO2 goes up, temperatures inevitably follow. But the graph below, where the variation of global temperatures from a 30-year mean is plotted against CO2 levels, shows the two lines clearly diverging, contrary to the theory. In this century, temperatures have fallen as CO2 has risen.

Christopher Booker, Global Warming & A Tale Of Two Planets, The Telegraph, 6 June 2009

The reality is that neither "anthropogenic global warming" nor the dangers of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are proven. What we can say, beyond doubt, is that, as noted by Mr. Booker, all of the computer models relied upon by the IPCC to push the concept of global warming have failed and are diverging ever more from reality.

Two, we are in a cooling trend that has reversed any claimed increases in global temperatures over the past century. And indeed, we are seeing anecdotal evidence of this cooling quite literally across the planet, be it from increasing sea ice in the poles to unusual winter weather from North Dakota to Saudi Arabia, from Greece to South Africa, and all points in between.

Three, we know that solar activity is at its lowest ebb in living memory. We know that such inactivity has been historically associated with periods of global cooling, including most notably the coldest patch of the Little Ice Age between 1639 and 1700, a period known as the Maunder Minimum.

But most seriously we are now seeing global cooling having a significant impact on food production. It is a trend that Dr. North at EU Referendum noted last year and that has gained momentum this year. This from Dr. North:

Just one report from the Mississippi basin tells us that weather related problems have curtailed spring time planting for corn. Growers have reduced yield per acre prospects for the 2009 crop and projected end stocks to use for 2009/10 corn working toward a record low level dating back to 1999.

We see the same effect further north, where cool weather has pushed growth of Western Canada's wheat and barley crop at least 10 days behind schedule. Late-spring frost has hit and continues to strike the Prairie canola (rapeseed). One pocket of western Manitoba dipped to -4°C and some farmers are considering reseeding. Similar weather effects are being reported in Brazil, which is considering cutting this year's corn output forecast for a third consecutive time as a frost in central southern states damaged crops. A drop of as much as nine million tons against last year is being expected.

What is extremely disturbing is that we are seeing the beginnings of a trend and, in fact, we were reporting similar woes this time last year. At the time, the message was don't panic … yet. Despite this the global warming industry ploughs on regardless, continuing its ludicrous propaganda, heedless of the political implications of a prolonged cooling cycle.

And, of course, on this side of the pond we have had the Obama EPA declare carbon dioxide a pollutant that, they tell us, is a direct cause of global warming. This was soon followed by the Waxman Cap and Trade bill, written behind closed doors by the far left and pushed out of committee with barely a hearing. There is complete investiture in the theory of anthropogenic global warming and the need to control carbon dioxide as a prime mover of global warming, yet there is a complete refusal to take account of the failed computer models of the IPCC and the reality of what is going on about us. Indeed, this mindless push of the global warming agenda comes at a time when agricultural production - already under threat because of the insane push for biofuels - is, as Dr. North points out, is now under ever-growing threat from global cooling. It has the potential to become a true crisis for which our political class is doing not the slightest bit of planning. As Dr. North opines:

[I]f a global shortage of food is a distinct possibility, the really disturbing thing is that the political classes – including our own – are so fixated with their global warming myth that there is no recognition of or planning for the travails that may well come.

That, above all, may well be the greatest political betrayal of them all, when the world starves because our fatuous politicians cannot even being to deal with reality and remain firmly embedded in their own fool's paradise.

Do read his entire post.

Art: Hendrick Avercamp, Winter Landscape

Update: Professor Dr. Doug L. Hoffman is a mathematician, computer programmer, and engineer who worked on environmental models and conducted research in molecular dynamics simulations. He teaches at Hendrix College and the University of Central Arkansas. Hoffman co-authored the 2009 book, The Resilient Earth. Dr. Hoffman is featured on page 91 of the 2009 U.S. Senate report of 700 plus dissenting scientists, wherein he asks the question, "Are we about to start a new Little Ice Age?"


References:

Throwing Green Fuel On An Economic Fire
A Bit Of Honesty From Speaker Pelosi
The Wages Of Green
Higher CO2 Levels Mean Higher Plant Yields
A Global Cooling Update
Cold Questions About Climate Change
Global Warming Under Threat

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The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change

The 2008 Non-Governmental International Conference on Climate Change has been meeting in New York since March 2. This meeting was convened by those scientists who are not part of the Goracle's "consensus" about global warming.




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A summary of the opinions and arguments being aired at the NG-IPCC can be found in the publication Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climage. The document begins with a rebuttal of the work of the highly politicized UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) penned by Frederick Seitz, President Emeritus, Rockefeller University, past President of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, and Chairman of the Science and Environmental Policy Project:

The IPCC is pre-programmed to produce reports to support the hypotheses of anthropogenic warming and the control of greenhouse gases, as envisioned in the Global Climate Treaty. The 1990 IPCC Summary completely ignored satellite data, since they showed no warming. The 1995 IPCC report was notorious for the significant alterations made to the text after it was approved by the scientists – in order to convey the impression of a human influence. The 2001 IPCC report claimed the twentieth century showed ‘unusual warming’ based on the now-discredited hockey-stick graph. The latest IPCC report, published in 2007, completely devaluates the climate contributions from changes in solar activity, which are likely to dominate any human influence.

The document sumarizes its findings in Section 1:

The IPCC continues to undervalue the overwhelming evidence that, on decadal and century-long time scales, the Sun and associated atmospheric cloud effects are responsible for much of past climate change. It is therefore highly likely that the Sun is also a major cause of twentieth century warming, with anthropogenic GH gases making only a minor contribution. In addition, the IPCC ignores, or addresses imperfectly, other science issues that call for discussion and explanation.

The present report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) focuses on two major issues – the very weak evidence that the causes of the current warming are anthropogenic (Section 2) and the far more robust evidence that the causes of the current warming are natural (Section 3) – and then addresses a series of less crucial topics:

- Computer models are unreliable guides to future climate conditions (Section 4);

- Sea-level rise is not significantly affected by rise in GH gases (Section 5);

- The data on ocean heat content have been misused to suggest anthropogenic warming. The role of GH gases in the reported rise in ocean temperature is largely unknown (Section 6);

- Understanding of the atmospheric carbon dioxide budget is incomplete (Section 7);

- Higher concentrations of GH gases are more likely to be beneficial to plant and animal life and to human health than lower concentrations (Section 8); and

- Conclusion: Our imperfect understanding of the causes and consequences of climate change means the science is far from settled. This, in turn, means proposed efforts to mitigate climate change by reducing GH gas emissions are premature and misguided. Any attempt to influence global temperatures by reducing such emissions would be both futile and expensive (Section 9).

Do see the entire report. And keep your hands firmly on your wallets until you decide whether we really need to engage in economy busting measures - such as biofuels and carbon credits - on the basis of the assertions of the Goracle.

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Where is the Warming?

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has produced a rather cheesy video, but one that makes a very valid point about which I have blogged previously - that the temperature plateau and, indeed, the dramatic recent drop in temperature, require a reexamination of the global warming theories before we institute economy busting measures to contain what may be mere fantasy.



Much more on this video from Debbie at Right Truth. Are we on the cusp of a period of prolonged global cooling due to the decrease in solar activity? That certainly seems to be borne out by the recent evidence.

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More Shivers

What does a person have to do to get some global warming around here?












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We may be on the cusp of a period of global cooling driven by a Maunder Minimum - a sudden and sustained drop off in solar activity. I've posted that the world has just experienced the largest 12 month, January to January, drop in temperature since they began keeping records in 1880. And in that same vein, there is this today from the National Post:

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

. . . In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

. . . [It] is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.

And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona -- two prominent climate modellers -- the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.

Read the entire article.

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B-r-r-r-r-r

Global Warming . . . or Maunder Minimum?

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According to the just released data from NASA's Goddard Space Science Center, the world has just experienced the largest 12 month, January to January, drop in temperature since they began keeping records in 1880. If you look at the data, you will see a drop of .75 celsius. If you live in Greece, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, China, etc., you can simply step outside your front door for a peek.

This from Chris Booker:

. . . Temperatures were lower than their 20th century average for the first time since 1982. Snow cover in the northern hemisphere was at its greatest extent since 1966. At the other end of the world, Antarctic ice-cover was at its most extensive since satellite records began in 1979, 30 per cent above the January average (see such websites as the US National Climate Data Center, Cryosphere Today and Watt's Up With That).

It may be too early to draw conclusions as to what this says about changing climate patterns, but the fact remains that such drastic cooling hardly accords with classic global warming theory, that rising CO2 must mean rising temperatures. Certainly nothing on this scale was predicted by those scientific bodies on which the world's politicians have been relying for their belief that global warming was the most serious challenge facing the planet.

At New Year, one such body, the University of East Anglia's Hadley Centre, predicted that, although 2008 would be cooler than some recent years, it would still be one of the 10 hottest years in history, and that any cooling would only "mask the underlying warming trend".

Seven weeks later it is clear that the cooling has gone much further than that, according better with the predictions of that growing body of scientists who argue that climate change is caused less by CO2 emissions than by magnetic activity on the Sun. They point to the abnormally low present sunspot level, of a type associated with severe cooling in the past, such as in the Little Ice Age between the 17th and early 19th centuries.

The political significance of all this, of course, is that our leaders are committing us to a range of measures whose economic effects will be without precedent, from their astronomically costly "carbon trading" schemes to their determination to spend hundreds of billions of pounds on wind turbines.

The most respected economist in this field, Yale's Professor William Nordhaus, estimates that the cost of the measures proposed by Al Gore would be $34 trillion (£17 trillion) - all resting on the belief that, unless we spend such sums, world temperatures are doomed to rise. The events of the first two months of 2008 may lead us to wonder whether these people really know what they are doing.

Read the entire article.

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Cold Questions About Climate Change

The computer models may not have changed, but the facts of our current climate and solar inactivity suggest we are in for a period of global cooling. Will any of those who have made of global warming a religion or business pay attention, and if not, than what the price?

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Combine brevity with clarity and you get eloquence. So it is with Cat at Brits At Their Best today. In her post, "Changing Your Mind," she notes the changing facts of our climate and quotes Lord Keynes who said "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

I posted the other day that we may may be on the cusp of a Maunder Minimum and face a prolonged period of global cooling. At the conclusion, I asked "would it be possible to prepare as a species for the looming cooling if we were to recognize its imminence and begin planning now?" Cat asks a related question at the end of her post. Do read it.

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