Of Global Cooling, Computer Models & Polar Bears

The only news sources not to parrot the IPCC line when it comes to "man made global warming" are Fox and the Daily Mail. But it is the Daily Mail that is by far the most aggressive in challenging the IPCC with facts. My hat is off to them for it.

In response to the release of the AR5 Summary For Policy Makers (SPM) by the IPCC (see post below), the Daily Mail on Sunday has published two articles on point. The first is on the lack of global warming for the past 17 plus years and what that means for all of the IPCC computer models used to predict global warming. The second article deals with the "endangered" polar bears which, at least until recently, were the poster children of the green's emotional campaign against illusory (but, mind you, 'catastrophic') global warming.

In the IPCC's SPM, they attempt to brush off the fact that there has been no warming for over 17 years, and they shamelessly lie about it when it comes to the implications for their computer models. All of the computer models posit that temperatures will steadily increase in proportion to man pumping ever more CO2 into the atmosphere. Those models have all failed. This from the Daily Mail:

The global warming ‘pause’ has now lasted for almost 17 years and shows no sign of ending – despite the unexplained failure of climate scientists’ computer models to predict it.

The Mail on Sunday has also learnt that because 2013 has been relatively cool, it is very likely that by the end of this year, world average temperatures will have crashed below the ‘90 per cent probability’ range projected by the models.

These also provide the main basis for the sweeping forecasts of a perilous, hotter world in a new report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The graph above covers the period June 1997 to July 2013. It was drawn using the official Met Office ‘HadCRUT4’ monthly data for world average temperatures, and shows the lack of a warming trend. . . .

A footnote in the new report also confirms there has been no statistically significant increase since 1997.

Last night independent climate scientist Nic Lewis – an accredited IPCC reviewer and co-author of peer-reviewed papers – pointed out that taking start years of 2001, 2002 or 2003 would suggest a cooling trend of 0.02-0.05C per decade, though this would not be statistically significant.

At a press conference to launch the report in Stockholm, the IPCC refused to say how long the pause would have to go on before casting doubt on the models, suggesting trends were only meaningful if they lasted 30 years. But some of the report’s authors are less confident.

Piers Forster, Leeds University’s Professor of Physical Climate Change, told The Mail on Sunday: ‘If it does get beyond 20 years, that would get very interesting.'We would have to revisit the models. As it goes on, it would get more and more peculiar.’

He added: ‘We are right on the edge of the probability distribution now. We have to accept that if we are going to come up with projections, they have to be correct.’

Even this marks a big change from earlier statements by eminent climate scientists. In 2009, Professor Phil Jones, head of the East Anglia University Climatic Research Unit, said in a leaked ‘Climategate’ email: ‘Bottom line: the no upward trend has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’

However, not only does the report deny the importance of the pause, it makes a firm, short-term forecast that it is about to end – claiming that the period 2016-2035 will, on average, be 0.3-0.7C hotter than 1986-2005. . . .

Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, said that since 1980, climate models had on average overstated the extent of warming by between 79 and 159 per cent. . . .

‘This does not mean that there is not some global warming, but it likely means that temperature rises will be lower than originally expected. That fact makes alarmist scenarios ever more implausible.’

He added: ‘The EU will pay $250 billion [£166 billion] for its current climate policies each and every year until the end of the century. For almost $20 trillion, temperatures will be reduced by a negligible 0.05C.’

In Stockholm, IPCC leaders described the models as ‘more and more remarkable’, insisting that the pause has no significance. . . .

It said no conclusion should be drawn from the lack of warming since 1998 because this was one of the hottest years on record, while the models were ‘not expected to reproduce the timing of internal variability’. Yet the pause has lasted since January 1997, not 1998, and 1997 was not a hot year.

This is all getting more surreal by the day. One has to love how the left claims the models are getting ever more accurate as the data shows them utterly failing. It truly is Soviet-esque. Now, as to the polar bears - whom the greens were able to have listed in 2008 as an endangered species wholly on the basis of computer models that posited that polar bear habitat would fall to global warming - . . .

. . . they are seeming rather fat and happy of late. This from the Daily Mail:

A bitter wind blows off the Arctic Ocean but the mother polar bear and her two cubs standing just 50ft in front of me are in their element.

For more than an hour I watch from a boat just offshore, transfixed and oblivious to the below-freezing temperatures, as the four-month-old twins gambol across the snow.

For years polar bears have been the poster boys of global warming – routinely reported to be threatened with extinction due to melting ice-packs and rising sea temperatures.

Indeed, when they were put on the US Endangered Species list in 2008, they were the first to be registered solely because of the perceived threat of global warming.

One prominent scientist said their numbers would be reduced by 70 per cent by 2050 while global warming proponents – including Al Gore and Sir David Attenborough – used emotive imagery to highlight their ‘demise’.

Yet there is one small problem: many polar bear populations worldwide are now stable, if not increasing. . . .

Last week I travelled to Kaktovik, Alaska – an Inupiat village of 239 hardy souls on Barter Island at the edge of the Arctic – which has become an unlikely boom town thanks to an influx of polar bears.

Village administrator Tori Sims, 26, beamed as she told me: ‘This has been a great year for the bears.

'They are fat, happy and healthy. We’re seeing a boom in tourism which brings much-needed revenue to the village and helps us continue to live the traditional life we cherish.

‘I’ve lived here all my life and there are more bears every year. I read stories about polar bears being on the brink of extinction because of global warming, look out of my window and start to laugh.’ . . .

Laugh? At the IPCC and ManBearPig? How atrocious. The last thing the left wants is for people to start confusing the issue of global warming with facts.

The damage being done to mankind by the global warming scam is the true catastrophe. There needs to be a reckoning for these people. They cannot be allowed to simply slip away into the night as this scam is finally exposed.

Should you think me a bit too vindictive, consider this:

Tar and feathering simply would not be enough. I suggest stripping them of their wealth and positions, then sending them en masse to Siberia where they can enjoy all the global warming they want.

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Politicized Science

. . . The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions. If scientific and technological information is developed and used by the Federal Government, it should ordinarily be made available to the public. To the extent permitted by law, there should be transparency in the preparation, identification, and use of scientific and technological information in policymaking. . . .

President Barack Obama, Memorandum, Subject: Scientific Integrity, 9 March 2009

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Obama strikes the highest of moral poses, yet scratch the surface and you will find no morality underneath. As has regularly been the case with Obama and the far left, the statists at the UN included, the gulf between words and deeds is a yawning chasm. In terms of politicized science, we have been treated over the past two months to:

- Obama's EPA making repeated claims that the science of global warming is "settled" and that regulation of CO2 is the only way to stave off disaster, yet suppressing its own internal study critical of the underlying science and that calls these conclusions into doubt. (H/T What Bubba Knows)

Update: This from CNET News:

The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty "decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."

The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message (PDF) to a staff researcher on March 17: "The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward...and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision

The e-mail correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be an independent review process inside a federal agency--and echoes criticisms of the EPA under the Bush administration, which was accused of suppressing a pro-climate change document

Alan Carlin, the primary author of the 98-page EPA report, said in a telephone interview on Friday that his boss, McGartland, was being pressured himself. "It was his view that he either lost his job or he got me working on something else," Carlin said. "That was obviously coming from higher levels." . . .

(H/T Memorandum)

- Last week, Team Obama released a 196 page report, "Global Climate Change Impacts In The United States" that contains so many inaccuracies and false claims that, as one climate scientist has stated, it would "make Pravda blush." And indeed, one of the major scientists whose data is relied upon in the report, Roger Pielke Jr., has taken the authors to task for wholly misrepresenting his work.

- Several weeks ago, during the House Energy Committee's truncated hearings on cap and trade, Democrats trotted out Al Gore, yet shielded him from testifying alongside Lord Christopher Monckton. Gore, who has long explicitly advocated suppressing dissenting voices on global warming, regularly ducks debates on the topic. There is probably no greater measure of how politicized the science of global warming actually is than the fact that its foremost proponent is unwilling to engage in public debate on the topic.

- The UN International Panel On Climate Change, an organization notorious for its suppression of dissenting voices and for presenting twisted and sometimes outright false data, is preparing for the next round of talks in Copenhagen. A subcommittee on polar bears is meeting now to prepare their report for the conference - but absent is one of the leading polar bear experts, Dr. Mitchell Taylor. He was disinvited because he does not believe carbon dioxide is a cause of global warming. Further, his own findings are that "global warming" is not harming the polar bears, with their numbers at optimum or growing - a truly inconvenient truth that we will not hear at the Copenhagen Conference. (H/T Crusader Rabbit)

When it comes to politicization of science, Obama and the left are bathing in it. They are pushing it to promote the vast expansion of government into, as Speaker Pelosi said, "every aspect of our lives."

The problems of politicized science are obvious. One is that, if acted upon, it will result in the massive misallocation of resources. A person need look no further in that regard than the House vote on Friday to enact a massive carbon tax. The plan will have negligible impact on global temperatures yet will have a huge negative impact on our lives. If enacted, it will drive substantial resources away from productive areas of the economy while, as Doug Ross notes, providing the engine for massive social engineering. Another example has been the disastrous push into bio-fuels. That push has critically lessened world agricultural production and, last year, drove food prices rocketing upwards to a level from which they have not returned.

The second effect of politicized science is more subtle, but equally as destructive. It is that scientific theories and observations that do not fit the politicized paradigm get ignored.

One example of that concerns the growing problem of droughts. According to the global warming crowed, carbon dioxide is the culprit. This from Peter Schwerdtfeger, emeritus professor of meteorology at Flinders University, writing in the Australian:

. . . Two decades ago, I pored over the spectral properties of the infra-red radiation of [carbon dioxide], which is essential to plant life, and found that it was almost completely overshadowed by the radiative properties of water vapour, which is vital to all forms of life on earth.

Repeatedly in science we are reminded that happenings in nature can rarely be ascribed to a single phenomenon. For example, sea levels on our coasts are dependent on winds and astronomical forces as well as atmospheric pressure and, on a different time scale, the temperature profile of the ocean. Now, with complete abandon, a vociferous body of claimants is insisting that CO2 alone is the root of climatic evil. . . .

. . . I do not believe for one moment that undisciplined burning of fossil fuels is harmless, but the most awful consequence of the burning of carboniferous fuels is not the release of CO2 but the large-scale injection of minute particulate pollutants into the atmosphere.

Detailed studies led by internationally acclaimed cloud physicist Daniel Rosenfeld of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have revealed that the minute water vapour droplets that form around some carbon particles are so small as to be almost incapable of being subsequently coalesced into larger precipitable drops. In short, the particulates prevent rainfall.

Rosenfeld's research group has shown that humans are changing the climate in a much more direct way than through the release of CO2. Rather, pollution is seriously inhibiting rain over mountains in semi-arid regions, a phenomenon with dire consequences for water resources in the Middle East and many other parts of the world, including China and Australia.

Rosenfeld is no snake-oil salesman. As an American Meteorological Society medallist, he has an internationally endorsed research record in cloud physics that no living Australian can claim to emulate. . . .

If Rosenfeld's scientific interpretations are correct, then southern Australia would greatly benefit from the application of his discoveries. At the very least, Rosenfeld's conclusions should be accorded appropriate evaluation and testing by an unprejudiced panel of peers.

Yet his work so far has been ignored in Australia because it does not fit in with the dominant paradigm that holds CO2 responsible for reduced rainfall in semi-arid regions. . . .

(H/T EU Referendum)

Yet a second example of this same evil could well prove the most disastrous of all. Those who fully embrace global warming are ignoring the signs of a cooling earth and actual cold-weather related drops in agricultural production. See here and here.

I had to laugh in March when Obama excoriated Bush for supposedly "politicizing science," particularly on the stem cell issue - an issue, as Charles Krauthammer pointed out, on which Bush had taken an ethical stand that had nothing to do with politicization. Nothing Bush did begins to compare with how Obama, the UN and the green left have politicized the science of global warming. Indeed, one would have to go back to the Catholic Church of medieval times to find anything comparable. They get away with it because a corrupt media utterly ignores their mammoth hypocrisy. Thus, as Dr. North at EU Referendum notes, the debate is rigged:

This is a broader point that deserves more attention, touching on an effect we see in defence and elsewhere. The media – as a collective – has its own narratives and as long as an utterance fits with those narratives, it is given an airing. That which goes against the grain is buried.

Currently, the media narrative on climate change is that global warming is real and represents a major threat to the planet and humankind. Similarly, all the woes in the military stem from "under-resourcing" and all problems in Afghanistan will be solved by more "boots on the ground". Thus is the debate rigged, through which means our decline into obscurity, poverty and impotence is managed.

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Polar Insanity

Polar bears are thriving. Their numbers are at their highest in half a century. Polar ice has become significantly thicker this year. Listing polar bears under the Endangered Species Act under these circumstances would be inexplicable. Yet today, that is what Bush's Interior Department did, though with sufficient caveats that the far left will not be able to use the decision to shut down the entirity of the U.S. economy.

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This from the Washington Post:

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said he made the decision to list the bear as threatened based on scientific evidence showing that the animal's "sea-ice habitat has dramatically melted in recent decades" and "is likely to further recede in the future." He said polar bears thus are "likely to become endangered in the foreseeable future -- in this case 45 years."

. . . "Although the population of bears has grown from a low of about 12,000 in the late 1960s to approximately 25,000 today, our scientists advise me that computer modeling projects a significant population decline by the year 2050," Kempthorne said. "This, in my judgment, makes the polar bear a threatened species -- one likely to become in danger of extinction in the foreseeable future."

Read the entire article. That this decision could be made on computer modeling rather than a single hard fact showing a decline in the polar bear population is sheer insanity. Yet for all of that, it could have been much worse. The decision did not quite hand a skeleton key to the courthouse to the Goracle. This from the NYT:

Barton H. Thompson Jr., a law professor and director of the Woods Institute of the Environment at Stanford University, said Wednesday that while the Interior Department gave itself “sufficient room” to list the polar bear, it did not provide “environmental organizations with a mechanism for trying to address climate change.”

He said that lawsuits challenging the connection between a factory’s greenhouse-gas emissions and the threat to individual polar bears might provide difficult to win.

“Interior has a reasonable case here that the connection is just too far removed,” he said.

The provision of the act that the department is using to lighten the regulatory burden that the listing imposes on the oil and gas industry — known as a 4(d) rule — was designed to permit flexibility in the management of threatened species, as long as the chances of conservation of the species would be enhanced, or at least not diminished.

Kassie Siegel, a lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity, one of three groups that originally sued to have the polar bear listed as threatened, said Wednesday that the decision was an acknowledgement of “global warming’s urgency,” but that it fell short of helping the polar bear.

“The administration acknowledges the bear is in need of intensive care,” Ms. Siegel said. “The listing lets the bear into the hospital, but then the 4(d) rule says the bear’s insurance doesn’t cover the necessary treatments.” . . .

Read the entire article. Also from the WaPo article, it appears the Sierra Club and other far left organizations are not reacting well to this decision:

[T]he Sierra Club charged that "Big Oil" would be the ultimate beneficiary of Kempthorne's action.

"After months of delay, the Interior Department has finally recognized that polar bears are on the brink of extinction," Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope said in a statement. "But the administration's decision is riddled with loopholes, caveats and backhanded language that could actually undermine protections for the polar bear and other species."

Pope added: "We can't protect polar bears unless we combat global warming and keep oil drills out of their habitat. Yet, the administration is so keen to appease Big Oil" that it promotes continued drilling in the polar bear habitat in spite of today's listing.

"Drilling would inundate polar bear habitat with pipelines, well pads, boat traffic, ice-breaking vessels and seismic blasting, not to mention the ever-present threat of oil spills," Pope said. He said the proposed rule changes "could gut the Endangered Species Act and prevent it from ever being used to actually protect the polar bear or address global warming -- which is precisely what is pushing the bear toward extinction."

This decision will do little more than set off a whole new round of litigation. As far as any new drilling for oil in ANWR or elsewhere in Alaska, I'll be surprised if any occurs. Possibly the only bright spot is that this highly questionable decision will not alone be used to shut down the U.S. economy in its entirity over the next decade.

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Thick Ice, Thriving Polar Bears, & Global Warming Legislation

This picture of polar bears puportedly stranded on a drifitng ice flow has become an icon of the global warming community. We now know it was taken wholly out of context. We also know that sea ice is at or above normal levels in both hemispheres. Polar bears are thriving. Yet there is legislation in Congress to declare polar bears a protected species. That legislation has little to do with protecting polar bears and everything to do with advancing the global warming agenda through our courts.





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The iconic photo above, purported to show two forlorn polar bears stranded on a drifting ice flow, was made famous by the Goracle. Al Gore used that photo as a centerpiece on his lecture circuit, stating of the two bears: "Their habitat is melting . . . beautiful animals, literally being forced off the planet."

There are several important falsehoods in the Goracle’s doomsday pronouncement. Arctic sea ice now covers as much territory as it did in 1970, there is actually more sea ice in the Antarctic, polar bears are thriving, and the use of this picture to show polar bears in danger was, as Carole Williams terms it in a recent article, a classic example of "How the Environmental Extremists Manipulate the Masses." Ms. Williams has the whole background story to the photo, which was stolen from a marine biologist and subsequently forwarded to the Goracle and his acolytes who proceeded to twist it completely out of context. (H/T EU Referendum)

As a threshold matter, polar bears are some of the world’s greatest swimmers, being able to swim tremendous distances. Polar bears have been tracked swimming over 60 miles at a time. You of course would not know that from the Goracle, but what you also wouldn’t know, until you read Ms. Williams article, is that the photo of the polar bears was taken near shore, easily within swimming distance for the bears. They were in no danger whatsoever. Or as Christopher Booker put it today, the bears "weren’t drowning," they were just "waving" for the cameras. And you would also not know from the Goracle that the polar bear population is at "historic highs" and growing.

The second bit of what we now know to be incorrect in the Goracle’s statement is that the sea ice has replenished. To be fair to Gore, what knowledge we had indicated otherwise whilst he was on the lecture circuit, bringing home the green. But, as Christopher Booker explains:

Last autumn the BBC and others could scarcely contain their excitement in reporting that the Arctic ice was melting so fast there would soon be none left.

Sea ice cover had shrunk to the lowest level ever recorded. But for some reason the warmists are less keen on the latest satellite findings, reported by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on the website Cryosphere Today by the University of Illinois.

This body is committed to warmist orthodoxy and contributes to the work of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Yet its graph of northern hemisphere sea ice area, which shows the ice shrinking from 13,000 million sq km to just 4 million from the start of 2007 to October, also shows it now almost back to 13 million sq km.

A second graph, "Global Ice Area", shows a similar pattern repeated every year since satellite records began in 1979; while a third, "Southern Hemisphere Ice", shows that sea ice has actually expanded in recent years, well above its 30-year mean.

Read the article here. That one will be difficult to explain away but I have faith in the Goracle and the IPCC once they get time to focus on it. They are busy at present trying to work out how global warming is causing snow from Iraq and Jerusalem to a massive snowfall in China.

But back now to the polar bears. In a bit of utter insanity, the Fish and Game Service is currently being pushed to declare polar bears an endangered species. Hearings are occurring as we speak.

What makes this truly insane is that the polar bears are thriving. According to the Inhofe blog, studies undertaken in 1970 estimated the the polar bear population to be about 5,000 –10,000. A 2002 study put the polar bear population at "historic highs, between 20,000 and 25,000. They occupy their entire natural range. And they are a hearty species. The fossil record shows that polar bears have survived several past global warmings that occurred before recorded history, one of which saw the Arctic wholly denuded of ice.

So how on God’s green earth can anyone suggest that polar bears should be listed on as an "endangered species?" And what could possibly be their motivation?

To justify listing polar bears as endangered, global warming enthusiasts are using dubious computer models that, they claim, predict that thirty years or so down the road, the now thriving polar bears will become endangered They have no physical evidence to support their assertions. It is a measure of how screwed we are as a people that our government is seriously considering this legislation.

The motivation for listing the polar bears as endangered has everything to do with the politics of global warming, not the plight of the thriving polar bears. Once listed as endangered, then global warming enthusiasts can challenge in court a whole host of economic and other activities across the width and breadth of America on the basis of their supposed effect on the polar bear and its Arctic home. Or as Senator Inhofe has stated:

Listing the bear as a threatened species is not about protecting the bear but about using the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to achieve global warming policy that special interest groups can not otherwise achieve through the legislative process.

Read the post here. You can find the Minority Report on this issue here. There is a reason we have democracy and several hundred men and women to debate and hold hearings. Somehow, though, I suspect this attept to run around the left side of the legislature and get it into the courts has the Goracle’s full support.

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