Global Warming Hysteria (cooled)

Well, well, what do you think? Just three years ago the BBC published this article revealing how a study of solar activity over the last 1,000 years - not just the 20 years shown in yesterday's new study published by the Royal Society - was at an "all-time high".

Here's the opening section of the earlier report:

A new analysis shows that the Sun is more active now than it has been at anytime in the previous 1,000 years.

Scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich used ice cores from Greenland to construct a picture of our star's activity in the past.

They say that over the last century the number of sunspots rose at the same time that the Earth's climate became steadily warmer.

 Don't the BBC reporters read their own reports? Game, set and match, I think?

Hat tip & thanks to:  Will & to David Vance at A Tangled Web blog.  

Naturalist David Bellamy writes:

"I am quite happy to be branded a heretic because throughout history heretics have stood up against dogma based on bigotry.

"I don’t like being called a denier because deniers don’t believe in facts. There are no facts linking the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide with imminent catastrophic global warming there are only predictions based on complex computer models.

Name calling may be acceptable in political circles but it has no place in the language of science, indeed what is happening in the annals of global warming smacks of Macarthyism complete with witch hunts.

Robust science is carried out in a robust way through reasoned argument based on well researched data and although it may dent the ego of the loser it does not smear the name of science."

This excellent article can be found at: The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition website.  

Global cooling is , once again, back on the agenda as evidence for a serious cooling period (as per the historic norm) is coming to light as we learn more about sunspot activity. Here is the closing section of an important article written by Professor Timothy Patterson, professor and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, Department of Earth Sciences, Carleton University.

 "The science of global climate change is still in its infancy, with many thousands of papers published every year. In a 2003 poll conducted by German environmental researchers Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, two-thirds of more than 530 climate scientists from 27 countries surveyed did not believe that 'the current state of scientific knowledge is developed well enough to allow for a reasonable assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases.' About half of those polled stated that the science of climate change was not sufficiently settled to pass the issue over to policymakers at all.

"Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada. As a country at the northern limit to agriculture in the world, it would take very little cooling to destroy much of our food crops, while a warming would only require that we adopt farming techniques practiced to the south of us.

"Meantime, we need to continue research into this, the most complex field of science ever tackled, and immediately halt wasted expenditures on the King Canute-like task of 'stopping climate change.'

Source: A 'must read' extract from important new article 'Read The Sunspots' in Canada's (excellent) National Post.

With thanks to Laura Curtis & Mitch Persaud for the information. 

Reid Bryson, known as the father of scientific climatology, considers global warming a bunch of hooey.

The UW-Madison professor emeritus, who stands against the scientific consensus on this issue, is referred to as a global warming skeptic. But he is not skeptical that global warming exists, he is just doubtful that humans are the cause of it.

There is no question the earth has been warming. It is coming out of the "Little Ice Age," he said in an interview this week. "However, there is no credible evidence that it is due to mankind and carbon dioxide. We've been coming out of a Little Ice Age for 300 years. We have not been making very much carbon dioxide for 300 years. It's been warming up for a long time," Bryson said.

The Little Ice Age was driven by volcanic activity. That settled down so it is getting warmer, he said.  Humans are polluting the air and adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, but the effect is tiny, Bryson said.

Source & full story: The Capital Times  (with thanks for the tip to Mitch Persaud, Canada)

You mean I gotta get used to this?The recent increase in the number of major Atlantic hurricanes may just be a return to the norm after a period of unusually low storm frequency, say researchers.

Johan Nyberg of the Geological Survey of Sweden and colleagues used marine sediment cores of coral samples from the northeast Caribbean to build a proxy record of wind shear and sea-surface temperatures since 1730, and from this they estimated hurricane activity since that time.

The team found that the frequency of major hurricanes decreased gradually from the 1760s, reaching an all-time low in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, numbers of large hurricanes have started to climb again, leading to several very active hurricane seasons. Most notable amongst these was the summer of 2005, which culminated in the devastation of New Orleans in the US by hurricane Katrina (see Hurricane season refuses to blow over).

In 2005, Peter Webster of the Georgia Institute of Technology, US, published a study showing that the frequency of the strongest tropical cyclones has almost doubled globally since the early 1970s (Science, vol 309, p 1844).

Nyberg says that, when considered in the context of the past three centuries, this sudden burst of large hurricanes is simply a return to the norm.

Source: The New Scientist 

Everyone is very much in agreement that over the last 100 years of good observational weather data, the Earth has warmed. The exact amount of this warming varies depending upon which data set you use, but warming is evident. The debate has been over the cause of the warming, whether it is mostly natural or anthropogenic (human induced) from an increasing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to human activity.

Of course, all of the doomsday scenarios of what will happen in the future come from computer forecasts as a result of a projected doubling of the amount of atmospheric CO2 in the next 100 years. I have written several posts in the past about the problems with the computer models, and there are many. See here and here for a couple of the discussions.

I think it would be very helpful to see an actual list of computer model forecasts and then compare these forecasts with what observational data we have since those forecasts have been made. An Australian scientist by the name of Warwick Hughes has done just that and you can see the abysmal performance of the computer models here. In fact, when looking at 32 specific predictions, according to Hughes, the models got 1 right and 27 wrong, with 4 cases where the results were inclusive. The more I study this subject and become increasingly aware of the failings of the computer models, the more I think you can trust the Old Farmer’s Almanac on what next year’s winter will be like more than you can trust the climate models.

That is certainly an opinion you can disagree with but there is a lot of evidence to support it from the people who actually work with the models.

Source: Meteorologist James Wood's (of Wood TV) blog.  

Jacques Ellul once wrote: "The propagandist uses a keyboard and composes a symphony." He might, had he been alive today, have been thinking of the mass media's current obsession: global warming scaremongering.  Ellul (as Konrad Kellen wrote in the Introduction to Ellul's book Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes) saw propaganda as "a greater threat to mankind than any of the more grandly advertised threats hanging over the human race."

The media's part in the mega-hype of the GW alarmism is the epitomizes Ellul's warning. This has, in part, been captured by a rash of exposing reports from the excellent Business & Media Institute in the US.  Here is their highlighting of the problem in 'Climate of Bias' and an excellent debunking review of the mass media's 'warming, cooling,warming, cooling' predictive hype over 100 years in the report Fire and Ice.

 For me though the work here was summed up in the simple, understated but all-encompassing quote:

"It would be difficult for the media to do a worse job with climate change coverage."

Amen to that. 

With special thanks to Laura Curtis for alerting me to this material.  

And here is yet more evidence of the counter-productivity of the media hype on global warming from scientist Mick Hulme who has been conducting research on people's attitudues to media portrayals of a catastrophic future.   Here's a taster:

His (Hulme's) concern is that these exaggerations have given the green light to the media to use the language of fear, terror and disaster when covering scientific reports - even when those reports are much more constrained in their description of the course of likely future events.

He says extravagated claims simply generate a feeling of helplessness in the public. 

"My argument is about the dangers of science over-claiming its knowledge about the future and in particular presenting tentative predictions about climate change using words of 'disaster', 'apocalypse' and 'catastrophe'," he said.

It's the Achilles Heel of all  Global Warming Alarmism (have you been GWA'd lately?): the wholesale reliance on "coulds", "mights" and "ifs" - a point made here by NZ meteorologist Augie Auer:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says drought is expected to hit the northern and eastern parts of New Zealand within 20-years. Eastern areas will face increased fire risk and an eventual decline in agriculture and forestry. The west can expect more floods and landslides.

But meteorologist Augie Auer says the 550 research studies behind the report were all funded by like interests, and there is a lot of duplication. He says New Zealand has been warmer, wetter and drier than it is now.

Mr Auer says there is no evidence that anything is going on, or is expected - other than in the IPCC report - that has not happened before. He says the report is full of "coulds", "mights" and "ifs".

A new study reveals that we simply don't know enough about natural climatic variability to be assertive on causes:

Background
Heat waves and cold spells. It makes little difference to climate alarmists, who say all such aberrations are due to CO2-induced global warming, as anything out of the ordinary is fodder for their catastrophe mill: it is bad, and it is a result of human activity. The new study of Jones and Briffa (2006), however, shows just how short-sighted such unfounded claims can be.

What was done
In the words of the authors, "this study focuses on one of the most interesting times of the early instrumental period in northwest Europe (from 1730-1745), attempting to place the extremely cold year of 1740 and the unusual warmth of the 1730s decade in a longer context." It relies primarily on "long (and independent) instrumental records together with extensive documentary evidence," as well as "unpublished subjective circulation charts developed by the late Hubert Lamb" and "others recently developed using more objective modern reconstruction techniques."

What was learned
Still quoting the two researchers from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (who are by no means climate skeptics), "the period 1740-1743 has been shown to be the driest period of the last 280 years [our italics], with the year 1740 the coldest recorded over the British Isles since comparable records began in 1659 [our italics]." What is more, they note that the record cold of the year 1740 "is all the more remarkable [our italics] given the anomalous warmth of the 1730s [our italics]," which was "the warmest [our italics] in three of the long temperatures series (Central England Temperature, De Bilt and Uppsala) until the 1990s occurred [our italics]."

What it means
Jones and Briffa say their study "highlights how estimates of natural climatic variability in this region based on more recent data may not fully encompass the possible known range," stating that "consideration of variability in these records from the early 19th century, therefore, may underestimate the range that is possible." Consequently, as with droughts and floods, the instrumental record is simply not long enough to provide a true picture of natural temperature variability in terms of what is possible in the absence of the influence of anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

The New York Times has pretty much been America's periodical of record for over 150 years. It should not be surprising then that it has covered the issue - and warmings and coolings of concern - of climate change over that whole period. Adbusters have reproduced some excerpts of that coverage of see-sawing wethur (..tch...that's another bad spell of weather!) here.

It makes very interesting reading. Indeed, you could be reading these excerpts in today's paper! Surprising, eh?

Professor S. Fred Singer (author, Unstoppable Global Warming) has written an article for the excellent The Independent Institute which puts Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and Martin Durkin's The Great Global Warming Swindle into their true historic debate perspective. Here is a part of what Professor Singer says:

The main message of The Great Global Warming Swindle is much broader. Why should we devote our scarce resources to what is essentially a non–problem, and ignore the real problems the world faces: hunger, disease, denial of human rights—not to mention the threats of terrorism and nuclear wars? And are we really prepared to deal with natural disasters; pandemics that can wipe out most of the human race, or even the impact of an asteroid, such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs?

Yet politicians and the elites throughout much of the world prefer to toy with and devote our limited resources to fashionable issues, rather than concentrate on real ones. Just consider the scary predictions emanating from supposedly responsible world figures: the chief scientist of Britain’s Labor Party tells us that unless we insulate our houses and use more efficient light bulbs, the Antarctic will be the only habitable continent by 2100, with a few surviving breeding couples propagating the human race. Seriously!

I imagine that in the not–too–distant future, all of the hype will have died down, particularly if the climate should decide to cool—as it did during much of the past century; we should take note here that it has not warmed since 1998. Future generations will look back on the current madness and wonder what it was all about. They will have movies like An Inconvenient Truth and documentaries like The Great Global Warming Swindle to remind them.

 NB. Further, I would recommend the work of The Independent Institute work more generally - what they stand for is something my own work presents (I hope): a departure from the unreasoning of much public policy debate. A shallowness inherent in much of our increasingly poor Western liberal mainstream media.

Yet more historical evidence - actual evidence, not the useless predictive computer model variety - Ancient Egypt via NASA. Of course, the alarmists won't be interested in history - to them history is just bunk. Here's an excerpt from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory article/ site:

 "Scientists have traditionally relied upon indirect data gathering methods to study climate in the Earth's past, such as drilling ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica. Such samples of accumulated snow and ice drilled from deep within ice sheets or glaciers contain trapped air bubbles whose composition can provide a picture of past climate conditions. Now, however, a group of NASA and university scientists has found a convincing link between long-term solar and climate variability in a unique and unexpected source: directly measured ancient water level records of the Nile, Earth's longest river."

Is there finally some hope that the public square debate and the reasoning mind may be "warming" to a higher degree of logic?

Well the latest evidence from the New York Times Bestseller List (Paperback non-fiction section) suggest it may be so. Avery and Singer's Unstoppable Global Warming (at no 18) and Chris Horner's The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (at no 20) - see my 'Key Books' page for reference - are both outstripping sales of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (at no 29). (Paperback non-fiction section)

Crisis, what crisis?The audience at the IQ2 (Intelligence SquaredUS) sponsored debate on the motion "Global Warming Is Not a Crisis?", held in New York on Wednesday, decided in favour of the motion: that GW is NOT a crisis  by 46.22% to 42.22%. BEFORE the debate however, the same audience voted by 57.3% to 20.9% against the motion!!  

 Speaking in favour of the motion were science writer Michael Crichton, Professor Richard S. Lindzen (Alfred Sloan Prof. of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT) & (Emeritus Professor and biogeographer at University of London) Phillip Stott. Speaking against the motion were Brenda Ekwurzel (Union of Concerned Scientists), Gavin Schmidt (climate scientist at NASA Goddard Institute) & Richard CJ Somerville (Professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography).

For a readable edited transcript of the debate itself  go here.  

Ed. Do you see why climate alarmists are so desperate not to have to argue their case via the the level playing field  of real debate? There is simply too much danger of facts, reason and real science being introduced.

NB. IQ2 is a US and UK-absed forum committed to returning true debate on key issues of the day. 

The International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska has mooted a further interesting cause/ contributory factor to global warming: that the Earth may still be recovering from the "Little Ice Age" (from 1800 or much earlier to the present day).

Though many of us perceive the science indicates solar activity is the likeliest root cause of the slight global warming we have seen we need not of course exclude other contributory factors (those that eco-warriors refuse even to countenance).

And here is where alarmists don't get it. The rest of us are open to facts, reason and empirical evidence - unlike they who approach the subject with an ideologically anti-human agenda.  It is called reason and rationality - environmentalists might like to try them some time?

Last night's first mainstream media TV expose on the UK's Channel 4 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' said it all - and well!

I can only hope this programme gets to be seen in America and elsewhere soon. Refusing to fall for the usual MSM nonsense of 'presenting both sides of the argument' (why the hell should they, the alarmists don't!) they made it plain that scientifically, economically and intellectually there is NO other side to the argument.

Richard Lindzen, Dr Tim Ball, S. Fred Singer, Roy Spencer (NASA), John Christy,  Phillip Stott and countless others. They were all given a voice, finally! And isn't that a terrible indictment of our current mass media that it took so long?  It even showed the gross fraud perpetrated by the UN in compiling the IPCC reports - and including names who did not agree with the findings as presented by the administrators, not the scientists!

You can actually buy videos direct from Channel 4 but I imagine a DVD will be out commercially directly. I will keep you informed. But how about badgering your TV networks to show it?  It literally does contains everything you will need to blow away all the feeble arguments the alarmists can put up.

One up in the MSM (finally) for the good guys, I think. 

Robert Cohen, a certified meteorologist writing for The San Jose Mercury News has denied a science consensus exists in this article. He also says:

"Research has also shown that slight changes in energy from the sun can significantly affect the earth, particularly in terms of clouds, which are a weak link in the global warming models. The level and amount of cloud can determine whether temperatures will warm as the cloud layer limits heat dissipation to space or whether temperatures will cool as the sun's incoming energy is reflected back to space before reaching the Earth's surface.

Temperature has fluctuated significantly in the past, with shorter-term cooling and warming trends of about 1,500 years superimposed on long-term cycles of ice ages and glacial melting. The 1,500-year cycle includes the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age, which together extended from about 900 to 1850 A.D. During the former, literature and archaeology provide evidence that the Vikings found grapes in Newfoundland, naming their new settlement Vinland. The Little Ice Age was associated with major diseases which were rampant, due at least partially to the cold weather. As the Arctic ice edge advanced, Inuit hunters in kayaks were observed as far south as Scotland around 1700.

Clearly, these changes were not due to human influence. It has yet to be determined whether we are in a warming period which is part of the normal climate cycle.

Is it worth destroying our economy and lifestyle based on an unproven theory which does not correlate with historical observations?"

Ed. final line emboldening is mine.   

More scientists will confirm that the greenhouse theory is a myth in the British TV expose The Great Global Warming Swindle this Thursday (see previous post) . They include Professor Ian Clark,  professor of palaeoclimatology at Ottawa University, who claims  that "warmer periods of the Earth's history came around 800 years before rises in carbon dioxide levels".

Speaking of the recent IPPC report "backed by 2,000 scientists, Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute in Paris said it was a "sham" given that it included in the list names of scientists who disagreed with its findings. Gary Calder, former editor of New Scientist, posits solar activity as the key factor, Professor Phillip Stott and  Patrick Moore, founder of Greenpeace all add  to the  anti-GW hysteria message. 

This out to bring the venomous enviroMENTALS out in force on Friday!  

Here is another fine comment piece from the Wall Street Journal (By Peter du Pont, Chairman of the National Center for Policy Analysis) entitled: The Earth Was Warm Before Global Warming Was Cool. It is a well-articulated and helpful reminder that warming and cooling have always been a cyclical fact of nature and history.  Here is a taster:

"When Eric the Red led the Norwegian Vikings to Greenland in the late 900s, it was an ice-free farm country--grass for sheep and cattle, open water for fishing, a livable climate--so good a colony that by 1100 there were 3,000 people living there. Then came the Ice Age. By 1400, average temperatures had declined by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, the glaciers had crushed southward across the farmlands and harbors, and the Vikings did not survive."

"Such global temperature fluctuations are not surprising, for looking back in history we see a regular pattern of warming and cooling. From 200 B.C. to A.D. 600 saw the Roman Warming period; from 600 to 900, the cold period of the Dark Ages; from 900 to 1300 was the Medieval warming period; and 1300 to 1850, the Little Ice Age.