Reference: 450 skeptical peer reviewed papers

15 11 2009

Andrew at Popular Technology has taken the time (quite a bit of it) to compile a list of papers that have skeptical views. It is reproduced in full here. My thanks to him for doing this. – Anthony

450 Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of  AGW caused Global Warming

A 2000-year global temperature reconstruction based on non-treering proxies (PDF)
(Energy & Environment, Volume 18, Numbers 7-8, pp. 1049-1058, December 2007)
- Craig Loehle

- Reply To: Comments on Loehle, “correction To: A 2000-Year Global Temperature Reconstruction Based on Non-Tree Ring Proxies”
(Energy & Environment, Volume 19, Number 5, pp. 775-776, September 2008)
- Craig Loehle

A Climate of Doubt about Global Warming
(Environmental Geosciences, Volume 7 Issue 4, pp. 213, December 2000)
- Robert C. Balling Jr.

A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions (PDF)
(International Journal of Climatology, Volume 28, Issue 13, pp. 1693-1701, December 2007)
- David H. Douglass, John R. Christy, Benjamin D. Pearson, S. Fred Singer

A critical review of the hypothesis that climate change is caused by carbon dioxide
(Energy & Environment, Volume 11, Number 6, pp. 631-638, November 2000)
- Heinz Hug Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 318 Comments »

Categories : Science, climate_change

Georgia Tech: “50 percent of the [USA] warming that has occurred since 1950 is due to land use changes rather than greenhouse gases”

11 11 2009
http://lcluc.umd.edu/images/Science_Themes/DBrown1.jpg

County-level land-use changes from 1950 to 2000, based on censuses of population, housing, and agriculture. A) change in population density; B) change in land area settled at “exurban densities” (i.e., 1 house per 1 to 40 acres); C) change in percent cropland (Brown et al. 2005).

From a Georgia Tech Press Release:

Reducing Greenhouse Gases May Not Be Enough to Slow Climate Change

Georgia Tech City and Regional Planning Professor Brian Stone publishes a paper in the December edition of Environmental Science and Technology that suggests policymakers need to address the influence of global deforestation and urbanization on climate change, in addition to greenhouse gas emissions.

According to Stone’s paper, as the international community meets in Copenhagen in December to develop a new framework for responding to climate change, policymakers need to give serious consideration to broadening the range of management strategies beyond greenhouse gas reductions alone.

“Across the U.S. as a whole, approximately 50 percent of the warming that has occurred since 1950 is due to land use changes (usually in the form of clearing forest for crops or cities) rather than to the emission of greenhouse gases,” said Stone.  “Most large U.S. cities, including Atlanta, are warming at more than twice the rate of the planet as a whole – a rate that is mostly attributable to land use change.  As a result, emissions reduction programs – like the cap and trade program under consideration by the U.S. Congress – may not sufficiently slow climate change in large cities where most people live and where land use change is the dominant driver of warming.”

According to Stone’s research, slowing the rate of forest loss around the world, and regenerating forests where lost, could significantly slow the pace of global warming. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 106 Comments »

Categories : Land use land cover change, climate_change

McIntyre and Lindzen to appear on Finnish TV documentary – transcript

9 11 2009

Transcript in English from the TV network website here (h/t to Goran Frojdh)

MOT: Climate catastrophe cancelled
Finnish Broadcasting Co. YLE, TV1, Nov 11th 2009 at 8.00 pm.

Voiceover (VO), reporter Martti Backman: Governments around the world are preparing for a grand climate conference, which should decide how humanity responds to the threat of a climate catastrophe. Negotiations are under way to replace the Kyoto treaty with a new treaty of Copenhagen.

VO: The threat is based on assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. According to the panel, the Earth is going through an unprecedented period of temperature increase, caused by man and his carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal and oil.

(Pictures from An Incovenient Truth)

The Earth’s climate has always been changing. But now we are told that warming is happening faster than ever. The view is based on this figure.


(Picture: The global warming hockey stick graph. Music: Electric organ sounds from an ice-hockey game)

VO: This ten-year-old figure, dubbed as the hockey stick, was meant to revolutionize the dominant view of global climate history. The stick’s handle stretches for almost a thousand years, creating an impression of a steady climate, and its’ rising blade in the late 1900’s is proof of sudden, strong warming, which is caused by man.

According to the older view, climate has naturally varied considerably over the past millennium, and in the middle ages it was clearly warmer than today. But in the hockey stick graph, the Medieval Warm Period and the little ice age after it have disappeared. The hockey stick was promoted to honorary status in the IPCC’s third assessment report’s cover. It became the logo of catastrophic climate change. The stick was used to back up the claim that, 1998 was the warmest year of the millennium. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 134 Comments »

Categories : climate_change, media

The climate engine

9 11 2009

Guest post by Erl Happ

stirling_solar_engine

Solar Powered Stirling Cycle Engine

What follows is a general theory of natural climate variation supported by observation of the changing temperature of the atmosphere and the sea between 1948 and September 2009. This work suggests that strong warming after 1978 is an entirely natural phenomenon.

Imagine a small planet about the size of the Earth orbiting a sun just like our own. The planet has an atmosphere composed of nitrogen (76%), oxygen (23%) and trace gases (1%) of which argon makes up half of that one percent.

Let us further imagine that the sun bombards the Earth with radiation so energetic as to destroy the integrity of nitrogen and oxygen in the planet’s upper atmosphere. The region where this occurs may be called the ‘ionosphere’. When superheated at the highest elevations it can be known as the ‘thermosphere’.  The electrically unbalanced particles of the ionosphere possess negative or a positive polarity. Like iron filings scattered across a piece of paper atop a magnetized iron bar, atmospheric ions orient themselves according to the lines of the planets magnetic field. Rotating with the planet, the ionosphere is a place of constant flux.  Particles are energized on the dayside and dragged into a long tail on the night-side by the pressure of the solar wind, a highly magnetized stream of helium and hydrogen emanating from the sun. There is an exchange of energy between the wind and the ionosphere and particles are accelerated in one direction or the other and re-distributed according to the tension imposed by the constantly changing electromagnetic medium. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 113 Comments »

Categories : climate_change

Report: Climate confidence falls worldwide

3 11 2009

A survey report titled Climate Confidence Monitor commissioned in part by the Earthwatch Institute, World Wildlife Fund, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute shows that confidence that we can actually manage climate change has been falling for the last two years in most countries:

Climate_confidence_graph

Click to enlarge

The question was: “I believe we will stop climate change”.

They cite in the report:

A fall in optimism and low levels of confidence in leaders suggest that people are becoming more pessimistic about the scale of the challenge that climate change presents.

I suppose that is one way to spin it. Here’s some other findings from the report. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 84 Comments »

Categories : Opinion, climate_change

The Midge Warm Period

20 10 2009

No that’s not a typo. Midges have just helped define the MWP, despite the claims of “proof” yesterday.

Another recent contradictory study to involving those pesky Chironomids. In this case, more fish during warming periods seem to account for less larval midge remains.

http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/ent/notes/Urban/images/midge-lc.jpg

Summer Temperatures Reconstruction in the Northern French Alps

The Abstract below is from a recent paper by Millet, L., Arnaud, F., Heiri, O., Magny, M., Verneaux, V. and Desmet, M. 2009, entitled: Late-Holocene summer temperature reconstruction from chironomid assemblages of Lake Anterne, northern French Alps. The Holocene 19: 317-328: Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 44 Comments »

Categories : climate_change, paleoclimatology

Revealed: the UK government strategy for personal carbon rations

20 10 2009

Guest post by Dr. Tony Brown

Food_ration_book_UK

From Their Past Your Future - click for website

“Personal carbon rations would have to be mandatory, imposed by Government in the same way that food rationing was introduced in the UK in 1939… Each person would receive an electronic card containing their year’s carbon credits …see the Tyndall Centre’s study on “domestic tradable quotas”… and their recent establishment on the political agenda…the card would have to be presented when purchasing energy or travel services, and the correct amount of carbon deducted. The technologies and systems already in place for direct debit systems and credit cards could be used.”

(Environmental Audit Committee minutes-House Of Commons-London)

Preface. This is a factual account of the highly politicised concept of catastrophic man made climate change. The views quoted above are supported in principle by the UK govt but said to be ahead of their time. However, the means to achieve them are now being quietly introduced into main stream thinking through the systematic use of a political agenda that uses the alarming notion of catastrophic man made climate change as the means to force through a measure of social engineering unequalled in the UK in modern times. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 152 Comments »

Categories : climate_change, economy-health

Hurricane Katrina Victims Have Standing To Sue Over Global Warming

19 10 2009

I say BRING IT ON. Finally we’ll get to put this absurdity about the connection between global warming and hurricanes to rest, because, it doesn’t exist. I hope the defense will bring in the findings of Ryan Maue at FSU COAPS as shown below.

12-month running sums of Accumulated Cyclone Energy for the entire globe. 1979-current

From the Wall Street Journal Law Blog

For years, leading plaintiffs’ lawyers have promised a legal assault on industrial America for contributing to global warming.

So far, the trial bar has had limited success. The hurdles to such suits are pretty obvious: How do you apportion fault and link particular plaintiffs’ injuries to the pollution emitted by a particular group of defendants? Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 96 Comments »

Categories : climate_change, ridiculae

Obama Poised to Cede US Sovereignty in Copenhagen, Claims British Lord Monckton

16 10 2009

Reposted from comments on the new Urban Future thread here

Originally from the blog Fightin’ Words

Above: Obama’s last visit to Copenhagen didn’t work out so well for the USA.

The Minnesota Free Market Institute hosted an event at Bethel University in St. Paul on Wednesday evening. Keynote speaker Lord Christopher Monckton, former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, gave a scathing and lengthy presentation, complete with detailed charts, graphs, facts, and figures which culminated in the utter decimation of both the pop culture concept of global warming and the credible threat of any significant anthropomorphic climate change.

A detailed summary of Monckton’s presentation will be available here once compiled. However, a segment of his remarks justify immediate publication. If credible, the concern Monckton speaks to may well prove the single most important issue facing the American nation, bigger than health care, bigger than cap and trade, and worth every citizen’s focused attention.

Here were Monckton’s closing remarks, as dictated from my audio recording:

At [the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in] Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regime from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.

I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfication of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.

How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it – Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize [winner]; of course he’ll sign it.

[laughter]

And the trouble is this; if that treaty is signed, if your Constitution says that it takes precedence over your Constitution (sic), and you can’t resign from that treaty unless you get agreement from all the other state parties – And because you’ll be the biggest paying country, they’re not going to let you out of it. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 331 Comments »

Categories : climate_change, politics

A bad climate for development – rebuttal to the Economist

8 10 2009

economistGuest post by Indur Goklany

The Economist’s print edition has published my letter taking it to task for a pretty uninformed piece it published on the impacts of climate change last month. Although the editors changed the title, dropped the references which I furnish reflexively, and is somewhat briefer, the printed version is for the most part quite faithful to the spirit of the original.  I am furnishing the original below for the benefit of your readers who may be interested in checking my statements and going beyond the “he said, she said” nature of most exchanges on the opinion pages of newspapers and magazines.

********************************************

A badly developed climate backgrounder

SIR — The Economist’s article, A bad climate for development (September 17), which also serves as a backgrounder for an online debate on climate change, is not only selective in the information it presents, it is riddled with speculation and unsubstantiated claims.

For example, its chart 3 presents portions of two of three panels in figure 2.1 of the World Development Report 2010.  But the panel that it chooses not to display shows that deaths from all climate related disasters have actually declined at least since 1981–85 despite (a) an enormous increase in the population at risk, namely, the world’s population, and (b) the fact that older data has a greater tendency to underestimate the number and casualties of extreme weather events. The original source of the data (Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, CRED) states that the increase in the data until 1995 “is explained partly by better reporting of disasters in general, partly due to active data collection efforts by CRED and partly due to real increases in certain types of disasters.”[1] They also state that they are unable to say whether the latter increases are due to climate change. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 64 Comments »

Categories : climate_change, economy-health

What climate news you aren’t seeing in the American press but can in Iran

8 10 2009

It’s really rather sad that you can read about Svensmark’s climate research in an Iranian news outlet (FARS) but you won’t see any mention of it in American press, such as in the NYT. A search for Svensmark (and also cosmic rays) yields nothing. Maybe Andy Revkin just hasn’t gotten around to it yet, but if I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t enjoy being scooped by Iran. WUWT covered this story, complete with comments direct from Dr. Svensmark, nearly one month ago. See here.

NYT-svensmark-search

FARS-iran

Here’s the story from FARS:

===

TEHRAN (FNA)- New research by the National Space Institute in the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) validated 13 years of discoveries that point to a key role for cosmic rays in climate change.

Billions of tons of water droplets vanish from the atmosphere in events that reveal in detail how the Sun and the stars control our everyday clouds.

DTU Researchers have traced the consequences of eruptions on the Sun that screen the Earth from some of the cosmic rays – the energetic particles raining down on our planet from exploded stars.

“The Sun makes fantastic natural experiments that allow us to test our ideas about its effects on the climate,” lead author of a report newly published in Geophysical Research Letters Prof. Henrik Svensmark said.

When solar explosions interfere with the cosmic rays there is a temporary shortage of small aerosols, chemical specks in the air that normally grow until water vapor can condense on them, so seeding the liquid water droplets of low-level clouds.

Because of the shortage, clouds over the ocean can lose as much as 7 per cent of their liquid water within seven or eight days of the cosmic-ray minimum.

“A link between the Sun, cosmic rays, aerosols, and liquid-water clouds appears to exist on a global scale,” the report concludes. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 106 Comments »

Categories : Science, climate_change, clouds, space

Aerosols and “cloud lifetime effect” cited as “enormous uncertainty” in global radiation balance

6 10 2009

From a Press Release from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology

Every cloud is different from the next. It is therefore important to study the types of cloud systems in which aerosols have the greatest influence. Image: Max Planck Institute for Meteorology / Stevens

Do dust particles curb climate change?

A knowledge gap exists in the area of climate research: for decades, scientists have been asking themselves whether, and to what extent man-made aerosols, that is, dust particles suspended in the atmosphere, enlarge the cloud cover and thus curb climate warming. Research has made little or no progress on this issue. Two scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg (MPI-M) and the American National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report in the journal Nature that the interaction between aerosols, clouds and precipitation is strongly dependent on factors that have not been adequately researched up to now. They urge the adoption of a research concept that will close this gap in the knowledge. (Nature, October 1st, 2009)

Greenhouse gases that heat up the earth’s atmosphere have their adversaries: dust particles suspended in the atmosphere which are known as aerosols. They arise naturally, for example when wind blows up desert dust, and through human activities. A large proportion of the man-made aerosols arise from sulfur dioxides that are generated, in turn, by the combustion of fossil fuels.

The aerosols are viewed as climate coolers, which compensate in part for the heating up of the earth by greenhouse gases. Climate researchers imagine the workings of this cooling mechanism in very simple terms: when aerosols penetrate clouds, they attract water molecules and therefore act as condensation seeds for drops of water. The more aerosol particles suspended in the cloud, the more drops of water are formed. When man-made dust particles join the natural ones, the number of drops increases. As a result, the average size of the drops decreases. Because smaller drops do not fall to the ground, the aerosols prevent the cloud from raining out and extend its lifetime. Consequently, the cloud cover over the earth’s surface increases. Because clouds reflect the solar radiation and throw it back into space, less heat collects in the atmosphere than when the sky is clear. Climate researchers refer to this mechanism as the “cloud lifetime effect”.

To date, however, it has not been possible to quantify the influence of the cloud lifetime effect on climate. The estimates vary hugely and range from no influence whatsoever to a cooling effect that is sufficient to more than compensate for the heating effect of carbon dioxide. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 77 Comments »

Categories : aerosols, climate_change

A tree ring study estimating past rainfall and drought shows the southeast USA drought was mild compared to past events

1 10 2009

Trees may be better rain gauges than they are thermometers.  From a press release of:

Killer’ Southeast Drought Low on Scale, Says Study

Others Were Far Worse; Population, Planning Are the Real Problems

Lake Allatoona, Ga., November 2007Lake Allatoona, Ga., November 2007

A 2005-2007 dry spell in the southeastern United States destroyed billions of dollars of crops, drained municipal reservoirs and sparked legal wars among a half-dozen states—but the havoc came not from exceptional dryness but booming population and bad planning, says a new study. Researchers from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory defied conventional wisdom about the drought by showing that it was mild compared to many others, and in fact no worse than one just a decade ago. According to the study, climate change has so far played no detectable role in the frequency or severity of droughts in the region, and its future effects there are uncertain; but droughts there are essentially unpredictable, and could strike again at any time. The study appears in the October edition of the Journal of Climate.

“The drought that caused so much trouble was pathetically normal and short, far less than what the climate system is capable of generating,” said lead author Richard Seager, a climate modeler at Lamont. “People were saying that this was a 100-year drought, but it was pretty run-of-the-mill. The problem is, in the last 10 years population has grown phenomenally, and hardly anyone, including the politicians, has been paying any attention.” Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 90 Comments »

Categories : climate_change, paleoclimatology

United Nations Environment Programme uses unreviewed graph from an anonymous Wikipedia author for official report.

26 09 2009
CCEP_report_cover

United Nations Climate Change Science Compendium - click for PDF

We’ve been lectured time and again about the importance of having climate science work come from peer reviewed papers, saying that the work of dedicated amateurs has no place in climate science unless the work rises to publication/peer review level.

Yet that doesn’t seem to apply for United Nations science publications. Of course just one look at the front cover at left tells you its more about selling than science.

The cover image pulls at heartstrings, making the world appear as if it is running out of time before turning entirely into an inhospitable desert. That is an extreme view in my opinion.

Steve McIntyre’s blog discovery of  UNEP’s folly bears repeating, because it shows the sort of sloppy science that is going into “official” publications.

This is much like the NCDC CCSP report just over a year ago where they used a photoshopped image of a “flooded” house.

UNEP_report_page5

Click for larger image

In this case, the United Nations simply grabbed an image from Wikipedia that supported the view they wanted to sell. The problem with the graph in the upper right of page 5 of the UNEP report is that it itself has not been peer reviewed nor has it originated from a peer reviewed publication, having its inception at Wikipedia.

And then there’s the problem of “Hanno” who is an anonymous contributor. This is simply his/her artwork and interpretation. We don’t have any idea who “Hanno” is, nor apparently does UNEP.

Yet UNEP cites the graph as if it was a published and peer reviewed work as “Hanno 2009″. Yet UNEP doesn’t even get the year right as the graph was created in 2005:

From Wikimedia - click for source

From Wikimedia - click for source

But as Steve McIntyre shows us, this graph from “Hanno” is just another variation of Mann’s discredited Hockey Stick based on questionable mathematics, outright errors such as data inversions, and dubious or excluded proxies that may not reflect temperature change at all.

From Climate Audit:

The UNEP CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE COMPENDIUM 2009 on page 5 uses the following graph from Wikipedia (not the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report): Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 172 Comments »

Categories : Alarmism, climate_change, politics, ridiculae

Obama’s disconnect with America on the climate issue

22 09 2009

Here’s the latest poll from Bloomberg on most important issues facing the country:

Bloomberg_poll_092209

Climate change ranks dead last in importance. Source: PollingReport.com

Now compare what the American People think to what Obama thinks in his UN speech today.

The following is the text of Obama’s speech as prepared for delivery today at the UN:

Good morning. I want to thank the Secretary-General for organizing this summit, and all the leaders who are participating. That so many of us are here today is a recognition that the threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing. Our generation’s response to this challenge will be judged by history, for if we fail to meet it — boldly, swiftly, and together — we risk consigning future generations to an irreversible catastrophe.

No nation, however large or small, wealthy or poor, can escape the impact of climate change. Rising sea levels threaten every coastline. More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent. More frequent drought and crop failures breed hunger and conflict in places where hunger and conflict already thrive. On shrinking islands, families are already being forced to flee their homes as climate refugees. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 196 Comments »

Categories : climate_change, politics

Climate Alarmists stoop to new low – create “fake” newspaper and website to push climate agenda

21 09 2009

UPDATE: From Daily Finance

Activists behind NY Post parody detained by police

The New York Post does not have a sense of humor about itself, it would seem.

Early this morning, some 2,000 activists affiliated with a group called The Yes Men handed out copies of a 32-page parody issue calling attention to climate change. But when volunteers tried to distribute copies outside the Post’s offices, they were detained by police and their papers were confiscated, says an eyewitness.

This won’t last long. I’m sure the New York Post won’t take kindly to ripping off their image and brand wholesale to promote this agenda.

The website is: http://nypost-se.com/ The “FAKE” label is mine so that this image doesn’t get confused with the real New York Post at http://www.nypost.com/

click for larger image

click for larger image

This fake version of the New York Post website seems to be part of the “New York Climate Week” effort, though it is hard to tell if it is connected or the work of a misguided person or sympathetic organization. Whomever it is behind it, it isn’t convincing anyone except for the galactically stupid.

As one attorney once said:

“Have you no sense of decency?”

- Joeseph Welch, June 9, 1954, during the McCarthy Senate hearings Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 115 Comments »

Categories : climate_change, media, politics, ridiculae

Climate Alarmists rush to judgment on dead walruses, ignore other possibilities

19 09 2009
Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge - Dead walruses litter the beach Thursday, September 17, 2009, on the shore of Icy Cape - Image: Tony Fischbach of the U.S. Geological Survey and distributed via The Associated Press

All over the web today, there’s the theme of: “dead walrus = caused by climate change”. On the Climate Progress blog they have this picture of the dead walruses (seen at left) which have been circulated by the Associated Press. I found the source photo on the Alaskan Daily News (ADN) here.

While uncredited on Climate Progress, the photo appears to have been taken from an airplane or helicopter by Tony Fischbach of the  U.S. Geological Survey and distributed via The Associated Press.

In the ADN news article two things stand out:

1- The USFWS official quoted in the article,  says that he doesn’t know the cause of the deaths:

“It’s just too early to say until we can get someone on the ground,” Woods said.

They report the dead walruses appeared to be mostly new calves or yearlings. However, neither the age of the dead walruses nor the cause of death is known, said Bruce Woods, spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

2- The AP reporter, Dan Joling,  gives a platform to somebody who also isn’t on the ground, or even Alaska but works in San Francisco, who assigns climate change as the blame:

Shaye Wolf, spokeswoman for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the walrus deaths were alarming.

“It provides another indicator that climate change is taking a brutal toll on the Arctic,” she said.

This isn’t the first time AP writer Jolin has had a story angle downplayed by Brice Woods. The other poster child for Arctic climate change, the polar bear was part of a 2006 AP story where woods also downplayed the significance.

Before I say anything further, let me point out that I’m no expert on Alaskan wildlife. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 134 Comments »

Categories : Alarmism, Arctic, climate_change, media, sea ice

Chinese Climate Wisdom

18 09 2009

The Chinese civilization has existed survived intact far longer than any other in human history, and they have records of that civilization that span 2-3 thousand years BC. They’ve seen more climate change than any other civilization.

Xiao Ziniu

The Guardian recently interviewed Xiao Ziniu, the director general of the Beijing Climate Center.

Excerpts:

A 2C rise in global temperatures will not necessarily result in the calamity predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), China’s most senior climatologist has told the Guardian.

He had this bit of wisdom to pass along:

“There is no agreed conclusion about how much change is dangerous,” Xiao said. “Whether the climate turns warmer or cooler, there are both positive and negative effects. We are not focusing on what will happen with a one degree or two degree increase, we are looking at what level will be a danger to the environment. In Chinese history, there have been many periods warmer than today.”

He added: Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 142 Comments »

Categories : Science, climate_change, forecasting

Svensmark: “global warming stopped and a cooling is beginning” – “enjoy global warming while it lasts”

10 09 2009

UPDATED: This opinion piece from Professor Henrik Svensmark was published September 9th in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Originally the translation was from Google translation with some post translation cleanup of jumbled words or phrases by myself. Now as of Sept 12, the translation is by Nigel Calder.  Hat tip to Carsten Arnholm of Norway for bringing this to my attention and especially for translation facilitation by Ágúst H Bjarnason – Anthony

Catainia photosphere image August 31st, 2009 - click for larger image

Spotless Cueball: Catania observatory photosphere image August 31st, 2009 - click for larger image

While the sun sleeps

Translation approved by Henrik Svensmark

While the Sun sleeps
Henrik Svensmark, Professor, Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen

“In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable,” writes Henrik Svensmark.

The star that keeps us alive has, over the last few years, been almost free of sunspots, which are the usual signs of the Sun’s magnetic activity. Last week [4 September 2009] the scientific team behind the satellite SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) reported, “It is likely that the current year’s number of blank days will be the longest in about 100 years.” Everything indicates that the Sun is going into some kind of hibernation, and the obvious question is what significance that has for us on Earth.

If you ask the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which represents the current consensus on climate change, the answer is a reassuring “nothing”. But history and recent research suggest that is probably completely wrong. Why? Let’s take a closer look.

Solar activity has always varied. Around the year 1000, we had a period of very high solar activity, which coincided with the Medieval Warm Period. It was a time when frosts in May were almost unknown – a matter of great importance for a good harvest. Vikings settled in Greenland and explored the coast of North America. On the whole it was a good time. For example, China’s population doubled in this period. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 638 Comments »

Categories : climate_change, solar

Forecasting the Earth’s Temperature

9 09 2009

http://www.pace.edu/emplibrary/thermometer.gif

Forecasting the Earth’s Temperature

by David Whitehouse via Benny Peiser’s CCnet

The recent spate of scientific papers that are attempting to predict what the earth’s temperature might be in the coming decades, and also explain the current global temperature standstill, are very interesting because of the methods used to analyse temperature variations, and because they illustrate the limitations of our knowledge.

Recall that only one or two annual data points ago many scientists, as well as the most vocal ‘campaigners,’ dismissed the very idea that the world’s average annual temperature had not changed in the past decade. Today it is an observational fact that can no longer be ignored. We should also not forget that nobody anticipated it. Now, post facto, scientists are looking for an explanation, and in doing so we are seeing AGW in a new light.

The main conclusion, and perhaps it’s no surprise, to be drawn about what will happen to global temperatures is that nobody knows. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 190 Comments »

Categories : climate_change, forecasting

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